Maharshi Patanjali, the original proponent of yoga, would have never imagined that the technique of self-realisation and transformation that he propagated would fall to such an extent. Recently, some people in Canada have introduced a new form of yoga — the ganja yoga — and soon this fad may spread across the globe.
“When you’re high, you can focus better on your breath,” says Dee Dussault, who runs a monthly session of “cannabis-enhanced yoga” at her centre, Follow Your Bliss, in Toronto. Says another ganja yoga enthusiast: “Yoga and marijuana together... It’s like putting salt on your food. It’s just a little enhancement.” She adds that smoking marijuana in small doses before a yoga class also makes students more receptive to the poses and philosophies behind the activities.
The enlightened mystics — ancient and modern — never recommend yoga with intoxicants. They say that samadhi and bliss attained this way is false. Osho explains: “It happens sometimes through drugs. Not a very good way to attain it — very dangerous, very costly, and illusory — but it happens. Hence the appeal of drugs down the ages. Drugs are not new; even in the Vedas they talk about Soma... one of the most powerful drugs ever discovered by man. It must be something like LSD. Aldous Huxley has said that in the future, when the ultimate drug will be known, we will call it Soma.
From the Vedas, the most ancient book in the world, to Timothy Leary, man has always been attracted by drugs — alcohol, marijuana, opium. Why this attraction? It gives a glimpse into the innocent mind of the child again. Through chemical impact, the mind becomes loosened... your thinking slips. You start looking into reality without thinking; again the world is colourful, as it is for the child; again in a small pebble you can see the greatest diamond; an ordinary flower looks tremendously beautiful; an ordinary human face looks divine... The whole world is the same. Something has changed in you — and that too only temporarily... You don’t have the mask; you can see into things with clarity.” That has been the appeal of drugs down the ages. This will continue forever if authentic yoga is not popularised on a large scale.
Drugs are dangerous. They can destroy your body’s equilibrium, your nature, your inner chemistry. You have a very delicate chemistry. Strong drugs can destroy your rhythm. More and more drugs will be needed and you will become addicted — yet the effect will keep diminishing. By and by, the mind will learn how to cope with the drugs, and then, even under the drug, you will not attain that state of innocence. Then you will need even stronger drugs.
While cannabis has been deeply entwined with spiritualism over the centuries, some yoga practitioners say that a pure body is ideal for exercise and that smoking pot could cause an unwieldy imbalance. Yoga and meditation — the existential harmony between body, mind and soul — is the purest science of expanding consciousness to attain samadhi and bliss.
Osho concludes: “To seek truth in existence, first he will have to seek the true in his own being. He will become more and more self-remembering. These are the two paths: self-forgetfulness, the way of the world; and self-remembrance, the way of God. The paradox is that one who seeks happiness never finds it; and one who seeks truth and doesn’t bother about happiness has always found it.”
Swami Chaitanya Keerti, editor of Osho World, is the author of Osho Fragrance
