What Is Original Yoga?

Long before Genesis, a Sumerian text described a garden where the lion did not kill and no one wept. This memory of a lost harmony turns up from the Tao to the Gospels, from the Upanishads to the Hebrew prophets. Original yoga offers a way back to it through a practice each person verifies for themselves rather than through belief. That is the first meaning of the word yoga, long before the postures.

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What Is Original Yoga?
A Spiritual Path at the Source of All Traditions

This text is inspired by a chapter from the book:

"The Fundamental Experience" PDF
 

Long before Genesis, a Sumerian text described a garden where the lion did not kill and no one wept. This memory of a lost harmony turns up from the Tao to the Gospels, from the Upanishads to the Hebrew prophets. Original yoga offers a way back to it through a practice each person verifies for themselves rather than through belief. That is the first meaning of the word yoga, long before the postures.

There exists, carved in cuneiform script nearly five thousand years ago, the account of a place called Dilmun. The Sumerian text describing it states that there, no one grew old, no one wept, the lion did not kill, and the wolf did not seize the lamb.

This account predates the account of Genesis by several millennia, and yet the intuition it carries does not belong to it alone: it turns up, in varied forms, across civilizations that never had any knowledge of one another.

Something in Man seems to keep the memory of a state that precedes the confusion brought on by its own forgetting, the forgetting of a fundamental harmony that no doctrine invented, and that no doctrine, on its own, will ever be able to restore.

This is what can be called the fundamental experience: it has never needed to be proven in order to be recognized. All we need, to live it, is for it to stop being hidden behind confusion.

A question then arises: how does one stop scattering the river into a thousand streams, in order to find the source again? It can be looked at from the outside, drawing on the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Buddha’s teaching, the words of Jesus, of Guru Nanak, and of Kabir, without favoring one of these voices over the others.

Yet there comes a moment when one has to look differently: no longer only at what others have seen and understood, but at what a lived practice allows one to verify for oneself. The spiritual path presented here carries a simple name: the original-Yoga of The Path. The word matters less than what it points to, but it was not chosen by chance.

In ancient Chinese, Tao literally means “The Path.” The word belongs to no religion in particular; it simply names a reality, a practice that several great contemplative traditions have each, in their own way, recognized: certain forms of Advaita Vedanta, the yoga of Patanjali, ancient Taoism, early Buddhism, Jainism, certain forms of Christian mysticism.

The spiritual Path stands within this continuity, without merging with any of these forms, and without claiming to precede or surpass them. To speak of original-Yoga is not to claim historical precedence. It is to name a return to what is essential: what can be lived directly, with no dogmatic system, and what came before all the modern forms of yoga, so often practiced today with no mystical aim at all.

The word yoga, too, does not first name a practice. It names what a practice leads toward. The forms given this name, jnana-yoga, karma-yoga, bhakti-yoga, ashtanga-yoga, for instance, are not yoga itself: they are sadhanas, paths toward the state of yoga, of inner peace.

Patanjali states this with an economy of words that has crossed the centuries: “citta-vritti-nirodhah, yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.” In Sanskrit, this mind has a name: the citta. What still has to be named is what appears to consciousness once these fluctuations settle.

The Sanskrit root yuj, from which yoga derives, belongs to the same family as the word yoke, which gave the Greek zugon. It may not be without meaning that Jesus, in the Gospel, invited those listening to him to take up his yoke, adding that it was easy and light. To be yoked, in this light, has nothing to do with servitude: it puts an end to scatteredness.

An image can help here. Lao-Tzu compared the emptiness at a wheel’s hub to what makes the wheel useful: “Without the hole at the hub, the cart would serve no purpose.” The mind can be pictured the same way. At its edges, everything stirs: sensations, thoughts, reactions. At its center, something does not move.

Traditions that have most closely observed this center gave it a name: Hridaya. This is where the essence of the embodied soul resides: the purusha, the one who watches, the Drastr. A more intimate question remains.

Between this unmoving center and the restlessness at its edges, something lives, chooses, acts, bears the consequences of its actions; neither pure mind, nor pure detached consciousness, but the living interface of the two. This point of junction, these traditions have named jivatman, the embodied soul.

The citta, for its part, is a mixed entity, much like lichen. The ego, ahamkara, which allows one to say “I” and to exercise free will, is there inseparable from the mind, from the cognitive and perceptual functions, from the upkeep of the body’s metabolic functions. Distinct in their function, the alga and the fungus form, in their working together, only a single organism.

The jivatman is born of this yoking: the citta, entire, harnessed to the purusha, that spiritual core which incarnation harnesses to its instruments so that it may say “I,” choose, act, and bear the consequences of its actions.

The jivatman is not an illusion to be dissolved. It is a living reality, called not to disappear but to grow finer, clearer, and to come into harmony with what it has always carried within itself without knowing it.

One may wonder why take up one more practice, in a life that has no shortage of them. Living, loving, succeeding, understanding: these aims are legitimate, and nothing here disputes them. But it happens that everything is in place, or nearly, and a background dissatisfaction remains, without one always being able to name it.

This is not a failure. It is something many people notice, sooner or later: ordinary goals change the conditions of life; they do not always change the way one lives them.

That is where a quieter question may arise: no longer “what should I do with my life?” but “how do I find and live what is essential again?” The Path does not answer the first question, though it has a view on the matter; it answers the second, without asking anyone to believe in it beforehand. It simply offers the means to verify it.

This verification does not rest on an idea. It rests on a repeated practice, a sadhana, built around a few simple pillars, practices, and ethical guidelines. The most important is the Holy-Name, that living presence other traditions have called Te; the virtue of the Tao, or Shabda-Brahman.

Around it are arranged Grace and Guidance, the Observance itself, meditation and its techniques, service understood as meditation in action, and satsang. Reincarnation is understood here as a maturing rather than a punishment; Bhakti, devotion, resembles what Lao-Tzu called a treasure of jade. And at the end of the path (marga) stands Realization.

The traditions can be followed one by one, theme by theme, without seeking to blend them. What the spiritual Path affirms does not contradict them: there are not several fundamental truths, but a single reality, unfolding through an infinity of expressions, according to cultures, eras, and languages.

Merging the traditions into one another would be a mistake: they already carry, deep down, one and the same reality, perceived differently. Another image says it in its own way: the traditions are maps, the truth is the territory. The mistake is to confuse the two, to take the description for the thing described.

That garden of Dilmun did not need to wait for Genesis to find an echo. Millennia later, and thousands of kilometers away, a Hebrew prophet describes the same peace restored: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent’s meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 65:25).

Elsewhere in the same book, the same vision closes on a still more intimate image: the wolf dwelling with the lamb, and “a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). Nothing suggests that one text knew the other. And yet the same peace is described there, in almost the same terms, as if Man, wherever he sought to say what he had lost, had ended up using the same images to say it.

What the spiritual Path offers to find again, and to recognize rather than believe, is the same thing under two names: God and Holy-Name. Still other names can be given, according to each person’s sensibility.

The Tao itself is equivalent to the Kingdom: the Totality. Its virtue, what it carries and what it gives, The Path calls Holy-Name; others have named it Fundamental Harmony, or Shabda-Brahman, the virtue of Ishvara: one and the same reality under different names.

What was sought far away turns out, for whoever takes the time to look, never to have ceased being there since the beginning.

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