I recently enrolled in yoga school, because I want to become a yoga teacher.  Although most contemporary yoga classes focus on the physical poses, the "asana", for some reason yoga school isn't considered complete without a dose of religion.  We are asked to contemplate the religious text known as the Yoga Sutras, which is a manual for enlightenment, the surrender to God, by way of various religious practices and meditation.  You may be wondering what this has to do with contemporary yoga.  I will be honest, I am still wondering.  The answer we are given in class  is that these practices create the spirit in which we practice our physical poses.  It seems more to me that these Sutras are the first text in historical terms to use the word "asana", and we want to give ourselves that patina of deep historical significance.

As you can probably tell, I have some resistance to being asked to take up a new religion.  However, as a good Unitarian Universalist, I try to be open to the exploration, to catching the flavor of his inspiration, the aspiration of his practice.  With those virtuous intentions, I dove into the text.  It was dry going for quite some time.  But!  Imagine my surprise when I found this truly juicy passage:

Book Two, Sutra 23. The union of the Owner (Purusa) and Owned (Prakrti) causes the recognition of the nature and powers of them both.

Like all religious texts, this one uses terms that need some unpacking to get to the juicy heart of the fruit.  Purusa is the abstract self, the reasoning self, the aspect of self that hopes to transcend messy mundane reality.  Prakrti is messy mundane reality.  Like so many religious teachers, the author of the Sutras would like nothing more than to ascend to a divine plane free of details like ordinary thoughts and physical embodiment.  Up until I reached this passage, I was getting rather fed up with his retreat from reality.  But he took an abrupt turn into a new dimension here, and let me share with you now the explanatory notes from his most popular commentator, Swami Satchidananda. 

"And here [as opposed to in the rest of the Sutras] it doesn't mean the union of the individual self with the higher Self, but the union of Purusa and Prakrti, Self and nature.  When they are completely apart, they don't express themselves.  Their connection, however, lets us know them both.  They help each other.  It is something like if you want to print with white letters, you must have a black background for contrast.  You can't write white letters on a white background.  Through the Prakrti [messy mundane reality], we realize we are the Purusa [transcendent self].  If not for the Prakrti, we could not know ourselves.  So Prakrti isn't just bondage as many people think.  It is necessary."

Swami Satchidananda goes on to say, "We should know nature first.  That is why nature is called the Mother.  Only through the Mother can we know God."

Now we have something I can relate to!  I can feel this on a visceral level.  I am a spiritual being engaged in an embodied experience.  I am a lucky little piece of nature, happy to be part of the web, my drives and emotions and messy needs pushing me to experience reality on the physical plane.  But at the same time, I can occasionally taste my transcendent self, and float inward to a non-physical place of belonging.

I can also imagine this on an intellectual level.  I take the Sutra's theme of advancing our mental processes to a greater understanding of Prakrti, nature, the world.  The deeper we look, the more refined our reasoning and reflecting, the more we understand.  The closer we get, the more information we have, and the greater our rejoicing to understand.  Swami Satchidananda describes the makers of the atom bomb as people who had a truly deep understanding of one particular aspect of nature, and they reached an almost godlike power through that deep understanding.  When we go deeply into nature, we come out with insights that transcend the ordinary world.  When he describes the need for the black background to make the white letters visible, I think of the op-art picture that is two faces in profile, but at the same time it's also a vase.  Do you focus on the foreground or the background, the black or the white?  Focus on the black and you see the faces, focus on the white and you see the vase. 

Which is actually the foreground?  Neither exists without the other.  Nature is understood from the perspective we gain when we are able to taste the infinite.  The infinite is only experienced through our embodied selves.