Apart from beliefs and propositions, religious texts generally contain moral injunctions on righteous living pleasing to their central deity. What is distinctive about Indic spiritual texts is that they tend to emphasise experience and practices, not beliefs and injunctions.
Yes, there are ethical imperatives in Indic texts but they are set in the context of a practical pathway of inner cultivation and training towards liberation from suffering and limitations. The texts of Yoga and Buddha Dhamma are a case in point. These texts are more empirical than dogmatic, largely constituted by specific instructions on processes and practices that transform and liberate the body and mind.
Yoga and Buddha Dhamma are essentially practical teachings for inner design-engineering of the bodymind system, away from afflictive defilements and towards full flowering of human potentials for goodness, happiness, love, compassion, bliss, and freedom. They can be deemed inner contemplative sciences and technologies unlike anything else we have seen in the world’s religious traditions.
There are many cultures, languages, and religions in our world but there is only one deathless Dhamma of awakening expressed in varied forms and styles of practice. This deathless Dhamma of awakening has the potential to unite the world. For peoples of all cultures, languages, and religions are welcomed to learn and apply these processes and practices in their lives. No need for conversion of religious beliefs or affiliations of any kind. Unlike certain religious messages that claim universality but in fact require adopting a set of beliefs and propositions that are deeply inextricable from a particular sociohistorical and religio-cultural matrix unless radically re-interpreted. Each is free to personally test and verify for themselves whether these processes and practices work. Dhamma is empirical, not dogmatic.
In the words of a beloved and well-known master of Yoga in our time, Sadhguru, his mission and by extension the mission of all genuine contemplative practitioners is to evoke a quantum shift away from “religion to responsibility.” Rather than promoting heavenly hubris, we focus on real experience in the here and now — and beyond. Going to a place called “heaven” in the hereafter is not the point. All places are necessarily located in space and time and thus steeped in entropy — they decay and die. An “eternal place” is an oxymoron.
Only in the nameless Now unencumbered by time and space is the timeless and deathless found. Everything else, everywhere else, at every point in time, is inescapably conditioned and thus ultimately unreliable. Only in the unborn, unconditioned, unconstructed is there real freedom. Not in the hereafter. Not in time.
And Now, Yoga.
Image credit: Sadhguru.
