Beyond the Drama of Seeking | The Yogas of Participation vs. Temple Religion

On what are the Yogas of Participation, the difference between temple religion and Yoga, how to practice without seeking, and the historic roots and dangers of motivated celibacy.

“Eternity is in love with the productions of Time.” — William Blake

Real Yoga is each person’s searchless and direct embrace of Eternity. It is your direct participation in God, arising now as the whole-body and all tangible and intangible conditions.

Yoga is easy and anybody can do it. It is primarily about participation in the union of all natural opposites: left/right, above/below, front/back, inhale/exhale, male/female, strength/receptivity.

By participating in the union of these opposites the source of all opposites is revealed: the hridaya; the heart on the right; the seed of Eternity, Truth, God, Reality Itself, that is blooming now, in and as your whole form.

Yoga is not a search but embrace only. The search for perfection (or connection, or Samadhi, or enlightenment, or God) only obliterates your ability to perceive the wonder that is already the case. The search is the problem. Stop looking, start living.

“Whatever you do in the pursuit of Truth or Reality takes you away from your own very Natural State in which you always are.” — U.G. Krishnamurti.

Eternity is pressing down on you from all quarters. Everybody is Eternity happening; and it does not arise by degrees, nor as a problem, nor solution. It is the form of Life itself. And no manipulation of the body or mind works nor is necessary for you to realize your Natural State. There are no steps to be taken.

Yoga begins when we accept the simple fact that everybody is the radiance of Eternity, already, prior to any activity in any direction. The mental thought-structures of seeking naturally dissolve when the Eternal condition of the body is felt. Yoga rightly practiced ends the habit of seeking.

It was the great Vedanta Acharya Ramanuja of the 10th century, the equivalent of a Buddha or Christ figure, who declared that Yoga was required for a God-realizing life. Ramanuja saw that the entire seen world of objects was but a shesha of God: an overflow of Eternity into form.

“Every thing is God,” he stated. “Therefore, intimate connection to any thing is God-realizing activity.”

Yoga is the technology of that connection.

Ramanuja also declared that a God-realizing life was utterly inclusive of Sex. He emphasized that the saints and sages of humanity would be appearing in family life. Sex was not to be avoided for the mistaken idea of celibacy; and neither was it to be used as a motivated technique for generating spiritual experiences.

Sex was to be honored as the heart’s activity; the outer enactment of giving and receiving that is the intrinsic nature of the hridaya heart; also known as the spiritual heart; that which has been spoken of throughout history by Reality Realizers like Ramana and others.

There is no requirement for Sex, should appropriate partnering not arise for any person. It is simply to say that spiritual life is inclusive of sexual intimacy and it is not to be avoided or deliberately bypassed.

Sex can and must be made positive within committed partnership between two people who Like, Love and Lust each other. Yoga, practiced as participation in the heart, tunes the body-mind to function easefully in relationship.

Daily intimate embrace of body, breath and relationship of all kinds — including right relatedness — is the appropriate response to the fact of Existingness; not meditation, not detachment, not philosophy, not withdrawal, not rote behaviouralism, not temple religion, not mindfulness, and not seeking.

In order for spiritual life to not be deluding, but to be real and useful, every person must receive an actual Yoga practice that is carefully adapted to their unique needs: body-type, age, health and culture. Yoga is relationship. Yoga is connection. Yoga is embrace. In intimate relationship, the secrets of the universe that are in you (as you) are revealed to the mind.

Yoga arose within non-hierarchical, egalitarian, Shamanic culture in the Indus Valley. It was shared as the practical means by which each person could respond to the guru’s grace.

It has developed over millennia into a human treasure of wisdom culture; an exquisitely refined set of practices handed down via the guru parampara (thread of teachers). It is there for every person to make use of regardless of gender, class, wealth, race, or religion.

Since the 14th C in India and Tibet however, and much earlier in Christian Europe, spiritual wisdom has been violently suppressed and transformed into an instrument of public control. Womanless men invented doctrinal power structures and the concept of God as ‘Other.’

Where God had been celebrated as the intrinsic condition of All, it was reconceptualized into an elusive entity above, beyond, or beneath the ordinary life. They taught that a relationship with God was reached only through a lifetime of diligent spiritual effort, self-improvement, and obedience to power structure.

The dark collaboration of Church and State has caused the misery of humanity. The sense of separation from Source has produced deep pain in the body-mind for generations.

It is locatable as a haunting sense that one is somehow ‘not there yet’ — and that there is a nebulous, hidden attainment that must be discovered before a person is free to relax into life proper and feel happy.

The womanless men of orthodoxy have destroyed indigenous cultures. They have exploited the planet for centuries and left us in the mess we are in. These masters of disaster have created the all-pervasive assumption of the public mind that life is a problem to be solved; a question requiring an answer.

They have imposed the model of the ‘perfect person’ onto humanity; the “knower” who is superior to the one who “does not know,” the one who is not perfect.

The central philosophy of religious life became that of detachment, not intimacy. God was to be found by leaving the village, getting away from women, and going to the monastery.

The phenomenal world of nature, body, breath, women, sex, pain, birth, death and all ‘objects’ were to be transcended by ‘going within.’ The elusive promise of enlightenment and God-union was dangled as the ultimate prize of a lifetime of renunciation. Such ideas are now synonymous with the very idea of spirituality itself.

The religious philosophy of detaching from experience culminates in the suppression of Sex. Celibacy has been glamourized as a superior state. Those at the top of spiritual hierarchies lay claim to power on the basis of their transcendence of Sex. I once met a Catholic priest who said:

“We’ve gone the extra mile because we’ve given up Sex.”

The idea that spiritual realization occurs in celibacy is a deadly cultural mistake. Sex is a vital force. It is how we all got here and it cannot be suppressed. The forcible, motivated, mind-driven denial of Sex directly causes illness and abuse.

Just as the attempt to suppress one’s breath causes it to burst out as a gasp, so the suppression of Sex creates aberrant eruptions of violent behaviour.

The behavior of men in the Catholic Church who had their sex taken off in their youth only for it to come out later as abuse is the obvious example. Yet, abuse within spiritual communities is equally present in Eastern religious groups.

We may consider ourselves to be modern people who are relatively free from the dark thought-structures of patriarchal religion. Yet the evidence of ongoing abuse says otherwise.

Hierarchy and sexual abuse is equally pervasive in the secular power structures of politics, commerce, and sport. The ubiquitous presence of pornography and the reduction of Sex to stress-relief orgasm is testament to the fact that Sex is still seen in less than sacred terms, as less than the heart’s activity.

We have a moral responsibility now to turn patriarchal culture on its head. We must chart a way for everybody to enjoy their life free from the dark thought-structures of seeking, cultism and the denial of intimate connection.

It is time now to put a spotlight on the trauma and burst the boil, so to speak, so that healing can occur. With great compassion for every person who is suffering, there is a way through. The Yogas of Participation in Eternity are available to all.

“Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” the visionary poet William Blake wrote.

That means your life and mine; your eyes reading these words; your body, breath and sex; your beautiful mind and powerful intellect. What is not immortal, the body and mind, is arising as a continuity of Eternity.

Be brave enough to ignore the social mind that seeks connection as if it is absent. Be a Yogi instead and practice intimate embrace of body, breath and relationship, in that order.

May everybody today notice, even for just a brief mystic moment, that they are at One with Life.

*My friends and I gather every week in the heart of yoga online studio for practical classes and conversation. As teachers, we do our best to pass on to any and every person the physical wisdom practices that we received from our teachers Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.