The Benefits and Drawbacks of Yoga as a System: Georg Feuerstein Interviewed by Richard Rosen, Part 3

When Georg Feuerstein died in 2012, I wrote an appreciation of him, Georg Feuerstein, 1947-2012, saying how much his work meant to me and how, even though I’d never met him, I considered him one of my teachers. Now I have learned of the existence of a very long, unpublished interview with him that Richard Rosen did way back in 1996. Richard has now published the interview in full on his website richardrosenyoga.com, but he has give me permission to include excerpts from it our blog.

Here’s the third excerpt, which is about the risks of making an ideology of yoga. Personally, I think Georg's overall message here is very important. How about this for a quote?

"If a system helps you grow, wonderful. If the system closes you down, shuts down your experience and your potential for further development, look at it and say, “Thank you very much, it’s an ideology. I don’t need it.”

—Nina

RR: I’m always trying to impress on my students that classical yoga is a system; it’s a very logical and beautifully thought out way of seeing the world. I’m wondering what the benefits and the drawbacks are of a system. I’m thinking of Krishnamurti, who said, “Truth is a pathless land.”

GF: My take on this is that if we “have a system,” the risk of making an ideology out of it far outweighs the benefits of a system. Because we always reify everything, we always think, “This is how reality is.” All philosophical systems are simply convenient devices to look at something. In our time we can perhaps appreciate that more than any other time, because we’re confronted with so many different systems, and we realize that none of them are the truth. Historically we have more because of our higher level of education than in past centuries—we have more an appreciation that none of these systems amount to reality.

RR: You’ve mentioned in one of your books that we’re more aware now, because of the discoveries of modern physics, how relative all these systems are.

GF: We’re viewing reality through our own lenses, thinking it is reality, but what we see is not reality, what we see is a filtered image. I think the benefit of some system like yoga darshana is simply that it gives us a plausible structure for understanding the yogic process. If we anxiously cling to the idea that there are endless, numberless purushas in liberation, and then there is prakriti separate from all of that, it’s an ideology, it’s not reality. I would say the same thing about Vedanta, if we believe that liberation is the melting of the individual self with the ultimate Self, it’s also just a way of expressing something that’s not like that.

RR: Because you can’t really put an ineffable experience like that into words—it doesn’t translate.

GF: You can’t. We need to have some crutches, so from my point of view it’s good to look for the crutches that make sense to you. If that crutch happens to be a particular yoga philosophy, fine. If that crutch happens to be Christian theology, fine. If it happens to be Heidegger, or Husserl, or Jung, fine, no problem. As long as the system you have can reasonably accommodate the experiences you encounter and can reasonably accommodate possible experiences. If a system like Materialism excludes a whole range of possibilities—dismisses those experiences as nonsensical, or false—you exclude yourself from the experience. Then you diminish your own being. If a system helps you grow, wonderful. If the system closes you down, shuts down your experience and your potential for further development, look at it and say, “Thank you very much, it’s an ideology. I don’t need it.”

RR: So a system is a guide.

GF: It’s a guide. There is another criteria: if a teacher insists that you swallow lock, stock and barrel his particular brand of teaching without you being allowed to critically examine anything—like the famous saying over the door of Rajneesh’s ashram, something like “Leave your mind with your coat outside”—this is already an indicator to beware, you are expected to be swallowed up by an ideology. You are not engaging the spiritual process. The spiritual process will not demand of you to take on any philosophy; on the contrary, the spiritual process will show the ultimate irrelevance of all philosophies, all theories, all concepts. The truth is pathless, but there is a path to the truth. There has to be a movement to it recognizing what the truth is, and that movement is structured in different ways by different traditions.

In Tibetan Buddhism you have the marvelous Lam Rim teaching, which are the stages of the path, a highly developed, almost formulaic, system of understanding each aspect of the path, far more complex than the eight limbs of classical yoga. As a student it makes perfect sense to encounter this, but it doesn’t mean to say that this is reality. Reality is nirvana; it’s beyond anything that can “blow,” it’s a blow out. [laughs]

I would recommend that if people do practice yoga, they have to practice within a context in which it has been transmitted for millennia. That context is highly diversified, which I have always tried to show in my books. There’s so many yogic approaches, so many different traditions, schools. Unless a yoga practitioner encounters that to some degree, and is enriched by that, there will always be the delusion that the way I’m doing it is the way.

If you, say, join a Bhakti cult, then everything suddenly is filtered through that lens. This may work for some people; it wouldn’t work for me. I would always want to have an overview. This Bhakti approach, this Jnana approach, this Karma approach, all the other approaches, well, what do they share? Really then be informed more by the commonality between traditions than the differences. Appreciate the differences and value them as something that allows the practitioners of that tradition to propel themselves on the path. Essential crutches on the path, but they don’t necessarily have universal validity.

RR: So take on the system, but don’t immerse yourself. Keep your perspective.

GF: Keep your perspective, the understanding that we need crutches but ultimately we need to throw them away. Whatever concepts we use are Band-Aids; we need them because otherwise we’d bleed to death. We put them on, we stop the bleeding, but after we healed, we should take it off. “I never was sick! It was an illusion.” [laughs]