The Enlightened Self: Identity and Aspiration in Two Communities of Practice
Abstract
:1. Introduction
“In each kind of self, material, social and spiritual, men distinguish between the immediate and the actual and the remote and the potential”—William James ([1], p. 200).
Religion, Narrative, and Aspirational Identities
2. Data and Methods
3. Results: The Enlightened Self
3.1. The Sacred Gaze
“Contemplative prayer…is prayer that sees the whole world through incense—a holy place, a place where the sacred dwell…[It] leads us to see the world through the eyes of God.”.([30, p. 35)
“To be present—to really be present and to notice. To notice. To see, to see. Like behind you, the sunlight on the wall; it’s just so beautiful…it’s about experiencing God in everything all the time. You become more and more aware when you live that way—you become more and more aware…you get drawn into the miracle of everything.”
3.2. Presence and Detachment
“Another example…Going to a movie and getting so involved in it that you totally feel for the character and will cry and laugh and identify and find that you’ve lost any sense of separation from what is going on. You’re experiencing it fully. And if it’s a good movie, you enjoy it even if it makes you sad…In the movie theater, it’s easy because your mind knows that I’m not there. You are in this witness place and you know you are sitting in the theater. You are immersed and enjoying it but you aren’t attached. Our mistake is thinking that we are the movie.”
3.3 Integration
“I don’t try to differentiate between the religious, the spiritual and the day-to-day. I think it’s all the same”—Rohit, Integral Yoga teacher and practitioner
“The goal is to live life in awareness of God: to be a person of God all the time.”—Sister Nancy
4. Discussion: The Enlightened Self as an Aspirational Identity
“We have a direction, not a destination. We are going East, but you can’t get East. You can only go East.”11
5. Conclusions
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Abbreviations
IYI | Integral Yoga Institute |
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- 1“As at the modern Orthodox synagogue, an attractive feature of the Hasidic community was that it provided numerous models of caring nuclear families and affirmed the value of family…The women expressed enormous admiration for the families they met within the religious community and saw them as prototypes for the families they would like to create” ([25], p. 120]).
- 2Spiritual direction is “help given by one Christian to another which enables that person to pay attention to God’s personal communication to him or her, to respond to this personally communicating God, to grow in intimacy with this God, and to live out the consequences of the relationship” ([29], p. 8).
- 3The year-long series met once per month for 2–5 hours per session between the months of September and May, for a total of 9–10 sessions. A few classes and workshops were offered “by donation.”
- 4These prices were significantly below comparable studios in the area. This is due in part to the fact that the IYI was registered as a not-for-profit community organization, while the vast majority of yoga studios are for-profit businesses.
- 5I began my fieldwork in both organizations with only a very basic understanding of the communities and their requisite beliefs and practices. While I had no prior affiliation with either group, my religious background (I was raised non-religiously), prior experience with the practice of yoga (although not in the IY tradition), and the diversity of religious backgrounds among participants, led me to feel more comfortable with the culture, practices, and discourse at the IYI. At Trinity, I felt more like an “outsider” (the overwhelming majority of participants were Catholic), although this feeling subsided substantially over time. Given my attendance at the majority of classes and workshops, I came to be seen as and treated by many as Sister Nancy’s “helper,” giving me a clear role and some degree of status among the participants. At both sites, my identity as a white, middle-class, female meant I was very similar to the “typical” participant. At Trinity, however, my age marked me as somewhat of a novelty. I only encountered a participant younger than myself (I was 27 at the time), on one occasion, and I was sometimes asked to speak on behalf of “young people.”
- 6Of course it is important to acknowledge that practitioners come to these communities with a range of different backgrounds, commitments, and identities. Variables such as gender, race, age, and profession, among others, likely affect how each individual navigates, understands, and engages with the discursive and practical resources offered by these organizations. Due to space constraints, this paper is not able to highlight the diversity of experience across individual practitioners, and focuses instead on the counters of the enlightened self as it is outlined in the “official discourse” (that put forward by teachers and texts) of these communities.
- 7While perception is a bodily process, it is neither universal and objective nor purely individual. Rather, perception is a process that is structured and shaped by cultural context and social interaction [32].
- 8Examen is a Jesuit practice, developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, which involves prayerful reflection on the day’s events in an effort to identify God’s presence and to discern his will in regards to the practitioners’ life and actions.
- 9Non-attachment is defined in Sutra 15 of the Yoga Sutras: “The consciousness of self-mastery in one who is free from craving for objects seen or heard about” ([37], p. 20).
- 10Priming is the implicit memory effect in which exposure to a stimulus influences response to a later stimulus. Psychologists often use priming experimentally to train a person's memory both in positive and negative ways. It has also been argued, however, that contexts, people, and objects can “prime” or make salient different identities. More, identity salience has been linked to stronger correlations between identity and behavior [39].
- 11Ramdas, Integral Yoga instructor.
- 13The study of aspirational (and other possible) identities can be studied from a variety of different angles and methodological approaches. This analysis starts with organizations, and seeks to elucidate and analyze and content and structure of the aspirational identities they transmit. Future work might also start with individuals in order to examine the content of their future self-concepts, before identifying where their various possible identities are rooted, which are most influential, and why. Both approaches can contribute unique insights to our understanding of the sources and consequences of various possible identities. I thank an anonymous reviewer for pointing this out.
© 2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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Johnston, E. The Enlightened Self: Identity and Aspiration in Two Communities of Practice. Religions 2016, 7, 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070092
Johnston E. The Enlightened Self: Identity and Aspiration in Two Communities of Practice. Religions. 2016; 7(7):92. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070092
Chicago/Turabian StyleJohnston, Erin. 2016. "The Enlightened Self: Identity and Aspiration in Two Communities of Practice" Religions 7, no. 7: 92. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7070092