An interview with georg feuerstein from 1997
INTRO - MAY 31, 2015
In the summer of 1996 I got a phone call from Donald Moyer, then the director of the Yoga Room in Berkeley. "Your hero’s coming here to talk," were the first words out of his mouth. I paused for a moment to consider .... my hero? Mickey Mantle was dead, so I knew it wasn’t him, I figured Bob Dylan would never agree to a gig at the Yoga Room, and Thomas Pynchon was a notorious recluse, so I eliminated him too. Donald, a master yogi, sensing my confusion even through the telephone wire, prompted me. "Georg," he said, and I immediately knew who he was talking about, Georg Feuerstein, whose books on yoga and other metaphysical topics were among my favorites of all time. This was indeed exciting news, the distinguished scholar coming down from the mountain (he lived at the time up in Clear Lake) to offer his words of wisdom to the hungering masses at the humble Yoga Room. I couldn’t wait.
The day finally arrived and it was all I hoped it would be. I had done some research here and there into traditional yoga, but Georg showed me what it meant to do the "real stuff," as he liked to say. I sat in the audience and recalled what I was told about the ancient upanishadic students, who would sit stock still for hours at a time while the teacher delivered the secret teaching. Movement of any kind, even a twitch, was considered to be an interruption and insult, and so I did my best to remain fidget-less, but I’m sorry to say, despite the engrossing talk, the insults piled up one after another.
A few days after the Yoga Room session I had a brilliant idea: I would interview Herr Feuerstein and have it published in Yoga Journal for the edification of the entire yoga community. I emailed Georg, and in my best obsequious voice—I was terrified of him at the time (though he gave me no reason to be)—I asked, please, would you please let me please interview you, please? To my enormous surprise, not to mention horror, he agreed, was even willing to drive down to the Bay Area and submit himself to my pitiful questions.
And so it came about that I spent nearly an entire day with Georg Feuerstein. I was in heaven and hell at the same time, speaking with this renowned scholar while at the same time revealing my own egregious ignorance about the material at hand. I somehow survived the ordeal, and awhile later one of his books appeared on my doorstep. Inside he’d written:
For Richard — with my best wishes for great success (siddhi) in Yoga, kind regards, Georg (om)
So armed with this ammunition I marched confidently over to the offices of Yoga Journal, then located in downtown Berkeley no more than a mile or so from my house. Now to be honest, at the time I was on the board of directors of the non-profit that ran the magazine, so I wasn’t exactly showing up cold. I knew the editor-in-chief, he knew me, and so I confidently poked my head into his office and smugly said, "How would you like an interview with Georg Feuerstein?" To me, it seemed about the same as asking, how would you like an interview with God? We’ll get this universal suffering question resolved at last. But the response was, well, less enthusiastic than I was expecting. Way less. The E-in-C hemmed and hawed, and I got the distinct impression that even if the interviewee HAD been the deity, there still would have been some hesitation. He was, I recalled, an avowed Buddhist, and not especially inclined toward modern Western yoga, which, like all good Buddhists, he thought of as beneath his dignity.
I was incredulous, and right away called on a few other board members, just to make sure that Georg was as well know among yoga people as I imagined him to be. He was. So not to be denied on this one, I persisted, reminded the Buddhist-in-Chief that his magazine was named YOGA (not Buddhist) Journal, and finally, more to get me off his back than anything else, I got permission to submit a shortened version of the interview.
Time passes, as it does whether we like it or not, and the full interview somehow drifted into the nether regions of my backup hard drive, where I re-discovered it last week. Callooh Callay, o frabjous day! So here it is in its final edited version, with Georg’s imprimatur. Though he’s passed away now (and after almost three years it still seems impossible), his spirit permeates everything I write (except the animal doggerel, which is mine alone), and I hope someday to be half the writer he was, that I’ll consider my siddhi. Along with a majestic upper deck homer at the Stadium in front of 65,000 wild-eyed Yankee fans during the World Series, Blowin’ in the Wind and Visions of Johanna ("the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of the face"), and Benny Profane, the gardener named the Marquis de Sod, and radio station KCUF, having been a friend of Georg’s is one of the great blessings of my life.
In the summer of 1996 I got a phone call from Donald Moyer, then the director of the Yoga Room in Berkeley. "Your hero’s coming here to talk," were the first words out of his mouth. I paused for a moment to consider .... my hero? Mickey Mantle was dead, so I knew it wasn’t him, I figured Bob Dylan would never agree to a gig at the Yoga Room, and Thomas Pynchon was a notorious recluse, so I eliminated him too. Donald, a master yogi, sensing my confusion even through the telephone wire, prompted me. "Georg," he said, and I immediately knew who he was talking about, Georg Feuerstein, whose books on yoga and other metaphysical topics were among my favorites of all time. This was indeed exciting news, the distinguished scholar coming down from the mountain (he lived at the time up in Clear Lake) to offer his words of wisdom to the hungering masses at the humble Yoga Room. I couldn’t wait.
The day finally arrived and it was all I hoped it would be. I had done some research here and there into traditional yoga, but Georg showed me what it meant to do the "real stuff," as he liked to say. I sat in the audience and recalled what I was told about the ancient upanishadic students, who would sit stock still for hours at a time while the teacher delivered the secret teaching. Movement of any kind, even a twitch, was considered to be an interruption and insult, and so I did my best to remain fidget-less, but I’m sorry to say, despite the engrossing talk, the insults piled up one after another.
A few days after the Yoga Room session I had a brilliant idea: I would interview Herr Feuerstein and have it published in Yoga Journal for the edification of the entire yoga community. I emailed Georg, and in my best obsequious voice—I was terrified of him at the time (though he gave me no reason to be)—I asked, please, would you please let me please interview you, please? To my enormous surprise, not to mention horror, he agreed, was even willing to drive down to the Bay Area and submit himself to my pitiful questions.
And so it came about that I spent nearly an entire day with Georg Feuerstein. I was in heaven and hell at the same time, speaking with this renowned scholar while at the same time revealing my own egregious ignorance about the material at hand. I somehow survived the ordeal, and awhile later one of his books appeared on my doorstep. Inside he’d written:
For Richard — with my best wishes for great success (siddhi) in Yoga, kind regards, Georg (om)
So armed with this ammunition I marched confidently over to the offices of Yoga Journal, then located in downtown Berkeley no more than a mile or so from my house. Now to be honest, at the time I was on the board of directors of the non-profit that ran the magazine, so I wasn’t exactly showing up cold. I knew the editor-in-chief, he knew me, and so I confidently poked my head into his office and smugly said, "How would you like an interview with Georg Feuerstein?" To me, it seemed about the same as asking, how would you like an interview with God? We’ll get this universal suffering question resolved at last. But the response was, well, less enthusiastic than I was expecting. Way less. The E-in-C hemmed and hawed, and I got the distinct impression that even if the interviewee HAD been the deity, there still would have been some hesitation. He was, I recalled, an avowed Buddhist, and not especially inclined toward modern Western yoga, which, like all good Buddhists, he thought of as beneath his dignity.
I was incredulous, and right away called on a few other board members, just to make sure that Georg was as well know among yoga people as I imagined him to be. He was. So not to be denied on this one, I persisted, reminded the Buddhist-in-Chief that his magazine was named YOGA (not Buddhist) Journal, and finally, more to get me off his back than anything else, I got permission to submit a shortened version of the interview.
Time passes, as it does whether we like it or not, and the full interview somehow drifted into the nether regions of my backup hard drive, where I re-discovered it last week. Callooh Callay, o frabjous day! So here it is in its final edited version, with Georg’s imprimatur. Though he’s passed away now (and after almost three years it still seems impossible), his spirit permeates everything I write (except the animal doggerel, which is mine alone), and I hope someday to be half the writer he was, that I’ll consider my siddhi. Along with a majestic upper deck homer at the Stadium in front of 65,000 wild-eyed Yankee fans during the World Series, Blowin’ in the Wind and Visions of Johanna ("the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of the face"), and Benny Profane, the gardener named the Marquis de Sod, and radio station KCUF, having been a friend of Georg’s is one of the great blessings of my life.
BEGINNING STEPS ON THE PATH
SECRECY AND THE MODERN DISSEMINATION OF THE TEACHINGS
THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE TEACHINGS FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE
THE WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY TO THE EASTERN “LEGACY”
THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF A SYSTEM ON THE NEED FOR A GURU
THE SPIRITUAL INTENT OF THE TEACHINGS
THE REVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF CHANGE
ON CONSCIOUSNESS
THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF PRACTICE
COMMITMENT TO PRACTICE
THE ROLE OF A YOGA TEACHER
WHERE IS YOGA GOING IN THIS COUNTRY?
SECRECY AND THE MODERN DISSEMINATION OF THE TEACHINGS
THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE TEACHINGS FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE
THE WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY TO THE EASTERN “LEGACY”
THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF A SYSTEM ON THE NEED FOR A GURU
THE SPIRITUAL INTENT OF THE TEACHINGS
THE REVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF CHANGE
ON CONSCIOUSNESS
THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF PRACTICE
COMMITMENT TO PRACTICE
THE ROLE OF A YOGA TEACHER
WHERE IS YOGA GOING IN THIS COUNTRY?
GEORG FEUERSTEIN interview with Richard Rosen
Berkeley, CA
October 10, 1997
BEGINNING STEPS ON THE PATH
RR: Maybe we should talk about you a bit. If I remember correctly, you became interested in
yoga at a relatively young age. Seventeen or younger?
GF: Fourteen.
RR: How did that happen? It reminds me of Aivanov; he was interested in those kinds of things
at an early age.
GF: But he was a master, I’m just a scholar. [laughs] Well, I discovered at a young age Paul
Brunton’s A Search in Secret India. That completely did it for me. I was on fire for months. I had
always looked around. I started being interested in philosophy at a very early age and was reading
European philosophers. But when I came across that book . . .
RR: Very exotic book.
GF: And a book in which he was concealing his own knowledge at the time. Because he had
already passed through certain experiences, but was writing this as a gateway for newcomers. So
it was written on a very basic, storytelling level. I remember when I came to his description of an
encounter with Ramana Maharishi, I read this I don’t know how many times. Again and again
and again, saying “I wish I could meet a master like that.” I just was totally captured. It was for
me spellbinding. My parents didn’t know what hit them. [laughs] I started meditating, a
meditation of my own design. [laughs] Reading that book over and over again and it really set the
stage for my spiritual interest. I’m very glad because, I can’t think of anyone better that Ramana
Maharishi to provide the right context. That was a great sage, a great realizer. And even in
Brunton’s kind of corrupt version of the story, I could pick up enough to feel that was a great
being. It took a few more years for me to jell with yoga. It was all still unknown territory I was
exploring here and there.
RR: Must have been hard to find information in the early 60's?
GF: Yes, 1961. Very difficult. So I found another book by Brunton which had been translated,
which was The Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. Marvelous volume. Even now when I look at it I
think this guy really has understood. Unfortunately, his work is not being read at all anymore, or
very little. But he was one of the people who brought Eastern traditions to the west. Very much
so. His work sold in the tens of thousands in those days, the 60's and 70's and then nothing.
RR: It is not a writing style . . .not an easy style.
GF: No, it seems Victorian.
RR: The writing is beautiful, but . . .
GF: It has a special flavor, [laughs] it belongs to the nineteenth century. But I still recommend
his notebooks of which there are 18 volumes. I think they are marvelous. They are a source of
inspiration. There is so much in them. But he is a writer I wish would be out there more, even
now.
So what happened then was Ramana Maharishi kindled my interest. Then I encountered
Yogananda’s autobiography, and again I was totally spellbound by it, all these miraculous stories.
Could they be true? [laughs] And then I discovered early on, and was very fortunate to discover a
book called Der Yoga, which means “The Yoga,” by a German Indologist. A big book, totally
scholarly book, and I spent my pocket money on it.
RR: Hauer?
GF: Yes. And there I found, surprises of all surprises, a translation of the yoga sutras and his
translations. And then that was it. I knew that was what I was going to do with my life, work in
yoga. And then as soon as I could, which was when I was 17 or so, I left home and studied with
an Indian yogi, hatha yogi, in the Black Forest. And learned hatha yoga the traditional way. Much
more emphasis on the energy, generating energy and pranayama and meditation.
RR: So that the asanas in that system are simply a way to strengthen and purify the body and it
isn’t the focus at all.
GF: No. He also had evolved very special exercises specifically for the spine, which were his
own system. He himself was a formidable man. Incredible power. He liked to show off his
strengths, with steamrollers rolling over his chest and this kind of stuff. Stopped his heart and
pulse. He was constantly in the newspapers. I had a very intimate relationship with him. I really
liked him. I thought that was really cool to have a teacher like that. When I showed up that first
time I remember he had a quiet castle, a whole castle in the Black Forest; that was his yoga
school. I got there and people were lined up in the big hall to be shown to their respective rooms,
a little suitcase you know. He came and greeted everybody, except me. [laughs] I thought why
didn’t he greet me, you know the mind at that age does crazy...you want to be recognized. So
everyone was shown to their rooms. Then he came back and looked at me for a while and said
“come with me.” He spoke English. He took me to a special room called the Himalaya room
[laughs] because it had no windows and it was winter time. That is where I was most of the time
I was in the ashram, I was allowed one blanket and I had to break the ice on the well in the
morning to wash. And he would watch whether I was doing it or not. I was just freezing and
hungry most of the time. But that was the training. I had been so much in my head, [laughs] he
needed to get me down into the body before he could work with me. It really worked. And then
he transferred me to Italy where we had a little ashram and we were building the stairs outside
and terrace near a cave.
SECRECY AND THE MODERN DISSEMINATION OF THE TEACHINGS
RR: Once upon a time these teachings were held to be very valuable. They were kept close to the
chest, so to speak and weren’t given out to just anybody. I’m wondering that now that the cat is
out of the bag, whether that’s a good thing or not. Is it good to have these teachings passing
through a lot of different hands, or whether there is an advantage to keeping it quiet and testing
the person who receives the teaching.
GF: I think there is a purpose to everything. The fact that for instance Tibetan Buddhist teachings
which were the preserve of very very few people are now freely available to anybody is a very
important moment not only in the evolution of Buddhism, but also in the evolution of spirituality
throughout the world. Because the fact that all these teachings are now available means there will
be a lot of cross-fertilizing going on, which will change the flavor of spirituality in the future, no
question.
RR: But at the same time, it opens it up to a lot of distortion, a lot of misuse.
GF: At the same time people will misuse it, misunderstand it, but the fact is that even though you
can now read texts like the Rig-Veda, which were held so sacred that only Brahmins were
allowed to read them and at least later on Brahmins didn’t know the meaning of what they were
reading in recent centuries--they had forgotten--it was western scholars who did all the work to
recover the meaning. But the fact is that even though they didn’t know the meaning, they were
still practicing that spirituality. And even though we have the Rig-Veda in paperback now, the
Upanishads and all the great scriptures, doesn’t mean that if you read it you know what you have
read. Most people don’t. They may have an intellectual understanding, but they don’t know the
feeling that comes with understanding the text. So in a way, nothing is lost. Those who have eyes
to see will see. Those who have ears to hear will hear. Those who don’t don’t. It will always be
secret.
RR: It’s hidden in plain view.
GF: It’s hidden, totally hidden. You could pick up that beautiful text of Kashmiri Shaivism we
were talking about, the Vijnana-Bhairava, there are so many methods of achieving the ecstatic
state. You can read this until you are blue in the face . . .
RR: There are over a hundred different . . .
GF: Yes, something like 118. Yet, never have the experience. Never even understand how to get
there. You can read it from beginning to end innumerable times, and I have a feeling that, for
instance, there are so many teachings out there on Vedanta, but who really has grasped the
Vedantic path of jnana yoga? Very, very few people.
I remember a time in England, I was invited to a very exclusive kind of Vedanta group and I
almost burst out laughing in the middle of the little dinner party we had, because Vedanta for
them was only philosophizing. It had nothing to do with the actual living reality, and I think they
all would have been shocked if Ramana Maharishi had sat in their midst half-naked, you know?
It just drove home to me the total absurdity of so much of western approaches to these ancient
teachings.
If a person isn’t prepared to drop everything, in other words renunciation, if a person isn’t
prepared to completely change their intellectual outlook, there is no way you can ever get close to
the heart of these teachings. There is no way. You have to be a yogi or a sannyasi to understand
them.
RR: One of the questions I have is about Tantra, and how this teaching is being distorted in the
West.
GF: To say the least.
RR: We’ve taken the practice and done things to it that were never intended.
GF: It’s a classic example of bowdlerizing an esoteric tradition, of making it common, total
misrepresentation. Tantra is always described as the path of desire, but it’s not indulging in
desire, it’s the transcendence of desire through the energy of desire. In Western so-called Tantra,
which I call neo-Tantra, it’s really only how to indulge yourself and have the illusion you’re
doing something spiritual. To me this is one of the saddest commentaries on Western response to
Eastern teachings. I’m not anti-sexual, anti-sensual, but if you borrow the name the name of a
tradition, you should honor the rest of what that word stands for. I’ve seen many books on neo-
Tantrism, and I’m completely disenchanted with what is presented as a spiritual tradition. I’m not
saying that it’s not useful; it’s possibly useful for certain people who have to work through
certain sexual hang-ups, confront them in a benign, loving environment, which some of these
groups may provide. In that case, it might be helpful, but please don’t call it spiritual practice. It’s
basic sexual therapy. Once you get into spirituality, even in the Tantric tradition, brahmacharya is
very much on the agenda. That’s the basic misunderstanding, as is the whole notion of
ejaculation, that you engage in Tantric practice for an hour or two, and you finally can’t stand it
anymore, and you ejaculate. There’s nothing like that in Tantra. The sexual side of Tantra is by
no means the most significant. It is always emphasized throughout the texts of Tantra that the
moment you pleasure yourself, you are no longer a Tantric practitioner. That’s very clear, you
have failed at the challenge. The whole idea is to energize the body through the sexual energy,
which is the lowest expression of your body’s spiritual energy. Use that in order to awaken the
Kundalini, and for no other reason. In fact when the Kundalini is awakened, the sexual center is
dead, it’s depleted, there’s nothing there.
RR: Because the energy has risen to the crown.
GF: The energy is in the sahasrara chakra. This message should be conveyed. The yoga
movement as a whole has a serious challenge in the future to clarify this kind of yogic approach.
I feel the same way about yoga teachings that only present asanas and have no other connection
with the yogic tradition. It’s not yoga. The sooner people understand that, the better for the
movement, the better for them. The minimal requirement for something to be yoga is to respect
that tradition that bears the name, and to respect the foundational practices, which are moral
practices, and to respect the fact that liberation or enlightenment is the common shared goal of all
these traditions. If we respect the tradition, we also respect our own true potential, which is that
of a liberated being. It’s not just being concerned with orgasm, concerned with food, concerned
with power, it’s not who we are.
THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE TEACHINGS FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE
RR: People in this culture sometimes have difficulty understanding exactly what it is they’re
reading when they read these texts. A question that always comes to me is how appropriate are
these Eastern teachings, for people in this culture? Do you need to be from that culture to really
understand what is being said in these texts or can you translate these texts across cultural lines?
Can Westerners really learn from these books?
GF: I think there are two levels to the answer. The first is that the translation process itself, which
is difficult because whenever you translate you translate out of one context into another, so
certain notions, like the notion of dharma, that are very difficult to capture in our context . . .
RR: Because in the old days person’s dharma was determined by his or her place in the society,
which was in turn determined by birth. That doesn’t happen in our time and place.
GF: Yes, but certain concepts have nuances that we just don’t have if we translate the term as
“law.” It is not quite law. Or “virtue.” Yes, in some contexts that could be. “Moral order.” But
even then we have associations with these terms that don’t exist in the Indian context. That’s one
level. A skillful translator will be able to find just the right term, or decide, as some people have,
not to translate the term and leave it untranslated and allow the reader to get a feeling sense for
that term as they read on. That’s one level.
On that level, pretty much any concept can be rendered either precisely, or like dharma, in a less
precise more ambiguous way into our language and still convey something useful.
RR: The sense of what is going on.
GF: The rough sense of what it stands for and find equivalents, if he is a good writer, then he can
evoke imagery and so on which will give the westerner a sense of this is how it would feel for me
to engage this, the Indian cultural context. But quite apart from that, we are also dealing, when
we deal with yoga, with esoteric texts. So there is the cultural level, which has to be translated,
and then there is the esoteric stuff. Now, a lot of that you can’t translate, because even if you
have a term like samadhi, and you translate it with ecstasy or enstasy, what does it convey to
anybody? Unless you have had the experience. You can get an intuitive sense, but unless you
have had the experience even a term like dhyana, meditation, most people have no clue what it
means. So, something is lost. That’s why I feel that even though these texts are all out there are
completely safe. They still have their seven seals all in order. [laughs] It requires personal
practice and a teacher, I think, to unlock these seals. Because even if you have your own
meditation going and so on, the moment, I’ve heard it so many times, the moment that person
finds a teacher that meditation takes off in a totally different way. Simply because there is
transmission. Even writing about a thing like transmission, I puzzle over how I’m going to say it;
unless you have experienced it, there is just no way to understand. You can find terms like the
Holy Spirit descending and so on, but even then, it is not the same.
RR: And a lot of people in our culture won’t believe . . .
GF: Won’t believe it exists. They think it is part of the Eastern mythology and superstition and
all the rest. Including people doing yoga, which is the sad part. So there are problems, but I think
you are trying to raise another question which is are these teachings of any use to us once we
have translated them to any degree?
GF: I think the states of consciousness which have been achieved in the east can be achieved in
the west by those who are qualified to experience them.
RR: You can then translate from one culture into the other. It is possible to do although there is a
level of difficulty that doesn’t exist if you are within that culture.
GF: It is both an advantage and a disadvantage to be in a culture. The advantage is that things
come more naturally, but the disadvantage is that the things that come more naturally to you can
also come to you unconsciously. It doesn’t make for great discrimination. We have to have
discernment about our own culture to understand what it is. In fact the saying is that if you only
know one culture, you don’t know any. You have to have that mirror of something else. If we
were brought up only knowing ourselves, we would know nothing at all. We need to have the
partner in dialogue. We need to have another culture in dialogue. So luckily, throughout history,
cultures have been in dialogue, with the few exceptions of tribal cultures, which have remained
backward essentially, they haven’t absorbed the richness of their environment, their cultural
environment.
So beyond all the possible translation that has to happen between cultures, we are one human
species. With the same aptitudes. We have the same genetic endowment. Same brain. It is one.
We are one. Therefore, we as self-conscious beings will also be able to see, to inspect our own
mechanisms, however they are determined culturally. It doesn’t really matter; we can see them.
And maybe we can see them more easily if we have the mirror of another culture. Just like if you
have the mirror of another person. If you are married it is much easier to get to know yourself.
This is the influx of eastern teachings into the west, which by the way didn’t begin with
Vivekananda. It began a long time ago, because even Christianity is from the east if people care
to remember. This influx of teachings has enriched our own heathen heritage. It continues to
enrich it. We also, through our export of technology and the ideology which comes with that,
even though it is destructive, we will enrich the east. Because they will be pushed into
experiences they will not otherwise have. Negative to be sure, but they will grow. So, as we all
are growing, maybe we can relate to each other a little more consciously and compassionately,
because we end of realizing we all are whatever color skin, culture, we have the same human
condition. We are born in pain. We live, experiencing pain, and we die. This is the teaching.
RR: Sarvam dukham.
GF: Yes. Once we realize that, that can be a basis for compassion for everybody.
RR: You’re saying though that it is an advantage to have to struggle with this material. It makes
you look at it more closely and it makes you look at yourself more closely. We may not get a
direct idea of what dharma is, what samadhi is, but we then have to explore these concepts in
terms we can understand and match those concepts with what we’re finding in the texts.
GF: Absolutely. I think to our discredit, we have lost touch with our own esoteric heritage. There
is a whole esoteric heritage in Christianity.
RR: The Aivanoff book brings that out, about gnosticism.
GF: Right. So we have that, but how many people are even aware of its existence? Aivanoff was
one of the great masters reviving that tradition, but how many people read his books? Very few.
So this truck coming from the east has stopped some people in their tracks and this is a
wonderful opportunity. Because smack right down in the hospital you wake up, what did I do,
why did I not watch where I was going? [laughs] So then there’s a lesson to be learned, and
indeed with this whole creation of Christian yoga which is a term that I have difficulty with but
essentially what it is, it is a product of the encounter between east and west. Some who were
Christians looked at the yoga tradition, experienced it to whatever degree, and then said, “Oh it’s
enriching my own heritage, which is perfectly fine. It’s wonderful if that happens. My objection
is more to the term “Christian yoga.” There is no such thing. Yoga is what the Indians call their
esoteric tradition. In Christianity it’s called “mysticism.” In Judaism it’s called Kaballah. So I
much prefer that these distinctions remain rather than to make a mish-mash . . . there is now a
Hebrew yoga, a Christian yoga, recently I saw a book called Egyptian yoga, which is really just
the Egyptian esoteric tradition, as we know it a little bit from the pyramid texts and later
scriptures. But why call it that. Unless there has been such a strong impact, cultural influence on
a tradition that you say “Well, there has been so much influence by Hinduism that its a from, a
hybrid of yoga, in that country.” Like you have this Buddhism, that’s an Indian buddhism, that’s
a Tibetan buddhism, that’s a far eastern buddhism, but it’s distinctly Buddhist, you can tell, it’s
coming from the same source, but Christian yoga and Egyptian yoga they don’t come from the
same source, its a term propped onto an existing tradition.
THE WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY TO THE EASTERN “LEGACY”
RR: This brings up the question: we are receiving this legacy from the east. There’s an enormous
influx of eastern teachings into western culture at this time. Its a valuable lesson, it’s taken these
people in the east thousands of years to accumulate this knowledge, and so what is our
responsibility to this teaching? You’re suggesting already a few things about it, but what should
we as westerners preserve, at the same time, what can we add to it? What do we have to enrich
the teaching?
GF: I think I want to go back to what you were saying at the beginning of the question: it’s a
wonderful lesson. It’s not a lesson yet. It’s a challenge. When it becomes a lesson, then there’s
the answer to the second part of your question. I think there’s a marvelous encounter, that’s
happening to still a very small degree. It’s not really yet deep enough to say even an encounter.
It’s a few people who have encountered these eastern teachings. What our responsibility as
westerners is to that tradition . . . I’m wondering whether one can put it in such a generic way. I
think it’s the individual who has the responsibility in encountering that tradition. And the
responsibility is to the degree that the person is able to respond to that tradition, to be true to it; in
other words, you don’t just pick up a book on the Gita or one of the Upanishads and then set
yourself up as a teacher. That would be cheating the tradition. The real response would be, here’s
a sacred scripture, what is the teaching environment for that, who is teaching that, where are the
real teachers of this scripture? Because all these scriptures, you must remember, were orally
transmitted from teacher to disciple to begin with, they were not written down, so with that
comes an empowerment. The person is empowered to realize the teachings in that tradition. Later
on they were written down because obviously people didn’t remember as well anymore.
RR: The power comes not only from the words but from the presence of the teacher as well.
GF: Yes, the teacher’s presence enlivens one’s own connection with the tradition. So not only
will the teacher be able to explain, expound, the tradition, like the Bhagavad-Gita, but also
because of the spiritual process that he will kindle in the disciple, that disciple will connect with
the life of that tradition through their scriptures in a different way. Suddenly there is a living
thing talking back, it’s not just a dead text, it’s a really living exchange going on, and there’s
learning happening in relation to that text, even if that tradition maybe has forgotten the precise
original significance of certain terms. Doesn’t matter. It’s the living current of that tradition.
GF: It’s remarkable that the Rig-Veda, for instance, which has over 1000 hymns, was accurately
transmitted for very probably 5000 and more years . . .
RR: Impossible to think about.
GF: Impossible . . . I look at it and I say, “What a wondrous thing.” But that is how precious
these teachings were to those people. And now sometimes I see these torn paperbacks, scribbled
all over, and it’s a sacred text. And we have no notion of what that means, none. . . . you have to
develop a special feeling for these things, or they won’t speak back to you. So even though the
Brahmins forgot the meaning of many of the words of the Rig-Veda, they still recited them,
faithfully learned them . . . some of these Brahmins can recite all three Vedas, some Brahmins
can recite the Vedas and the Brahmans, prose texts that have nonsense syllables, mantric
syllables in the middle, is marvelous. And so for us, because our mind is much focused on
acquiring, and putting, we live in such a speed, that memory doesn’t mean anything to us
anymore. We have now a calculator, we don’t have to learn our multiplication tables, we have a
computer, so we externalize our inner technology. Then we can’t understand the obligation
Brahmins or other guardians, custodians of these sacred traditions have to preserve them. And we
have a paperback culture.
RR: So that does make it difficult for us to realize the power of the yoga legacy, the great history
behind it, the great force of humanity that stands behind it.
GF: Completely. Of the people that I often speak to, including yoga teachers, I don’t think there
is much of a notion that literally thousands of yogis over a period of five and six thousand years,
have labored on these teaching, and realizing their purpose.
RR: Taking chances, sacrificing themselves
GF: Totally. Making mistakes. Somebody said, “well, if you stand on one leg for a thousand
years you realize the divine, or maybe nothing happens.” [laughs] So they experimented with
their own bodies and minds, and no doubt there were failures, the scriptures talk about them.
Because the path is very difficult, it’s a razor’s edge that they walk, and sometimes they slip and
Ouch! We to get an appreciation, and all my work has been about making these authentic
traditions available in ways that will be, hopefully, accessible to people, and always finding new
ways, new texts, new traditions, to write about.
RR: At the same time, you’ve done a wonderful job of relaying that idea that this is an enormous
human enterprise, and it should be held in tremendous respect, it’s nothing to be taken lightly.
GF: Right, nothing to be taken lightly. And I think you said it, it’s a human enterprise, it’s not
just the Indian enterprise, it’s us, it’s our brothers and sisters in India who happen to develop this
tradition, but it’s a human enterprise, and I think as human beings concerned about who we are . .
.
THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF A SYSTEM
RR: I’m always trying to impress on my students that classical yoga is a system, it’s a very
logical and beautifully thought out way of seeing the world. I’m wondering what the benefits and
the drawbacks are of a system. I’m thinking of Krishnamurti, who said “Truth is a pathless land.”
GF: My take on this is that if we “have a system,” the risk of making an ideology out of it far
outweighs the benefits of a system. Because we always reify everything, we always think, “This
is how reality is.” All philosophical systems are simply convenient devices to look at something.
In our time we can perhaps appreciate that more than any other time, because we’re confronted
with so many different systems and we realize that none of them are the truth. Historically we
have more because of our higher level of education than in past centuries, we have more an
appreciation that none of these systems amount to reality.
RR: You’ve mentioned in one of your books that we’re more aware now, because of the
discoveries of modern physics, how relative all these systems are.
GF: We’re viewing reality through our own lenses, thinking it is reality, but what we see is not
reality, what we see is a filtered image. I think the benefit of some system like yoga darshana, is
simply that it gives us a plausible structure for understanding the yogic process. If we anxiously
cling to the idea that there are endless, numberless purushas in liberation, and then there is
prakriti separate from all of that, it’s an ideology, it’s not reality. I would say the same thing
about Vedanta, if we believe that liberation is the melting of the individual self with the ultimate
self, it’s also just a way of expressing something that’s not like that.
RR: Because you can’t really put an ineffable experience like that into words, it doesn’t translate.
GF: You can’t. We need to have some crutches, so from my point of view it’s good to look for
the crutches that make sense to you. If that crutch happens to be a particular yoga philosophy,
fine, if that crutch happens to be Christian theology, fine, if it happens to be Heidegger, or
Husserl, or Jung, fine, no problem. As long as the system you have can reasonably accommodate
the experiences you encounter and can reasonably accommodate possible experiences. If a
system like Materialism excludes a whole range of possibilities, dismisses those experiences as
nonsensical, or false, you exclude yourself from the experience. Then you diminish your own
being. If a system helps you grow, wonderful, if the system closes you down, shuts down your
experience and your potential for further development, look at it and say, “Thank you very much,
it’s an ideology, I don’t need it.”
RR: So a system is a guide.
GF: It’s a guide. There is another criteria, if a teacher insists that you swallow lock, stock and
barrel his particular brand of teaching without you being allowed to critically examine anything--
like the famous saying over the door of Rajneesh’s ashram, something like “Leave your mind
with your coat outside”--this is already an indicator to beware, you are expected to be swallowed
up by an ideology. You are not engaging the spiritual process. The spiritual process will not
demand of you to take on any philosophy; on the contrary, the spiritual process will show the
ultimate irrelevance of all philosophies, all theories, all concepts. The truth is pathless, but there
is a path to the truth. There has to be a movement to it recognizing what the truth is, and that
movement is structured in different ways by different traditions.
In Tibetan Buddhism you have the marvelous Lam Rim teaching, which are the stages of the
path, a highly developed, almost formulaic, system of understanding each aspect of the path, far
more complex than the eight limbs of classical yoga. As a student it makes perfect sense to
encounter this, but it doesn’t mean to say that this is reality. Reality is nirvana, it’s beyond
anything that can “blow,” it’s a blow out. [laughs] I would recommend that if people do practice
yoga, they have to practice within a context in which it has been transmitted for millennia. That
context is highly diversified, which I have always tried to show in my books, there’s so many
yogic approaches, so many different traditions, schools. Unless a yoga practitioner encounters
that to some degree, and is enriched by that, there will always be the delusion that the way I’m
doing it is the way.
If you, say, join a bhakti cult, then everything suddenly is filtered through that lens. This may
work for some people, it wouldn’t work for me. I would always want to have an overview: this
bhakti approach, this jnana approach, this karma approach, all the other approaches, well, what
do they share? Really then be informed more by the commonality between traditions than the
differences. Appreciate the differences and value them as something that allows the practitioners
of that tradition to propel themselves on the path. Essential crutches on the path, but they don’t
necessarily have universal validity.
RR: So take on the system, but don’t immerse yourself, keep your perspective.
GF: Keep your perspective, the understanding that we need crutches but ultimately we need to
throw them away. Whatever concepts we use are Band-Aids, we need them because otherwise
we’d bleed to death. We put them on, we stop the bleeding, but after we healed, we should take it
off. “I never was sick! It was an illusion.” [laughs]
ON THE NEED FOR A GURU
RR: The teachings are suited to the capacity of the student rather than just give a blanket teaching
to a large group of people. That’s one of the reasons why you want your own teacher.
GF: So the teacher who knows you will also know where your boundaries are, where your
limitations are and he will constantly prick the balloon. Constantly, if he is a good teacher. At the
same time, if he is a good teacher, he will also provide enough nurturing for you to continue with
this ordeal. It is a rite of passage.
RR: You can’t just pull out the stops and let the person flounder.
GF: You have to know what you’re doing, and I think the bad teachers, of which there are many
in evidence, are the ones who just pull the rug and then say “oh, tough luck.” And leave the
person to their own devices. At the Foundation we get people who have kundalini problems,
genuine kundalini problems because it was awakened but then the teacher didn’t see it through.
Because they are not capable of seeing it through. It is very easy to do. Awaken something, and
then where is the help? This particular danger in teaching has always existed. I translated a little
passage from the Kula-Arnava Tantra which talks all about bad teachers, teachers who cheat,
pretend, etc. They are in the majority. But there is also the misconception I think that we have in
the west which I often hear when I go out and talk to students, that there are not enough good
teacher. “Where is my good teacher.” “There are so many good students, but not enough good
teachers.” My view on that is always the same. Very forcefully I tell them that there are a
hundred times more good teachers than there are disciples. But if you don’t see, the teacher could
stand right beside you and you wouldn’t know he is your teacher. Your own delusions are in the
way. So if we have a bad teacher, who is to blame? Us. No one else.
RR: For not being discriminating
GF: Exactly. I think to approach a teacher we need to do as we do with everything else. When we
buy a car we go through the works, not just look at the color. You find out before you put the
money down. Same with a teacher. Find out, and then even when you have committed to a
certain degree you find out some more for a period of time to see ok how is the teacher
responding to me. How am I responding to that teacher? Is there a connection and so on. And the
teacher does the same.
RR: Can you give some criteria people can use to look for a teacher. In deciding on and choosing
a good teacher. Are there specific things to look for? Or is it more of a feel?
GF: No, I think people like Wilbur and others have put a list together. Frances Vaughn also I
think. Of who are the teachers who qualify as good teachers. I don’t recall all the criteria, but I
think one criterion for me personally would be is this teacher part of a recognized tradition and
lineage? In other words, who is that teacher’s teacher? Very important. Because, if you have a
wild card, you don’t know.
RR: No responsibility to anything.
GF: Yes. There is no environment for them to have to prove themselves. They are only talking to
the student, which is a one-way street. So that is one thing. To look at who has made that teacher.
Who is he responsible to. The second criterion I would say, what are your instincts about that
teacher? What is the gut reaction? If there is doubt about the teacher’s integrity, if there is doubt
about ability, why commit? At the same time you have to make sure it is not your own stuff that
you are reacting to. It is a very subtle thing.
I would also look at, the biblical saying about the fruits, “by their fruits you shall know them,”
that’s the case. Talk to others. If there is confusion, chaos and pain around a teacher, it is likely
that the teacher is the cause of that pain and confusion.
RR: It all flows from the source.
GF: Yes. Around great teachers there will always be people who are confused and in pain and all
that, because they don’t discriminate. They allow people to come in whoever they are if they
have the karma to be there. And they help to whatever extent they can, but you will also find in a
group, in a community like that people of worth. Who have passed through the process. The
other think I have done, my whole experience with Da Free John, before I set out on this
adventure, which I knew was totally crazy because it would challenge me in every conceivable
way, but I entered it open-eyed. I understood I was doing this for a very specific reason, in my
case. I wanted to have this confrontation with a very strong teacher who would challenge me in
ways that no one has challenged me before. But I made a deal with myself that after a certain
period of time, a number of years, whatever, you look at the situation. If there is a sense of
basically feeling good about he involvement, even if there is pain, you decide to renew your
contract with yourself in a way. But if you find it has just become a nightmare or you feel you
haven’t grown in the preceding period, it is time to leave, say goodbye, it’s not for me.
This is what happened in my case. I felt I wasn’t growing anymore. I had grown for four or five
years and then I felt I reached a plateau having to do with my perception of the teacher. There
was a level of trust I couldn’t reach. So when that happens, when you can’t open up to the teacher
on that deep inner level, there is no way that relationship can flourish. No way. Transmission will
not continue. I realized that this is what was happening. I had to say goodbye. I don’t think
anyone who is wise will look at their life after a period of time and say “how am I doing?” Rather
than just go with the status quo and hope for the best. There has to be an intelligent process of
self-examination, which has to be continuous anyway.
RR: Although difficult to sustain in an environment like that. When you get close to someone
like that, it is easy to give yourself up and give yourself over and stop thinking for yourself.
GF: That then is the childish response. A good teacher will not tolerate it. Because you always
have to think for yourself. Always. You always have to make your own mistakes. The teacher can
point out to you that you are about to make a mistake but if you feel you have to make it, to find
out for yourself, you have to do it.
THE SPIRITUAL INTENT OF THE TEACHINGS
GF: Take the asanas from their spiritual context, I would use the term advisedly, is fateful,
because it shortchanges the student who thinks they are doing yoga. Whereas there is this vast
background that is really designed to uplift the person from their present state of ordinariness of
confusion of basic human suffering and need. Uplift them from that into something far more
sublime and give them a vision of who they could be. And it is reducing yoga to a level . . . that’s
what it moved away from. That is why it was designed. Health . . . I have nothing against
cultivating health. People say you are down on exercise, I’m not. It is important to cultivate that,
especially if you feel the need for it. It is important to cultivate in the same way an intelligent
mind to be informed about what is going on, not just live like a zombie, but be up on events, see
what this life is about.
But more important than any of that is to see who we are in spiritual terms and to do something
about that. Because without that there is no way we can relate to the rest of it in any deep
sensitive way.
RR: It just becomes an exercise without any firm basis.
GF: It just becomes a shell. You are exercising the shell, you are training the dog. And you
salivate when the bell rings. But beyond that, there is nothing. There is no sense that behind that
brain there is a great mind. Behind that great mind there is a great reality. People are not told
about that. So the hunger for something more remains. And since there is no pointer in the right
direction they will continue to look for happiness in the wrong places. And continue with their
cycle of suffering. When you have understood enough about the traditions, then there is a desire
growing in yourself to reduce others’ suffering, like you want to reduce your own. And be a
compassionate presence in your work, in your life, in your family life.
RR: I like the way you always relate the teachings to a larger picture, not just yourself you’re
concerned with. It’s other people; in fact, it is the whole planet.
GF: We are everyone. The sooner we understand that, the better. Because right now, even our
consumption pattern, we live in total isolation and delusion. We think that this is what we
deserve. We deserve this great lifestyle we have in America. By the way, not everybody has it in
America, there are many many hungry people on the streets who used to have good jobs, but I
think we delude ourselves into believing that we deserve any of that. We delude ourselves into
believing that this is how it is pretty much around the world. Pretty much around the world is
hunger and frustration. You just need to go to any country in Africa and Asia and you know you
encounter what is really happening. If we think in isolation, we will suffer isolation. We cannot
grow. We need to have a sense of our place in the midst of things. To be able to pick up a
paperback on the Rig Veda or the Gita or the Upanishad or Kashmir Shaivism is a tremendous
privilege. It is not just plunking down your money to get a book. It is a privilege to have that
book, to get that teaching. You don’t have to travel for six months to find that teacher who holds
the teaching.
RR: You don’t have to prove yourself.
GF: You don’t have to prove yourself in pain sitting in front of the door [laughs] and the teacher
says come back in a month. So I think the quicker we understand that all of us are in this together
and that this realm we are in is not a pretty sight. There are nice moments, but on the whole, it is
not a pretty sight. We must have not only responsibility for our own upliftment, but for everyone
else, because on our own, we are not going to make it. That is part of the process. We have to
care for everyone.
RR: That gives a more universal definition to yoga, to the word union, you are aware of your
union with everything around you.
GF: It is not a traditional definition. The yogi has always been primarily concerned with his/her
own liberation, but the whole moral laws of Yama are how the yogi relates to the environment,
the social environment, and there is always profound concern. The concern is to manifest higher
values in the social relationships, especially non-harming. How little we respect that law, in so
many ways. Even going on the bus and not yielding your chair to someone in need. We just
ignore others. Or you walk by someone obviously unhappy, you give a smile, even if you don’t
know the person, you know? Give a grin, nod, whatever. This is non-harming. Anything else...if
we withhold our own energy we have already failed in the spiritual process.
RR: I remember you making the point about ahimsa, that it is a positive force. It is not just
withdrawing and avoiding violence, but it is something that you actively do.
GF: We extend our own life energy to others. I think that in the ideal of the bodhisattva that has
become a nicely polished diamond. In previous teachings it was largely implied. But there it was
made the idea of the practice, that yes we must strive for liberation or enlightenment ourselves.
We must do that, that is the spiritual process, but who do we do it? We do it to uplift everyone,
because we cannot bear the idea that all these beings are related to us. We are related to them.
We only look at our own family nowadays, and even then . . . But in the past there was more of a
sense of belonging to a larger group, whether a clan, the village. Now we don’t have that. We
isolate and exclude. In spiritual practice we must then come back, especially in our times, come
back more to a sense of we are everybody.
THE REVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF CHANGE
RR: People don’t understand the revolutionary nature of the books, of the teachings. They think
they can practice yoga and go on the way they have been going on for all their lives and not have
to make any sacrifices.
GF: No real sacrifices. They want to fix a little here and a little there.
RR: Self-improvement rather than self-transformation.
GF: That’s right. And it doesn’t work. All the teachings demand everything of one. Everything.
Whoever you think you are you have to abandon that view.
RR: I teach a course for the Yoga Room in the Yoga-Sutra. One of the questions I ask my
students is “Is liberation something you really want?” Because it can be dangerous, to your life
and to the lives of those around you. It’s not something to be taken up lightly.
GF: No, dangerous to your health. [laughs] Completely, because that which we treasure the most,
which is not liberation, is ourselves. Is our own concept of who we are. And the first thing the
teacher will do will be to find out all the ways in which you identify with that which is not real.
And then one by one, pull the carpet from under your feet. How many people are willing to go
through that process? It’s an ordeal. People don’t understand that spiritual life is not easy. So
many times I have talked with people who think they are practitioners, spiritual practitioners. I
ask, “what do you do on a typical Sunday, or during the week?” And what they do has nothing
whatsoever to do with spiritual practice. They think spiritual practice is when they go to their
Wednesday group or their Sunday group, like people go to church, that this is what it is.
RR: For an hour-and-a-half.
GF: Few people understand that the spiritual process is initiated, which requires a spiritual
teacher who knows what they are doing. Once this process is initiated, it is a 24-hour thing. Your
life at night is different and your life during the day is different. There is no way of knowing how
it will manifest. There may be days and weeks and months or years of no sleep. Or bad sleep,
because all this stuff is being processed inside you. There may be days where you say “oh, why
am I feeling suicidal?” And you realize it is just a feeling. You would never take action on it, but
it arises because it is sitting there, deep down. It is a despair with life. It is part of the process.
You have this book here, The Chasm of Fire by Irina Tweedy, who was a friend of mine, I can’t
say a teacher, but she was a guide for a period of time. She describes very clearly her despair.
RR: Very vividly, graphically.
GF: Yes, and this is what it boils down to for everybody. It manifests in different ways, but you
have to confront your own disappearance.
RR: Frightening.
GF: Terrifying. So unless you confront it and pass through it, there is no way to come out on the
other side and there is no way of telling, not even for the guru, how long this process of passing
through will take. It could be the rest of ones life.
RR: Or if it will be successful. There is no assurance that even if you go through all this that
something positive will happen in the end.
GF: I differ on that. I think it will be successful if you pass through. If it is in this lifetime is
another matter. I think the Bhagavad-Gita says that no effort is ever lost. I think what we tend to
do because we are always in a rush about everything we give ourselves such a short period of
time for this major transformation. People need to start looking at the total picture of spiritual life
and say I must make a lifetime’s commitment, a lifetimes’ commitment to this process. And not
think ok a year from now, or ten years from now, as some teachings promise, it will necessarily
happen for me. The reason is that even though these teachings may be completely correct that in
one year given this method you could realize yourself or the divine, even though that may be
completely true, but how many people are at the point where they can pass through this crisis in
such a short period of time. I think for most people the nervous system would just give up. They
would go mad, literally mad.
So that’s why there are teachings that propose a more gradual manner.
RR: Do you think it’ll becomes more common as these ideas enter the mainstream? That as more
and more people take up the practice, do you think that more and more people will then find their
way to the top of the mountain?
GF: That’s the ideal, but if it will happen, I don’t know. Because the work is so difficult. It
demands everything you have.
RR: Why is it so difficult?
GF: Because of the gravity of karma. Karma is just a drag. [laughs] We have created in lifetime
after lifetime karmas that just maintain a pattern in us. It’s very difficult to extract yourself from
that gravity pull of karma. Even in one lifetime you may have some gain . . . this is what I like
about the Buddhist teachings, and it’s also to some degree formulated in the Hindu teachings: our
life is a unique opportunity to engage the spiritual process because we have intelligence, we have
the conditions . . . there are teachers around who will teach us, there are teachings around that we
can learn from. Maybe there will be cultures and environments that have none of that, maybe
other planets somewhere out there in the universe life has not received teachings. Here on earth
we have very precious teachings, so we must make use of them. Also the insight that our lifetime
is very short, and if we don’t get accustomed in our youth to this way of thinking, it’s very
difficult to change later on. You will already have made more karmas in this lifetime that push
for fruition, to call all that back is very difficult.
ON CONSCIOUSNESS
RR: I wanted to ask you about your definition of yoga as a “technology of consciousness
transformation.” I wanted to talk specifically about consciousness. Consciousness is the field of
yoga, especially classical yoga . . .
GF: All yoga.
RR: In particular, how the yogis see consciousness, the difference for example between citta and
cit. The other questions would be: how and why? How do you transform your consciousness,
what is the process, and why do you want to do that? What is wrong with your consciousness the
way it is, that it needs to be transformed?
GF: I think what’s wrong with it has been answered in one of the early Upanishads, which talks
about the Absolute being great and expansive. Everything else is alpa, meaning petty and
insignificant. So in our ordinary consciousness, we don’t live out of the fullness of who we are.
It’s the surface consciousness, it’s the foam, it’s not the ocean. The yogis early on discovered that
there was this vast ocean of Being or awareness, since awareness and Being go hand in hand in
this vastness, was the reality sustaining the rest of it. But we identify only with this small part of
who we are, and it’s a totally insignificant part, and the part that is riddled with delusions, and
causing us endless pain. We just need to examine one day the interactions we have with people:
how much misunderstanding, how much projection, how much absence of real connection. We
can’t share who we are with the people we work with, we can’t share who we are with the people
on the bus. That’s painful. For most people that’s just silly talk, but it’s because there isn’t yet a
sensitivity to that separation we experience all the time. That separation is created by the
mechanism of our own limited karma-driven--or Jung might say unconsciously-driven--
consciousness, the mind, which duplicates itself over and over and over again. It’s like a broken
record. When you become sensitive to the fact that you’re just a broken record, then you say,
“Ah, what else am I? Am I just this broken record? That’s sad.” For most people this kind of
thinking happens in mid-life crisis, which is a wonderful thing to happen, but you can ask those
questions early on. Unfortunately in our culture, we are not encouraged to do so, it’s a total
absence of what I call a “philosophical culture.” We merely anchor ourselves in the byproduct of
our education; in other words, who we are right now is who we have been made to be, by and
large.
RR: Who we’re told to be.
GF: Who we’re told to be, by our parents, or educators, and so on. When people mature, the
question comes, “Who am I? Why am I so screwed up?” Then there’s the possibility of doing
some real self-inspection, and gaining real self-understanding, and when that real selfunderstanding
happens we realize that none of these things, these patterns, that we normally
identify with, are us. They are us only in an incidental way. The real us is this large, beautiful,
all-comprising, ecstatic Being that looks through the eyes of all beings. And that’s who we are.
Most of the time we don’t have a clue about that, unless we have the karma that suddenly an
experience like that happens to us, then we say, “Oh my God, all these years, I’ve been in a
dream.” Literally, as most people live it, is this kind of daydream. There may be, because of
conditions or momentum created in the past, some people are allowed to get a glimpse of this
larger thing that we are. Then maybe the spiritual work can begin. But so many people don’t have
that option, don’t have that opportunity, then something other must come in and smack them real
hard, like the death of a loved one, a really serious illness. Then, “What’s it all about?” We
cannot accept, if we look at life, that this is all there is, we cannot. No one in his right mind can.
Because it is not all there is. Something in us tells us we must look deeper. And then if we are
encouraged to look deeper, either because a friend of ours has done so and can recommend some
path, some book, something, life can begin again for us in a real way. That’s the spiritual process
start, but then it’s that matter of commitment to it, to stick with it, to allow it to unfold however
difficult it seems. But we are like explorers in unknown territory, like the Antarctic, it’s cold, it’s
uncomfortable, but look at the vastness, the freedom of it all. This is what spiritual life is, we
have to climb Mount Everest-like slope, all the dangers, all the hard work, but then when you’re
on top, you look around and see the total stillness of the mountain peaks below you, the valleys
below you. That’s the yogic image, of being up above, looking down. Not looking down in a
negative way, but looking down in the sense of reaching a plateau that is so much broader . . .
RR: A new perspective.
GF: Totally open up a new perspective. From that perspective you can go down into the valley,
and do your work. It’s a totally altering experience. And that experience is different from socalled
altered state of consciousness, which can be anything--even sleep is an altered state of
consciousness--I think ordinary consciousness is the only altered state there is, the rest is the real
stuff.
RR: And this is what yoga is meant to do.
GF: Yoga is meant to open up that vista. It’s meant to help you. It’s the climbing gear to go up
that slope, but it’s still your legs, your muscles, that do the walking, the climbing. On top you let
go of the gear.
That’s why yoga has two meanings. Yoga is used in the sense of the discipline, and in the sense
of the actual union. When you have the union, you don’t need the gear anymore. But very few
people can claim to have reached that level. I think there are practitioners that have been allowed
glimpses of it, and their work gets encouraged by that, they continue with their process and
helping others in the process. But I think full enlightenment is a very, very rare accomplishment.
THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF PRACTICE
RR: I wanted to ask you about what you think are some of the essential aspects of a spiritual
practice. There are a lot of different approaches now, but to your mind what is important. What
needs to be there in a sound spiritual practice?
GF: I give you a very short answer and it is not my words. It is the words of the Dalai Lama when
he was asked what he believes in, what his religion was. He says “my religion is kindness.” He
manifests that. That is the ideal of the bodhisattva. You can find different words for that, but it is
what I just said. Non-harming extended as a practice must be the foundation. So often people
take off, go on retreat, try to achieve all this satori or something, and they come out and behave
like everyone else. Something is missing. They didn’t get something. That is why in western
yoga, it is largely failing still because the foundations are missing. Where are the yamas? Where
are they? Nowhere to be found. It all starts with asana, so yama and niyama are missing. Like
lopped off, no lower legs, no pelvis, nothing. Just starts from the belly up. You move the arms.
[laughs] This is sad, but is, I think, what essentially is going on. Unless teachers assume
responsibility for teaching in an unpopular way, because it can be unpopular to talk about
morality, unless they are willing to do that, talking about non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing,
chastity. Who dares to talk about that?
RR: It would be a good way to clear out your classes in a hurry.
GF: Non-grasping in general. But unless this is reintroduced into western yoga it cannot thrive as
a spiritual practice. Impossible. Why do the yogis have it there? Because that supplies the energy
for the rest of the process.
RR: Gets you moving in the right direction.
GF: Yes. And it supplies energy.
RR: Because it cleans things up.
GF: Yes, but not just that. Also because truthfulness is a force, is an energy. If you are truthful in
a difficult moment, you can see how it enlivens you. If you are non-harming when it is difficult,
it enlivens you. So without that, where is the energy for the higher process. There can’t be any. It
is all mental. People tell me about their great meditation experiences and I know it is just fantasy.
It has to come with the body, the rest of the trunk, the legs have to be there. And they won’t be
there if there is no yamas or niyamas. Impossible.
RR: So that would be an essential part of any yoga practice to pay attention to what the yamas
and niyamas have to say about your external and internal relationships.
GF: Completely. Without it. . . nada. [laughs]
RR: The inner sound?
GF: [laughs] Not the inner sound, but the Spanish nada.
I think apart from that there has to be a ruthless self-honesty. Few have the ability to look at
something they have been doing for a long time and admit to themselves that they have been
deluding themselves. I need to start again. I think there has to be a constant willingness to selfcreate.
To recreate yourself. You don’t like what you see? It doesn’t matter, just start again. Try
again, not give up. Always looking again and again and again. However difficult it is. Without
that quality you cannot sustain the interest in the spiritual process.
RR: So self-observation.
GF: Self-observation is the beginning, but self-understanding, which is deeper. Because you can
observe yourself but still not quite understand. So self-understanding is the deeper level of that.
And there has to be a commitment to that. And then there has to be a commitment to actually
changing what you see is wrong about you. To open to feedback from others. One of the sad
things among yoga teachers is there are not willing to listen to input from their students and most
students are too scared to give input. It is essential. It is essential in any relationship to have
feedback, otherwise you are off on your own.
There is also a sense that if the teacher is wrong about something and you feel strongly about
it, you can bring that up. And you go to the teacher and say “I know I may be wrong, but this is
bothering me. This is what is bothering me, would you please clarify.” Then there is a dialogue.
The advantage, I think, within the Buddhist tradition is that it is monastic tradition (at least
Tibetan Buddhism, which is what I am talking about), so there has already been a lot of dialogue
during the formative period of a monk’s life. There is all this debating going on. And there is a
sense, and this is something the Dalai Lama wrote about in one of his books, I think The Path to
Enlightenment, that critical faculties must be alive throughout the process. If it means that you
have to challenge the teacher, you have to do that, but do so respectfully. And if there is no
agreement, you leave, but without anger.
Everybody has limitations. Even an enlightened being has limitations, or that person wouldn’t be
alive in this realm.
RR: Just being embodied . . .
GF: Just being embodied is subtle limitation and that body will have a particular brain and that’s
limiting, and that brain will have a certain education and that’s limiting. So we have to be more
tolerant, but there has to be dialogue. I think in the yoga movement where there isn’t a strong
educational dialogue based tradition in the formative years of a teacher, dialogue is even more
essential. Otherwise that teacher will live in total isolation and probably delusion. If everyone
says yes to you, sooner or later you start thinking you are god. There is no other way, unless you
have a total commitment to self-understanding. Then you look and perhaps say I don’t like what I
see about myself. If you can say that and not collapse, but do something about it, then the
spiritual process is alive and well.
COMMITMENT TO PRACTICE
RR: You’ve used the word commitment a lot. How do you make a commitment to the practice?
What do you say to a student whose commitment is waning? How do you help a student rekindle
that commitment if say he/she is getting frustrated with the practice and is losing interest?
GF: It depends on the student and what the problem is., what is behind it. I think people need
from the beginning to be told that it is not just going to be hunkey-dorey. It is going to be a
process that will challenge them. There is a honeymoon period and after that reality sets in. If the
spiritual process really is taking place you can tell, because that person is up against it all the
time. All the time. There are very few nice honeymoon moments after that. In fact, I think the
challenge is to live with the crunch all the time. You always feel it and not mind because you
know something is being processed, is going to change, and if you had the ability to change your
physical frame, it is painful, right? Because the tendons and everything would go. [laughs] This
is the spiritual process too. We’re growing muscles there in the other realm [laughs] and it is
painful. The pain is partly self-revelation and partly it is a very esoteric process of the very
structure of ones being changing. It is a constant process that can take years. And you have to be
happy anyway. If you are not, you still have to serve others anyway. That is the challenge. Many
people give up at that point. And that is the gateway.
RR: There is really not much you can say then to a person at that point.
GF: Remind them. If that person has engaged the process out of some understanding, then all it
takes is a reminder of why they started to begin with. And what choice is there? Either you go
unconscious, and most people at a certain point can’t do that anymore, or you just accept you are
in this process, it is not reversible and just go ahead and make the best of it and be happy doing it
[laughs]. Not constantly complaining.
RR: Be happy you are in the process.
GF: Yes, exactly. And be happy that in every moment you engage it, you are reducing the karmas
binding you to this realm. Every moment. Even at the end of your lifetime if you haven’t had
samadhi or this or that, the work you will have done at that point will be significant. We look at it
in too narrow a way. We need to look not just at this lifetime, but as the whole work we have to
do in this realm. And then, even go out with the intent that even if I am liberated, I will come
back here and help those poor guys down there who are still struggling and not understanding
[laughs] which is the bodhisattva ideal.
RR: There is not a similar ideal in the yoga tradition though, is there?
GF: The yoga tradition . . . there is in some schools of Vasishta Advaita, is using the idea of
liberation of all humanity, but probably influenced by the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva,
because it is much later. I think it is implicit though because why do big teachers come back if
not to help others.? And throughout the history of yoga big teachers have been known to
incarnate again. They don’t have to come back but they come back in order to help. Same in
Jainism with the tirthankaras, the great teachers come back to teach.
THE ROLE OF A YOGA TEACHER
RR: A lot of yoga teachers will be reading this interview. Yoga Journal prints each year a code of
conduct, which is written to give these teachers and their students guidance in their professional
lives. How do you understand the role of the yoga teacher in the yoga community and in the
larger society? What are the responsibilities that the teacher has to the people around him or her?
GF: It’s a huge responsibility, huge. I think if people fully understood that they would be far
more careful in choosing to become a teacher. A teacher is not a guru. A guru has a responsibility
that’s incomprehensible, because he’s not just responsible for this one lifetime. They take on
things that affect their own being. Teachers do that to a small degree but they take on an
obligation for communicating wisdom that’s very old. It should be preserved in it’s full integrity.
This means they have to be continuous learners. The teacher who has stopped learning is no
longer a teacher. It’s impossible to teach without continuing to learn. It’s impossible to be a
teacher if you’re no longer growing. If your students think you are the same year after year,
you’ve stopped growing. There always has to be that moment of surprise, “Oh, you’re different
from last year.” There has to be that, or else there’s something that’s not happening, and you
shouldn’t be a teacher. There has to be enthusiasm for communicating the genuine teachings, and
delight in their growth. If that’s not there, you’re not a teacher either. The whole process has to
be one of we are all moving toward a greater understanding, a greater expression of our inner
capacities, and greater delight. If that’s not there, you’re in the wrong business. There has to be a
commitment to the tradition, which means you have to keep yourself informed of the tradition.
Not just learning in the sense that I now know how to do this asana better, but also a learning in
terms of really studying. Always emphasize study. I’m a scholar, but study is very much part of
the yogic tradition. It’s been in classical yoga since ancient times. How were the teachings
communicated? Through study of the original texts. There’s no way to explain anything unless
you study. This has to be continued.
Teachers have to talk with one another. Forget about competition. What’s the point? If teachers
work together not only would their individual practices thrive, but they would also promote the
entire movement. The old saying, “Strength in unity.” Right now, it’s a kaleidoscope that doesn’t
hang together. It’s sad to see. In India, even though each ashram has its approach, there was a
general sense of we are engaged in something very powerful and profound, and there was a kind
of respect. On the whole you could say, “There is this ashram up the road and there’s a great
teacher there, if you want to go there, go there. If you don’t belong here, that’s fine, go up the
road.” But here is much more, “How many more students can I get?” This is an infringement of
ahimsa. It’s a harmful thing to be that competitive. As a teacher you also have the responsibility
of embodying the things you talk about.
RR: You have responsibility to the other members of the yoga community, not only students, but
other teachers.
GF: Everyone. The whole movement. I think right now because the teachers only see their own
little acre, they don’t look to the neighbor, they also don’t see the movement as a whole;
therefore very few teachers that I know of are concerned about what is happening with the yoga
tradition in the Western world, where is it going? The answer is, it’s not going to go anywhere
without direction. Where is the direction coming from? Right now it’s unfolding wildly, and
that’s maybe appropriate at this stage, but I think enough people are beginning to ask, where
could it go? People are asking, how should we train teachers? There’s too many teachers out
there who don’t know what they’re doing, both in the exercises, which is in itself criminal,
because you can do damage to people, but also they don’t know the teaching. When I say, have
you heard of Patanjali’s sutra, they say, what’s that? Then it means they’re not yoga teachers. So
there has to be preparation for the job, not just a weekend, or a video. In professional terms, you
have to have qualifications, or you’re menace. Looking at the larger picture, there also has to be a
deep love for people, and a deep love for this tradition. And then things can galvanize in a
different way.
If more yoga teachers lived the ideals of the tradition which they avow, they would come together
more, they would share more, and they would create the kind of culture that would be supportive
to the tradition. Six million people practice yoga in this country, of one form or another. Now
these six million peopled may represent only a part of the population practicing yoga on their
own, quietly on and off, that’s a significant number. If enough of these people could be made to
understand the greatness of the tradition from which they benefit, they could provide a supportive
environment.
Living in this realm, which is a very flawed realm, those who have woken up to a degree have no
option, we have to struggle out, we have to free ourselves from the flawed nature of this world,
and we do it by purifying ourselves, getting clarity in our own being, finding more light, finding
more joy, and then communicating that as best we can to others. That should be the real task of
the yoga teacher, not what you pass on as postures and breath control and all that. That’s the real
communication, because that’s what people want--when you nail them down, sooner or later they
will admit that--they’re suffering, yes, they don’t know why they’re suffering, but we want to be
free of this suffering, and that’s why we’re here. Even these silly postures we do, we’re really looking for something deeper, and I think to give them a chance to come to that insight, is the challenge of the teacher.
Like this vision of everybody’s our mother . . . because we’ve lived so many lives together,
we’ve all been mothers to each other. So if it’s your mother, how can you let your mother suffer,
right? Your heart goes out, and you say, “Ah, I give these postures, but I wish I could tell you
that there is more!” [laughs] And wait patiently. They may never wake up to something bigger.
RR: But you give them the opportunity.
GF: If that could happen, I think we could create, through the movement, a more benign
environment for those who care, to do something different. It’s just a hope and a wish. Given the
nature of this realm, it may not happen in the next 500 years. [laughs]
RR: Well, we all have many lifetimes to work on that.
GF: Exactly. You try again. In the Yoga-Sutra it says, the purpose of yoga is to overcome
suffering yet to come. And it means the suffering of all lifetimes. But how many people feel this
urge? You have to feel the urge, the desire for liberation. You get out of this by changing yourself
and having a new perspective, because if you are peaceful in yourself, you can be in a hell realm
and not mind. You’re still suffering, because you’re burning with the others, but you are freeing
yourself to give that new vision. If you happen to be in a hell realm, you might as well make the
most of it. But you don’t suffer in the same way, you still have pain but you don’t suffer.
RR: There’s no feeling of alienation, or limitation.
GF: Right. If you are in the cooking pot in hell with your mothers you can’t be alienated. You
say, “Mommy, how come you’re suffering here? You have to wake up. It’s just a hot pot.”
[laughs]
WHERE IS YOGA GOING IN THIS COUNTRY?
RR: Do you have any sense of where yoga is going in this country? Can you tell what’s going to
happen in the next few years or decades.
GF: Just from having talked to various people over the last year, I think there are a few good
people who would like to see things change in terms of the teacher training. They have done yoga
long enough to see that there’s a little bit of a problem. Something is not being communicated,
people are not approaching yoga for the “right reasons,” having a sense of obligation that more of
the tradition needs to be communicated. However we reshape that in the process of teaching is
another question. I can see in light of the comments made to me over last year by people who are
well known in the movement, that there might be before long a more concerted effort with the
help of, say, the British Wheel of Yoga and the European Union of Yoga Teachers, to do
something similar here in America. Which every one knows will lead to tremendous resistance
by a whole number of teachers who feel we don’t want to be squashed into any of these
preconceived frameworks. An understandable reaction, if it happens, but also a regrettable
reaction if it prevents them from participating. I think the teachers who are talking about
improving teaching standards are also teachers who have understood you cannot coerce anyone
to take any qualifications that they might come up with. It has to happen in dialogue. These
people are open to dialogue, it’s a matter now of shaking loose some of the lethargy that’s out
there in the movement and galvanizing teachers into wanting to participate as well. I think the
dialogue will continue for a number of years before there is any rough consensus. It will always
be a difference of opinions on certain points, but enough consensus for enough teachers to come
together and say, “This is what we have worked out,” some kind of a syllabus for training, and
then put that forward as desirable. Then more and more teachers will over the coming years will
say, “I think I myself deserve to be trained properly, and I think my students deserve that too.”
This is exactly what happened when the British Wheel of Yoga was started, many years ago,
there was understandable resistance, it took many years for it to become prominent enough for
them to have over a thousand members. This is something to be rejoiced in, you can always work
on the actual quality of those training courses but unless you come together and create something
that you agree as a basis, it can’t grow.
Also I hope in the years to come, more and more people will become skeptical about the quick
and easy solutions. More people have become disenchanted with the New Age movement and are
looking for the real stuff, realizing the real stuff is not quick and easy, ever. I hope that when they
are searching there will be enough real teachers in place to give them the genuine tradition. It’s
just a hope, I have no way of prophesying what will and what won’t happen.
Looking at the movement, I think that despite its shortcomings in this country, is very vital. It
won’t be squashed. As our social circumstance, as our economic circumstance becomes more
difficult, as undoubtably it will, I think more people will look for inner fulfillment. They’ll be
asking, “Why is it collapsing around us? What can I do to stay sane?” Our society has gone
amok, it’s crazy. If enough patients realize they’re crazy, then they can begin to do something
about it. The yoga tradition has so much to offer. Of course it comes in all these different forms,
from Hinduism to Buddhism. Yoga is not just Hinduism, yoga is word used also in the Buddhist,
the Chinese, and the Sikh traditions. One of the points in the Center is not to promote one
tradition, but to make the yoga tradition as a whole known. It’s valid as a path in these different
forms. Hopefully more people will find their way to genuine teachings.
THE ROLE AND GOALS OF THE YRC
RR: And what role do you hope the Yoga Research Center will play in all of this? What do you
see is the goal of the Yoga Research Center?
GF: The Yoga Research Center is a revival of something I did in the early 1970's back in
London, which was the Yoga Research Association. I felt I needed to have some kind of an
organization in which I could conduct my own work, give my own work more of a formal
identity, but also invite in others who do similar work.
For some reason, last year it became obvious that it was needed, and that I needed to do it. So I
started it and put out the idea, it’s still very much of an embryo that needs to be nurtured. I’m
hoping that enough people will see what the potential is of such a center, which is, first, to
conduct research, both on the scriptural side of yoga, in other words, make more translations of
yoga texts available. There are many good texts out there, but they are outdated translations,
incorrect translations, or translations no longer available. Also to make not just Sanskrit texts
available, but also there are some marvelous texts on yoga in Tamil, that has nothing translated.
There’s only one that has been translated that’s significant. There are other languages that would
be nice to have competent translators for. Then to coordinate what is going on in the world of
yoga research, because there are all these scholars all around the world, and they talk to each
other at conferences, but no one really knows what’s going on. Hopefully the center can provide
some kind of a forum for them. One of my hopes is that my bi-monthly newsletter can grow into
a academic magazine or journal. But not purely academic, because that becomes irrelevant, but a
journal that will allow people to publish their translations, their other research around the texts,
things to make parts of the tradition that have been barren for a long time come alive again. Also
I want to help facilitate the kind of research that’s happening in the medical and psychological
fields. A lot has been done that’s not known. I was surprised, when people found out about the
center, the biggest interest is, what kind of medical research exists on . . . AIDS, rheumatism . . .
This really prompted me to look at the purposes of the center and to upgrade that kind of
research, and give it more priority. We’re creating a data base of medical and psychological
research on yoga. That in itself should really encourage people to see how effective yoga is,
because the findings are very positive. Also the center could serve as a forum for organizing
symposia, conventions, seminars. When once there is an actual physical facility big enough to
have more rooms, to have bona fide scholars and serious teachers live there for a few weeks,
months, do some teaching in exchange, do some research. That’s my dream for it. How much of
that can be realized remains to be seen. It will depend on the collaboration of teachers and
scholars. Scholars have been responding to the word tremendously, it is really encouraging.
Teachers? Some yes, others couldn’t care less.
Essentially I see it as a gathering point for energy involving more people than myself, and my
close collaborators, to put out more energy for the movement, because for whatever cosmic
reasons, I feel a passion for the yoga tradition. I want to help as best I can to pass it on through
the scriptures. I’m not teacher, so I don’t pass it on myself, but I pass it on through the scriptures.
My books of presentations of the tradition, trying to find ever new ways of making them
palatable and understandable.
Berkeley, CA
October 10, 1997
BEGINNING STEPS ON THE PATH
RR: Maybe we should talk about you a bit. If I remember correctly, you became interested in
yoga at a relatively young age. Seventeen or younger?
GF: Fourteen.
RR: How did that happen? It reminds me of Aivanov; he was interested in those kinds of things
at an early age.
GF: But he was a master, I’m just a scholar. [laughs] Well, I discovered at a young age Paul
Brunton’s A Search in Secret India. That completely did it for me. I was on fire for months. I had
always looked around. I started being interested in philosophy at a very early age and was reading
European philosophers. But when I came across that book . . .
RR: Very exotic book.
GF: And a book in which he was concealing his own knowledge at the time. Because he had
already passed through certain experiences, but was writing this as a gateway for newcomers. So
it was written on a very basic, storytelling level. I remember when I came to his description of an
encounter with Ramana Maharishi, I read this I don’t know how many times. Again and again
and again, saying “I wish I could meet a master like that.” I just was totally captured. It was for
me spellbinding. My parents didn’t know what hit them. [laughs] I started meditating, a
meditation of my own design. [laughs] Reading that book over and over again and it really set the
stage for my spiritual interest. I’m very glad because, I can’t think of anyone better that Ramana
Maharishi to provide the right context. That was a great sage, a great realizer. And even in
Brunton’s kind of corrupt version of the story, I could pick up enough to feel that was a great
being. It took a few more years for me to jell with yoga. It was all still unknown territory I was
exploring here and there.
RR: Must have been hard to find information in the early 60's?
GF: Yes, 1961. Very difficult. So I found another book by Brunton which had been translated,
which was The Hidden Teachings Beyond Yoga. Marvelous volume. Even now when I look at it I
think this guy really has understood. Unfortunately, his work is not being read at all anymore, or
very little. But he was one of the people who brought Eastern traditions to the west. Very much
so. His work sold in the tens of thousands in those days, the 60's and 70's and then nothing.
RR: It is not a writing style . . .not an easy style.
GF: No, it seems Victorian.
RR: The writing is beautiful, but . . .
GF: It has a special flavor, [laughs] it belongs to the nineteenth century. But I still recommend
his notebooks of which there are 18 volumes. I think they are marvelous. They are a source of
inspiration. There is so much in them. But he is a writer I wish would be out there more, even
now.
So what happened then was Ramana Maharishi kindled my interest. Then I encountered
Yogananda’s autobiography, and again I was totally spellbound by it, all these miraculous stories.
Could they be true? [laughs] And then I discovered early on, and was very fortunate to discover a
book called Der Yoga, which means “The Yoga,” by a German Indologist. A big book, totally
scholarly book, and I spent my pocket money on it.
RR: Hauer?
GF: Yes. And there I found, surprises of all surprises, a translation of the yoga sutras and his
translations. And then that was it. I knew that was what I was going to do with my life, work in
yoga. And then as soon as I could, which was when I was 17 or so, I left home and studied with
an Indian yogi, hatha yogi, in the Black Forest. And learned hatha yoga the traditional way. Much
more emphasis on the energy, generating energy and pranayama and meditation.
RR: So that the asanas in that system are simply a way to strengthen and purify the body and it
isn’t the focus at all.
GF: No. He also had evolved very special exercises specifically for the spine, which were his
own system. He himself was a formidable man. Incredible power. He liked to show off his
strengths, with steamrollers rolling over his chest and this kind of stuff. Stopped his heart and
pulse. He was constantly in the newspapers. I had a very intimate relationship with him. I really
liked him. I thought that was really cool to have a teacher like that. When I showed up that first
time I remember he had a quiet castle, a whole castle in the Black Forest; that was his yoga
school. I got there and people were lined up in the big hall to be shown to their respective rooms,
a little suitcase you know. He came and greeted everybody, except me. [laughs] I thought why
didn’t he greet me, you know the mind at that age does crazy...you want to be recognized. So
everyone was shown to their rooms. Then he came back and looked at me for a while and said
“come with me.” He spoke English. He took me to a special room called the Himalaya room
[laughs] because it had no windows and it was winter time. That is where I was most of the time
I was in the ashram, I was allowed one blanket and I had to break the ice on the well in the
morning to wash. And he would watch whether I was doing it or not. I was just freezing and
hungry most of the time. But that was the training. I had been so much in my head, [laughs] he
needed to get me down into the body before he could work with me. It really worked. And then
he transferred me to Italy where we had a little ashram and we were building the stairs outside
and terrace near a cave.
SECRECY AND THE MODERN DISSEMINATION OF THE TEACHINGS
RR: Once upon a time these teachings were held to be very valuable. They were kept close to the
chest, so to speak and weren’t given out to just anybody. I’m wondering that now that the cat is
out of the bag, whether that’s a good thing or not. Is it good to have these teachings passing
through a lot of different hands, or whether there is an advantage to keeping it quiet and testing
the person who receives the teaching.
GF: I think there is a purpose to everything. The fact that for instance Tibetan Buddhist teachings
which were the preserve of very very few people are now freely available to anybody is a very
important moment not only in the evolution of Buddhism, but also in the evolution of spirituality
throughout the world. Because the fact that all these teachings are now available means there will
be a lot of cross-fertilizing going on, which will change the flavor of spirituality in the future, no
question.
RR: But at the same time, it opens it up to a lot of distortion, a lot of misuse.
GF: At the same time people will misuse it, misunderstand it, but the fact is that even though you
can now read texts like the Rig-Veda, which were held so sacred that only Brahmins were
allowed to read them and at least later on Brahmins didn’t know the meaning of what they were
reading in recent centuries--they had forgotten--it was western scholars who did all the work to
recover the meaning. But the fact is that even though they didn’t know the meaning, they were
still practicing that spirituality. And even though we have the Rig-Veda in paperback now, the
Upanishads and all the great scriptures, doesn’t mean that if you read it you know what you have
read. Most people don’t. They may have an intellectual understanding, but they don’t know the
feeling that comes with understanding the text. So in a way, nothing is lost. Those who have eyes
to see will see. Those who have ears to hear will hear. Those who don’t don’t. It will always be
secret.
RR: It’s hidden in plain view.
GF: It’s hidden, totally hidden. You could pick up that beautiful text of Kashmiri Shaivism we
were talking about, the Vijnana-Bhairava, there are so many methods of achieving the ecstatic
state. You can read this until you are blue in the face . . .
RR: There are over a hundred different . . .
GF: Yes, something like 118. Yet, never have the experience. Never even understand how to get
there. You can read it from beginning to end innumerable times, and I have a feeling that, for
instance, there are so many teachings out there on Vedanta, but who really has grasped the
Vedantic path of jnana yoga? Very, very few people.
I remember a time in England, I was invited to a very exclusive kind of Vedanta group and I
almost burst out laughing in the middle of the little dinner party we had, because Vedanta for
them was only philosophizing. It had nothing to do with the actual living reality, and I think they
all would have been shocked if Ramana Maharishi had sat in their midst half-naked, you know?
It just drove home to me the total absurdity of so much of western approaches to these ancient
teachings.
If a person isn’t prepared to drop everything, in other words renunciation, if a person isn’t
prepared to completely change their intellectual outlook, there is no way you can ever get close to
the heart of these teachings. There is no way. You have to be a yogi or a sannyasi to understand
them.
RR: One of the questions I have is about Tantra, and how this teaching is being distorted in the
West.
GF: To say the least.
RR: We’ve taken the practice and done things to it that were never intended.
GF: It’s a classic example of bowdlerizing an esoteric tradition, of making it common, total
misrepresentation. Tantra is always described as the path of desire, but it’s not indulging in
desire, it’s the transcendence of desire through the energy of desire. In Western so-called Tantra,
which I call neo-Tantra, it’s really only how to indulge yourself and have the illusion you’re
doing something spiritual. To me this is one of the saddest commentaries on Western response to
Eastern teachings. I’m not anti-sexual, anti-sensual, but if you borrow the name the name of a
tradition, you should honor the rest of what that word stands for. I’ve seen many books on neo-
Tantrism, and I’m completely disenchanted with what is presented as a spiritual tradition. I’m not
saying that it’s not useful; it’s possibly useful for certain people who have to work through
certain sexual hang-ups, confront them in a benign, loving environment, which some of these
groups may provide. In that case, it might be helpful, but please don’t call it spiritual practice. It’s
basic sexual therapy. Once you get into spirituality, even in the Tantric tradition, brahmacharya is
very much on the agenda. That’s the basic misunderstanding, as is the whole notion of
ejaculation, that you engage in Tantric practice for an hour or two, and you finally can’t stand it
anymore, and you ejaculate. There’s nothing like that in Tantra. The sexual side of Tantra is by
no means the most significant. It is always emphasized throughout the texts of Tantra that the
moment you pleasure yourself, you are no longer a Tantric practitioner. That’s very clear, you
have failed at the challenge. The whole idea is to energize the body through the sexual energy,
which is the lowest expression of your body’s spiritual energy. Use that in order to awaken the
Kundalini, and for no other reason. In fact when the Kundalini is awakened, the sexual center is
dead, it’s depleted, there’s nothing there.
RR: Because the energy has risen to the crown.
GF: The energy is in the sahasrara chakra. This message should be conveyed. The yoga
movement as a whole has a serious challenge in the future to clarify this kind of yogic approach.
I feel the same way about yoga teachings that only present asanas and have no other connection
with the yogic tradition. It’s not yoga. The sooner people understand that, the better for the
movement, the better for them. The minimal requirement for something to be yoga is to respect
that tradition that bears the name, and to respect the foundational practices, which are moral
practices, and to respect the fact that liberation or enlightenment is the common shared goal of all
these traditions. If we respect the tradition, we also respect our own true potential, which is that
of a liberated being. It’s not just being concerned with orgasm, concerned with food, concerned
with power, it’s not who we are.
THE APPROPRIATENESS OF THE TEACHINGS FOR A WESTERN AUDIENCE
RR: People in this culture sometimes have difficulty understanding exactly what it is they’re
reading when they read these texts. A question that always comes to me is how appropriate are
these Eastern teachings, for people in this culture? Do you need to be from that culture to really
understand what is being said in these texts or can you translate these texts across cultural lines?
Can Westerners really learn from these books?
GF: I think there are two levels to the answer. The first is that the translation process itself, which
is difficult because whenever you translate you translate out of one context into another, so
certain notions, like the notion of dharma, that are very difficult to capture in our context . . .
RR: Because in the old days person’s dharma was determined by his or her place in the society,
which was in turn determined by birth. That doesn’t happen in our time and place.
GF: Yes, but certain concepts have nuances that we just don’t have if we translate the term as
“law.” It is not quite law. Or “virtue.” Yes, in some contexts that could be. “Moral order.” But
even then we have associations with these terms that don’t exist in the Indian context. That’s one
level. A skillful translator will be able to find just the right term, or decide, as some people have,
not to translate the term and leave it untranslated and allow the reader to get a feeling sense for
that term as they read on. That’s one level.
On that level, pretty much any concept can be rendered either precisely, or like dharma, in a less
precise more ambiguous way into our language and still convey something useful.
RR: The sense of what is going on.
GF: The rough sense of what it stands for and find equivalents, if he is a good writer, then he can
evoke imagery and so on which will give the westerner a sense of this is how it would feel for me
to engage this, the Indian cultural context. But quite apart from that, we are also dealing, when
we deal with yoga, with esoteric texts. So there is the cultural level, which has to be translated,
and then there is the esoteric stuff. Now, a lot of that you can’t translate, because even if you
have a term like samadhi, and you translate it with ecstasy or enstasy, what does it convey to
anybody? Unless you have had the experience. You can get an intuitive sense, but unless you
have had the experience even a term like dhyana, meditation, most people have no clue what it
means. So, something is lost. That’s why I feel that even though these texts are all out there are
completely safe. They still have their seven seals all in order. [laughs] It requires personal
practice and a teacher, I think, to unlock these seals. Because even if you have your own
meditation going and so on, the moment, I’ve heard it so many times, the moment that person
finds a teacher that meditation takes off in a totally different way. Simply because there is
transmission. Even writing about a thing like transmission, I puzzle over how I’m going to say it;
unless you have experienced it, there is just no way to understand. You can find terms like the
Holy Spirit descending and so on, but even then, it is not the same.
RR: And a lot of people in our culture won’t believe . . .
GF: Won’t believe it exists. They think it is part of the Eastern mythology and superstition and
all the rest. Including people doing yoga, which is the sad part. So there are problems, but I think
you are trying to raise another question which is are these teachings of any use to us once we
have translated them to any degree?
GF: I think the states of consciousness which have been achieved in the east can be achieved in
the west by those who are qualified to experience them.
RR: You can then translate from one culture into the other. It is possible to do although there is a
level of difficulty that doesn’t exist if you are within that culture.
GF: It is both an advantage and a disadvantage to be in a culture. The advantage is that things
come more naturally, but the disadvantage is that the things that come more naturally to you can
also come to you unconsciously. It doesn’t make for great discrimination. We have to have
discernment about our own culture to understand what it is. In fact the saying is that if you only
know one culture, you don’t know any. You have to have that mirror of something else. If we
were brought up only knowing ourselves, we would know nothing at all. We need to have the
partner in dialogue. We need to have another culture in dialogue. So luckily, throughout history,
cultures have been in dialogue, with the few exceptions of tribal cultures, which have remained
backward essentially, they haven’t absorbed the richness of their environment, their cultural
environment.
So beyond all the possible translation that has to happen between cultures, we are one human
species. With the same aptitudes. We have the same genetic endowment. Same brain. It is one.
We are one. Therefore, we as self-conscious beings will also be able to see, to inspect our own
mechanisms, however they are determined culturally. It doesn’t really matter; we can see them.
And maybe we can see them more easily if we have the mirror of another culture. Just like if you
have the mirror of another person. If you are married it is much easier to get to know yourself.
This is the influx of eastern teachings into the west, which by the way didn’t begin with
Vivekananda. It began a long time ago, because even Christianity is from the east if people care
to remember. This influx of teachings has enriched our own heathen heritage. It continues to
enrich it. We also, through our export of technology and the ideology which comes with that,
even though it is destructive, we will enrich the east. Because they will be pushed into
experiences they will not otherwise have. Negative to be sure, but they will grow. So, as we all
are growing, maybe we can relate to each other a little more consciously and compassionately,
because we end of realizing we all are whatever color skin, culture, we have the same human
condition. We are born in pain. We live, experiencing pain, and we die. This is the teaching.
RR: Sarvam dukham.
GF: Yes. Once we realize that, that can be a basis for compassion for everybody.
RR: You’re saying though that it is an advantage to have to struggle with this material. It makes
you look at it more closely and it makes you look at yourself more closely. We may not get a
direct idea of what dharma is, what samadhi is, but we then have to explore these concepts in
terms we can understand and match those concepts with what we’re finding in the texts.
GF: Absolutely. I think to our discredit, we have lost touch with our own esoteric heritage. There
is a whole esoteric heritage in Christianity.
RR: The Aivanoff book brings that out, about gnosticism.
GF: Right. So we have that, but how many people are even aware of its existence? Aivanoff was
one of the great masters reviving that tradition, but how many people read his books? Very few.
So this truck coming from the east has stopped some people in their tracks and this is a
wonderful opportunity. Because smack right down in the hospital you wake up, what did I do,
why did I not watch where I was going? [laughs] So then there’s a lesson to be learned, and
indeed with this whole creation of Christian yoga which is a term that I have difficulty with but
essentially what it is, it is a product of the encounter between east and west. Some who were
Christians looked at the yoga tradition, experienced it to whatever degree, and then said, “Oh it’s
enriching my own heritage, which is perfectly fine. It’s wonderful if that happens. My objection
is more to the term “Christian yoga.” There is no such thing. Yoga is what the Indians call their
esoteric tradition. In Christianity it’s called “mysticism.” In Judaism it’s called Kaballah. So I
much prefer that these distinctions remain rather than to make a mish-mash . . . there is now a
Hebrew yoga, a Christian yoga, recently I saw a book called Egyptian yoga, which is really just
the Egyptian esoteric tradition, as we know it a little bit from the pyramid texts and later
scriptures. But why call it that. Unless there has been such a strong impact, cultural influence on
a tradition that you say “Well, there has been so much influence by Hinduism that its a from, a
hybrid of yoga, in that country.” Like you have this Buddhism, that’s an Indian buddhism, that’s
a Tibetan buddhism, that’s a far eastern buddhism, but it’s distinctly Buddhist, you can tell, it’s
coming from the same source, but Christian yoga and Egyptian yoga they don’t come from the
same source, its a term propped onto an existing tradition.
THE WESTERN RESPONSIBILITY TO THE EASTERN “LEGACY”
RR: This brings up the question: we are receiving this legacy from the east. There’s an enormous
influx of eastern teachings into western culture at this time. Its a valuable lesson, it’s taken these
people in the east thousands of years to accumulate this knowledge, and so what is our
responsibility to this teaching? You’re suggesting already a few things about it, but what should
we as westerners preserve, at the same time, what can we add to it? What do we have to enrich
the teaching?
GF: I think I want to go back to what you were saying at the beginning of the question: it’s a
wonderful lesson. It’s not a lesson yet. It’s a challenge. When it becomes a lesson, then there’s
the answer to the second part of your question. I think there’s a marvelous encounter, that’s
happening to still a very small degree. It’s not really yet deep enough to say even an encounter.
It’s a few people who have encountered these eastern teachings. What our responsibility as
westerners is to that tradition . . . I’m wondering whether one can put it in such a generic way. I
think it’s the individual who has the responsibility in encountering that tradition. And the
responsibility is to the degree that the person is able to respond to that tradition, to be true to it; in
other words, you don’t just pick up a book on the Gita or one of the Upanishads and then set
yourself up as a teacher. That would be cheating the tradition. The real response would be, here’s
a sacred scripture, what is the teaching environment for that, who is teaching that, where are the
real teachers of this scripture? Because all these scriptures, you must remember, were orally
transmitted from teacher to disciple to begin with, they were not written down, so with that
comes an empowerment. The person is empowered to realize the teachings in that tradition. Later
on they were written down because obviously people didn’t remember as well anymore.
RR: The power comes not only from the words but from the presence of the teacher as well.
GF: Yes, the teacher’s presence enlivens one’s own connection with the tradition. So not only
will the teacher be able to explain, expound, the tradition, like the Bhagavad-Gita, but also
because of the spiritual process that he will kindle in the disciple, that disciple will connect with
the life of that tradition through their scriptures in a different way. Suddenly there is a living
thing talking back, it’s not just a dead text, it’s a really living exchange going on, and there’s
learning happening in relation to that text, even if that tradition maybe has forgotten the precise
original significance of certain terms. Doesn’t matter. It’s the living current of that tradition.
GF: It’s remarkable that the Rig-Veda, for instance, which has over 1000 hymns, was accurately
transmitted for very probably 5000 and more years . . .
RR: Impossible to think about.
GF: Impossible . . . I look at it and I say, “What a wondrous thing.” But that is how precious
these teachings were to those people. And now sometimes I see these torn paperbacks, scribbled
all over, and it’s a sacred text. And we have no notion of what that means, none. . . . you have to
develop a special feeling for these things, or they won’t speak back to you. So even though the
Brahmins forgot the meaning of many of the words of the Rig-Veda, they still recited them,
faithfully learned them . . . some of these Brahmins can recite all three Vedas, some Brahmins
can recite the Vedas and the Brahmans, prose texts that have nonsense syllables, mantric
syllables in the middle, is marvelous. And so for us, because our mind is much focused on
acquiring, and putting, we live in such a speed, that memory doesn’t mean anything to us
anymore. We have now a calculator, we don’t have to learn our multiplication tables, we have a
computer, so we externalize our inner technology. Then we can’t understand the obligation
Brahmins or other guardians, custodians of these sacred traditions have to preserve them. And we
have a paperback culture.
RR: So that does make it difficult for us to realize the power of the yoga legacy, the great history
behind it, the great force of humanity that stands behind it.
GF: Completely. Of the people that I often speak to, including yoga teachers, I don’t think there
is much of a notion that literally thousands of yogis over a period of five and six thousand years,
have labored on these teaching, and realizing their purpose.
RR: Taking chances, sacrificing themselves
GF: Totally. Making mistakes. Somebody said, “well, if you stand on one leg for a thousand
years you realize the divine, or maybe nothing happens.” [laughs] So they experimented with
their own bodies and minds, and no doubt there were failures, the scriptures talk about them.
Because the path is very difficult, it’s a razor’s edge that they walk, and sometimes they slip and
Ouch! We to get an appreciation, and all my work has been about making these authentic
traditions available in ways that will be, hopefully, accessible to people, and always finding new
ways, new texts, new traditions, to write about.
RR: At the same time, you’ve done a wonderful job of relaying that idea that this is an enormous
human enterprise, and it should be held in tremendous respect, it’s nothing to be taken lightly.
GF: Right, nothing to be taken lightly. And I think you said it, it’s a human enterprise, it’s not
just the Indian enterprise, it’s us, it’s our brothers and sisters in India who happen to develop this
tradition, but it’s a human enterprise, and I think as human beings concerned about who we are . .
.
THE BENEFITS AND DRAWBACKS OF A SYSTEM
RR: I’m always trying to impress on my students that classical yoga is a system, it’s a very
logical and beautifully thought out way of seeing the world. I’m wondering what the benefits and
the drawbacks are of a system. I’m thinking of Krishnamurti, who said “Truth is a pathless land.”
GF: My take on this is that if we “have a system,” the risk of making an ideology out of it far
outweighs the benefits of a system. Because we always reify everything, we always think, “This
is how reality is.” All philosophical systems are simply convenient devices to look at something.
In our time we can perhaps appreciate that more than any other time, because we’re confronted
with so many different systems and we realize that none of them are the truth. Historically we
have more because of our higher level of education than in past centuries, we have more an
appreciation that none of these systems amount to reality.
RR: You’ve mentioned in one of your books that we’re more aware now, because of the
discoveries of modern physics, how relative all these systems are.
GF: We’re viewing reality through our own lenses, thinking it is reality, but what we see is not
reality, what we see is a filtered image. I think the benefit of some system like yoga darshana, is
simply that it gives us a plausible structure for understanding the yogic process. If we anxiously
cling to the idea that there are endless, numberless purushas in liberation, and then there is
prakriti separate from all of that, it’s an ideology, it’s not reality. I would say the same thing
about Vedanta, if we believe that liberation is the melting of the individual self with the ultimate
self, it’s also just a way of expressing something that’s not like that.
RR: Because you can’t really put an ineffable experience like that into words, it doesn’t translate.
GF: You can’t. We need to have some crutches, so from my point of view it’s good to look for
the crutches that make sense to you. If that crutch happens to be a particular yoga philosophy,
fine, if that crutch happens to be Christian theology, fine, if it happens to be Heidegger, or
Husserl, or Jung, fine, no problem. As long as the system you have can reasonably accommodate
the experiences you encounter and can reasonably accommodate possible experiences. If a
system like Materialism excludes a whole range of possibilities, dismisses those experiences as
nonsensical, or false, you exclude yourself from the experience. Then you diminish your own
being. If a system helps you grow, wonderful, if the system closes you down, shuts down your
experience and your potential for further development, look at it and say, “Thank you very much,
it’s an ideology, I don’t need it.”
RR: So a system is a guide.
GF: It’s a guide. There is another criteria, if a teacher insists that you swallow lock, stock and
barrel his particular brand of teaching without you being allowed to critically examine anything--
like the famous saying over the door of Rajneesh’s ashram, something like “Leave your mind
with your coat outside”--this is already an indicator to beware, you are expected to be swallowed
up by an ideology. You are not engaging the spiritual process. The spiritual process will not
demand of you to take on any philosophy; on the contrary, the spiritual process will show the
ultimate irrelevance of all philosophies, all theories, all concepts. The truth is pathless, but there
is a path to the truth. There has to be a movement to it recognizing what the truth is, and that
movement is structured in different ways by different traditions.
In Tibetan Buddhism you have the marvelous Lam Rim teaching, which are the stages of the
path, a highly developed, almost formulaic, system of understanding each aspect of the path, far
more complex than the eight limbs of classical yoga. As a student it makes perfect sense to
encounter this, but it doesn’t mean to say that this is reality. Reality is nirvana, it’s beyond
anything that can “blow,” it’s a blow out. [laughs] I would recommend that if people do practice
yoga, they have to practice within a context in which it has been transmitted for millennia. That
context is highly diversified, which I have always tried to show in my books, there’s so many
yogic approaches, so many different traditions, schools. Unless a yoga practitioner encounters
that to some degree, and is enriched by that, there will always be the delusion that the way I’m
doing it is the way.
If you, say, join a bhakti cult, then everything suddenly is filtered through that lens. This may
work for some people, it wouldn’t work for me. I would always want to have an overview: this
bhakti approach, this jnana approach, this karma approach, all the other approaches, well, what
do they share? Really then be informed more by the commonality between traditions than the
differences. Appreciate the differences and value them as something that allows the practitioners
of that tradition to propel themselves on the path. Essential crutches on the path, but they don’t
necessarily have universal validity.
RR: So take on the system, but don’t immerse yourself, keep your perspective.
GF: Keep your perspective, the understanding that we need crutches but ultimately we need to
throw them away. Whatever concepts we use are Band-Aids, we need them because otherwise
we’d bleed to death. We put them on, we stop the bleeding, but after we healed, we should take it
off. “I never was sick! It was an illusion.” [laughs]
ON THE NEED FOR A GURU
RR: The teachings are suited to the capacity of the student rather than just give a blanket teaching
to a large group of people. That’s one of the reasons why you want your own teacher.
GF: So the teacher who knows you will also know where your boundaries are, where your
limitations are and he will constantly prick the balloon. Constantly, if he is a good teacher. At the
same time, if he is a good teacher, he will also provide enough nurturing for you to continue with
this ordeal. It is a rite of passage.
RR: You can’t just pull out the stops and let the person flounder.
GF: You have to know what you’re doing, and I think the bad teachers, of which there are many
in evidence, are the ones who just pull the rug and then say “oh, tough luck.” And leave the
person to their own devices. At the Foundation we get people who have kundalini problems,
genuine kundalini problems because it was awakened but then the teacher didn’t see it through.
Because they are not capable of seeing it through. It is very easy to do. Awaken something, and
then where is the help? This particular danger in teaching has always existed. I translated a little
passage from the Kula-Arnava Tantra which talks all about bad teachers, teachers who cheat,
pretend, etc. They are in the majority. But there is also the misconception I think that we have in
the west which I often hear when I go out and talk to students, that there are not enough good
teacher. “Where is my good teacher.” “There are so many good students, but not enough good
teachers.” My view on that is always the same. Very forcefully I tell them that there are a
hundred times more good teachers than there are disciples. But if you don’t see, the teacher could
stand right beside you and you wouldn’t know he is your teacher. Your own delusions are in the
way. So if we have a bad teacher, who is to blame? Us. No one else.
RR: For not being discriminating
GF: Exactly. I think to approach a teacher we need to do as we do with everything else. When we
buy a car we go through the works, not just look at the color. You find out before you put the
money down. Same with a teacher. Find out, and then even when you have committed to a
certain degree you find out some more for a period of time to see ok how is the teacher
responding to me. How am I responding to that teacher? Is there a connection and so on. And the
teacher does the same.
RR: Can you give some criteria people can use to look for a teacher. In deciding on and choosing
a good teacher. Are there specific things to look for? Or is it more of a feel?
GF: No, I think people like Wilbur and others have put a list together. Frances Vaughn also I
think. Of who are the teachers who qualify as good teachers. I don’t recall all the criteria, but I
think one criterion for me personally would be is this teacher part of a recognized tradition and
lineage? In other words, who is that teacher’s teacher? Very important. Because, if you have a
wild card, you don’t know.
RR: No responsibility to anything.
GF: Yes. There is no environment for them to have to prove themselves. They are only talking to
the student, which is a one-way street. So that is one thing. To look at who has made that teacher.
Who is he responsible to. The second criterion I would say, what are your instincts about that
teacher? What is the gut reaction? If there is doubt about the teacher’s integrity, if there is doubt
about ability, why commit? At the same time you have to make sure it is not your own stuff that
you are reacting to. It is a very subtle thing.
I would also look at, the biblical saying about the fruits, “by their fruits you shall know them,”
that’s the case. Talk to others. If there is confusion, chaos and pain around a teacher, it is likely
that the teacher is the cause of that pain and confusion.
RR: It all flows from the source.
GF: Yes. Around great teachers there will always be people who are confused and in pain and all
that, because they don’t discriminate. They allow people to come in whoever they are if they
have the karma to be there. And they help to whatever extent they can, but you will also find in a
group, in a community like that people of worth. Who have passed through the process. The
other think I have done, my whole experience with Da Free John, before I set out on this
adventure, which I knew was totally crazy because it would challenge me in every conceivable
way, but I entered it open-eyed. I understood I was doing this for a very specific reason, in my
case. I wanted to have this confrontation with a very strong teacher who would challenge me in
ways that no one has challenged me before. But I made a deal with myself that after a certain
period of time, a number of years, whatever, you look at the situation. If there is a sense of
basically feeling good about he involvement, even if there is pain, you decide to renew your
contract with yourself in a way. But if you find it has just become a nightmare or you feel you
haven’t grown in the preceding period, it is time to leave, say goodbye, it’s not for me.
This is what happened in my case. I felt I wasn’t growing anymore. I had grown for four or five
years and then I felt I reached a plateau having to do with my perception of the teacher. There
was a level of trust I couldn’t reach. So when that happens, when you can’t open up to the teacher
on that deep inner level, there is no way that relationship can flourish. No way. Transmission will
not continue. I realized that this is what was happening. I had to say goodbye. I don’t think
anyone who is wise will look at their life after a period of time and say “how am I doing?” Rather
than just go with the status quo and hope for the best. There has to be an intelligent process of
self-examination, which has to be continuous anyway.
RR: Although difficult to sustain in an environment like that. When you get close to someone
like that, it is easy to give yourself up and give yourself over and stop thinking for yourself.
GF: That then is the childish response. A good teacher will not tolerate it. Because you always
have to think for yourself. Always. You always have to make your own mistakes. The teacher can
point out to you that you are about to make a mistake but if you feel you have to make it, to find
out for yourself, you have to do it.
THE SPIRITUAL INTENT OF THE TEACHINGS
GF: Take the asanas from their spiritual context, I would use the term advisedly, is fateful,
because it shortchanges the student who thinks they are doing yoga. Whereas there is this vast
background that is really designed to uplift the person from their present state of ordinariness of
confusion of basic human suffering and need. Uplift them from that into something far more
sublime and give them a vision of who they could be. And it is reducing yoga to a level . . . that’s
what it moved away from. That is why it was designed. Health . . . I have nothing against
cultivating health. People say you are down on exercise, I’m not. It is important to cultivate that,
especially if you feel the need for it. It is important to cultivate in the same way an intelligent
mind to be informed about what is going on, not just live like a zombie, but be up on events, see
what this life is about.
But more important than any of that is to see who we are in spiritual terms and to do something
about that. Because without that there is no way we can relate to the rest of it in any deep
sensitive way.
RR: It just becomes an exercise without any firm basis.
GF: It just becomes a shell. You are exercising the shell, you are training the dog. And you
salivate when the bell rings. But beyond that, there is nothing. There is no sense that behind that
brain there is a great mind. Behind that great mind there is a great reality. People are not told
about that. So the hunger for something more remains. And since there is no pointer in the right
direction they will continue to look for happiness in the wrong places. And continue with their
cycle of suffering. When you have understood enough about the traditions, then there is a desire
growing in yourself to reduce others’ suffering, like you want to reduce your own. And be a
compassionate presence in your work, in your life, in your family life.
RR: I like the way you always relate the teachings to a larger picture, not just yourself you’re
concerned with. It’s other people; in fact, it is the whole planet.
GF: We are everyone. The sooner we understand that, the better. Because right now, even our
consumption pattern, we live in total isolation and delusion. We think that this is what we
deserve. We deserve this great lifestyle we have in America. By the way, not everybody has it in
America, there are many many hungry people on the streets who used to have good jobs, but I
think we delude ourselves into believing that we deserve any of that. We delude ourselves into
believing that this is how it is pretty much around the world. Pretty much around the world is
hunger and frustration. You just need to go to any country in Africa and Asia and you know you
encounter what is really happening. If we think in isolation, we will suffer isolation. We cannot
grow. We need to have a sense of our place in the midst of things. To be able to pick up a
paperback on the Rig Veda or the Gita or the Upanishad or Kashmir Shaivism is a tremendous
privilege. It is not just plunking down your money to get a book. It is a privilege to have that
book, to get that teaching. You don’t have to travel for six months to find that teacher who holds
the teaching.
RR: You don’t have to prove yourself.
GF: You don’t have to prove yourself in pain sitting in front of the door [laughs] and the teacher
says come back in a month. So I think the quicker we understand that all of us are in this together
and that this realm we are in is not a pretty sight. There are nice moments, but on the whole, it is
not a pretty sight. We must have not only responsibility for our own upliftment, but for everyone
else, because on our own, we are not going to make it. That is part of the process. We have to
care for everyone.
RR: That gives a more universal definition to yoga, to the word union, you are aware of your
union with everything around you.
GF: It is not a traditional definition. The yogi has always been primarily concerned with his/her
own liberation, but the whole moral laws of Yama are how the yogi relates to the environment,
the social environment, and there is always profound concern. The concern is to manifest higher
values in the social relationships, especially non-harming. How little we respect that law, in so
many ways. Even going on the bus and not yielding your chair to someone in need. We just
ignore others. Or you walk by someone obviously unhappy, you give a smile, even if you don’t
know the person, you know? Give a grin, nod, whatever. This is non-harming. Anything else...if
we withhold our own energy we have already failed in the spiritual process.
RR: I remember you making the point about ahimsa, that it is a positive force. It is not just
withdrawing and avoiding violence, but it is something that you actively do.
GF: We extend our own life energy to others. I think that in the ideal of the bodhisattva that has
become a nicely polished diamond. In previous teachings it was largely implied. But there it was
made the idea of the practice, that yes we must strive for liberation or enlightenment ourselves.
We must do that, that is the spiritual process, but who do we do it? We do it to uplift everyone,
because we cannot bear the idea that all these beings are related to us. We are related to them.
We only look at our own family nowadays, and even then . . . But in the past there was more of a
sense of belonging to a larger group, whether a clan, the village. Now we don’t have that. We
isolate and exclude. In spiritual practice we must then come back, especially in our times, come
back more to a sense of we are everybody.
THE REVOLUTIONARY NATURE OF CHANGE
RR: People don’t understand the revolutionary nature of the books, of the teachings. They think
they can practice yoga and go on the way they have been going on for all their lives and not have
to make any sacrifices.
GF: No real sacrifices. They want to fix a little here and a little there.
RR: Self-improvement rather than self-transformation.
GF: That’s right. And it doesn’t work. All the teachings demand everything of one. Everything.
Whoever you think you are you have to abandon that view.
RR: I teach a course for the Yoga Room in the Yoga-Sutra. One of the questions I ask my
students is “Is liberation something you really want?” Because it can be dangerous, to your life
and to the lives of those around you. It’s not something to be taken up lightly.
GF: No, dangerous to your health. [laughs] Completely, because that which we treasure the most,
which is not liberation, is ourselves. Is our own concept of who we are. And the first thing the
teacher will do will be to find out all the ways in which you identify with that which is not real.
And then one by one, pull the carpet from under your feet. How many people are willing to go
through that process? It’s an ordeal. People don’t understand that spiritual life is not easy. So
many times I have talked with people who think they are practitioners, spiritual practitioners. I
ask, “what do you do on a typical Sunday, or during the week?” And what they do has nothing
whatsoever to do with spiritual practice. They think spiritual practice is when they go to their
Wednesday group or their Sunday group, like people go to church, that this is what it is.
RR: For an hour-and-a-half.
GF: Few people understand that the spiritual process is initiated, which requires a spiritual
teacher who knows what they are doing. Once this process is initiated, it is a 24-hour thing. Your
life at night is different and your life during the day is different. There is no way of knowing how
it will manifest. There may be days and weeks and months or years of no sleep. Or bad sleep,
because all this stuff is being processed inside you. There may be days where you say “oh, why
am I feeling suicidal?” And you realize it is just a feeling. You would never take action on it, but
it arises because it is sitting there, deep down. It is a despair with life. It is part of the process.
You have this book here, The Chasm of Fire by Irina Tweedy, who was a friend of mine, I can’t
say a teacher, but she was a guide for a period of time. She describes very clearly her despair.
RR: Very vividly, graphically.
GF: Yes, and this is what it boils down to for everybody. It manifests in different ways, but you
have to confront your own disappearance.
RR: Frightening.
GF: Terrifying. So unless you confront it and pass through it, there is no way to come out on the
other side and there is no way of telling, not even for the guru, how long this process of passing
through will take. It could be the rest of ones life.
RR: Or if it will be successful. There is no assurance that even if you go through all this that
something positive will happen in the end.
GF: I differ on that. I think it will be successful if you pass through. If it is in this lifetime is
another matter. I think the Bhagavad-Gita says that no effort is ever lost. I think what we tend to
do because we are always in a rush about everything we give ourselves such a short period of
time for this major transformation. People need to start looking at the total picture of spiritual life
and say I must make a lifetime’s commitment, a lifetimes’ commitment to this process. And not
think ok a year from now, or ten years from now, as some teachings promise, it will necessarily
happen for me. The reason is that even though these teachings may be completely correct that in
one year given this method you could realize yourself or the divine, even though that may be
completely true, but how many people are at the point where they can pass through this crisis in
such a short period of time. I think for most people the nervous system would just give up. They
would go mad, literally mad.
So that’s why there are teachings that propose a more gradual manner.
RR: Do you think it’ll becomes more common as these ideas enter the mainstream? That as more
and more people take up the practice, do you think that more and more people will then find their
way to the top of the mountain?
GF: That’s the ideal, but if it will happen, I don’t know. Because the work is so difficult. It
demands everything you have.
RR: Why is it so difficult?
GF: Because of the gravity of karma. Karma is just a drag. [laughs] We have created in lifetime
after lifetime karmas that just maintain a pattern in us. It’s very difficult to extract yourself from
that gravity pull of karma. Even in one lifetime you may have some gain . . . this is what I like
about the Buddhist teachings, and it’s also to some degree formulated in the Hindu teachings: our
life is a unique opportunity to engage the spiritual process because we have intelligence, we have
the conditions . . . there are teachers around who will teach us, there are teachings around that we
can learn from. Maybe there will be cultures and environments that have none of that, maybe
other planets somewhere out there in the universe life has not received teachings. Here on earth
we have very precious teachings, so we must make use of them. Also the insight that our lifetime
is very short, and if we don’t get accustomed in our youth to this way of thinking, it’s very
difficult to change later on. You will already have made more karmas in this lifetime that push
for fruition, to call all that back is very difficult.
ON CONSCIOUSNESS
RR: I wanted to ask you about your definition of yoga as a “technology of consciousness
transformation.” I wanted to talk specifically about consciousness. Consciousness is the field of
yoga, especially classical yoga . . .
GF: All yoga.
RR: In particular, how the yogis see consciousness, the difference for example between citta and
cit. The other questions would be: how and why? How do you transform your consciousness,
what is the process, and why do you want to do that? What is wrong with your consciousness the
way it is, that it needs to be transformed?
GF: I think what’s wrong with it has been answered in one of the early Upanishads, which talks
about the Absolute being great and expansive. Everything else is alpa, meaning petty and
insignificant. So in our ordinary consciousness, we don’t live out of the fullness of who we are.
It’s the surface consciousness, it’s the foam, it’s not the ocean. The yogis early on discovered that
there was this vast ocean of Being or awareness, since awareness and Being go hand in hand in
this vastness, was the reality sustaining the rest of it. But we identify only with this small part of
who we are, and it’s a totally insignificant part, and the part that is riddled with delusions, and
causing us endless pain. We just need to examine one day the interactions we have with people:
how much misunderstanding, how much projection, how much absence of real connection. We
can’t share who we are with the people we work with, we can’t share who we are with the people
on the bus. That’s painful. For most people that’s just silly talk, but it’s because there isn’t yet a
sensitivity to that separation we experience all the time. That separation is created by the
mechanism of our own limited karma-driven--or Jung might say unconsciously-driven--
consciousness, the mind, which duplicates itself over and over and over again. It’s like a broken
record. When you become sensitive to the fact that you’re just a broken record, then you say,
“Ah, what else am I? Am I just this broken record? That’s sad.” For most people this kind of
thinking happens in mid-life crisis, which is a wonderful thing to happen, but you can ask those
questions early on. Unfortunately in our culture, we are not encouraged to do so, it’s a total
absence of what I call a “philosophical culture.” We merely anchor ourselves in the byproduct of
our education; in other words, who we are right now is who we have been made to be, by and
large.
RR: Who we’re told to be.
GF: Who we’re told to be, by our parents, or educators, and so on. When people mature, the
question comes, “Who am I? Why am I so screwed up?” Then there’s the possibility of doing
some real self-inspection, and gaining real self-understanding, and when that real selfunderstanding
happens we realize that none of these things, these patterns, that we normally
identify with, are us. They are us only in an incidental way. The real us is this large, beautiful,
all-comprising, ecstatic Being that looks through the eyes of all beings. And that’s who we are.
Most of the time we don’t have a clue about that, unless we have the karma that suddenly an
experience like that happens to us, then we say, “Oh my God, all these years, I’ve been in a
dream.” Literally, as most people live it, is this kind of daydream. There may be, because of
conditions or momentum created in the past, some people are allowed to get a glimpse of this
larger thing that we are. Then maybe the spiritual work can begin. But so many people don’t have
that option, don’t have that opportunity, then something other must come in and smack them real
hard, like the death of a loved one, a really serious illness. Then, “What’s it all about?” We
cannot accept, if we look at life, that this is all there is, we cannot. No one in his right mind can.
Because it is not all there is. Something in us tells us we must look deeper. And then if we are
encouraged to look deeper, either because a friend of ours has done so and can recommend some
path, some book, something, life can begin again for us in a real way. That’s the spiritual process
start, but then it’s that matter of commitment to it, to stick with it, to allow it to unfold however
difficult it seems. But we are like explorers in unknown territory, like the Antarctic, it’s cold, it’s
uncomfortable, but look at the vastness, the freedom of it all. This is what spiritual life is, we
have to climb Mount Everest-like slope, all the dangers, all the hard work, but then when you’re
on top, you look around and see the total stillness of the mountain peaks below you, the valleys
below you. That’s the yogic image, of being up above, looking down. Not looking down in a
negative way, but looking down in the sense of reaching a plateau that is so much broader . . .
RR: A new perspective.
GF: Totally open up a new perspective. From that perspective you can go down into the valley,
and do your work. It’s a totally altering experience. And that experience is different from socalled
altered state of consciousness, which can be anything--even sleep is an altered state of
consciousness--I think ordinary consciousness is the only altered state there is, the rest is the real
stuff.
RR: And this is what yoga is meant to do.
GF: Yoga is meant to open up that vista. It’s meant to help you. It’s the climbing gear to go up
that slope, but it’s still your legs, your muscles, that do the walking, the climbing. On top you let
go of the gear.
That’s why yoga has two meanings. Yoga is used in the sense of the discipline, and in the sense
of the actual union. When you have the union, you don’t need the gear anymore. But very few
people can claim to have reached that level. I think there are practitioners that have been allowed
glimpses of it, and their work gets encouraged by that, they continue with their process and
helping others in the process. But I think full enlightenment is a very, very rare accomplishment.
THE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF PRACTICE
RR: I wanted to ask you about what you think are some of the essential aspects of a spiritual
practice. There are a lot of different approaches now, but to your mind what is important. What
needs to be there in a sound spiritual practice?
GF: I give you a very short answer and it is not my words. It is the words of the Dalai Lama when
he was asked what he believes in, what his religion was. He says “my religion is kindness.” He
manifests that. That is the ideal of the bodhisattva. You can find different words for that, but it is
what I just said. Non-harming extended as a practice must be the foundation. So often people
take off, go on retreat, try to achieve all this satori or something, and they come out and behave
like everyone else. Something is missing. They didn’t get something. That is why in western
yoga, it is largely failing still because the foundations are missing. Where are the yamas? Where
are they? Nowhere to be found. It all starts with asana, so yama and niyama are missing. Like
lopped off, no lower legs, no pelvis, nothing. Just starts from the belly up. You move the arms.
[laughs] This is sad, but is, I think, what essentially is going on. Unless teachers assume
responsibility for teaching in an unpopular way, because it can be unpopular to talk about
morality, unless they are willing to do that, talking about non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing,
chastity. Who dares to talk about that?
RR: It would be a good way to clear out your classes in a hurry.
GF: Non-grasping in general. But unless this is reintroduced into western yoga it cannot thrive as
a spiritual practice. Impossible. Why do the yogis have it there? Because that supplies the energy
for the rest of the process.
RR: Gets you moving in the right direction.
GF: Yes. And it supplies energy.
RR: Because it cleans things up.
GF: Yes, but not just that. Also because truthfulness is a force, is an energy. If you are truthful in
a difficult moment, you can see how it enlivens you. If you are non-harming when it is difficult,
it enlivens you. So without that, where is the energy for the higher process. There can’t be any. It
is all mental. People tell me about their great meditation experiences and I know it is just fantasy.
It has to come with the body, the rest of the trunk, the legs have to be there. And they won’t be
there if there is no yamas or niyamas. Impossible.
RR: So that would be an essential part of any yoga practice to pay attention to what the yamas
and niyamas have to say about your external and internal relationships.
GF: Completely. Without it. . . nada. [laughs]
RR: The inner sound?
GF: [laughs] Not the inner sound, but the Spanish nada.
I think apart from that there has to be a ruthless self-honesty. Few have the ability to look at
something they have been doing for a long time and admit to themselves that they have been
deluding themselves. I need to start again. I think there has to be a constant willingness to selfcreate.
To recreate yourself. You don’t like what you see? It doesn’t matter, just start again. Try
again, not give up. Always looking again and again and again. However difficult it is. Without
that quality you cannot sustain the interest in the spiritual process.
RR: So self-observation.
GF: Self-observation is the beginning, but self-understanding, which is deeper. Because you can
observe yourself but still not quite understand. So self-understanding is the deeper level of that.
And there has to be a commitment to that. And then there has to be a commitment to actually
changing what you see is wrong about you. To open to feedback from others. One of the sad
things among yoga teachers is there are not willing to listen to input from their students and most
students are too scared to give input. It is essential. It is essential in any relationship to have
feedback, otherwise you are off on your own.
There is also a sense that if the teacher is wrong about something and you feel strongly about
it, you can bring that up. And you go to the teacher and say “I know I may be wrong, but this is
bothering me. This is what is bothering me, would you please clarify.” Then there is a dialogue.
The advantage, I think, within the Buddhist tradition is that it is monastic tradition (at least
Tibetan Buddhism, which is what I am talking about), so there has already been a lot of dialogue
during the formative period of a monk’s life. There is all this debating going on. And there is a
sense, and this is something the Dalai Lama wrote about in one of his books, I think The Path to
Enlightenment, that critical faculties must be alive throughout the process. If it means that you
have to challenge the teacher, you have to do that, but do so respectfully. And if there is no
agreement, you leave, but without anger.
Everybody has limitations. Even an enlightened being has limitations, or that person wouldn’t be
alive in this realm.
RR: Just being embodied . . .
GF: Just being embodied is subtle limitation and that body will have a particular brain and that’s
limiting, and that brain will have a certain education and that’s limiting. So we have to be more
tolerant, but there has to be dialogue. I think in the yoga movement where there isn’t a strong
educational dialogue based tradition in the formative years of a teacher, dialogue is even more
essential. Otherwise that teacher will live in total isolation and probably delusion. If everyone
says yes to you, sooner or later you start thinking you are god. There is no other way, unless you
have a total commitment to self-understanding. Then you look and perhaps say I don’t like what I
see about myself. If you can say that and not collapse, but do something about it, then the
spiritual process is alive and well.
COMMITMENT TO PRACTICE
RR: You’ve used the word commitment a lot. How do you make a commitment to the practice?
What do you say to a student whose commitment is waning? How do you help a student rekindle
that commitment if say he/she is getting frustrated with the practice and is losing interest?
GF: It depends on the student and what the problem is., what is behind it. I think people need
from the beginning to be told that it is not just going to be hunkey-dorey. It is going to be a
process that will challenge them. There is a honeymoon period and after that reality sets in. If the
spiritual process really is taking place you can tell, because that person is up against it all the
time. All the time. There are very few nice honeymoon moments after that. In fact, I think the
challenge is to live with the crunch all the time. You always feel it and not mind because you
know something is being processed, is going to change, and if you had the ability to change your
physical frame, it is painful, right? Because the tendons and everything would go. [laughs] This
is the spiritual process too. We’re growing muscles there in the other realm [laughs] and it is
painful. The pain is partly self-revelation and partly it is a very esoteric process of the very
structure of ones being changing. It is a constant process that can take years. And you have to be
happy anyway. If you are not, you still have to serve others anyway. That is the challenge. Many
people give up at that point. And that is the gateway.
RR: There is really not much you can say then to a person at that point.
GF: Remind them. If that person has engaged the process out of some understanding, then all it
takes is a reminder of why they started to begin with. And what choice is there? Either you go
unconscious, and most people at a certain point can’t do that anymore, or you just accept you are
in this process, it is not reversible and just go ahead and make the best of it and be happy doing it
[laughs]. Not constantly complaining.
RR: Be happy you are in the process.
GF: Yes, exactly. And be happy that in every moment you engage it, you are reducing the karmas
binding you to this realm. Every moment. Even at the end of your lifetime if you haven’t had
samadhi or this or that, the work you will have done at that point will be significant. We look at it
in too narrow a way. We need to look not just at this lifetime, but as the whole work we have to
do in this realm. And then, even go out with the intent that even if I am liberated, I will come
back here and help those poor guys down there who are still struggling and not understanding
[laughs] which is the bodhisattva ideal.
RR: There is not a similar ideal in the yoga tradition though, is there?
GF: The yoga tradition . . . there is in some schools of Vasishta Advaita, is using the idea of
liberation of all humanity, but probably influenced by the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva,
because it is much later. I think it is implicit though because why do big teachers come back if
not to help others.? And throughout the history of yoga big teachers have been known to
incarnate again. They don’t have to come back but they come back in order to help. Same in
Jainism with the tirthankaras, the great teachers come back to teach.
THE ROLE OF A YOGA TEACHER
RR: A lot of yoga teachers will be reading this interview. Yoga Journal prints each year a code of
conduct, which is written to give these teachers and their students guidance in their professional
lives. How do you understand the role of the yoga teacher in the yoga community and in the
larger society? What are the responsibilities that the teacher has to the people around him or her?
GF: It’s a huge responsibility, huge. I think if people fully understood that they would be far
more careful in choosing to become a teacher. A teacher is not a guru. A guru has a responsibility
that’s incomprehensible, because he’s not just responsible for this one lifetime. They take on
things that affect their own being. Teachers do that to a small degree but they take on an
obligation for communicating wisdom that’s very old. It should be preserved in it’s full integrity.
This means they have to be continuous learners. The teacher who has stopped learning is no
longer a teacher. It’s impossible to teach without continuing to learn. It’s impossible to be a
teacher if you’re no longer growing. If your students think you are the same year after year,
you’ve stopped growing. There always has to be that moment of surprise, “Oh, you’re different
from last year.” There has to be that, or else there’s something that’s not happening, and you
shouldn’t be a teacher. There has to be enthusiasm for communicating the genuine teachings, and
delight in their growth. If that’s not there, you’re not a teacher either. The whole process has to
be one of we are all moving toward a greater understanding, a greater expression of our inner
capacities, and greater delight. If that’s not there, you’re in the wrong business. There has to be a
commitment to the tradition, which means you have to keep yourself informed of the tradition.
Not just learning in the sense that I now know how to do this asana better, but also a learning in
terms of really studying. Always emphasize study. I’m a scholar, but study is very much part of
the yogic tradition. It’s been in classical yoga since ancient times. How were the teachings
communicated? Through study of the original texts. There’s no way to explain anything unless
you study. This has to be continued.
Teachers have to talk with one another. Forget about competition. What’s the point? If teachers
work together not only would their individual practices thrive, but they would also promote the
entire movement. The old saying, “Strength in unity.” Right now, it’s a kaleidoscope that doesn’t
hang together. It’s sad to see. In India, even though each ashram has its approach, there was a
general sense of we are engaged in something very powerful and profound, and there was a kind
of respect. On the whole you could say, “There is this ashram up the road and there’s a great
teacher there, if you want to go there, go there. If you don’t belong here, that’s fine, go up the
road.” But here is much more, “How many more students can I get?” This is an infringement of
ahimsa. It’s a harmful thing to be that competitive. As a teacher you also have the responsibility
of embodying the things you talk about.
RR: You have responsibility to the other members of the yoga community, not only students, but
other teachers.
GF: Everyone. The whole movement. I think right now because the teachers only see their own
little acre, they don’t look to the neighbor, they also don’t see the movement as a whole;
therefore very few teachers that I know of are concerned about what is happening with the yoga
tradition in the Western world, where is it going? The answer is, it’s not going to go anywhere
without direction. Where is the direction coming from? Right now it’s unfolding wildly, and
that’s maybe appropriate at this stage, but I think enough people are beginning to ask, where
could it go? People are asking, how should we train teachers? There’s too many teachers out
there who don’t know what they’re doing, both in the exercises, which is in itself criminal,
because you can do damage to people, but also they don’t know the teaching. When I say, have
you heard of Patanjali’s sutra, they say, what’s that? Then it means they’re not yoga teachers. So
there has to be preparation for the job, not just a weekend, or a video. In professional terms, you
have to have qualifications, or you’re menace. Looking at the larger picture, there also has to be a
deep love for people, and a deep love for this tradition. And then things can galvanize in a
different way.
If more yoga teachers lived the ideals of the tradition which they avow, they would come together
more, they would share more, and they would create the kind of culture that would be supportive
to the tradition. Six million people practice yoga in this country, of one form or another. Now
these six million peopled may represent only a part of the population practicing yoga on their
own, quietly on and off, that’s a significant number. If enough of these people could be made to
understand the greatness of the tradition from which they benefit, they could provide a supportive
environment.
Living in this realm, which is a very flawed realm, those who have woken up to a degree have no
option, we have to struggle out, we have to free ourselves from the flawed nature of this world,
and we do it by purifying ourselves, getting clarity in our own being, finding more light, finding
more joy, and then communicating that as best we can to others. That should be the real task of
the yoga teacher, not what you pass on as postures and breath control and all that. That’s the real
communication, because that’s what people want--when you nail them down, sooner or later they
will admit that--they’re suffering, yes, they don’t know why they’re suffering, but we want to be
free of this suffering, and that’s why we’re here. Even these silly postures we do, we’re really looking for something deeper, and I think to give them a chance to come to that insight, is the challenge of the teacher.
Like this vision of everybody’s our mother . . . because we’ve lived so many lives together,
we’ve all been mothers to each other. So if it’s your mother, how can you let your mother suffer,
right? Your heart goes out, and you say, “Ah, I give these postures, but I wish I could tell you
that there is more!” [laughs] And wait patiently. They may never wake up to something bigger.
RR: But you give them the opportunity.
GF: If that could happen, I think we could create, through the movement, a more benign
environment for those who care, to do something different. It’s just a hope and a wish. Given the
nature of this realm, it may not happen in the next 500 years. [laughs]
RR: Well, we all have many lifetimes to work on that.
GF: Exactly. You try again. In the Yoga-Sutra it says, the purpose of yoga is to overcome
suffering yet to come. And it means the suffering of all lifetimes. But how many people feel this
urge? You have to feel the urge, the desire for liberation. You get out of this by changing yourself
and having a new perspective, because if you are peaceful in yourself, you can be in a hell realm
and not mind. You’re still suffering, because you’re burning with the others, but you are freeing
yourself to give that new vision. If you happen to be in a hell realm, you might as well make the
most of it. But you don’t suffer in the same way, you still have pain but you don’t suffer.
RR: There’s no feeling of alienation, or limitation.
GF: Right. If you are in the cooking pot in hell with your mothers you can’t be alienated. You
say, “Mommy, how come you’re suffering here? You have to wake up. It’s just a hot pot.”
[laughs]
WHERE IS YOGA GOING IN THIS COUNTRY?
RR: Do you have any sense of where yoga is going in this country? Can you tell what’s going to
happen in the next few years or decades.
GF: Just from having talked to various people over the last year, I think there are a few good
people who would like to see things change in terms of the teacher training. They have done yoga
long enough to see that there’s a little bit of a problem. Something is not being communicated,
people are not approaching yoga for the “right reasons,” having a sense of obligation that more of
the tradition needs to be communicated. However we reshape that in the process of teaching is
another question. I can see in light of the comments made to me over last year by people who are
well known in the movement, that there might be before long a more concerted effort with the
help of, say, the British Wheel of Yoga and the European Union of Yoga Teachers, to do
something similar here in America. Which every one knows will lead to tremendous resistance
by a whole number of teachers who feel we don’t want to be squashed into any of these
preconceived frameworks. An understandable reaction, if it happens, but also a regrettable
reaction if it prevents them from participating. I think the teachers who are talking about
improving teaching standards are also teachers who have understood you cannot coerce anyone
to take any qualifications that they might come up with. It has to happen in dialogue. These
people are open to dialogue, it’s a matter now of shaking loose some of the lethargy that’s out
there in the movement and galvanizing teachers into wanting to participate as well. I think the
dialogue will continue for a number of years before there is any rough consensus. It will always
be a difference of opinions on certain points, but enough consensus for enough teachers to come
together and say, “This is what we have worked out,” some kind of a syllabus for training, and
then put that forward as desirable. Then more and more teachers will over the coming years will
say, “I think I myself deserve to be trained properly, and I think my students deserve that too.”
This is exactly what happened when the British Wheel of Yoga was started, many years ago,
there was understandable resistance, it took many years for it to become prominent enough for
them to have over a thousand members. This is something to be rejoiced in, you can always work
on the actual quality of those training courses but unless you come together and create something
that you agree as a basis, it can’t grow.
Also I hope in the years to come, more and more people will become skeptical about the quick
and easy solutions. More people have become disenchanted with the New Age movement and are
looking for the real stuff, realizing the real stuff is not quick and easy, ever. I hope that when they
are searching there will be enough real teachers in place to give them the genuine tradition. It’s
just a hope, I have no way of prophesying what will and what won’t happen.
Looking at the movement, I think that despite its shortcomings in this country, is very vital. It
won’t be squashed. As our social circumstance, as our economic circumstance becomes more
difficult, as undoubtably it will, I think more people will look for inner fulfillment. They’ll be
asking, “Why is it collapsing around us? What can I do to stay sane?” Our society has gone
amok, it’s crazy. If enough patients realize they’re crazy, then they can begin to do something
about it. The yoga tradition has so much to offer. Of course it comes in all these different forms,
from Hinduism to Buddhism. Yoga is not just Hinduism, yoga is word used also in the Buddhist,
the Chinese, and the Sikh traditions. One of the points in the Center is not to promote one
tradition, but to make the yoga tradition as a whole known. It’s valid as a path in these different
forms. Hopefully more people will find their way to genuine teachings.
THE ROLE AND GOALS OF THE YRC
RR: And what role do you hope the Yoga Research Center will play in all of this? What do you
see is the goal of the Yoga Research Center?
GF: The Yoga Research Center is a revival of something I did in the early 1970's back in
London, which was the Yoga Research Association. I felt I needed to have some kind of an
organization in which I could conduct my own work, give my own work more of a formal
identity, but also invite in others who do similar work.
For some reason, last year it became obvious that it was needed, and that I needed to do it. So I
started it and put out the idea, it’s still very much of an embryo that needs to be nurtured. I’m
hoping that enough people will see what the potential is of such a center, which is, first, to
conduct research, both on the scriptural side of yoga, in other words, make more translations of
yoga texts available. There are many good texts out there, but they are outdated translations,
incorrect translations, or translations no longer available. Also to make not just Sanskrit texts
available, but also there are some marvelous texts on yoga in Tamil, that has nothing translated.
There’s only one that has been translated that’s significant. There are other languages that would
be nice to have competent translators for. Then to coordinate what is going on in the world of
yoga research, because there are all these scholars all around the world, and they talk to each
other at conferences, but no one really knows what’s going on. Hopefully the center can provide
some kind of a forum for them. One of my hopes is that my bi-monthly newsletter can grow into
a academic magazine or journal. But not purely academic, because that becomes irrelevant, but a
journal that will allow people to publish their translations, their other research around the texts,
things to make parts of the tradition that have been barren for a long time come alive again. Also
I want to help facilitate the kind of research that’s happening in the medical and psychological
fields. A lot has been done that’s not known. I was surprised, when people found out about the
center, the biggest interest is, what kind of medical research exists on . . . AIDS, rheumatism . . .
This really prompted me to look at the purposes of the center and to upgrade that kind of
research, and give it more priority. We’re creating a data base of medical and psychological
research on yoga. That in itself should really encourage people to see how effective yoga is,
because the findings are very positive. Also the center could serve as a forum for organizing
symposia, conventions, seminars. When once there is an actual physical facility big enough to
have more rooms, to have bona fide scholars and serious teachers live there for a few weeks,
months, do some teaching in exchange, do some research. That’s my dream for it. How much of
that can be realized remains to be seen. It will depend on the collaboration of teachers and
scholars. Scholars have been responding to the word tremendously, it is really encouraging.
Teachers? Some yes, others couldn’t care less.
Essentially I see it as a gathering point for energy involving more people than myself, and my
close collaborators, to put out more energy for the movement, because for whatever cosmic
reasons, I feel a passion for the yoga tradition. I want to help as best I can to pass it on through
the scriptures. I’m not teacher, so I don’t pass it on myself, but I pass it on through the scriptures.
My books of presentations of the tradition, trying to find ever new ways of making them
palatable and understandable.
