Religious Scholar

Viewing Meister Eckhart through the Bhagavad Gita by Linda Brown Holt is now available in both paperback and hard cover editions at Amazon.com, BN.com, and other booksellers (including Garland of Letters in Philadelphia, Pa.). This book views major teachings of the 14th century Dominican scholar and mystic, Meister Eckhart, through the lens of the "gospel of Hinduism," the Bhagavad Gita. The striking parallels encourage all who seek to find common sources of wisdom, compassion, and inspiration in the world's major religious traditions.

Dr. Vijayendra Pratap, founder of the SKY Foundation and a clinical psychologist and yoga teacher, lectures to a capacity crowd at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Connelly Auditorium, on Sunday evening, January 15, 2012. He discussed the yoga sutras and their relevance today, and answered questions from the audience.

In The Yoga Sutras Book I, Verse 7, Patanjali lists three types of “right knowledge. “  In my transliteration of the Sutras, Threads of Yoga (copyright 2008)

http://www.religiousscholar.com/storage/Threads%20of%20Yoga%20by%20L%20B%20Holt.pdf,

 I describe them as follows:

• ·         Direct perception
• ·         Inference
• ·         Reliable testimony

(Edwin F. Bryant translates these as sense perception, logic, and verbal testimony. The Yoga Sutras, North Point Press, 2009.)

Direct perception is when you actually see or experience something.  In a lecture at Thomas Jefferson University on Jan. 15, 2012, Dr. Vijayendra Pratap, psychologist and yoga teacher, offered the example of a building on fire. You see the fire, and you know it exists.

Inference is when you perceive traces or suggestions that something exists.  If you see a red glow on the horizon, hear fire trucks, and smell smoke, you may infer that there is a fire.

Reliable testimony is when you are not present, but an informed source, such as a journalist, your trusted neighbor who actually witnessed it, or a firefighter who was there says there has been a fire.  

Applied to religion and spirituality, these are the tests of truth. You know your faith is true because you have experienced it directly. You infer that it is true because you have seen evidences of it in the world around you.  And in divine scripture, you find the testimony of revered sages who assert that it is true.  As these tests apply to knowledge, they also apply to Divine Love.

In The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali underscores the importance of replacing negativity and disruption with positive actions and thoughts (Book II:33).  According to my transliteration (1993), this sutra reads, “When overcoming destructive forces, one should cultivate their opposites.”

This sutra applies readily to the proliferation of uncontrollable thoughts and negative thinking in our own time. The brilliant translator, commentator and teacher, Edwin F. Bryant, likens our unwelcome and unhealthy thoughts to weeds in a garden:

“In even the best-tended gardens, weeds inevitably pop up from time to time…As in a garden, the more one makes an effort to uproot weeds, the more the bed will eventually become a receptacle for fragrant flowers, which will then grow and reseed of their own accord until there is hardly any room for the weeds to surface.”  (Edwin Bryant’s text on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, North Point Press, 2007, pp. 255 and 257.)

As PoetOfZen on Twitter, I once tweeted the eight branches of Yoga. The original eight branches were recorded nearly 2,000 years ago by the Indian sage, Patanjali, in a text known as the Yoga Sutras. They provide a tool to help people lead better lives, regardless of their religion or worldview.  Here is my take on the eight branches of Yoga as 140-character tweets (based on my 1993 transliteration of the Sutras):

• There are 8 branches of Yoga. 1st Yoga Branch: Social ethics. Be harmless, truthful, don’t steal, be sexually responsible, don’t be greedy.

• 2nd Yoga Branch: Personal ethics. Be clean, content, streamlined, know yourself, surrender to your idea of a Higher Power.

• 3rd Yoga Branch:Take care of the body. Have good posture, take regular, gentle exercise; know that body/spirit/mind are integrated & whole.

• 4th Yoga Branch: Breathe. Be grateful for breath, which sustains us all our days. Be aware: respect the breath we share as living beings.

• 5th Yoga Branch: Our senses are our servants. Don’t let them tell you what to do. Be a loving master: know when to turn them off.

• 6th Yoga Branch: Learn to concentrate. Sunlight focused through a lens can set a field on fire. Power lurks in concentration.

• 7th Yoga Branch: Meditate. Go beyond concentration on a single object. Clear your mind, open your heart: be there.

• 8th Yoga Branch: Experience the unity of your own soul with something great. Call it God, Nature or Humanity: this is the goal of Yoga.