Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

Jnana and Bhakti yoga encourages devotion to more essential higherprinciples of life rather than to sectarian religious deities. In this time of intensifying religious wars, we must constantly endeavor to understand and deprogram our consciousness from ritualistic and sectarian beliefs, however old and cherished, that divide us and are the cause of so much killing and planetary degradation. We might better direct our devotion toward the great common denominators of higher perception, the great guiding principles of love, truth, common humanity, the sacredness of life and our planet, and the highest good of all. This is not just a secular, humanist point of view—it is the essence of spirituality.
    Jnana yoga has been called the
pathless path
. It endeavors to free us from conditioning and the limitations of knowledge. It shows us that when we open our eyes and begin to see the beauty and sacredness around us we have less need of techniques, rituals, or beliefs. An ancient yogic text,
Bhagavad Gita
, says, “For one who has seen the infinite, all the sacred texts are of as much use as a container of water in a place where there has been a flood.” We need to end our illusion and delusion. This happens through the awakening of perception and watchfulness in our daily life. But imbalanced practice of Jnana can lead to cynicism, excessive intellectualism, or dry, mental self-indulgence.

Karma Yoga
    Karma yoga is the yoga of action, the yoga of doing. We must live and act in the world, and this branch of yoga seeks to bring more awareness and artistry into our actions. It deals with both the quality and the motivation of action and could be called the
yoga of doing
. Karma yoga urges us to learn to act with clarity, wholeness, artistry, and meditation in action. Our businesses, our bodies, our relationships, and even how we do the dishes, with right understanding, all become expressions of our yogic awareness. Our actions are the manifestation of our inner reality. As is often said, we can talk the talk, but do we walk the walk?
    Karma yoga is the place where all yoga systems can come together. No matter what our point of view, when spiritual awareness awakens and the heart opens with love and compassion, its expression is in sharing it with others. A danger of yoga, and of life itself, is excessive self-centeredness. Most yoga practices deal with improving our minds, bodies, and hearts so we must be vigilant about becoming preoccupied with ourselves. Yoga is something far deeper than developing the body beautiful or increasing personal bliss. Karma yoga also reminds us to think of and serve others, especially those who cannot help themselves—the poor, the sick, the elderly. Karma yoga asserts that “you are the world.”

The Wholeness of Yoga
    To our unawakened eye these branches of yoga may seem to contradict each other. Bhakti says have faith, while Jnana says question everything. Raja says control your mind, while Jnana says the controller is that which you are trying to control. Bhakti says pray, serve, and surrender to God, while Jnana says prayer and ritual can strengthen separation—that we must see instead that we are already one with God. We may perceive the unity of these branches when we understand that yoga practices are tools to help us on our journey, rather than means or paths to an end or goal. When we have seen that there is no path to truth, that truth and spirit are living things, then the limbs of yoga can serve us as useful practices and guiding tools that we use on our journeys.
    Perhaps the metaphor of a sage will help. He likened the four yoga branches to the parts of a bird. Raja yoga is the tail, steering, steadying, and guiding the bird with control. Karma is the yoga of action; it is the wings propelling the bird onward. Bhakti is the heart, guiding with love and compassion. And Jnana is the head, piloting the bird toward the light with perception and vision. Which part can we deny and still fly?
    The four yogas actually point to four key qualities or capacities that balance each other—faith balanced by questioning or doubt, and control balanced by surrender or letting go. These qualities are essential polarities in our internal guidance systems. Any one of these can be out of balance, but used together they give different perspectives that guide us on our path.



W hen most people think of yoga, they immediately think about the most popular form of yoga in the Western world today: