This Dreamtime Pathway from Australia is both a symbol and a map
Humans are symbol-making creatures. Symbolic expression permeates our lives, giving them meaning and order. When concentrated and coordinated, symbols begin to form systems. When webbed together into systems, symbols start to function in a new way: they begin to generate and sustain the experience of reality.
Applied at the most diffuse level, symbol-systems transform individuals across time into a virtual unity – a culture. At a more concentrated level, they become religious systems. Here, the tool that orders ordinary experience generates an ultra-world experienced as more permanent and more real than consensus reality.
All of this happens unconsciously. What happens when tools of symbolic reality-creation become conscious? If the goals are completely secular, this knowledge becomes advertising and propaganda: the conscious use of symbolism to manipulate other minds. If, however, the conscious use of symbolism remains ‘sacred,’ that is, ‘ if it is used not to manipulate minds but to enhance awareness, it becomes a yogic or mystical system.
In ‘religions,’ however, these two motivations – manipulation and evolution – occur side-by-side. This seeming contradiction deep in the category of ‘religion’ makes it difficult to address – but address it we must, for the issue of ‘religion’ looms large in yoga thought these days.
There are pragmatic social concerns here; if yoga is a religion, it cannot make claims to universality, whether on the basis of common human physiology psychology. If yoga is not a religion, it can be regulated and taxed like any other educational program.
The issue of ‘religion’ raises important psychological issues for the individual too. Especially in the United States, many yoga explorers found their practice through dissatisfaction with mainstream theist traditions – especially a conviction that effort-won experience is a more reliable guide than blind belief in a credo. Similarly, since yoga is an experimental system, it shares with science the conviction that only through observation can we learn ‘what is.’
Most importantly, however, religions are reality-shaping systems. In the next post, I’ll show you how the process works. In seeing it, you may be able to see how it works in your own awareness as well.
