Greetings Reader,

Back in 1990-something, I was working for a digital video systems manufacturer. My job was to demonstrate their products at trade shows and to train end-users how to operate them.

There was a lot of travel involved: to the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley, to trade shows in Las Vegas and Amsterdam, and to cities large and small whenever a local broadcaster purchased a motion graphics system or title effects generator.

On one occasion, the head of marketing told me I was being sent to London for two weeks to train a group of European sales reps.

I was psyched. I’d never been to London.

They lied. They weren’t sending me to London.

They were sending me to Datchet, a back of beyond village a full hour west of London.

I was not psyched. I’d never even heard of Datchet.

Instead of spending a fortnight in a global hub for finance, fashion, and culture, I was going to a titchy town that had a train station, a pub, a dinky industrial park, and a nail salon.

It wasn’t a glamorous gig: my days were spent leading training sessions in a windowless office at the industrial park. My evenings were spent . . . in Datchet.

On the bright side, I didn’t have an obligation to socialize with my colleagues after-hours, so, every night after dinner, I went for a mantra meditation walk on the long and winding road that followed the River Thames to the thousand year-old castle in the neighboring town. If nothing else, Datchet had the distinction of being just four or five rounds from Windsor.

One night, I decided to change things up and walk in the opposite direction. There was no castle or, for that matter, anything else to walk to; just a road to nowhere.

As I proceeded into the gloom, the piddling glow of beautiful downtown Datchet bounced off the low-hanging clouds of a bleak January night sky and painted the surrounding English countryside in assorted shades of grey.

The road took a long leftward curve, the river angled away from me to the right, and a series of soft hills rolled slowly up from the left bank of the road.

At which point I noticed something odd about the tallest hill furthest away from me: there were white plastic bags strewn all over it.

And they weren’t little grocery store-sized plastic bags; they were whoppers — gurt big bags better suited for collecting a chaldron of sycamore leaves than for lining a kitchen trash basket.

And there were a lot of them. It seemed . . . curious.

Then it went from curious to really curious: As I got closer, I could see that some of the bags were just lying listlessly on the hill and others were stuck up on sets of short black sticks.

Why would someone attach big white plastic bags to short black posts and place them in such a haphazard fashion all over the side of a hill? Was a local litter bug moonlighting as a conceptual artist or something?

I stopped trying to make sense of it, forced my gaze back down to the road in front of me and brought my mind back my mantra.

When I got to the base of the hill, I looked up again, and, in a flash of recognition, it all made sense.

Sheep. Not big white plastic bags on little black sticks. Sheep.

C’mon, whaddaya expect: I was a New Yorker who thought he was going to London. Of course I thought they were plastic bags littering the hill or some random rural art installation. Why would I think they were sheep?

Yoga wisdom tells us that the human condition makes us prone to four inherent limitations:

1. karaṇa-pāṭava: imperfect senses that cause us to
2. bhrama: make mistakes, which leads us to
3. vipralipsā: think that something is other than what it really is, or
4. vipralambha: believe that something is what we want it to be instead of what it really is.

I didn’t want the sheep to be plastic bags, but I also didn’t want to believe I was in a place where a few dozen sheep hanging out on a hill at night was normal, so I’ll give myself a perfect score: 4 out of 4.

Once I got close enough, it was easier to see through my illusion and recognize the sheep for what they really were. Sometimes all it takes is proximity.

Other times, light helps. If I had I been walking in the daylight, the truth might have been self-evident a lot sooner.

Walking along the path of yoga is a way to close the distance between where our consciousness is at and reality — the reality of our true selves and the true nature of the world around us.

It’s also a way get closer to the light at the end of the tunnel. The brighter the light, the easier it is to see.

And if we all walk along the path of yoga, the odds of us developing a shared sense of reality increase significantly.

We may all have different conceptions of reality, but that’s just a function of perception through the lens of defective senses.

Yoga wisdom proposes that true reality exists independently of human perception, opinions, wishes, or delusions. Or, as science fiction writer Phillip K. Dick put it,

Or, as the Bhagavad-gita puts it,

In a world of perpetual conflict rooted in contradictory conceptions of reality, I find it reassuring to think that there might actually be a stable foundation — a changeless spiritual substratum of Absolute Reality — that we can connect to in order to stay truly grounded.

I may not be able to tell the difference between a derangement of plastic bags and a tenebrous flock of sheep, but I know that my imperfect senses are not the all-in-all when it comes to ascertaining the truth, and that the power of accurate discernment relies more on the elevation of consciousness than it does on inherently limited instruments of perception.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: I hope you'll join me on Saturday, October 10, for my next live online workshop: Beyond Belief — Yoga Wisdom for Discerning Truth from Falsehood. Yoga has a surprisingly practical framework for examining not only what we believe, but how we know what we think we know, and gives us a system for testing what we think we know to see if it's worthy of our belief. In this workshop, we’ll look at how these teachings can be practically applied in the here and now of competing viewpoints and AI-generated fake news. CLICK HERE for complete information and enrollment.