Yoga and Psychology – Language, Memory and Mysticism

By Harold Coward, SUNY, 2002

Review by Mike King, August 2004

Harold Coward’s fascinating book explores the relation of Western thought to the Indian Yoga tradition and one of its founding texts – Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. It provoked in me just the kind of reflection that I think was intended. Coward’s mastery of the complex Indian terminology necessary to penetrate the ideas of Patanjali is daunting at times, but the book would be equally interesting to those with knowledge of the Yoga Sutras as to those for whom this would be an introduction. For myself it was a journey back to my experiences in India some twenty-five years ago, and also to my bookshelf to retrieve the relevant texts. Coward asks just the questions that my encounter with India – principally in the forms of B.K.S.Iyengar (yoga teacher) and Bhagwan Shree Rajnees (guru) – has left me exploring ever since. I was physically exhausted after the intensive hatha yoga course with Iyengar, and emotionally exhausted after the transpersonal therapy courses at the Rajneesh Ashram. I was however spiritually awakened, and experienced my first samadhi in India, which took years to integrate into my being. Coward’s book provoked a re-assessment of both that experience and also the whole issue of the differences between Eastern and Western notions of mind. It prompted to me retrieve from my bookshelf not only the scholarly translation of the Yoga Sutras by Georg Feuerstein, but also the translation and commentary by Rajneesh, along with Jungian and more recent transpersonal texts.

Coward finishes his book by reprising his exposition of two fundamental difference between Eastern and Western theories of mind: first around karma and the collective unconscious, and second on the issue of the perfectibility of mind. The latter is a question of the West’s ambivalence on the question of enlightenment, liberation, moksha, nirvana, or whatever non-Western term we choose to use. Coward points to the insistence in Jung, and more recently in the work of comparative philosopher John Hicks, that enlightenment in Eastern terms is an impossibility – a notion where yoga ‘overextends itself.’ Coward leaves us with the only strategy for resolving this conundrum: to undertake the experiential practice of yoga under a qualified guru.

And here lies the rub, how are we to assess which guru is ‘qualified?’ Iyengar claimed he would be enlightened in his next lifetime, so we can count him out, while Rajneesh, who did claim to be already enlightened, is utterly discredited in the eyes of most commentators. Karen Armstrong usefully points out that our dilemma is due to the different cultural development of religion in East and West – the West is a tradition of scripture, while the East is a tradition of teacher or guru. The authority of scripture in the West rests on its putative origins in the mind of ‘God’ (a claim that alienates faith communities from secular culture like almost no other). The fate of the guru in the West on the other hand has been a disaster, as books like Storr’s Feet of Clay, Feuerstein’s Holy Madness, and Marianna Caplan’s Half Way up the Mountain testify. It is a personal anguish for me that Rajneesh is the touchstone for guru malpractice in many such works, not that I can defend many of his more outrageous actions. But his brilliant translation and commentary on the Yoga Sutras, coupled with my deeply Eastern spiritual instincts and personal experience of samadhi, have given me a perspective that makes me sceptical to Western interpretations. Feuerstein to some degree but Coward in particular raises the question for me, to what extent are they reading Western monotheist assumptions into the Yoga Sutras?

Coward’s exposition is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the relationship between the yoga tradition and language, and the second dealing with yoga and Western psychology, principally the transpersonal. Coward provides in masterly fashion a route into the obscurity of Patanjali via a number of very Western contemporary preoccupations, principally the role of language in constructing experience, but also including transpersonal psychology and recent advances in neurology. The Yoga Sutras (dated approximately 200 CE) are difficult even for the spiritually literate Westerner because of three factors: they are aphoristic (pithy statements like for example in Pascal’s Pensées); they are further condensed because of the Sanskrit habit of using only nouns; and because they are written on the basis of cultural assumptions that are profoundly different to our own. The cultural gap involves two factors: firstly, as Armstrong has identified, a fundamentally different attitude to scripture, and secondly the necessity to take into account the secularisation of Western culture. Coward’s strategy is to take locate the potential common ground, work out from there, and leave us with the challenges that the Yoga tradition poses to the West.

The common ground as Coward sees it includes a possible identification of the Hindu Isvara in the Yoga Sutras with the Western ‘God,’ the role of language, and the relationship between Western theories of memory and yogic notions of karma. Overall, the framework which Coward adopts as his starting point is Abrahamic language-centred monotheism, a natural Western starting point, but for me, quite alien. Since my spiritual awakening in India I have naturally explored the great spiritual literature of the East, but, much more difficult was to learn the Western tradition. Hence I am quickly alerted to what I think is a number of ‘awkward fits’ when reading one tradition in terms of the other. In particular, the emphasis that Coward places on a few short statements in the Yoga Sutras, which list ‘surrender to Isvara’ as a valid technique for liberation. Rajneesh was adamant in his commentaries that this was merely included by Patanjali for the sake of completeness, and that they represent the devotional path (bhakti yoga), not at all the subject of his exposition. Coward has quite the right instinct to see it as the common ground with Christian monotheism, but his emphasis on it rather imposes on the original I think. Nevertheless, it allows for the second part of his strategy, that is to focus on language. Only by standing outside of the Abrahamic monotheism of the West is it possible to see that the emphasis on the ‘Word’ and language is a peculiarity of that tradition and not at all a universal. However Coward is in good company with leading British transpersonal scholar, Brian Lancaster, whose exposition of ‘language mysticism’ draws on his own Judaic roots, and which emphasis on language is core to both Western religion and philosophy. Coward finds support for the language analysis from the Hindu philosopher of language and poet, Bhartrhari, while Lancaster draws from the Abhidhamma texts of the Buddhist Pali canon.

My own spiritual experiences and my own reading of the Indian texts, including the Pali canon, lead me to think that the cluster of notions around monotheism and language, when laid over the Yoga Sutras, obscure rather than reveal. However, Coward’s arguments, drawing on the work of Bhartrhari, are fascinating. Is he right to assert, in line with the Western tradition, that language has the power to ‘realize release?’ In particular, when this language has the scriptural authority of origins in Iswara? Or is this an imposition of the Western notion of the revealed ‘Word of God,’ onto the Eastern tradition that Armstrong suggests is more oriented around the guru and personal experience than scripture and textual authority?

Coward tackles the difficult Eastern notion of karma in terms of Western psychology and neurology of memory, providing further ground for a Western reader to approach the alien world of the Yoga Sutras. Again, from personal experience of the workings of karma, I am hesitant about this approach. Karma is much more than the neutral accumulation of memory traces that Coward suggests, and the strategy he uses of evidence from neurology is problematic for me. On the one hand, by drawing on contemporary neuroscience, we can appeal against the reductionist secular prejudice against the spiritual. On the other hand it gives the sceptic ammunition too; in this case to ask how on earth neuronal pathways could be ‘grooved’ by sense experience from previous lives.

The last sections of Coward’s stimulating book explore how Jung – perhaps emblematic of the Western mind – was sceptical that ‘liberation,’ as the goal of the Yoga Sutras, was possible at all. Jung memorably described notions of Eastern enlightenment or nirvana as an ‘amputation,’ believing that pursuing the goal of yoga and similar disciplines would lead to a state of total unconsciousness. Coward explores this issue with reference to later transpersonal theorists, though he might usefully have called on Wilber’s assessment of Jung as victim of the ‘elevationist fallacy,’ whereby Jung equated the unconscious with the highest states of mind, such as described by Patanjali. Coward tells us that Jung held yoga to be in error, effectively holding to the Western view that only ‘God’ was perfect, and that the human mind was imperfectable. With the Western system of the authority of revealed scripture, no testimony from its own mystics has been admissible. In the East on the other hand the guru manifests the ultimate, scripture acting more as a support. As we mentioned at the outset, Coward leaves us with this central issue regarding the East / West divide. Having taken us through the Yoga Sutras with rather Western eyes, he acknowledges that mere scholarship cannot resolve the issues – only study under a guru can do that. And I have to acknowledge that while it worked for me, it is a step that few are prepared to take, for good reasons.