by Donna Quesada: Most descriptions of Jnana Yoga say something like this:

“The path of attaining knowledge of the true nature of reality through the practice of meditation, self-inquiry, and contemplation.” But this is a pile of words and it’s difficult to know exactly what it means.

Jnana is the path of Yoga that is the most elusive and difficult to summarize, and there is a reason for that…because it is not meant to be conveyed through words. Like all Yogas, it is meant to be experienced.

First, a few steps back. Yoga began its journey to the west in the late 1800s, by way of Swami Vivekenanda, who famously spoke about it at the World’s Fair in Chicago, in 1893, to an audience that included a very impressed Nikola Tesla.

He began by saying “I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true.” And then he spoke of God, the soul and how all of us are really ONE…

“As different streams having different sources all mingle their waters in the sea, so different paths that men take through different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to Thee.”

This emphasis on unity is the essence of all Yoga. Through the next 100 years, eastern teachings would continue to trickle into the U.S., by way of Paramahansa Yogananda, Swami Satchidananda, who spoke at Woodstock, as well as other teachers who came from different Yogic traditions. Because some teachers emphasized a more physical approach, and because many westerners were better able to relate to those styles of Yoga that focused on physical activity, those are the schools of Yoga that came to be embraced in the west.

But not all Yoga requires movement.

Forget the complicated descriptions that stamp Jnana Yoga as The Yoga of the intellect and such… It’s not really intellectual at all. It likely came to be described this way because few really understand it well enough to properly say what it is.

Jnana Yoga is the core of what all spiritual practices in the whole world are about: remembering that you are ONE with God and ONE with all. That’s it.

Zen Buddhism is Jnana Yoga. It’s how Jnana Yoga developed once it landed in China, and eventually Japan, Korea and then the western world. You sit and sit until the idea of YOU disappears. The separate self is a fiction… there’s just an interconnected web of existence.

You know how when you look at a word—any word—for too long, it loses its meaning? It’s like that. You sit for long enough, and the idea of YOU loses meaning. There’s just… THIS.

We complicate our idea of what Yoga is, but Jnana Yoga is stripped down to the most elegant and simple form, which is often just a question, like “What Am I?” And this is meant to bring us to the realization of No-Self, known formally as Non-duality, in Vedanta—the pinnacle of Indian philosophy and the essence of these teachings. Non-duality, because there aren’t multiple things or selves. There’s just wholeness.

ONE.

To use a funny analogy, what comes to mind when you think of sauce? So many of them require lots of mixing and whisking. But some are very simple… with no more than one ingredient. Like the cranberry sauce that people will heap over their mashed potatoes in a few weeks. Even with just one ingredient, it’s still a sauce!

Yoga too. Some require breathing and stretching, and even laughing sometimes… But Jnana is named around a simple idea and that idea is questioning the self. Who am I?… What am I?

After sitting with these questions long enough, at some point all of the ideas around “me” become sort of absurd.

This is why Jnana is known as the Yoga of Knowledge. It’s not knowledge in the usual sense, as in storing ideas and information. But rather, knowledge in the sense of understanding who you really are. It would actually be better to say who you really aren’t.

It is to become one with God, which is in turn, to transcend your individual self.

In Zen, we have Koans, which are funny little questions in the vein of “Who Am I,” meant to jar us out of our attachment to the “I”. An example would be, “What was your original face, before you were born?”

George Harrison, after becoming enamored with Hindu philosophy, wrote the lyrics:

Going on strong all the time

All through the day

I, me, mine

I, me, mine

And In the Corinthians, it says…

“But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him.”

In all traditions, there is Jnana Yoga. It is simply called by different names and expressed in different ways… as in the mantra I am that I am, originally translated from Hebrew. We get lost in the world of “I,” but what “I” really is… is infinite reality. It is Whole. It is ONE. To gain knowledge of this is self-realization… it is the “I” experiencing itself. And once the idea that we are “something” is extinguished, then only wordless infinity remains.

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Source: AWAKEN