It’s Not Yoga?
21 August 2008 - 21 אב 5768 by Huw
ACK IN 1999, working at Gay.com, one of the owners and I went out to lunch at the Taco Bell, located on the first floor of our building. Yes, I know: Taco Bell. Anyway, Jeff and I were standing at the cash register, waiting for our $1.99 Tortilla Pizza (or whatever it was) and laughing at the signs suddenly announcing that “due to a national shortage” there was no corn chips. (You may remember that was the first time GMO corn was acknowledged to be in the food supply.)As Jeff payed and picked up his order, one of the homeless people (quite omnipresent near 6th and Market, even today), stood behind me and about one foot away. He started to make chopping motions with his hand and talking very loudly. Jeff - who was using his DotCom fortune to finally become a yoga instructor - sidled away to safety while I dropped into a recitation of the Jesus prayer. I ordered my meal and took out my wallet (right next to the homeless person making the chopping signs). Then I walked away with my food and Jeff turned to me and said, “Wow. That was some serious yoga you were doing there.”
My second story involves a story I was told in Confession - and my own repetition of the event. I confessed to being afraid of driving - I was, at the time, a new driver (maybe I’d had my DL a month?) and I was preparing to go surprise my Mom on Mother’s Day. I’d worked it out with Dad that I’d rent a car and, leaving Asheville after Liturgy, I’d drive to Phenix City and we’d all go out to supper. Then, early the next morning, I’d drive back to town in time to get some sleep before work that night. But, in confession, I admitted I was very afraid. Father told me of a time when he was working in two mission parishes, very far from each other - and both very far from his home. Often he’d be driving home from one late at night. He said that he recited the Jesus prayer on those long drives and that he was sure that Jesus had kept him safe and awake.
Naturally enough I arrived in Atlanta just at the same time as everyone else who was traveling that Sunday. All 8 lanes were filled with vehicles (well, 16 Lanes, really - but I was only worried about the 8 on my side of the meridian) most all of ‘em doing 70 or so in that 55 zone. To make matters worse, I85 empties into the connector from the left, depositing one in the fastest lane of traffic. So, at some point above the merger, I started my Jesus prayer. I swear to you it was rather like there was a cushion of air around my car and a cloud of peace inside my heart.
I’ve learned to chant my mantra of the Jesus prayer anytime I need to reach out to God for “Eleison” - the oil of blessing flowing down around me.
Over and over again in the annals of modern Christian spiritual writing are two suggestions:
1) Pray the Jesus prayer.
2) It’s not a mantra.
But yet it is hard to read texts on the Jesus prayer (such as this from the OCA) and not hear the exact parallel in Buddhist and Hindu Scriptures. They are teaching the same thing from physical posture, to use, to the urgent need for a guru (ie: a Spiritual Father), to the advice to avoid things like visions, etc, and even the advice against magical use of the mantra without the inner, spiritual work needed. Point of order, I heard the same advice in the writings of Aleister Crowley, especially in The Vision and the Voice.
Part of me wonders if the Byzantine end of the silk road didn’t market religious ideas as well as spices.
Sitting down to chant the same prayer over and over 100 times (or more in multiples of 100) is, exactly, the use of a Mantra. “Yoga limits the oscillations of the mind” begins the classic Hindu Sutra on Yoga. The Hesychasts refer to “quieting the mind” and even to a spinning force that bounces temptations away. It’s a good match with the Hindu and Buddhist usage of a Mantra. Coupled with seated or walking practice, with use before icons, what we have here is a very fully developed Christian parallel to Hindu home altars and yogic practice. In like manner we hear pious Romans claiming that the Rosary or the Ignatian Exercises are not the same as New Age visualisation. It’s more than a good match: it is the same thing.
In other words, looking at Christian Yoga and declaiming that it is “not Christian yoga” says more about the speaker than about the Christian yoga.
I wonder if the desire to insist this is not Christian Yoga is part of the desire to “clean things up” that Arturo laments among us modern, Western types.
One of my oppositions to some (but not all) of the hesychasts is precisely Bishop Theophan’s opposition. That is, it is spiritual narcissism. This is not to say that the Jesus Prayer is a bad thing, but rather, that the concentration on techniques can confuse method with meaning.
On the other hand, I long ago realized that Orthodoxy does participate in a cultural mindset that is shaped looking down the silk road (as you put it) rather than down the Roman highways. But, I consider this a good thing. The comment about Romanism and Constantinopolianism being the two lungs is both accurate and points us to the necessity of different cultural orientations in order to achieve the breadth of vision necessary for the Church to be the Church.
Because the two lungs are separated, it has the unfortunate effect of allowing each “lung” to travel down independent roads. This means that cultural tendencies can flourish without the counterbalance of the opposing cultural tendency. And it can lead to the danger of an overemphasis on your cultural viewpoint that can actually twist Christianity into a shape other than what it ought to be. So, at one end you have Dutch hyper-Calvinism, one of the most rigorously logical systems of Christian thought in existence. It is only too bad that the Holy Spirit could not break into that theology if He wanted to. At the other end, you have the extreme Palamites, who would deny any knowledge of God whatsoever despite Jesus’ repeated assertions that we can know God by knowing Him.
The Great Schism had many tragic results. Your article actually points to one of those tragic results, even though that was not your original intent.
I’ll take it one further than Dutch hyper-Calvinism. “Progressive Christianity” takes out even the mysticism that Calvin allowed in exchange for a Literalist Modernism (ie, just a different end of the fundamentalist string).
The solution to both is in the East.
I think, btw, that Palamas is as Thomistic as Tom, himself: just in an apophatic way.