Jñaña Yoga
Writer: Felix Quist Møller
02.02.23
“There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance” - The Buddha
Jñaña Yoga
Dear reader. Welcome to Healing Arts!
During the next months I will take you on a deep dive into the yogic philosophy as it relates to my own life and hopefully you will gain some insights in what yoga is all about.
Last week we covered Bhakti Yoga and how to practice devotion to God, but this week is all about reaching your fullest spiritual potential through gaining knowledge.
Pronounced ‘njana’, Jñaña Yoga means Knowledge of Yoga. This is the path of the intellectual student who likes to read and study literature. Digged deep into ancient texts of Vedic lore, the yogi comes to realize her own divinity through reading and learning how to control her mind. As I mentioned in the last episode, the knowledge of yoga is probably older than writing, so for generations it has been passed down mouth to ear, word by word from teacher to student, repetitively. This has been done through chanting and you can just imagine how the yogis must have been sitting in a circle under a tree, with their guru initiating them in ancient knowledge that has been carefully passed down through hundreds of generations. In this part I would like to take some time to present the different texts that I have studied, and that I recommend you to read as well.
A disclaimer here is that I can’t really read Sanskrit myself, I just know a few words. However, I have read others’ translations and thereby interpretations. It is thus always important to be critical towards those who have interpreted it. Sometimes it can have been interpreted by people with a particular religious agenda and therefore the translation will fit towards their personal belief system. Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just means that the original words have been colored and bent a bit. Therefore it can be a good idea to read several different interpretations to get a better overview. One teacher that I have always leaned towards is my Guru, B.K.S. Iyengar, who studied all the yogic texts and postures through his whole life and made some really good interpretations.
Especially because he was so focused on bringing the gift of yoga to the West he collaborated with professors and doctors who kind of “spoke our language” and that’s why words like Soul and God are a part of his translations. In Sanskrit there are several words for Soul and God and a good way to understand the difference is that in the East their world perceptions are more holistic, whereas westerners tend to understand everything linear and dualistic. Holistic means something like wholeness, understanding everything as interconnected and as part of a whole. Time is seen as more circular and transitional. Our western mindset is usually fixed on a linear time with a beginning and an end where death is finite and we divide the body from the soul, almost as if there were two worlds; one materialistic and one immaterial invisible world. I could go deeper into why it is like this, but I will just briefly say that most european interpretations of the Bible were done at a time where the greek philosopher Plato's and his scriptures were rediscovered, and they divided the world into cosmos and chaos, which then shaped our spiritual understanding of God and the Soul.
The best books I can recommend to study are The Core of the Yoga Sutras and Light on Yoga, both by B.K.S. Iyengar. But these are explanations of the text themselves. For core texts I can recommend the Yoga Sutras themselves written by Patañjali and then of course The Upanishads which I could read a millions times. Upa means “next to” and ni-shad means sitting down and therefore translates “sitting down next to” referring to the gurus who, for thousands of years, would sit in a circle and pass on the knowledge of yoga. It is said that the teachings in those books are so fundamental and their essence so universal, that even if all copies of them were destroyed and all knowledge of them destroyed, it would just be a matter of time before they were written again by someone else who has reached enlightenment. I find that so powerful.
That was this week's chapter of Healing Arts. I hope you have enjoyed the reading, and if you have been following our blog so far you have my deepest gratitude. I put a lot of love and effort into this blog, so I hope that shines a bit through to you.
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Namasté.
Felix
