Jnana Yoga

Jnana Yoga is the most metaphysically ambitious of Vivekananda's four yoga books and probably the closest in form to philosophy as a Western reader will recognise it. Sixteen lectures, delivered in London and New York in the mid-1890s, on the Vedantic doctrine of non-duality — the claim that the apparent multiplicity of the world rests upon a single, undivided reality, and that the path to freedom lies in seeing this directly.

Vivekananda is here in his most rigorous mode. He goes through the classical Vedantic problems with patient care: the nature of Maya, the relation between freedom and necessity, the problem of evil, the meaning of immortality, the cosmology of the Upanishads, the Atman as the single common ground of all consciousness. He refuses, throughout, the easy mystical hand-waving that other lecturers of the period leaned on. The argumentation is closer to William James than to Madame Blavatsky.

What lifts the book above pure philosophy is Vivekananda's gift for the apt example. The exposition of Maya in chapter 3 — the cosmic illusion as a process rather than a thing — is one of the great prose passages in English religious writing of the nineteenth century. "The Real and the Apparent Man," the final lecture, is the book's most affecting: a sustained argument that every honest examination of the self leads to the recognition of a self that is not the self one started with. The reader does not have to share the conclusion to be moved by the seriousness of the inquiry.