Vedanta Yoga
The word yoga comes from the root word yuj, meaning to “yoke” or “unite.” The earliest yoga teachings are found in the Upanishads, which are the final portions of the Vedas, India’s most ancient and venerated scriptures. The Upanishads contain the oldest extant teachings of the spiritual wisdom, ideals, and practices of yoga: Self-realization, meditation, self-control, karma, rebirth, maya, moksha, spiritual psychology, and so on.
The wisdom of the Upanishads is known as the Vedanta, meaning the culmination of the Vedas. The Upanishads are the ecstatic expressions of unknown sages who lived thousands of years ago regarding the nature of reality and our relationship to that reality, and they contain the first teachings of the various spiritual disciplines and practices that would come to define the four main mystical yoga pathways in future scriptures.
Primary among the many monumental spiritual revelations first offered to humanity through the Upanishads is the Oneness of Existence. The Upanishads call the Eternal Oneness Brahman, the “great breath” or “expanse.” According to the Upanishads, everything in the universe is a temporary expression of the One: everything comes from the One, has its being in the One, and returns to the One. There is nothing in the universe that is not in reality a temporary manifestation of Brahman.
The Upanishadic seers also gave humanity its first teachings on the divinity of the human soul. The Upanishads teach that the true essence of each human being is the Atman, the sacred Self, Brahman indwelling. Atman is Brahman, Brahman within, and this is the reality of who we are. We are not our bodies, we are not our minds, we are not our thoughts, we are not our ego. We have a body, we have a mind, we have thoughts, and we have an ego, but our highest truth is the Ever-Blessed Atman.
Vedanta teaches that the great spiritual challenge facing each of us is that we have forgotten who we truly are, believing ourselves to be the individual ego by falsely identifying ourselves with all of its small notions, fears, selfish desires and illusions of separateness. It teaches that this is what causes all of our psychic pain, and that the purpose and supreme goal of life is to free ourselves from the painful bondage of ego-identification in order to reunite with our highest Self and manifest our divinity. This uniting is called Yoga, and the pathways to the divinity within each of us are the blessed Vedanta Yoga paths that lead to Self-realization.
There have been many subdefinitions of the word yoga in the thousands of years of its teachings and practice, with many modern Western definitions reducing its meaning to a series of physical postures, or asanas, but the oldest, truest, and highest meaning of yoga, found continuously in yoga scriptures throughout the millennia, is our union with the Infinite Spirit, or Atman, and the many paths and practices that lead to that union. Swami Nikhilananda put it beautifully: “The word ‘yoga’ denotes the union of individual soul with Universal Soul, and also the means to such union. Hence yoga is the goal of all religions and the basis of all religious practices.”
The four main mystical yoga pathways to spiritual union taught in the Bhagavad Gita, the most beloved yoga scripture in history, are built on the profound recognition made by yoga masters thousands of years ago that human beings have four faculties through which they can learn to purify the heart, discipline the mind, restrain the senses, and unite with the Self within: the intellect, love, psychic control, and work. Whether you become fully devoted to one of the paths, or you practice all of them, the great vedantic promise is that you will attain to your Highest Truth.
On this page I have posted selections from my books to give you a taste of the scriptural roots of the Vedanta wisdom and its glorious yoga pathways to God.