Eat, Pray, Love

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which
I’m going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Dif-
ferent schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s ap-
parently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam
blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all
our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the
clash between our natural drives and civilization’s needs. (As my friend Deborah the psycho-
logist explains it: “Desire is the design flaw.”) The Yogis, however, say that human discontent-
ment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We’re miserable because we think that we are
mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly
believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recog-
nize our deeper divine character. We don’t realize that, somewhere within us all, there does
exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, univer-
sal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a no-
tion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus:
“You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not.”
Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experi-
ence forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away
from your endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future so that
you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and
your surroundings with poise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of
the world (and yourself) be revealed to you. True Yogis, from their seat of equipoise, see all
this world as an equal manifestation of God’s creative energy—men, women, children,
turnips, bedbugs, coral: it’s all God in disguise. But the Yogis believe a human life is a very
special opportunity, because only in a human form and only with a human mind can God-
realization ever occur. The turnips, the bedbugs, the coral—they never get a chance to find
out who they really are. But we do have that chance.
“Our whole business therefore in this life,” wrote Saint Augustine, rather Yogically, “is to
restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
Like all great philosophical ideas, this one is simple to understand but virtually impossible
to imbibe. OK—so we are all one, and divinity abides within us all equally. No problem. Un-
derstood. But now try living from that place. Try putting that understanding into practice
twenty-four hours a day. It’s not so easy. Which is why in India it is considered a given that
you need a teacher for your Yoga. Unless you were born one of those rare shimmering saints
who come into life already fully actualized, you’re going to need some guidance along your
journey toward enlightenment. If you’re lucky enough, you will find a living Guru. This is what