The Roots of Yoga: Seeking Truth Amid Uncertainty

The field of uncertainty widens every day it seems. It’s hard not to keep checking the news to see what the latest developments are. We check because we want to know, we don’t want to be in the dark. And yet we can’t know the future. It’s an inherent part of our human condition to navigate life without assurances of how things will develop from here.

Yoga came into being to support us as we seek truth in the midst of uncertainty. Thousands of years ago in the land now called India, a movement of seekers emerged. Amid nascent cities, and in the midst of an increasingly rigid, stratified society, these rebels defied conventional norms. They walked away from their families and friends, out of the cities and into the forests and fields. Soaked by the monsoon rains and baked by the relentless sun, unprotected from venomous snakes, wild dogs and mountain cats, they gave themselves to a timeless quest for self-understanding. They traded comfort and safety for the adventure of hunting unadulterated truth.

In pilgrimage places throughout India today, you can find descendants of these seekers, smeared with sacred ash, calloused feet treading scorching asphalt streets and rocky forest paths. They carry all that they own, with the sky as their shelter and their hearts set on absolute liberation. Some mutter prayers and mantras as they walk, begging for food, traveling from sacred site to sacred site, tracing the steps of countless seekers before them. They live in caves and on riverbanks, by crematory grounds and abandoned shrines, seeking, striving, reaching for union with the absolute truth that has no opposite, no gradations.

India’s most ancient texts mention the luminous long haired munis, wearing dirt smeared garments and following the swirling path of the wind like the radiant ones before them (Rig Veda 10.136.1-2). The Rig Veda, considered the foundational text of so many of India’s varied spiritual traditions, is a great symbolic song, and it paints an elaborate picture of a multidimensional cosmos populated by beings both seen and unseen. Some serve truth and harmony, and others obscure and divide. The Rig Veda tells us that there is more to reality, more to ourselves and our surroundings than what we can see and hear and touch and taste.

Ancient poet-seers received the timeless and eternal hymns of the Rig Veda. They called out to the stars and the sun, to the soul that embodies as rain and wind, to the source of inspiration and the divine lure that draws the human heart toward knowledge and understanding. And they drew forth a response, cultivated relationship. They lived in dialogue with an interactive universe, a cosmos that responds to our touch, that loves and nurtures us and draws us ever toward a wider and more encompassing reality. These rishis, seers of the holy word, created a framework for living in this multidimensional cosmos. They illuminated the human condition, revealing the layers of our being, including the fundamental, undying, unharmable radiance that lures our conscious mind always toward truth, and the divine essence that pervades the universe like a sweet scent.

Fire was the intermediary of the Vedic cosmology. Sitting by the glowing blaze, flames licking toward the heavens reflected in their eyes, a priest offers precious ghee, honey, rice, and aromatic herbs to Agni, the being of fire. Agni receives the gifts and releases the essence of each into the sky, billowing smoke and subtle scents that pervade the atmosphere. Left behind is sacred ash, the carbon clothing worn that defines material reality. The ash is what remains when the soul is released, whether the soul of rice or of a human being.

Over time, this living ritual was drained of its immediacy. The rituals were codified, and the depth of meaning was lost. A caste of priests increasingly used the Vedic framework to consolidate power and prestige, and the Vedic tradition congealed into a superstitious cult of influence and prestige. The priests stood between common people and the divine reality, using their self-defined position as intermediaries between the human and the divine to amass wealth and power at the expense of others. They severed the connection between ritual and meaning, leaving an empty shell that they used to manipulate the masses, who they locked out of the Divine embrace.

It was within this milieu, a calcified, stratified society orbiting around empty ritual, that the śramana movement began. The śramanas rejected the empty rituals and priestly manipulations. They walked away from their families and the tightening embrace of social rules and into the forests and fields and sought answers to some of the most fundamental human questions: who am I? who are you? why must we suffer and die? what is this body made of? what gives rise to this mind? how can life be purposeful in the shadow of death and pain?

The word śramana has the sense of exertion or hard work, and was also applied to menial laborers. But the work of these śramanas was not toil in service to the society that they rejected. They strove to discover themselves, to understand the meaning of life. They sought the source of death and pain, and grappled with how to live and find fulfillment in the midst of suffering, decay, and dissolution. Philosophical theories and abstract ideas could not appease their hunger. They walked away from civilization and dove within, conducting intensive physical, emotional, and psychological experiments on themselves. They were inner cosmonauts, reaching for direct experience to illuminate their understanding. The śramanas rebelled against the collective delusion of Vedic ritualism, and sought a throughline to the ancient truths of Vedic wisdom.

A collective fire of aspiration swept across the land. Sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers left their families to plumb the depths of inner reality in search of truth. The need for self-discovery overrode all other needs. Facing the looming specter of death and suffering around them, they didn’t turn away and hide, they leaned in. Some sat for hours and days, still as a stone, focusing their attention on a single word. Some stood for months and years, never lying down to sleep or sitting to rest. Some renounced speech or food or sleep or human company, enduring extremes of suffering and probing the fringes of life itself.

They walked toward the fires of hell, exploring the physical, emotional, and psychological dimensions of existential pain. Collectives of śramanas, commonly called aśrams, strove together, compared notes, and conducted an incredible array of scientific experiments. They hypothesized and tested, using their own bodies, minds, and lives, and souls as the field of experimentation.

They discovered paths through pain to freedom, paths through imposed limitation and suffering to the experience of the essential, eternal, unharmable self. The gleanings of the śramana movement have flowed through the ages, and have poured into the consciousness of the modern west, mainly through the conduits of Yoga and Buddhism. They mingle the timeless reflections of Vedic wisdom with the undercurrents of human will and the longing to understand.

We stand today in the midst of a million insoluble problems converging in upon each other. We live in the shadow of collective annihilation. There is no apparent escape, no way through. The status quo has taken us to the edge of a cliff. And our ideas will not save us.

To approach the insoluble problems of our day, we will need to change. And lasting change doesn’t come about by persuasion, or by thinking new thoughts. Not just our minds, but our relationships, our actions, and our very experience of ourselves will need to change. The wisdom of the śramanas points us toward an inner path, but reading the ancient texts and talking about the implications is not enough. The yoga tradition offers us a guidebook, but we must ourselves take the journey.