Fraud and Yoga: Looking for the Real Thing

How do you tell the real thing? You infer its genuineness by the standardized marks it bears

One key question lies at the heart of all human religion, spirituality, science, and even states of awareness in general: how do you tell the real thing from a fake?

In ancient India, where yogic systems developed, this issue was critical. False teachers literally capitalized on the credulous, accumulating money while they disappointed would-be seekers.

The same is true in the modern world. From Dianetics and now to Dahn, accusations of religious fraud abound. Other teachers personal lives’ reveal deep character flaws. Some of these flaws were harmful only to the teacher involved. Other situations were more exploitive.

From another angle, the Canadian teacher Anasakta Baba now claims all meditation teaching has failed in the west. What are we to make of this situation? Will the ‘real teachers’ please present themselves? There is a more fundamental question: how would know you the real thing if you encountered it?

The traditional guarantor of genuineness is lineage. If you know a certain teacher has trained in a certain school or with certain masters, you infer that person is genuine – just as you infer that a person is a genuine doctor from their medical degree.

So knowledge of genuineness comes only through inference. The goal of yoga, on the other hand, is to move from inferential, once-remove knowledge characteristic of consensus-reality knowledge to direct observing in the present – characteristic of yogic forms of knowledge.

To move from inference to observation is a fundamental goal of all yogas. It amounts to a move from an illusory, second-hand world into the actual. So an understanding of fraud and illusion will be a key element of yoga practice. By refining your understanding of fraud and illusion, you learn to recognize that the body-mind’s claims to be the ultimate horizon of reality are false.

From the Yogic perspective, we can extend the principle: the world itself is fraudulent when we interpret its various appearances as ‘real’ in any ultimate sense. For we know that the range of the real goes beyond the body, senses and mind. The electromagnetic spectrum, for example, extends far beyond our ability to perceive it directly.

In a similar way, our capacity for experience extends far beyond its apparent limitations. To claim otherwise is to claim you have the market cornered on reality. In this claim lies true religious fraud.

Tagged as: Fake, fraud, Genuine, illusion, Lineage