Tag: Post2

An ancient practice offers surprising insights.

Despite warnings over environmental consequences, oil consumption in the U.S. is nearing historic highs, and efforts to create energy-efficient alternatives have dropped. Yoga culture has something to say about the reversal in direction, and to understand how these seemingly unrelated fields intersect, let’s put our present moment in historic perspective.

How We Got Here

A century ago, German sociologist Max Weber described that prior to the Industrial Revolution, pursuit of wealth was considered a mortal sin and condemned by organized religion. Humility and simplicity ranked higher as Christian ideals than wealth and acquisition.

Encouraged first by Renaissance notions of unlimited human potential, then by explosive developments in communications and transportation technology, those ideals switched places. By this new formulation, hard work and resultant wealth became the real test of piety, and no industry embodied this shift more vividly than oil.

John D. Rockefeller, whose company, Standard Oil, was the most powerful corporation of its day, regarded petroleum as “the bountiful gift of the Creator” and used his fabulous wealth to build churches, endow Christian universities, and underwrite early televangelist ministries. By his reckoning, fossil fuel was not merely a natural resource, it was the sacred link between humans and their Maker. By the 1920s, the religious work ethic was firmly established. Diligent labor would lead to prosperity, and prosperity was proof that God was pleased.

Nature, in this formulation, was an endless resource to be exploited in the pursuit of profits. With grim foresight, Weber predicted that the system would endure “until the last ton of fossil fuel has been consumed.” A century later, his words seem eerily prophetic.

The Trap of More

Soon, however, the theological part of the formula dropped away. What need is there any longer for God, asked the wealthy, since hard work alone has proven itself sufficient for achieving prosperity?

What sustained that ethic, and what still sustains it, was the assumption that progress meant producing more, consuming more, and it is here that yoga culture offers an important corrective. There is evidence of yoga in India dating back at least six thousand years, and from its inception, yoga’s central proposition has been that there is a self beyond matter. Of course, that idea in isolation does not constitute a position on the environment. On its own, yoga does not clean rivers or vote down oil pipelines. But it does suggest that progress can be measured differently—not only in profit margins and energy output but in steadiness, awareness, and restraint.

Most of us don’t sit in the boardrooms where energy futures are decided. We make smaller choices, in how we spend, consume, and live. Modest choices, yes, but cultures are built out of them. The ethic of endless production was not revealed on stone tablets; it was assembled from human decisions. And it can be disassembled the same way.

What Yoga Offers

Yoga culture does not promise redemption. It doesn’t exempt us from the political struggle over energy and the environment. But it does suggest that our sense of wealth and progress is not inevitable, and that redefining those terms is possible. It steadies us when the news tempts us to despair. It keeps alive the idea that prosperity isn’t only about what we take from the earth but also about what we recover from ourselves.

That may sound modest, but modest shifts in definition can change civilizations. The work ethic that linked wealth with divine favor remade the modern world. A culture that measures prosperity not by accumulation but by awareness could do the same.

Yoga culture doesn’t offer easy fixes. What it offers is a way to begin again, to act with clarity, and to remember that change is possible. Each of us can carry that steadiness into our families, our communities, and our work. And if enough of us do, even the largest systems can shift.

Yoga suggests that real prosperity lies in discovering forms of progress that enrich us inwardly, while leaving the world around us whole. At stake is how we have come to measure prosperity itself, and whether a different measure might point us toward something more lasting.

Two Bestsellers with Unhappily-Ever-After Endings

As if life weren’t dramatic enough, I’ve been reading novels that predict humanity may not recover from its abuse of the natural world.

Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake imagines a near-future wasteland created by genetic experiments gone wrong. In an interview, Atwood explained the book’s eerie hybrids and collapsing ecosystems as a warning: “What if we continue down the road we’re already on? How slippery is the slope? Who’s got the will to stop us?”

For decades Atwood clipped bizarre items from the back pages of newspapers. What seemed paranoid fantasy then, she noted, often became reality. One telling example: she finished the book in the shadow of 9/11. “It’s unsettling when you’re writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens. I thought maybe I should turn to gardening books. But what use are gardening books in a world without gardens or books?”

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road strips the apocalypse bare. A father and son wander a nuclear-winter landscape, dodging cannibal gangs, scavenging for scraps, urging each other not to lie down and die. The prose is hypnotic, the mood ash gray. Yet beneath the bleakness, McCarthy insists that love can redeem even when redemption seems impossible.

Both novels echo earlier warnings—particularly in George Orwells’ 1984 novel Brave New World—that something “false within” is driving humanity to ruin. The Bhagavad Gita diagnosed the same disease millennia ago: “The demoniac say this world has no God in control, that its main moving force is sex, and following such conclusions they engage in unbeneficial, horrible work that can destroy the world. ‘So much is mine now,’ they tell themselves, ‘and it will increase in times to come.’”

Unlike novels which often offer no way out, the Gita provides a frame of consciousness that transcends borders and politics. Bhakti—the vision of all life as sacred—has the potential to be a practical program for social reform, but it will require compassion, respect for nature, and concern for the wellbeing of all. Disasters may come, but in a culture guided by devotion, they need not be final. A simple acknowledgment of life’s sanctity opens access to unseen resources and creative ideas for restoration. Even a hint of humility, the Gita suggests, can nudge humanity and the natural world back on track.

The Gita may lack the page-turning thrills of apocalypse novels (for that, see its parent epic, the Mahabharata). But for readers who want to close a book feeling more hopeful than horrified, the Gita is the ultimate survival manual.

Friends,

I don’t know about you, but I’m not an enlightened yogi, and I don’t think any of the people I’ve met in Bhagavad Gita classes are either. None of them can shoot fire from their eyes, make an apple manifest from thin air, or float. What they can do is melt my heart. With few exceptions, people attending these classes are beautiful souls, hungry for joy, and fumbling at the lock of transcendence with keys that don’t quite fit. But they keep coming. I’ve often wondered why. Then I came across the following story told by the late Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, and it gave me a clue.

Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov (c.1700-1760), the healer and mystic who founded Hasidic Judaism, looked out at the world and saw disaster stalking everywhere. So he went into the forest, found the place where rituals were performed, lit a sacred fire, recited mystic prayers—and the disaster disappeared.

In the following generation, disaster again rose its head. But the Baal Shem Tov had passed away, and his disciples did not know the location of the place of rituals. They only knew how to build the sacred fire and recite the mystic prayers. But it was enough, and again disaster was avoided.

Then came the next generation, and when disaster again threatened, followers knew neither the location of rituals nor how to light a sacred fire. They knew only the mystic prayers. But once again, it was enough, and disaster dissolved away.

Then came yet another generation, and this generation knew nothing of sacred places, healing fires, or mystic prayers. All they knew was the story of the Baal Shem Tov and how the generations after him had worked with whatever tools they had to heal the world.

So, that was the story they told. They told it to one another, to others, and the people listened to it and passed it along. Words—just words. But the words were enough to inspire a new generation, and by the telling of the story, once again disaster was averted.

And us? We’re not mystic healers. We’re not even exceptional students. We are the tail end of a long inheritance, frayed, fragile, pieces missing. But we can tell the story and pass it on. We can tell it wherever we are, in classrooms, in kitchens, in parks or any place where people gather, wherever ears are open.

And when the story is told from the heart, something moves in the hearts of others. The mystery rises from obscurity, and the world shifts a little, and maybe, just maybe, disaster steps back.

Don’t wait to be holy. No need. Just keep coming, and we will regale one another with stories from long ago and far away—or from yesterday and next door. Everyone is the vehicle for a powerful story. It just needs to be told from the heart.

Tell your story. That’s how we fight disaster. That’s how we survive and grow.

Fondly,
Yogesvara