Greetings Reader,

I recently heard former late night television star Stephen Colbert describe his erstwhile gig as the equivalent of “being lowered like carbon rods into a radioactive pool every day, and then being pulled out and put in front of a camera to radiate it back out at the audience at a non-lethal rad level.”

Sometimes I feel like I could say the same thing about my current gig.

On the one hand, I feel the need to know what’s going on in the world, both for myself and for the sake of being able to write about how the news looks from a yogic perspective.

On the other hand, staying on top of so much sickening news is . . . sickening.

The therapeutic dose of lithium used in the treatment of bipolar disorder is dangerously close to its toxic dose and has to be closely monitored.

Similarly, I try to monitor my news intake: enough to be well informed, not enough to trigger manic depression.

When accessed in therapeutic doses, the news can reveal reasons for hope (looks like things are going pretty well in Mamdanistan), causes for concern (record high diesel fuel prices that will have a domino effect this winter), and opportunities to do something (thank you to everyone who showed up at the Kenedy Center).

And we can’t just ignore the hyper-negative news — the damage that can’t be undone — because eventually, but inevitably, the opportunity to hold people accountable will come.

The news gets toxic when we overdose on that negativity and convince ourselves that there’s nothing we can do about it. Regulating our news intake so that it’s motivating rather than paralyzing is one way to keep it together.

But that only works if the news we’re getting is real, which makes being able to distinguish between real news and fake news all the more important.

In some respects, it’s getting easier to tell which news organizations are being truthful in their reporting: being banned from the White House is the new stamp of credibility.

In other respects, parties more invested in the pursuit of power than people’s prosperity are hellbent on sowing chaos and confusion through the use of AI generated phony baloney.

Yoga wisdom offers us some tools to help us tell the difference between real news and fake news, and it starts by pulling the curtain aside to take a good look at the messenger behind the message.

The metaphysics of yoga may seem abstract and theoretical at first glance, but they’re actually a practical set of tools for understanding human nature.

Case in point: how the Bhagavad Gita describes the characteristics of people who value truthfulness verses the characteristics of those whose very nature is to traffic in falsehoods:

It’s a little like a “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” proposition: if someone is relatively free from anger, greed, and envy, there’s a relatively good chance that they’re going to be a reliable source of accurate information.

On the other hand,

Notice how dishonesty is both the first and last attribute of those who are egotistical, smug, resentful, mean, and witless? Show me a mean-spirited ego-maniac and I’ll show you a liar.

The temperament of a saintly person is sattvic, characterized by qualities associated with the material mode of luminance. A demonic mentality is characterized by rajasic and tamasic qualities; attributes of the material modes of passion and darkness.

This is a great example of how looking at the world through the lens of the three guṇas, the three qualities of material nature — sattva, rajas, and tamas (luminance, passion, and darkness) — can bring clarity in situations where bad actors are going to great lengths to make us believe things that aren’t true.

In yoga, our objective is to lift our consciousness out from under the influence of the lower modes of passion and darkness and situate ourselves in the mode of luminance in order to see the true nature of the self.

Similarly, when the news media is situated in the mode of luminance, we get the truth about what’s going on. When it’s situated in the modes of passion and darkness, you get news that’s unreliable at best, incorrect at worst, or, , purposely incorrect.

The news may still feel toxic because so much of it is being generated by dumb and evil people doing dumb and evil things.

But if we at least have access to honest reporting about the dumb and evil things they’re doing and the tools of discernment that yoga offers to help us tell real news from fake news, then there’s a chance we can make it to the ballot box without setting off any Geiger counters.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k