What if We Could Weed Out Avidya (Ignorance)?

by Baxter

Constellation Awakening at Dawn by Joan Miro

In her post Ignorance About Ignorance, Nina did a lovely job discussing avidya, a key concept in yoga philosophy that has everyday ramifications for us. In a nutshell, the yogis of old noticed that our everyday unrestrained mind was the underlying culprit not only of our present psychological suffering, but also of our ability to reach many desirable goals regarding health, well-being, and spiritual growth.

Their cure for this was to gain control of the fluctuations, whirls, or cycling of our minds and thoughts (see Thoughts About Quieting the Mind). But they noted that there were obstacles to clear out of the way if we want to make any progress in achieving our goals, and the giant at the doorway to our success is this thing called “avidya,” which Nina so astutely pointed out can mean both ignorance (just plain not knowing something true and real) and misapprehension (having a mistaken understanding of the way things are). 

There are entire fields of knowledge that I am entirely ignorant about, such as quantum physics or jet propulsion engineering, as well as huge pieces of personal history I don’t know about for even some of my closest friends. And although I might still operate in the world on a daily basis without too much trouble or suffering due to these particular areas of ignorance, there are other times where my ignorance does contribute to my suffering and the suffering of others.

To illustrate this, here is little story Nina shared with me that shows how lack of knowledge directly contributed to the suffering of a young woman who was dealing with bouts of anxiety. The young woman’s mother told Nina, “Well, I guess, anxiety just comes and goes.” Nina’s friend and her daughter seemed to feel that the daughter was at the mercy of some emotion that took her over periodically and that there was nothing she could do to change that. But, of course, we now know that there are things you can do to manage anxiety. Through a combination of educating yourself and making some lifestyle changes, you can empower yourself to deal more effectively with stressful situations and hopefully reduce the levels of stress and/or anxiety. Once Nina’s friend learned all this about anxiety, she was able to start taking steps to help her daughter, instead of just feeling helpless.

And when it comes to misapprehension, I do fall into the trap of mistaken understanding all the time, as I—and I suspect you do, too!—tend to make a lot of incorrect assumptions about other people and situations that may not be based in reality at all. These assumptions can often lead to all sorts of difficulties, misunderstandings, hurt feelings, etc., both for me and for others. At its most serious extreme, I can’t help but think about the recent spate of unnecessary killings of young black Americans by local law enforcement based on blatantly false assumptions, such as they were brandishing a weapon that turned out to be a toy gun, or assuming someone is a criminal based on a hooded sweatshirt and the color of their skin. 

Ignorance and misapprehension happen on a personal level regularly, and also happen on a societal level around issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on. And the resulting behaviors and responses in action and policy are often misguided and destructive both individuals and to large groups of people. What if we could weed out this avidya? Would this lead to less psychological suffering and a more peaceful world? The ancient yogis said yes to the first and probably to the second. And our yoga practices, when performed regularly, are the practical way to uncovering these inaccurate perceptions of the world around us, especially the more refined practices like pranayama, concentration, and meditation.

I certainly love to apply yoga philosophy to practical everyday situations to make it relevant and helpful for my own life and my student’s lives as well. But it is also worth noting that the concept of avidya originally applied more specifically to the relationship of ignorance and misapprehension to yoga concepts. This means you would eliminate avidya by studying to scriptures to learn more about how the mind works, what the other obstacles are to quieting the mind, and which practices in life and in meditation would be helpful for moving beyond those obstacles. For example, learning about the yamas and niyamas can be helpful for living a more harmonious life, which in turn will help quiet the mind, eventually leading to the deeper experiences of yoga, such as identifying with the connectedness and inseparability of the individual with the divine.

If you want to learn more about avidya and its outgrowth obstacles known as the klesas, consider reading more about them in a translation and commentary of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, such as those by BKS Iyengar or TKV Desikachar. I often find it helpful to compare two different commentaries, as individual commentators can have unique takes on the same Sanskrit words and concepts. Nina has written briefly about the klesas in her post The Pains Which Are To Come.

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More

Ignorance About Ignorance (Avidya)

by Nina

A boy blowing on an ember to light a candle by El Greco

2.4 Lack of true knowledge is the source of all pains and sorrows whether dormant, attenuated, interrupted or fully active. —translated by B.K.S. Iyengar

I’ve been thinking a lot about the yoga concept of avidya, which can be defined as lack of knowledge or ignorance. That’s because Baxter and I are working on a list of essential yoga concepts that we want to teach. And when he suggested avidya, or ignorance, as being one of his essential concepts, I was surprised. It honestly wasn’t something I had thought much about and it certainly didn’t make my top 10 or even my top 25. But because it was important to him, I decided to study a bit about avidya and also to talk with him in person about it. When we got together yesterday, we talked both about why ignorance causes suffering and what you can do about it, but even after our philosophical luncheon, I still felt uncertain, and unprepared to write about ignorance. It wasn’t until I did some further reading and found the following yoga sutra that I reached some clarity:

2.28 By dedicated practice of the various aspects of yoga impurities are destroyed: the crown of wisdom radiates in glory. —translated by B.K.S. Ieyngar

I’ll write a bit more about sutra 2.28 later, but I thought that first—since I’ve had a little epiphany about how ignorance caused tremendous suffering in my own life—I’d tell you that story as a way of illustrating the general concept. During the 90s when I was working at a small software startup company at the same time as I was raising—with Brad, who was a professor at a university—two small children, I had a serious nervous breakdown, which was eventually diagnosed as agitated depression. I can easily say that this was the worst experience of my life. And in retrospect I can now see how ignorance was what led me to that low point.

• I had no idea that the chronic stress I was enduring at my high-pressure job could lead to a breakdown like that. So I was “ignorant” about the problems associated with chronic stress.
• I believed that since I was working in a very stressful environment, it was natural and inevitable for me to feel very stressed out, suffer from insomnia, nausea, and so on. Here I was under the “misapprehension” that being stressed out was natural and could not be avoided, which is a form of ignorance.
• I didn’t have the tools to help myself deal with chronic stress. Those would come later, when I set out to acquire solutions to my tendency to get too stressed out and got serious about yoga. But at the time, my “lack of knowledge” about how to manage stress certainly caused me a lot of suffering.

As you can see from my story, ignorance not only includes just plain lack of knowledge, such as my ignorance about the dangers of chronic stress, but misapprehension, which is a mistaken belief. I mention this because I found it interesting that that Desikachar—who translates the Yoga Sutras using very different language that most other translations—translated “avidya” in sutras 2.4 and 2.5 as misapprehension follows:

2.4 Misapprehension is the source of all the other obstacles. They need not appear simultaneously and their impact varies. Sometimes they are obscure and barely visible; at other times they are exposed and dominant.

2.5 Misapprehension leads to errors in comprehension of the character, origin, and effects of the objects perceived.

Of course, I’m sure we can all think of problems in our own lives or our friend’s lives that were caused by misapprehension of one kind of another (financial success didn’t bring happiness after all, your lover wasn’t who you thought they were, the plan you had for your life fell apart, and so on). But mainly I want to say that it wasn’t until I read Desikachar’s translation of sutra 2.28 in which he refers to avidya as “misapprehension” that I had my little epiphany. 

2.28 The practice and inquiry into different components of Yoga gradually reduce the obstacles such as misapprehension. Then the lamp of perception brightens and the distinction between what perceives and what is perceived becomes more and more evident. Now everything can be understood without error. —translated by T.K.V. Desikachar

Now I realize that understanding avidya is so important because it one of the main reasons why we should practice all eight branches of yoga, not just asana. Notice that Desikachar says “practice and inquiry into different components of Yoga” and that Iyengar translates the same phrases as “By dedicated practice of the various aspects of yoga.” And, of course, these different components of yoga are the eight branches of yoga (the very next sutra after 2.28, is the sutra that outlines the eight-fold path). See Ram’s series on the eight-fold path, starting with The First Branch of Yoga: The Yamas and ending with Samyama, for information. But the first step is to acknowledge our ignorance:

2.27 The attainment of clarity is a gradual process.

The first step is to recognize that certain tendencies of our mind are responsible for producing painful effects. —translated by T.K.V. Desikachar

Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° Join this site with Google Friend Connect

Read More