Do religion and tantra share any common tenets? Can a religious man practise yoga?
First of all, I want to make it very clear. Just as history is not geography and biology is not mathematics, economics is not English, religion is not yoga and yoga is not religion. A man having a religion can practise yoga, and a person practising yoga can practise religion. Just as a doctor can read a book on geography or a scientist can read a book on religion.
Yoga and religion have two different philosophical concepts. In religion everything is believed. It is hard and very difficult for one to establish that truth by any evidence. In yoga, whatever is said is an outcome of a person’s experience. In religion there is a total authority behind what is said – God. God said it, so you keep quiet please. You have no right to say it is wrong because God said it. This is what is said in religion.
In yoga, it is the experience of an individual which becomes the basis of evidence. Your experience and my experience become the basis of evidence and if another person has some other experience, then my experience is not a final experience. That is to say, each and every individual’s experience, his discovery, his research and his understanding cannot be considered final, but yet they can form the evidence.
In tantra, there is no concept of God as such. Shiva and Shakti do not represent an authoritarian principle. When I say authoritarian principle I always mean God, because according to most religions, not Buddhism of course, but according to all religions, God is like a policeman. He punishes everybody and he rewards everybody. This authoritarian concept is totally absent in tantra. The concept in tantra about Shiva and Shakti is exactly the same concept as you have in modern science, the concept of matter and energy.
Even the terminology that we use in English, male principle and female principle, is not written in tantra. They use the word Shiva tattwa. Tattwa means principle. Shakti tattwa or principle. While they are translated into English by modern people, we always write the male principle and the female principle. Matter and energy are two opposite poles of energy. You may call it male and female, it is up to you. In the same way, Shiva and Shakti represent the two opposite poles of energy. Shiva represents consciousness and Shakti represents energy. When there is union between the two, an explosion takes place. It is a principle like that.
A great scientist, Itzhak Bentov, who died in a plane accident in Chicago, was one of the most important scientists responsible for discovering the principle of the propulsion engine. He has tried to explain the principle of Shiva and Shakti. He says, whenever time and space come together, they always have to travel in an opposite direction, and not in the same direction. If time and space have to join each other, they have to travel in the opposite direction. When they travel in the opposite direction, there is a point where they meet. The point where they meet is the nucleus, and there is a blast in the nucleus. That is the principle also in physics.
Time and space have to come to one point of collision. When they come to one point of collision, there is a blast. When there is a blast, then in yoga samadhi takes place. Awakening of kundalini takes place in you. If that happens in the external world, anywhere in creation then the blast causes thousands and millions of nebulae. The fragments are thrown into the universe, into akasha, the moving nebulae. That is how the world was created.
Time and space are the representative symbols of Shiva and Shakti. One represents the plus energy, another represents the minus energy. Plus means positive, minus means negative. They always live separate. At one moment, they come close to each other. Where do they meet? In your mind. They come closer to each other in your mind, and when they join there is a blast. So, there is no concept of God. Shiva and Shakti are tattwas, elements.
Kindly remember, tantric philosophy and yogic philosophy both academically belong to the Samkhya system. Samkhya is a system which does talk about God not at all. Even in Patanjali’s raja yoga, there are only two places where the word Ishwara has been referred to. Ishwara in Sanskrit means God; one who governs is Ishwara. Only twice it has come in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Wherever the word Ishwara has been used, it has been used in order to denote your inner awareness, not an external God. It will be possible for me to define the word Ishwara because of its root. The root of Ishwara is to govern, to rule, the indweller, and that is inside you.
There is another important point which makes yoga completely different from religion. You can always subject yoga to any scrutiny and investigation – objective research, objective investigation. Through those objective investigations, it will come out with definite results; maybe some of the statements made in yoga may not stand the test, but we do not have any method to test religion.
How do yoga and religion differ in their respective cosmology?
The cosmology of yoga is completely different from the cosmology of religion. In yoga there is no such system that somebody created the world, and somebody created man and the mind. It is a complete philosophy which talks of evolution from matter to mind, and from mind to consciousness. That is how the whole thing has been evolving. The basis of this theory of cosmology can be found in Samkhya. The Samkhya sutras tell you how the whole picture came about. They do not say that God got up and said, ‘May there be heaven; may there be hell; may there be animals.’ No, it is not like that. They cannot be equated.
In most religions, God is the planner, God is the builder, God is the carpenter, God is the painter. God is everything, whereas in yoga the concepts of evolution, transformation, metamorphosis are systematically designed.
The principal theory of yoga is that every matter which you hold, it may be the mind or it may be an object, is not only that much. Within the womb of matter, within the body of matter, there is energy. Within energy, there is consciousness. You take a litre of milk and within it is cream, within the cream is butter and within the butter is fat, so the apparent form of milk is not the total quality and total constituent of milk. In the same way, matter is not the total and ultimate form.
If matter is classified, and if you can go deep into it by dividing it or by disintegrating it, you will find the ultimate form of that matter is not only energy but also consciousness.
It is better in my opinion that religion may have some similar practices to that of yoga, or yogis might practise some of the religious practices also. After all, I have a religion, you have a religion. Even if you practise yoga asanas, where does the religion come in? It is better to consider these two as separate, because in the next century, man will come very close to the reality of things, and it will be hard for the man of the twenty- first century to accept a God who is a dictator. We can accept the existence of truth in terms of what you call collective responsibility. Air, fire, water, earth, sun and moon, the stars and prana are also gods. Why should there be only one god?
The one god theory does not appeal to me; at least it is like the dictator of some place. He does everything. He can do anything, and everybody has to be afraid of him. Yet you call him benefactor. There has to be a collective responsibility. This ashram is not run just by one swami, everybody is working. There is not only one swami, there are twenty swamis working here. My ashram is not run by one man, me. No, it is a collective responsibility. There are one hundred people working. They are also swamis; they are also builders. In this creation, there is not only one force which is in action. There are millions of powers in action. They are all gods, and therefore we must have the concept of many gods, not of one God.
What is the concept of the original sin?
It is a very important point because I am not supposed to interpret the Bible; that is not my subject. I do not want to interpret any religious book. Original sin itself has to be reinterpreted. It has more to do with atma and jiva. The whole story is Adam and Eve. Adam represents atma, the original individual self. Eve represents jiva. These are the two things that exist in us: your consciousness and the ego; your spirit and ego. They live close to each other. This jiva, the individual self, what does it do? It involves itself with the pleasures of sense objects. What you call Adam and Eve, atma and jiva, purusha and prakriti are the same principles.
Jiva is ego, and this ego identifies itself with the objects of the senses; that is the forbidden apple. The identification and the involvement of ego with the objects of this world are supposed to be forbidden.
There is a story in one of the Upanishads about how they are forbidden. There is a tree and two birds are seated on the tree. One at a lower branch, another at a higher, upper branch. The bird of the lower branch is eating a fruit and spitting it out. After some time, the bird which is sitting on the lower branch flies to another tree, and the bird on the upper branch follows him. In the other tree also they are seated in the same position, and the bird on the lower branch is doing the same thing, eating a fruit and spitting it out. Oh, it is so bitter. Like this they keep changing trees and trees for many years.
Once the lower bird got frustrated because the fruit of every tree it was trying to eat was bitter and it spat it out. In order to overcome its frustration, it looked at the upper bird and said, ‘Ay, why don’t you eat?’ The other bird said, ‘You have eaten, that is enough for me. You have been eating the fruits of the trees year after year, incarnation after incarnation and you have not been eating at all, you have only been spitting under the impression or under the expectation that someday some fruit will be sweet. So, in order to experience one sweet fruit, you have been eating all bitter fruits and you had to spit, you cannot eat them.’
The bird at the lower branch said, ‘Yeah, you are right. But what proof is there that I am not going to get a sweet fruit? I might get it.’ He said, ‘Okay, try.’ So the other bird said, ‘Why don’t you also try?’ The bird from the upper branch replied, ‘No, let me be a witness. You eat and spit.’ ‘And suppose I get a sweet fruit.’ The bird from the upper branch said, ‘I will just witness it.’
This is how you have to interpret it. The relationship between Adam and Eve, atma and jiva, the fruit of the forbidden tree and the original sin has something to do with historical tradition. It has nothing to do with reality, because in reality what we people talk about as original sin, is not a sin. It is a creation of nature, and tantra is very clear about it.
If you are honest, if I am honest, if I don’t want to play fraud with anybody, I will definitely say, ‘No, it has a deeper meaning in life.’ It is not just the original sin. It is not an animal act; it is not the outcome of passion. It is a means to explode an experience out of an act, just as there is a process of exploding energy out of a substance. As you explode energy out of a substance, you can also produce some experience out of an act. When you eat chocolate, you produce a taste. That is an experience. Every act produces an experience. That is called explosion.
This explosion is on account of the relationship between the senses, the mind and the object. When sense, mind and object unite, there is an experience. This experience can be had on a lower plane and this experience can be had on a higher plane. It depends on how evolved you are and where your consciousness is. If I give you one slap or maybe you give me one slap, where do I feel it? I feel it on the face. Did the pain take place on the face? No. The actual experience has taken place in the higher centre of the brain but I have felt it on the face. If I hurt my knee, where do I get the pain? I get it in the brain. Why? It is the centre of pain. It is the centre of experience. Every experience takes place in the brain. Every experience takes place in consciousness. That is also a very important philosophy of yoga.
April 1982, Aarhus, Denmark