Eyeballing

If you take this yoga business seriously, then it’s pretty serious business. Here’s how the brilliant 20th century writer Christopher Isherwood puts it in An Approach to Vedanta:

“…Yoga is the process of exploring your own nature; of finding out what it really is. It is the process of becoming aware of your real situation. The day-to-day space-time “reality” (as it is reported to us by our senses and the daily newspapers) is, in fact, no reality at all but a deadly and cunning illusion. The practice of yoga meditation consists in excluding, as far as possible, our consciousness of the illusory world, the surface “reality,” and turning the mind inward in search of its real nature. Our real nature is to be one with life, with consciousness, with everything else in the universe. The fact of oneness is the real situation.”

Huh. You don’t say.

So it’s not just a way to get your abs in shape, or to sweat out the toxins of last night’s partying; it’s not even merely a way to find peace of mind and true happiness—although that may follow indirectly.

If Isherwood is right (and the odds of that are reasonably good; he was a literary genius, a student and co-translator of Sanskrit texts with Swami Prabhavananda, who hung out with folks like Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell) then yoga is mainly a way of seeing things as they really are; it’s a tool for discernment and clarity, a means of getting a better picture of reality.

As someone who’s been very myopic ever since about second grade, and is now, as a middle-aged man, increasingly presbyopic, too, I know all about the importance of devices that help you see; eyeglasses are serious business, too, but what's even better about the Ashtanga yoga prescription—“take these poses 6 times a week and don’t call me in the morning”—is that it never requires me to go to the optometrist and have drops put in my eyes.