I’ve said before that Hinduism says there are four paths to God: jnana yoga (the path through knowledge), bhakti yoga (the path through love), karma yoga (the path through work), and raja yoga (the path through psychophysical exercises).
Corresponding to each of these four paths are four different personality types. Some people prefer to think and reflect. Some are more emotional. Some like being active. Others like experiments. Hinduism’s four paths offer a way for all types of people to find God in the way they’re most comfortable.
Me—I’m pretty much a thinker. I learn best by reading and studying. I always hated those times in school where the teacher would make you play a game or work in groups—basically, I didn’t like anything that made the students active participants in the lesson. I’d rather have a book to read and a lecture to follow any day. Just leave me to take notes and don’t make me talk in class. (And yes, I do realize that this pretty much makes me a freak—everybody else seemed to love breaking up the monotony of lectures and doing something as a group. But in my opinion—yuck!)
Not that I’m not emotional. I’m sure my boyfriend would be more than happy to tell you that I can be disturbingly overemotional on occasion. But at the heart of it, I’m mostly a thinker. So, for me, the path of jnana yoga sounds just about right.
The first step in jnana yoga is (surprise, surprise) learning. You’re encouraged to read and listen to the great works of Hindu scripture to absorb the wisdom of the ages. Hooray! I get to read and take notes! I think I could stop at this step forever and feel almost completely fulfilled.
Next, you move on to thinking. By reflecting deeply on all the knowledge you’ve acquired, you’re eventually able to transform academic concepts, such as the atman (the God within your own soul), and really understand and feel what those ideas mean on a deeper level.
Jnana yoga teaches that all of us are, essentially, actors performing roles during our lifetimes. As Huston Smith puts it, “We have been cast for the moment in the greatest of all tragi-comedies. . . .”
The problem most of us have is that we think of the role we’re playing right now, in this particular lifetime, as what we actually are. Because we can’t remember our past lives and, no matter how hard most of us try, we find it difficult to envision other lifetimes in the future (at least on more than an intellectual level), it’s hard to separate our eternal selves from our current roles.
Making that essential distinction is the goal of jnana yoga. We learn to look deep within ourselves until we can peel away all the layers of personality and circumstances and are able to see the real actor, the eternal soul, that’s underneath it all.
Once that has been achieved (as if it’s so easy!), we can move on to the next step, where we’re able to see ourselves as eternal souls, as “Spirit,” all the time, even in our mundane daily lives, and not just during an occasional moment of powerful meditation.
One way that Hindus suggest we can manage this is to view ourselves in the third person, as if we are no more than witnesses to our own lives. To quote Huston Smith again, doing this “drives a wedge between one’s self-identification and one’s surface self, and at the same time forces this self-identification to a deeper level until at last . . . one becomes in full what one always was at heart.”
I really like this idea, although I’ve got to say that thinking about myself in the third person is encouraging me to do a somewhat annoying running commentary on my rather boring life:
“Oh, look! Tara ’s oversleeping again. Wow, Tara really doesn’t need to be eating that ice cream! Tara should really get her big butt outside and go for a walk. A little exercise would definitely not hurt Tara ! Poor, lazy Tara . . .”
Well, I may not be achieving enlightenment just yet, but at least I’m keeping myself entertained.
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