Simulating Spirituality

The following article was written for the Yoga Atlantic Magazine, The Wave, for the Spring 2009 issue. Please feel free to leave comments.

Simulating Spirituality: The Story of a Public Entertainer

Robert Webber

In the 1960’s the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote that the most important event of the 20th century was the arrival of Eastern philosophy in the West. With its attention to the search for self-knowledge, Buddhism, Yoga, and other forms of spirituality had the potential to implode our social, political, and economic structures and systems. Up until then in the West, economic progress, democratic politics, and the idea of an external God provided a tightly knit super-structure. Indeed, the sociologist Max Weber, who saw the Protestant work ethic as the spiritual basis of capitalism development. Now people would be less prepared to work eight or ten hours a day at a mundane job just to get ahead and retire early. Eastern thought would make it harder for people to maintain that outward focus on the world that the traditional Western idea of progress had held in place.

So what has happened? Has yoga created an implosion in Western society? Is there a radical revolution building within our systems or has something else happened? Like a physical organism that is attacked by a virus, we have to look at the Western economic system’s ability to release the anti-bodies necessary to kill that virus. To put it differently, is Western society absorbing yoga into itself? Was Toynbee less prophetic than he seemed? To go into this question fully would require much more than the 800 words or so that I have here but I’ll offer a few suggestions that might stimulate you to consider the question for yourself.

We first need to ask what is at the heart of our contemporary economy. I would suggest that our whole economy and society is now based upon entertainment. Whether something is entertaining determines whether we pay attention to it. Things have to be fun. No matter what event or product your see advertised today, no matter what its underlying purpose, you see more or less every time the tag line that it’s also going to be fun. It seems like we have lost our depth, our ability to take anything seriously. Perhaps in our pursuit of progress our life has become so utterly one-dimensional that we are hopelessly depressed and have to be injected with the promise of fun before we’ll get up off the sofa?

I’ve been interested in this question for years, ever since I studied the work of Jean Baudrillard during my Ph.D. research, but the question came up again strongly when I glanced at the cover of a copy of Vanity Fair at a friend’s house about a year ago. Besides the photo-shopped cover picture, the cover had a small quotation in the bottom left hand corner. Drawn to it for some reason, I read “I am just a public entertainer who has understood his times.” The quotation was from Pablo Picasso and it really made me stop and think. In an instant I realized that this is what I was as a yoga teacher. All the popularity of my classes over ten years flashed before me, and I saw myself just as I was, an entertainer. I was just a public yoga entertainer who had for some reason understood the spirit of the times he lived in.

In my classes I spoke to that spirit very well and people came because it fitted their own lingering sense of something existing below of the surface of saving for retirement or paying off the mortgage. I talked lucidly and engagingly about discovering one’s true self, finding one’s dharma, listening to how your body feels and finding inner guidance. But the truth is that until I saw the quote from Picasso and woke up, I was only ever playing with images. The image of finding our dharma or being guided from within were interesting for students so long as we didn’t get too close to the actuality of it, and my skill as the unwitting entertainer was to keep just enough distance between the students and the actuality so that the ideas were never real. In practical terms, I was inviting people to observe how they feel, but not to observe the “me” that was observing the feeling. The depth was missing and so it was just entertainment. Students felt relaxed, their bodies felt healthy and vibrant, they explored some interesting ideas, and they had fun. Everyone, usually anyway, was happy. To use a phrase of Baudrillard’s, we were “simulating” spirituality.

So what really is entertainment? Entertainment is an escape from what is through playing with images. Movies are entertaining because you can identify with the images but not have to pull the trigger, throw the punch, or leave the dying friend in the road. However, we also look at images in our own minds all the time without being at the movies or watching TV. To a large degree our whole lives have become movies with ourselves in the staring role. It begins when we are kids and imagine we are a great football or hockey players when we are on the playing field or at the rink, and it continues all the way into adulthood with identification with movie stars. Take the popularity of celebrity make-over TV programs as an example.

But take it a little further and ask yourself who you imagine yourself to be in your in your yoga classes, either as a student or as a teacher. Are you Shiva Rhea or Erich Schiffmann? Also, do you include “fun” or similar words in your class descriptions? In other words, are you entertaining yourself and your students with images? It’s out of insecurity that we dumb down what we do for others or identify with a teacher, tradition, or idea. It makes what we do more appealing to others and us more likeable. You might want to try this inquiry. Ask yourself if you are aware of a fear of losing your students? Observe very closely your own reaction to what you say in class next time you teach and see. Are you an entertainer?

At the same time though, yoga students exist in their own world of images. So while you might be chatting along about the importance of discovering the Atman, the crucial the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, or the break in knowledge about yoga that appeared with the Vedanta, they might be working towards the image of Trikonasana that they have seen on a DVD. You might be talking to yourself and they might be creating their own measurement of progress in their practice. Progress is entertaining. Thought constantly plays with the image of the quest, going from here to there, and achieving something. That’s why the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali has been so popular and held authority in yoga circles for so long.

As I observed my own teaching and my own classes in my post-Picasso world, I saw that I had to find a way of getting my students to relate directly to what is, to show them how to know themselves from what they were doing rather than relating to images, ideas, and concepts. It was out of this realization that I turned to the work of Krishnamurti that I had flirted with a bit for a little while. Krishnamurti’s teachings have helped me to develop my teaching so that it’s harder for my students to avoid the real issues of personal transformation while they are in their yoga postures. Nothing is being forced on them, but by taking each posture and using it as an inquiry into the images that we create as reactions to what is, each posture becomes a mirror into wider and deeper self-knowledge.

I was asked to write on the Yoga Loft’s new Yoga Teacher Training course for this article, which was very nice as it would be an opportunity to promote the course a little. But as it hasn’t started yet it felt that all I would actually do is entertain you with ideas and images rather than give you a description of actuality! What I can say is that it is geared towards promoting self-inquiry in students. Not only is it infused deeply with my interest in Krishnamurti’s teachings (I am going to the Krishnamurti Foundation in Ojai, California for five weeks this summer to take some courses and do some research), it is also set up as an exploration of the differences and similarities between my style of practice and teaching and that of my colleague and friend Seth Daley, who teaches Ashtanga Yoga.

My sense, without wishing to be critical of other local programs, is that yoga teacher training can become another form of entertainment, especially when you follow just one style, one teacher, or one yoga tradition. It allows the mind to move too easily in a straight line, narrowing its focus, and it gives students too reassuring an image of where they are heading. My hope with our program at the Yoga Loft is that students taking it will, right from the start, be required to question for themselves their own identity as yoga practitioners and then as yoga teachers. The whole idea is not to offer a path to follow but instead to inspire a spirit of questioning. In this way, the students will continue to find out for themselves throughout their whole career as yoga teachers. As Krishnamurti put it, famously now, truth is a pathless land. You can’t create a system or a method to find liberation; you just have to look and see what is.

The Yoga Teacher Training Program starts on September 25, 2009. You can find more details at www.theyogaloft.ca/ytt