04/01/2025
SATYA ~ TRUTH in a POST TRUTH ERA
First of all, I don’t identify myself as a royalist and secondly, I feel deeply sorry for Kate Middleton, a woman, a mother, a daughter for her encounter with cancer. Can I talk about her and the previous photo editing episode before she made the announcement without sounding insensitive? Why would I want to do that? Because I want to talk about SATYA, often translated from Sanskrit to mean that which sustains the TRUTH.
Sitting around drinking Yogi tea and eating avocado and lime cheesecake (wow!) after the wonderful Yoga Day organized by Katie’s Yoga Collective, the conversation turned to Kate Middleton and the photo editing controversy. I hadn’t actually heard about it, but I understood she had Photoshopped a family photo and the story got plenty of press coverage. The general opinion around the table seemed to be that the story didn’t warrant so much attention.
I had just come out of offering a workshop on SATYA, so with the practice fresh in my being, without knowing much about the story I piped up that I thought it was important for press companies to adhere to their rules about photo editing. The next person could say, “it was only a small revolver that I edited out”. I am, however, critical that the story got more attention than the story about soaring child poverty figures in the UK, which is in my view more important news, but this blurring of the lines and blotting of the blemishes asks us questions about TRUTH in a POST TRUTH ERA.
Let’s be clear, I’m talking about the inquiry into SATYA ~ TRUTH as proposed in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras as the second YAMA (guideline, jewel, helping hand, depending on translation) written over two thousand years ago. A few hundred years later SATYA was still in vogue in the Indian subcontinent and was in fact promoted from second YAMA to first in the Classical Ta***ic text, Śāradātilaka, compiled by Srilakshmanadesikendra, meaning it became a foundation to all yoga practice. You might not be overtly aware that every time you get onto your yoga mat you are communicating with the inquiry into SATYA (unless you come to one of my workshops that is!), but the concept is there, sustained over two millennia of practice. In both these texts, SATYA is the commitment to truth in thought, word and deed.
As for Post Truth, it is a concept which has become rife over the past decade or so. The word itself can be traced back as far as 1992, but documented usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared to 2015 with the rise of Trump (1). But if this is the era of post-truth, was there ever a halcyon age of truth? A cursory look at history, according to historian, Yuval Harari, reveals that propaganda and disinformation are actually nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions (2).
This observation by Harari coincides with yogic understanding of TRUTH. Nothing actually articulated in words can ever be true (wow!). Any experience translated into words is an interpretation, so what is true for me will never be true for you. Also what was true for me yesterday will not necessarily be true for me today. Words are like signposts pointing more or less accurately to a non-verbal experience that can never be described using words. When communicating with words, you are always leaving something out. Experience is the important word here. SATYA starts off as an experience and then is translated into words, followed by deeds. To be able to discern between what is universal and what is relative, to discern what is your direct experience and your interpretation of it, to eke out space between the actual experience and the labelling of the experience is essential discernment on the path to awakening.
Having said this, some vocalisations are truer than others. Those spoken in first person for example, those that strive to describe the unique personal subjective embodied experience. For example, during the SATYA workshop I noticed how a tingling sensation rippled through my body, there was a slight blushing of my cheeks and a gentle curl upwards of my lips into the beginning of a smile of wonderment, as each student of SATYA got up from their mat when invited, one by one, and offered the pink camellia, given to them previously, to the centre as a way of embodying their commitment to the inquiry of TRUTH. No one can argue with that subjective experience of mine. My interpretation of the situation was: This is TRUTH as a verb, as an action, no longer lost in words or in the wishy washiness of the abstract noun.
I felt the warm sensation of tears welling up from beneath my lids from the beauty of it all and Emily Dickinson’s poem came to mind.
I Died for Beauty
I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.
He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth - the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.
And so, as kinsmen met a-night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.
Here Beauty emerges as a sibling to Truth. I notice how I am beginning to feel a distancing from the story about Kate Middleton and photo editing, I no longer care if Kate Middleton used Photoshop and I agree with my fellow yogis that the Kate Middleton’s story didn’t warrant so much press coverage. It turns out she was tinkering with a hand, a zip, some buttons (but still I commend the press agencies in this instance for picking it up and sticking to their guns). I am no longer connecting to the story of princess, Photoshop, buttons and zips, but the underlying true essence of the human experience of Kate and us all.
As Harari says, we are always going to have stories as it is part of our super power as a species, but as yogis, it is our practice to discern what is story and to be able to feel deeply its presence and meaning without identifying with it. It’s a fine line, because if any moment we don’t fully feel the story then we could fall into the murky waters of spiritual bypassing, which is of no benefit to anyone. Meaning and words have been closely wed and it can be challenging to pry them apart. You can ask yourself, what does it feel like to be me right now, prior to thought and interpretation; you can give yourself the opportunity to explore sensations of the body without needing to label them. If we do label them because we are so used to doing so, then at least we can notice the difference between labelling and the sensation. Let us practice discernment between our unique, sensorial interpretation of the world and that which underlies all experience, between the words on the page and the blank page sustaining the words, between the avocado and lime cheesecake and the white plate on which it lies. If we do not do this, we allow a messy mishmash of truths and untruths and the millennia long inquiry into Truth gets diluted by the more recent (hopefully fleeting), noisy Post Truth labelling.
The inquiry into SATYA is not lofty, nor out of date, it is the bedrock to our yoga practice. The beauty and truth of it is, I guess, you and me and Kate’s bodies will perish, but the moss will keep on growing. And I find great comfort in that, to put my trust in the truth of moss.
(1) https://theconversation.com/the-surprising-origins-of-post-truth-and-how-it-was-spawned-by-the-liberal-left-68929
(2) https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-in-a-post-truth-era-yes-but-thats-because-were-a-post-truth-species/
