The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word yoke, Y-O-K-E, and
 the Latin word, jungere, to join. Join, junction, yoke, union, all these words are basically
 from the same root. And so likewise when Jesus said, "My yoke is easy," he was saying, really,
 "My yoga is easy." And the word therefore basically denotes the state that would be
 the opposite of what our psychologists call alienation, or what Buddhists call sakkaya-drishti,
 the view of separateness, the feeling of separateness, the feeling of being cut off from being. And
 most civilized people do in fact feel that way, because they have a kind of myopic attention
 focused on their own boundaries and what is inside those boundaries, and they identify
 themselves with the inside, and don't realize that you cannot have an inside without an
 outside. That would seem, wouldn't it, to be extremely elementary logic, that we could
 have no sense of being ourselves, of having a personal identity, without the contrast
 of something that is not ourselves, that is to say, other. But the fact that we don't
 realize that self and other go together is the root of an enormous and terrifying anxiety.
 Because what will happen when the inside disappears? What will happen when the so-called I comes
 to an end, as it seems to? Of course, if it didn't. I mean, if things did not keep moving
 and changing, appearing and dissolving, the universe would be a colossal bore. And therefore,
 you are only aware that things are all right for the moment. I mean, I hope most of the
 people in this gathering have a sort of genial sense inside them that for the time being
 things are going on more or less okay. Some of you may be very miserable, and then your
 problem may be just a little different, but it's essentially the same one. But you must
 realize that that sense of life being fairly all right is inconceivable and unfeelable
 unless there is way, way, way in the back of your mind the glimmer of a possibility
 that something absolutely, unspeakably awful might happen. It doesn't have to happen. Of
 course, you'll die one day. But there always has to be the vague apprehension, the hint
 of gedanke, that the awful awfuls are possible. It gives spice to life.
 Now these observations are in line with what I'm going to talk about tonight, the intellectual
 approach to yoga. There are basically certain principal forms of yoga. Most people are familiar
 with Hatha yoga, which is a psychophysical exercise system, and that's the one you see
 demonstrated most on television because it has visual value. You can see all these exercises
 of lotus positions and people curling their legs around their necks and doing all sorts
 of marvelous exercises. And they're good exercises. The most honest yoga teacher I know is a woman
 who teaches Hatha yoga and doesn't pretend to be any other kind of guru, and she does
 it very well.
 Then there is bhakti yoga. Bhakti means devotion. And I suppose in general you might say that
 Christianity is a form of bhakti yoga, because it is yoga practiced through extreme reverence
 for and love for some being felt more or less external to oneself who is the representative
 of the divine.
 Then there is karma yoga. Karma means action. And incidentally, that's all it means. It
 does not mean the law of cause and effect. When we say that something that happens to
 you is your karma, all it's saying is it's your own doing. Nobody's in charge of karma
 except you.
 Karma yoga is the way of action, of using one's everyday life, one's trade, or an athletic
 discipline like sailing or surf riding or track running as your way of yoga, as your
 way of discovering who you are.
 Then there's Raja yoga. That's the royal yoga. And that's sometimes also called Kundalini
 yoga. And that involves very complicated psychic exercises having to do with awakening the
 serpent power that is supposed to lie at the base of one's spiritual spine and raising
 it up through certain chakras or centers until it enters into the brain. There's a very profound
 symbolism involved in that, but I'm not going into that.
 And then finally there is, well there are several others. There's mantra yoga. Mantra
 yoga which is the practice through chanting of humming either out loud or silently certain
 sounds which become supports for contemplation for what is in Sanskrit called jhāna. And
 jhāna is the state in which one is clearly awake and aware of the world as it is, as
 distinct from the world as it is described. In other words, in the state of jhāna you
 stop thinking. That is to say you stop talking to yourself and figuring to yourself and symbolizing
 to yourself what is going on. You simply are aware of what is. And nobody can say what
 it is because as Korzybski well said, "The real world is unspeakable." It's a lovely
 double take in that. But that's jhāna, that's zazen where one practices to sit absolutely
 wide awake with eyes open but not thinking. That's a very curious state, incidentally.
 I knew a professor of mathematics at Northwestern University who one day said, "You know, it's
 amazing how many things there are that aren't so." You know, he was talking about old wives'
 tales and scientific superstitions and so on. But when you practice jhāna you are amazed
 how many things there are that aren't so. Because when you stop talking to yourself
 and you are simply aware of what is, that is to say of what you feel, what you sense,
 even that saying too much, you suddenly find that the past and the future have completely
 disappeared. So also have disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower
 and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and
 the thought. They just aren't there. Because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those
 things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas. They are phantoms, ghosts.
 So when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away. And you find you are in an eternal
 here and now. And there's no way you're supposed to be. There's nothing you're supposed to
 do. There's no way you're supposed to go, because in order to think you're supposed
 to do something, you have to think. And so it's incredibly important to unthink at least
 once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life.
 So if we stop that temporarily and get our mind clear of thoughts, we become, as Jesus
 said again, as children, and get a direct view of the world, which is very useful once
 you're an adult. There's not much you can do with it when you're a baby, because everybody
 pushes you around. And now they pick you up and sit you there, they sit you there. And
 you can't do much except practice contemplation. Only you can't tell anyone what it's like.
 But when, as an adult, you can recapture the baby's point of view, you will know what all
 child psychologists have always wanted to know, how it is that a baby feels. And the
 baby, according to Freud at least, has the oceanic experience. That is to say, a feeling
 of complete inseparability from what's going on. The baby is unable to distinguish between
 the universe and his or her action upon the universe. And most of us, if we got into that
 state of consciousness, might be inclined to feel extremely frightened. And beginning
 to ask, "Who's in charge?" I mean, "Who controls what happens next?" We would ask that, because
 we are used to the idea that the process of nature consists of controllers and controllees.
 Things that do and things that are done to. This is purely mythological.
 So many spiritual teachers and gurus will look at their disciples and say, "I am God.
 I have realized." See? But the important thing is that you are. Whether I am or not is of
 no consequence to you whatsoever. I could get up and say, "I have realized." I'd put
 on a turban and yellow robe and whatever, and say, "Come and have darshan. I'm guru.
 You need the grace of guru in order to realize," and so on, and it would be a wonderful hoax.
 It would be like picking your pockets and selling you your own watch. But the point
 is, you are.
 Now, what are we saying when we say that? We are obviously saying something very important.
 Alas and alack, there is no way of defining it. That is to say, going any further into
 words about it. See, when a philosopher hears such a statement as "Tat Tvam Asi," "You
 are it," or "There is only the Eternal Now," the philosopher says, "I don't see why you
 are so excited about it. What do you mean by that?" And that he asks that question because
 he wants to continue in a word game. He doesn't want to go on into an experiential dimension.
 He wants to go on arguing because that's his trip. And all these great mystical statements
 mean nothing whatsoever. They're ultimate statements. Just as, you know, the trees and
 the clouds and the mountains and the stars have no meaning, because they're not words.
 Words have meaning because they're symbols, because they point to something other than
 themselves. But the stars, like music, music, only bad music has any meaning. Classical
 music never has a meaning. And to understand it, you must simply listen to it and observe
 its beautiful patterns, go into its complexity. So, when your mind, that is to say your verbal
 systems, get to the end of their tether, that is to say, when they arrive at the meaningless
 statement, here is the critical point. And the method of Jnana Yoga is to exercise one's
 intellect to its limits, so that you get to the point where you have no further questions
 to ask. You can do this in philosophy study, if you've got the right kind of teacher, who
 shows you that all philosophical opinions whatsoever are false. Or at least, if not
 false, extremely partial. And so you feel a kind of intellectual vertigo, which is called
 in a Zen Buddhist poem, "Above, not a tile to cover the head, below, not an inch of ground
 to stand on." Well, where are you then? Well, of course, you're where you always were. You've
 discovered you're it. And that's very uncomfortable, because you can't grab it. See here, I've
 discovered that whatever it is that I am, and that's not something inside my head, it
 is just as much out there as it is in here, but whatever it is, I cannot get hold of it.
 Well that gives you the heebie-jeebies. You get butterflies in the stomach, anxiety, traumas,
 and all kinds of things. But this was all explained by Shankara, the great Hindu commentator
 on the Upanishads, the great master of the non-dualistic doctrine of the universe, when
 he said, "That which knows, which is in all beings the knower, is never an object of its
 own knowledge." So therefore, to everyone who is in quest of the supreme kick, the great
 experience, the vision of God, whatever you want to call it, liberation, when you think
 that you're not it, any old guru can sell you on a method to find it. And that may not
 be a bad thing for him to do, because, as Blake said, "A fool who persists in his folly
 will become wise." And a clever guru is a person who leads you on. "Here, kitty, kitty,
 kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, I've got something very good to show you. You just wait. Oh,
 but you've got to go through a lot of stages yet." You say, "Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
 ha, can I get that? Oh, I want to get that." You know, all the time it's you. I was talking
 with a Zen master the other day, and he said, "You should be my disciple." I looked at him
 and said, "Who was Buddha's teacher?" And he looked at me in a very odd way and said,
 "Oh," he burst into laughter, "and he gave me a piece of clover." So, you see, so long
 as you can be persuaded that there's something more that you ought to be than you are, you've
 divided yourself from reality, from the universe, from God, or whatever you want to call that,
 the tat and tat vamasi. And you will find constantly, if you were interested in anything
 like this, in psychoanalysis, in gestalt therapy, in sensitivity training, in any kind of yoga
 or what have you, that there will be that funny sensation of what I'll call spiritual
 greed that can be aroused by somebody indicating to you, "There are still higher stages for
 you to attain. You should meet my guru."
 So you might say then now, to be truly realized, you have to get to the point where you're
 not seeking anymore. So then you begin to think, "Well, we will now be non-seekers."
 You know, like disciples of Krishnamurti, who, because he says he doesn't read any spiritual
 books, they can't read anything but mystery stories. You know, becoming spiritually unspiritual.
 Well you find that that too is what is called in Zen, "legs on a snake." It's irrelevant.
 You don't need not to seek. Because you don't need anything. You know, it's like crawling
 into a hole and pulling the hole in after you. And the great master of this technique
 was a Buddhist scholar who lived about 200 A.D. called Nagarjuna. He invented a whole
 dialectic. He had a whole school called Madhyamika, where the, as it were, leader of the students
 would simply destroy all their ideas, absolutely abolish their philosophical notions. And there
 get the heebie-jeebies. They see he didn't have the heebie-jeebies. He seemed perfectly
 relaxed and not having any particular point of view. Well he said, "Teacher, how can
 you stand it? We have to have something to hang on to." Who does? Who are you? And
 eventually you discover, of course, that it's not necessary to hang on to anything. To rely
 on anything. There's nothing to rely on. Because you're it. It's like the universe. It's like
 asking the question, "Where is the universe?" And by that I mean the whole universe. Whereabouts
 is it in space? Everything in it is falling around everything else, but there's no concrete
 floor underneath for the thing to crash. Because the space, you can think of infinite space
 if you like. You don't have to think of curved space. The space that goes out and out and
 out forever and ever and has no end. What is that? Of course it's you. What else could
 it be? Only the universe is delightfully arranged so that as it looks at itself, in order not
 to be one-sided and prejudiced, it looks at itself from an uncountable number of points
 of view. We thus avoid solipsism, as if I were to have the notion that it's only me
 that's really here, and you're all in my dream. Of course, that point of view cannot
 really be disputed, except by imagining a conference of solipsists arguing as to which
 one of them was the one that was really there. Now, you see, if you understand what I'm
 saying with your intelligence, and then take the next step and say, "But I understood
 it now, but I didn't feel it," then next I raise the question, "Why do you want to
 feel it?" You say, "I want something more," because that's again that spiritual greed.
 And you could only say that because you didn't understand it. There is nothing to pursue
 because you're it. And if you don't know that, you always were it. And if you don't
 know that, in other words, to put it in Christian terms or Jewish terms, if you don't know
 that you're God from the beginning, what happens is that you try to become God by force. Therefore,
 you start being violent and obstreperous and this and that and the other. All our violence,
 all our competitiveness, all our terrific anxiety to survive is because we didn't know
 from the beginning that we were it. Well, then you would say, "If we did know from
 the beginning, as in fact you did when you were a baby," but then everybody says, "Well,
 nothing would ever happen." But it did happen, didn't it? And some of it's pretty messy.
 But what people don't realize is they say, "Well, take the Hindus. It's basic to Hindu
 religion that we are all God in disguise and that the world is an illusion." All that is
 a sort of half-truth. But if that is the case, if Hindus and really awakened Hindus, by the
 knowledge of their union with the Godhead, would simply become inert. Why then Hindu
 music, the most incredibly complex, marvelous technique? When they sit and play, they laugh
 at each other. They're enjoying themselves enormously with these very complicated musical
 games. But when we come and the symphony orchestra gets up, everybody dresses in evening dress,
 the most serious expression, and all the audience is down, and it's like it's in a kind of church.
 And there's none of that terrific zest where the drummer, the tabla player laughs at the
 sarod player as they compete with each other in all kinds of marvelous improvisations.
 So if you do find out by any chance who you really are, you, instead of becoming merely
 lazy, you know, you start laughing. And laughing leads to dancing. And dancing needs music.
 And we can play with each other for a change.
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