Karma/Ashtanga Yoga — the yoga of techniques and actions — is the most promising method to pursue. I also showed that those who practice this yoga face the danger of getting completely absorbed in techniques such as practicing asana, forgetting that the underlying purpose of all yoga is either to obtain self-knowledge (Jnana) or to realize yourself as a child of God (Bhakti) — which ultimately become the same thing once the mind is transcended in the state of infinite consciousness.
The best way to keep one’s practice whole, to avoid the pitfalls of obsession with technique and neglect of the ultimate purpose of yoga, is to connect deeply with the spiritual roots of yoga. The modern Ashtanga Yogi has two pathways available by which he or she may integrate the ancient spiritual roots of yoga into his or her practice. Path 1 — studying Indian philosophy — will connect you with your Jnanic roots. Path 2 — studying Indian myth — will connect you with your Bhaktic roots. Although these are different paths, they share the same origin and destination. For this reason, it is also possible for the Karma yogi to follow both paths simultaneously, creating an approach with three prongs — Karma, Bhakti, and Jnana Yoga — like the trident of the Lord Shiva.
What is the right path for you? That depends on your pranic constitution. The study of philosophy is the tool of choice if you have an academic and intellectual inclination, which is usually the case if your subtle body has a preponderance of prana flowing in the solar nadi. Philosophy often consists of causal chains in which arguments and positions are strung on a logical thread, as flowers are strung together to form malas in India. Practitioners grasp it slowly by means of rational understanding. Mythology, in contrast, is for those more intuitively endowed, those who have a preponderance of prana flowing in the lunar nadi. Myth expresses complex, multilateral connections. Often multiple paradoxes are encrypted in myth; the listener or reader grasps them spontaneously by means of intuition.
My first book, Ashtanga Yoga: Practice and Philosophy, discusses in detail the subject of Indian philosophy as well as the ancient branch of Indian psychology. Readers who have a solar, or rational, constitution may refer to that work. The present chapter, which focuses on Indian myth, is for those readers who have a lunar, intuitive constitution, those who want at least an introduction to the fascinating world of Indian mythology, and those who want to benefit from the fact that reading myth helps develop the intuitive, right side of the brain, which allows you to spontaneously understand connections.
As philosophy was compiled in terse texts called sutras, mythology was collected in extensive tales called Puranas. Purana means “ancient.” Today, eighteen main Puranas, called Maha Puranas, and eighteen ancillary Puranas, called Upa Puranas, exist. Since there was no tradition established to preserve their accuracy, as was the case with the Vedas, the Upanishads, and many of the sutras, much material was added to the Puranas over time. Although their cores are ancient, the Puranas are interspersed with modern, occasionally dubious material. For this reason, they need to be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, they constitute a rich encyclopedia of the myths of India.
Myth and the Development of the Higher Self
The ancient spiritual practice of retelling, listening to, reading, and reliving myths is integral to Indian culture, and it continues today. Myths were and are still considered important because reading sacred texts stimulates the sattvic, or spiritual and noble, aspects of the psyche. This is why Patanjali identified the reading of sacred texts as svadhyaya (self-study) and made it a part of both niyama and Kriya Yoga (yoga of action, preliminary yoga). Even in Patanjali’s time, people engaged their minds for much of the time in activities that stimulated the tamasic and rajasic forces of their personalities, and Patanjali recognized that reading sacred texts was an effective way of engaging and developing the higher aspects of the psyche instead. Reading the myths in the sacred texts was the pursuit of an arya, somebody who strives to develop qualities of his noble, higher, and sacred self.2
Today, we are tempted even more to indulge the lower urges of our psyches, surrounded as we are by mass media, digital entertainment, advertising, and the like. If Patanjali were alive today, he would want us to read holy books instead of watching reality shows or soap operas. How much time do you spend watching television, listening to radio and music, and reading newspapers and trash novels? If you keep feeding yourself with this material, you may invest a lot of effort into your daily asana practice and be surprised by how little you actually change.
If you are currently a media consumer, try an experiment: for a predetermined time frame such as one complete moon cycle (twenty-eight days) or one year, instead of consuming various forms of entertainment promulgated through the mass media, read passages from the sacred texts, even if just for thirty minutes every day. If you reclaim some or ideally all the time and energy you spend on mindless entertainment and invest it into reading holy books, you will be surprised by how much your life will change in a short time.
Myth and Your Meditation Deity
Aside from imparting a generally beneficial influence, reading sacred texts carries with it a specific and crucially important effect: it is fundamental for realizing one’s ishtadevata, or meditation deity. This is because the sacred texts, in relating the many myths, describe in detail the many divine forms from which your ishtadevata may be drawn. The concept of ishtadevata is for those who want to understand the Indian mind, are interested in Indian spirituality, and want to integrate Indian spirituality into their lives.
The ancient Indian sages recognized that people are very different and that what works for one person does not necessarily work for another. People may have intellectual, devotional, emotional, or physical constitutions. And within these categories we find still many more subdivisions and combinations. Due to this fact, many different meditation images were developed so that there was one to suit each of the many different constitutions. These meditation images have human aspects that we can recognize in ourselves, but they also have divine aspects, which are usually worshiped outside of ourselves.
Meditation deities are derived from the many divine forms called devas. The term deva is often translated as “god,” and as such it has acquired much unfortunate baggage.3 It is best to use the original Sanskrit word, with its far more complex meaning, which has the great advantage of continually reminding us that we may not understand the term completely. The terms divine form and divine image are also acceptable because they are somewhat less loaded than god, although they do not have the richness of deva, with its many nuances.
To understand the significance of the concept of deva, we need to look at the relationship of the many devas (which is a lunar concept born of prana going through the left nostril) to the one Brahman (which is a solar concept born of prana going through the right nostril). The many Indian deities are only aspects of the one Brahman, and thus one is not different from another. The sacred texts that are considered the highest authority (the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutra; collectively referred to as prashthana trayi or the triple canon) all agree that there is only one Supreme Being but that this Supreme Being can be seen or understood in many different ways. For example, in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says, “Whichever deva you worship you will always come to me.” The Skanda Purana states, “Vishnu is nobody but Shiva, and he who is called Shiva is but identical with Vishnu.”4 The Varaha Purana says that Devi (the Great Goddess), Vishnu, and Shiva are one and the same and warns that those “idiots” who don’t understand this fact will end up in hell.5
