How to Discover Yourself in the Maze of Life : Depth First or Breadth First Search?
Computer Science talks of two fundamental ways to search graphs. So is in the path of Yoga - there are two ways. Which one would you choose?
Have you ever gotten lost in mazes?
During the 19th century, an idiosyncratic french mathematician Charles Pierre Trémaux discovered an algorithm to find a way out of mazes. Today, Tremaux algorithm has several applications in graph theory.
Essentially, there are two fundamental approaches to searching a tree or a graph data structure in Computer Science. Depth First Search and Breadth First Search.
In simple laymen terms, Depth First algorithm goes as far down as it can to look for a specific search data before it begins to backtrack the search.
Breath First algorithm spreads as far wide as possible before switching over to another data set.
The former adopts a “go deep” strategy, whereas the latter adopts a “go wide” strategy to achieve the goal.
So how does this relate to Yoga?
The majority of us practice Yoga to experience relief : either from some nagging pain in the body, or from the constant disarray of thoughts in our minds.
Although we arrive at Yoga after we have exhausted multiple options in our search for a relief, our practice remains tied to a specific goal.
We continue searching until our goal is met. We remain focused on the means to a desired end. And we continue shopping for various means - techniques, teachers and yoga traditions.
In the end, we lose the motivation to continue our search and say Yoga didn’t work for me.
I started Yoga with the goal of relieving myself of my struggles with Rheumatoid Arthritis. I dreamt of a day when I would email all my friends of how I have gone off all medications and cured myself.
The fervor to achieving this goal drove the intensity of my practice. I kept drawing causal loops in my head with my diet, lifestyle, sleep, thought patterns, beliefs to find out all possible causes I could imagine behind this illness.
In this fervor to find the ultimate cause, I realized that I had gotten lost in a maze of cause-effect relationships. It took me a while to realize that I can go only so far wide towards healing myself.
Why?
Because not all causes can be known.
Because there is a limitation to what my thinking mind can grasp.
This fervor is akin to the Breadth First approach, wherein I exhaust myself searching for all tools and techniques to get myself out of the problem.
It is only when I am in touch with the exhaustion of getting lost in the maze, a possibility of coming out arises.
It is only when I am in touch with the limitation of my understanding and the futility of focusing on external triggers, the path out of the maze reveals itself.
It is here that we embark on a Depth First approach to Yoga.
The SamkhyakArikA , one of the earliest surviving texts of the Samkhya school of Indian philosophy, opens by stating that the pursuit of happiness is a basic need of all human beings. Yet, one is afflicted by 3 forms of suffering :-
AdhyAtmika - caused by the self. The trigger lies within.
Adibhautika - caused by others and external influences. The trigger is external.
Adidaivika - caused by nature or supernatural agencies. The trigger is unknown.
When my mind magnifies the external triggers, I lose my agency and get lost into the maze of finding external triggers and solutions.
The path of Yoga requires me to resolve the three into AdhyAtmika and commit to understanding deeply why and how am I a part of my own suffering.
This shift in orientation, opens me to dig deeper and explore the causes that are not visible to myself.
My Yoga mentor Raghu Ananthanarayan, in one of his fascinating lectures on Yoga sutra, talks about the iceberg of the human condition in which one pursues the intangible ground inside oneself (UpAdAna kAraNa), going beyond the tangible causes (Nimitta KAraNa)
According to Samkhya, evolution happens from subtle to gross. But understanding this evolution requires one to move inward from gross to subtle.
And it is this depth-first journey that opens up the possibility of unraveling the disowned parts and processes within us which we have never paid attention to.
When we pay attention to our breath, in our Yoga practice, it quietens our mind enabling us to touch the deeper layers within, that were hitherto unknown.
Yoga shows us the way to explore this iceberg of our human condition. What does it take to shift our orientation to depth first in our yoga practice?
We will explore this further.