If you’re ready to apply yoga philosophy to your own life—or teach it with clarity and feeling—my classes and workshops create space to sharpen your thinking, steady your inner life, and connect your practice to what matters now.
Yogis don’t need no diamond rings
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Greetings Reader, My latest rationalization for not pulling my phone away from my nose? Watching reels of musicians explaining the brilliance of the Beatles. It’s fun to learn what makes their songs so great. And it’s nice to see that these reels are coming from relatively young musicians, not my antediluvian contemporaries with memories of Beatlemania. One of the many ways that the Beatles upended the rules of pop songwriting was by opening songs with the chorus instead of a verse. The most iconic example is probably “Strawberry Fields”— a personal favorite — but the one that’s been on my playlist lately is “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It must be on Elon Musk’s playlist, too. Earlier this month, he tweeted (or X-ed) “Whoever said ‘money can’t buy happiness’ really knew what they were talking about.” Aww — my heart pumps peanut butter for you, Elon. 😢 For the record, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century French philosopher, who suggested that money buys everything except morality. As if moral behavior had anything to do with happiness. You would think all of that data-scraping planet-poisoning parasitic hoarding would make a man as happy as a tapeworm. But I guess too much is never enough. Conventional wisdom tells us that money can’t buy happiness. Yoga wisdom tells us why some people think that it can, or how someone like Elon can be compelled to keep chasing after it even when he knows it won’t. The key to understanding what drives people to chase after more money than anyone anywhere could ever possibly need is the concept of tri-guṇa: the three qualities of material nature. The three qualities — luminance, passion, and darkness (sattva, rajas, and tamas) — are the most basic metaphysical elements of the universe. They operate like primary colors, dynamically blending together to produce every hue, tint, and shade of every person, place, and thing in the world. Including our own personal psychologies. When the mode of passion takes hold of our consciousness, we can be very creative and lively (“Can’t Buy Me Love” is definitely a song in the mode of passion). But if we get hit with mode-of-passion-overload, we strive like maniacs to fill a bottomless pit of desires. The unfortunate result is a state of anxiety, frustration, and distorted intelligence: we think that the more we shovel into the pit, the happier we’ll become. By the time we realize we’re wrong, it’s too late: shoveling is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we can’t stop. The mode of darkness also has its value — we wouldn’t be able to sleep without it — but when darkness goes into overdrive, destruction, insanity, and delusion pull us down into a well of anger and crapulence. Put them together and you get obscenely wealthy kleptocrats destroying the planet in the process of stealing our happiness in order to make themselves . . . miserable? Yup. Misery is the end product of the qualities of passion and darkness. Happiness, on the other hand, is the end product of the mode of luminance. The quality of luminance is characterized by preservation, kindness, generosity, and clarity. The results of acting under the influence of luminance are knowledge, stability, and contentment. So how do we develop the quality of luminance and find real happiness? According the Yoga Sutras, that’s what the yamas and niyamas are for. Surprise! Rousseau was right: moral behavior does have something to do with happiness. The ethical guidelines (yama) and principles of self-care (niyama) aren’t just arbitrary rules and regulations; they’re a formula for living in a way that lifts consciousness out from under the influence of the lower modes of passion and darkness. And we can nest the positive elements of the qualities of passion and darkness inside the mode of luminance, so it doesn’t mean that we just sit still or become insomniacs. But it does mean that we can experience a kind of happiness that doesn't depend on filling bottomless pits. Yogis don’t need no diamond rings, cause they’re self-satisfied. Yogis only want the kinds of things that money just can’t buy. I don’t care too much for money, . . . which is why I only charge $27 for my workshops. 😬 The next one is coming up on Saturday, March 14th. Details soon – stay tuned. Wishing you all good fortune, - Hari-k |
Hari-kirtana das
If you’re ready to apply yoga philosophy to your own life—or teach it with clarity and feeling—my classes and workshops create space to sharpen your thinking, steady your inner life, and connect your practice to what matters now.
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