Avidya is a concept all yoga practitioners, men and women alike, should become familiar with. It means ignorance. It’s opposite if Vidya or Truth. Specifically, Avidya is the ignorance that keeps us in the throws of samsara or the eternal cycle of birth, life, suffering, death and rebirth. Avidya can go on forever, in unthinkable and myriad ways, but it ends in a moment with spiritual illumination, with enlightenment. So the question is, how do we deal with greed, jealousy and aggression – the byproducts of ignorance – in ourselves and in others as a yogi?
The locus of Avidya or Maya (the illusion of ignorance) is the soul, or jiva. The only way one can experience illusion is through wrong knowledge or the absence of knowledge. Ignorance only exists in a state of illusion. That does not make it any less real in our experience. The Buddha put it quite eloquently, “Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.” This is also true of fear, greed, and aggression, for the smallest acts to the most insane deeds of war. It is also the Universal law of Karma. Our ignorance, however, keeps us from realizing this when our energy is negatively charged.
According to Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras there are four types of Ignorance or Avidya. One which is assuming things which are transient are eternal, the second is mistaking the impure for the pure, the third is thinking that which bring misery can bring happiness, and the fourth is thinking that which is not-self to be self. These come from the Sanskrit words: antiya ashuchi dunkha anatmasu nitya shuchi sukha atman khyatih avidya. They translate as such:
Antiya – non-eternal, ephemeral
Ashuchi – impure
duhkha = misery, painful, sorrowful, suffering
anatmasu = non-self, non-atman
nitya = eternal, everlasting
shuchi = pure
sukha = happiness, pleasurable, pleasant
atman = Self, soul
khyatih = taking to be, supposing to be, seeing as if
avidya = spiritual forgetting, ignorance, veiling, nescience
In a world of seemingly endless acts of aggression, most often caused by men (see chart below courtesy of Wikipedia for a list of the cumulative fatalities of wars just in the past 44 years, and not a completely exhaustive listing as it only names wars with 1000 deaths or more) what can we do to curb ignorance?
Start of Conflict
War/Conflict
Location
Cumulative fatalities
1967
Naxalite-Maoist insurgency
India
10,500+ (1,174+ in 2010)
1978
Afghan civil war
Afghanistan
600,000-2,000,000 (10,461+ in 2010)
1991
Somali Civil War
Somalia
300,000[7] –400,000 (3,000+ in 2010)
2003
Iraq War
Iraq
99,328-108,514 (4,000+ in 2010)
2004
War in North-West Pakistan
Pakistan
30,452 (5,000+ in 2010)
2004
Shi’ite Insurgency in Yemen
Yemen
12,833-16,439
2006
Mexican Drug War
Mexico
More than 31,834(12,456+ in 2010)
2009
Sudanese nomadic conflicts
Sudan
2,000-2,500
2011
Libyan uprising
/ Libya
3,000-10,000+
War is only one obvious way in which we cause violence. There are the things we do as men and as practitioners of yoga with our smaller actions as well, such as ruining someone’s day with our dark mood, screaming at someone in busy traffic or running out of patience with our family members friends, and loved ones. These are all acts of ignorance, and are rooted in deep mental grooves attributed to many lifetimes of conditioning by our families, religions and cultures. This programming must be overcome by replacing bad habits with new ones, so that the impulse to anger, turns to reflection on the feelings arising to cause that anger. This in turn, gives us Vidya, or Truth. This gives us the heightened perspective we need to deal with emotions wisely instead of rashly.
Further, ignorance leads to violence, so it is the root cause we must address. Martin Luther King told us, “Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.” He speaks the same Truth as the Yoga Sutras. We must root out hate. As yogis, we must see the smallest amount of unchecked hate as a cancer of the Infinite Mind of God. Our practice should be a vigilance of our thoughts. Gandhi said, “Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well.”
In Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda tells us, “….250 years before Christ, Asoka had the courage to express his horror and remorse at the results of a successful campaign, and deliberately to renounce war as a means of policy. In the course of a long reign he achieved what seems to us to be a mere aspiration of the visionary: enjoying the greatest possible material power, he organized peace.” Asoka was an ancient Martin Luther King, only he was successful in organizing his people where Martin Luther King was unable to due to his untimely assassination. Asoka was a King who believed in philanthropic rule, secular emperorship, true kingship of his people, and heroic administration. Much like the time of the Pharaohs in Egypt, only those who could truly lead their people with a benevolent heart and ascended mind could take a position of power.
Aside from being vigilant with our own minds, we can actively participate in electing officials with ascended vision instead of blindly following those who would lead us with ignorance. We can trade Avidya for Vidya. War for Peace, and poverty for the infinite wealth of a benevolent creator when we realize this is not a visionary plan for the future, but one we can create now with our thought, actions and deeds. I challenge you, my fellow men, to lift the veils of Maya and to create a different world. Instead of throwing hot coals at others, we can turn them to diamonds in our mind before they ever leave the hand.
References:
http://www.swamij.com/yoga-sutras-20109.htm#2.5
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_military_conflicts
http://www.finestquotes.com/select_quote-category-Harmony-page-0.htm#ixzz1GXRraPnz
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/King_asoka_was_famous_for#ixzz1GXTLXQiX