The Wisdom of Yoga: A Seeker's Guide to Extraordinary Living by Stephen Cope is a sort of sequel to his book
Yoga and the Search for the True Self
. This time Cope shares the stories of a small group of friends, each intensively committed to a yoga practice for different reasons. Through the experiences these six share, Cope explores Patanjali’s
Yoga Sutras and his own understanding of the philosophy of yoga.
Cope is once again candid with his own struggles while also sharing the stories of those with whom he shared a part of his spiritual journey. Although he states at the beginning of the book that none of these people is a real individual but rather a conglomerate of people with whom he has interacted, the way he presents each person makes them feel like a single soul, someone one might meet and even want to meet for themselves. Flawed as they are, Cope has combined people who really knew into characters who are so believable that sometimes the reader (or at least I) can get confused by the veracity of what he is writing and how the philosophy Patanjali defined nearly 2000 years ago can influence the experience of contemporary people.
This is not a commentary on Patanjali’s work so much as it is an experiential explanation of how yoga can dynamically change a person who is open or even eager for spiritual growth. Cope does an excellent job of explaining how rāja-yoga and Buddhism are similar and different justifying his own choice to use Buddhist meditation practices in conjunction with a yoga practice. This is an inspired decision and when he later shares a vision for future spirituality, I confess I found myself excited. Although the author set out to publish a commentary, what he offers is something more intimate and presumably accessible. Perhaps a wise choice, I am sorry that Cope did not share more of his understanding of the sutras and I can only hope that in the future he finds a way of sharing his interpretation so that others may be inspired to perhaps find their own meaning in the text. Hopefully, he will find a way to do so someday soon.
~*~
All wisdom traditions insist upon a healthy mistrust of
other people’s answers—or even the revealed experience of others. (xxxi)
To know that we are not our thoughts is the first step
toward freedom. (28)
Not seeing suffering is suffering. (47)
As meditation proceeds, we make a wonderful discovery: We do not have to learn how to be happy. We already know. (50)
Most Western psychotherapeutic models scrupulously avoid
prescribing any kind of direct and willful cultivation of so-called wholesome
behavior. Psychodynamic psychotherapists
hold that will learn to act in more wholesome ways once they understand the
historical and unconscious sources of their problems and once they have
experienced the healing of their problems, and once they have experienced the
healing of their capacity to love and be loved and be loved in the development
and resolution of the therapeutic relationship.
There are serious problems with the strategy. First of all, it is often not true. There are patients for whom mountains of
insight never matures into a molehill of behavioral change—or happiness and
freedom. (167)
Right effort, [Patanjali] says, consists of four practices:
- To
prevent evil, unwholesome states from arising
- To
abandon them if they should arise
- To
generate wholesome states not yet existing
- To
maintain them without lapse, causing them to develop and to reach full
growth and perfection. (176-177)
Unless there is greed, we can systematically train the heart
toward generosity. Where there is anger,
we can train the heart toward loving kindness.
Where there is jealousy and envy, we can train the heart toward sympathetic
joy. Where there is hatred, train toward
compassion—and so forth. In the yoga
tradition, each afflictive emotion has its own “opposite” or “antidote” which
can be intentionally cultivated. (177)
The yoga traditions are specific about which qualities need
to be trained. A partial list would be:
Moderation
(mitahar)
Faith (āstikya)
Patience
(dhairya)
Forbearance
(kshamā)
Compassion
(daya)
Straightforwardness
(ārjava)
Humility
(hrī)
Loving
kindness (metta)
Sympathetic
joy (muditā)
Equanimity
(upeksa)
(178)
The Buddha . . . taught the ten paramis (or ten perfections:
generosity, patience, loving kindness, strong determination, awareness,
equanimity, ethical behavior, concentration, insight, and truthfulness. (178)
Adapted from Sylvia Boorstein
May you feel protected and safe.
May you feel contented and pleased.
My your body support you with strength.
May your life unfold smoothly and with ease. (183-184)
Quoting Svatmarama
Those who practice hatha
and do not know rāja-yoga, I consider
such practitioners to be depriving themselves of the fruit of their endeavor.
Without rāja-yoga, the
earth is inauspicious. Without rāja-yoga, the night is
inauspicious. Without rāja-yoga, even mudrās are
inauspicious. (197)
Breathing deeply is not necessarily the same as breathing
fully and effectively. Truly effective
breathing involves long, slow exhalation and natural (nor forced or excessive)
inhalation. (207)
Quoting from Shree Rajneesh
The Secret of Secrets,
VolII p 281
God is. There is no
question of God’s being. The question
is, we cannot see Him. We don’t have
eyes. All the meditation and the prayers
and the purifications only help you, make you capable of seeing. Once you can see, you will be surprised—it has
always been there. Day in, day out, year
in, year out, it was showing on you, but you were not sensitive enough to catch
hold of it, you were not empty enough to be filled by it. You were too much full of your own ego. (271)
Finally, I would say that these overlapping areas of view
and practice that we have examined only serve to point out, once again, that
classical yoga and Buddhism are sister traditions. They have traded ideas and practices back and
forth for two thousand years, and continue to do so. For most of us, this is not a problem. I would to even further. I believe that these two great traditions
will experience a rapprochement in the West, which will integrate them in a new
fashion. We are already seeing evidence
of this: postures (āshana) and breathing practices (prānāyāma) have found their way into many Buddhist meditation
retreats. Meditation practices from
Buddhism have found their way into many yoga studios. The process has
begun. I wish not to confuse the issue,
but also I do not wish to resist a healthy rapprochement. (282)
