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Joel Kramer emerges from the bedroom,
where he's been working on his asanas, slips easily into
Lotus position, and settles down for a long talk about one
of his favorite subjects. Kramer is physically small and
compact, with a solid though not overly muscular body; his
abundant energy spills out in incessant hand gestures and
in a forehead that wrinkles deeply with each thought. Clearly,
he loves talking about yoga, loves doing yoga, and he approaches
the topic with all the reverence and humor that such an
intense interest inevitably inspires.
Joel, in the past 15 years or so, you've
carved out a name for yourself as something of a maverick
in the Western yoga community. You are almost completely
self-taught, you don'tseem to follow anybody's rules but
those of your own instincts, and your theories, in some
cases, debunk some of the classical teachings of yoga. What's
yoga all about for you?
From my perspective, yoga is a transformative
process, a continual renewal of the possibilities we have
as human beings. And my movement in yoga has been to translate
a lot of what might be called the wisdom of the ages into
modern, meaningful terms that can be appropriate for our
lives and our culture.
That's exactly what makes your approach
so suitable for Western students, I think. Your attention
to the role of mind in yoga practice -what you call Jnana
Yoga is particularly attractive to those of us interested
in the body-mind synthesis. How did you come across the
principles of Jnana Yoga and begin to apply them to your
life?
In the 1960s I was concerned with some of
those excruciating dilemmas that young people face, questions
like, "Why am I here?" "What's living about,
anyway?" and "What in the world should I be doing!"
First I looked for answers along a traditional, academic
route, working for a doctorate in philosophy and later switching
to the study of psychology. Eventually, though, all that
became like a game of tic-tac-toe, where you know the game
so well you never lose! But I still wasn't getting the answers
I wanted. So I dropped out of graduate school in 1965 and
began to investigate the influx of Eastern philosophy just
beginning at that time. I was particularly interested in
the differences between Eastern and Western approaches to
the structure of thought.
One day a friend played me a tape of a lecture
by Krishnamurti. At the end of the half-hour, I realized
I hadn't heard a word of it! When I listened to it again,
I understood that I had tuned it out because what Krishnamurti
was saying undermined many of the things I held dear. He
was talking about how deeply conditioned the human mind
is. This was my first introduction to what, in the broadest
sense, might be called yoga, the yoga of the mind. I was
totally fascinated by the methodology of his approach to
the inner search an inward turning of the mind onto itself.
I'd never seen anything like this in all my formal training.
As I explored further and realized what a
highly conditioned mind I had, I also became aware of what
a highly conditioned body I had how stiff and tight it was.
So around 1967 I began to do physical yoga. At that time
not too much information was available about Hatha Yoga,
and the art, at least in this country, was rather primitive.
I began to pick people's brains who knew something about
it, and I lived for a while with a man who had studied in
India. Although his classes didn't particularly interest
me, I was attracted by the way he moved as an animal, a
kind of elegance, an élan. So I decided to look into this
physical yoga on my own and I've never stopped! It just
clicked for me quite naturally. Not that I was particularly
flexible I could hardly touch my knees at first, let alone
my toes, and I couldn't do any of the postures. But I began
to see that I was playing with energy, and I developed an
internal, nonintellectual understanding of the meaning and
differentiation of energy. The physical yoga began to move
energy in a way that made it easier for me to become more
attentive to my internal processes.
Which in turn enriched your study of Jnana Yoga.
Yes. I began to see how the mind structures
and conditions. How it builds habits, and how those habits
actually filter our perception of the world. I began to
observe how I dodge things with my mind, how I separate
myself from others out of fear or out of a need to feel
better than they. I didn't find all this particularly comfortable,
but I did find interesting!
Maybe you'd better clarify what you mean by
Jnana Yoga.
Jnana Yoga is a quality of awareness in which
the mind turns in upon itself and begins to observe its
own conditioning process. You're not saying,''Oh, I shouldn't
be doing this," you're not necessarily trying to control
it or make it go away, you're just becoming interested in
the nature of mental conditioning.
Much of the structure of our conditioning
reveals itself only in our relationships. Let's say, for
example, that you and I have a relationship. If you hurt
my feelings, I'll start to see you through the filter or
memory of that hurt. There are lots of things I could do
with that: I could forgive you, I could avoid you, I could
ignore you, or I could eke out a little vengeance against
you not necessarily even consciously by a sharp word or
a subtle put-down, or by telling my friends what a drag
you are. And I would probably enjoy this vengeance, even
though I don't acknowledge that I'm a vengeful person. But
if I begin to look closely at the nature of this relationship,
I can observe that when you hurt me, I automatically want
to hurt back. If I can just observe this automatic, conditioned
response without judging it, I can see my conditioning.
And that seeing frees me from having to react to you in
an automatic way. In order to do that, though, I have to
be willing to look.
This sounds very much like Buddhist Vipassana
meditation watching the arising of thoughts and feelings
without evaluating or trying to control them.
Many traditions touch on this -Vipassana,
certain Hindu techniques, Taoist traditions. They're all
describing a quality of awareness that does nothing but
observe. You observe the movement of thought within yourself;
you don't try to silence it or make it go away. You're trying
to catch it in the moment of its appearance. Although it
sounds simple, this is probably one of the most difficult
things to do, because it's very hard to do nothing and just
take a look at what's happening. But this, I feel, is how
we move toward real understanding. Growth almost always
involves a shattering of self-images, a major shift in one's
habitual life patterns.
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