Greetings Reader,

I don’t think of yoga as a commerce-driven wellness industry.

I think of yoga as a movement driven by spiritual imagination.

A movement that proclaims the possibility of a different reality.

The thing fascinated me about yoga when I first heard about it was the idea that it was a way to expand your consciousness and experience reality on a higher level.

And yeah, I did a lot of tripping as a teenager.

But that came later. The idea that I could expand my consciousness was already well-established when I was a kid thanks to my growing up in the psychedelic sixties.

That and my collection of Dr. Strange comics, which I thought of as peer-reviewed journals on the science of mystic power.

So I sat with my desire to have a psychedelic experience until I was finally old enough to buy my first hit of acid.

Which was around the same time Be Here Now, Ram Dass’s spiritual guidebook for counter-culture freaks who were looking for a way to never come down, arrived on the scene with some practical instructions on how to practice yoga and meditation.

Perhaps I’m just a product of my time, but the combination of tripping and yoga seemed as natural to me as peanut butter and jelly, so, of course, I put the two together.

Embellishing my early attempts to practice yoga and meditation with eight hours of artificially-induced consciousness expansion was enough to convince me that a natural and enduring expansion of consciousness was possible.

I think it’s easy to understand how such an experience could inspire an awakening of spiritual imagination on an individual level.

What took me a little longer to understand was how the experience of an alternative reality — or reasonable faith in the possibility of one — can reorganize our social imaginations.

To be clear, I’m not talking about alternative reality games or any external technological facsimile of reality.

I’m talking about the awakening of a broader bandwidth of direct perception and, ultimately, a categorically different kind of perception.

And by spiritual imagination, I don’t mean idle speculation about what the experience of a spiritual reality might be like.

I mean a dynamic visualization of what a material world informed by an experience of spiritual reality might look like.

So what can a spiritual movement accomplish on a social level when it publicly announces the possibility of a different reality?

For starters, it can establish the grounds for rejecting material consciousness or, more specifically and relevantly, what American Christian scholar and theologian Walter Brueggemann calls “empire consciousness.”

Empire consciousness is the consciousness that makes capitalist authoritarianism possible. The external manifestations of empire consciousness are

• Affluence attained by exploitation, a system in which the desires of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
• Static, state-controlled religion that turns God into a patron of the state rather than a force for freedom.
• Totalizing ambition, which commodifies people and shapes politics, economics, entertainment, education, and art in such a way that no part of society remains outside its influence.
• Triumphalism and self-justification that numbs people to pain, grief, and the structural injustices happening around them.
• Suppression of imagination to ensure acquiescence to a single, unchallengeable, and inevitable conception of reality.

Announcing the possibility of a different reality is what both engaged yoga and the mid-term elections in the United States are really about.

Engaged yoga contrasts empire consciousness with yogic counter-consciousness.

• Prosperity attained by cooperation, a system in which wealth is equitably distributed to meet everyone’s needs.
• Dynamic religious freedom that invites glorification of God (īśvara) as a force for freedom rather than reducing God to a patron of the state.
• Radical non-compliance with totalizing ambition that places politics, economics, entertainment, education, and art in a spiritual context and liberates people from commodification.
• Humility and selfless service that sensitizes people to pain and grief and works toward the elimination of structural injustices.
• Liberation of imagination to encourage an expansive sense of possibility and support resistance to a single, unchallengeable, and inevitable conception of reality.

A just, equitable, and peaceful society becomes possible when the social implications of yoga’s proclamation are taken seriously.

In other words, yoga, as a movement of spiritual imagination, announces the possibility of an alternative reality but communities still have to learn how to live consistently with that reality before a just society will emerge.

Yoga has a social function, but not because it contains a ready-made political program. Its social potential begins at a more fundamental level, in its capacity to change what people perceive as real, valuable, sacred, and possible.

Can a spiritual movement make an alternative conception of reality socially imaginable?

What do you think? Feel free to share your thoughts with me — I'll always be happy to hear from you.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: If you do write, please note that it may take a little more time than usual for me to write back because I'll be galavanting around the south of Spain for the next few weeks — thank you in advance for your patience.