A Yogi’s Relationship with Culture

Urban Sadhu Exploration August 2025

satsangatvē nissangatvam, nissangatvē nirmōhatvamnirmōhatvē nischalatattvam nischalatattvē jēēvamuktihibhaja gōvindam, bhaja gōvindam bhaja gōvindam, mudha-matē

– From Śrī Ādi Śaṅkarācārya’s Carpaṭa-Pañjarikā

Meaning: Good and virtuous company gives rise to non-attachment. From non-attachment comes freedom from delusion. With freedom from delusion, one feels the changeless reality. Experiencing that changeless reality, one attains liberation in this life. I AM is the ocean of awareness. Realizing this, one feels, “I am not the body and mind, although I have a body and mind.” Realize Govinda, realize Govinda in your heart, O wise one! – Interpretation by Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati 

Culture is a vague concept that many profess to understand while insisting that others around them do not. The debates about culture can become heated. But what is culture, and where does culture come from?

According to the American Sociological Association, “Sociology understands culture as the languages, customs, beliefs, rules, arts, knowledge, collective identities, and memories that are expressed through social narratives, ideologies, practices, tastes, values, and norms in collective representations and social classifications.” In other words, culture is a projection and creation of the human mind. Culture – whether dominant culture or subculture – is a paradigm that only humans can create; it’s “man-made.” Yes, I know that is a masculine binary term, but it somehow makes a clear point, because man-made has always implied “artificial.”

Cultural identification is the mind trying desperately to catalogue and compartmentalize the world around us and then identifying with that narrative. Ancient yogis would have called this identification avidya, or “wrong identification, wrong wisdom.” Avidya in Sanskrit can be broken down into its roots: a meaning “away from” and vidya meaning “knowledge.” Avidya can also be translated as “ignorance.”

The human mind is fickle, and a fickle mind is an unstable mind. An unstable mind is not able to distinguish subjective reality from objective reality. Culture is a subjective reality; it is based on feelings, opinions, and emotions. This is why culture changes so frequently. For example, the culture that you are experiencing is not the same as the culture of your grandparents. Keeping up with what people call culture today is exhausting. Your grandparents did not have TikTok and the social effects that it has manifested. One could even say that TikTok is its own culture. In the modern world things change so quickly that we often confuse high culture (long-standing traditions) with mass/pop culture (things like social media apps, popular music, dance, film, or fashion); in our modern world, high and pop culture blend into a very subjective understanding of culture. This type of culture often sparks aggressive arguments among people who are attached to frivolous phenomena. These subjective mental fluctuations give rise to defensive territorial terms such as “my culture” or “our culture.” And yet some of the things people are identifying with are shallow and superficial, just like a viral TikTok video, which is made only to be scrolled by within a few short seconds and replaced by the next cultural identity obsession.

Indeed, many of the things about ourselves that we can’t change – race, sexuality, ethnicity, and gender – become part of what we refer to as cultural identity. If you are someone who has been oppressed by the dominant culture, the culture wars can be brutal. For those of us looking to promote social justice in the world, culture may not change as fast as we would like, but I can assure you that culture, like everything else in the material world, is always changing. We are swept up in the current of cultural changes.

Alan W. Watts, a scholar of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, wrote in The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, “We seldom realize, for example, that our most private thoughts and emotions are not our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society [culture].” Yoga allows the human mind to start to distinguish and understand the difference between subjective reality and objective reality, giving us a life preserver while in the swift-changing currents of culture.

Patanjali defines this life preserver as yogah chitta vritti nirodhah – “by stopping the fluctuations [the changing, unstable attachments] of the mind, yoga is obtained.” By calming this mental chatter – much of that chatter created by the cultures we identify with that are outside us – we can begin cultivating a mind that identifies with objective reality, sat. Sat is our true cultural identity. According to yoga philosophy, anything that is changing isasat, meaning ”changing reality” or subjective truth. The opposite is sat, which is “unchanging reality,” objective truth, or eternal wisdom.

So why do humans march around proclaiming to themselves and to others “I am this culture and I am that culture,” only to create conflict within themselves internally and with those around them? Because misidentification quickly gives rise to egoism, which gives rise to control, as Watts points out. One difference between humans and animals is that animals don't need to validate the ego. No lion marches around the forest proclaiming to itself, “I am a lion, king of the jungle!” On the other hand, we humans do create a false identity that we call culture, so that we can proclaim that we are king in any given situation within the culture wars.

This is not to say that within the phenomenal world, a practicing yogi is absent from a culture. Yoga encourages the satsang, a spiritual culture that is dedicated to supporting those seeking sat or unchanging truth. The Sanskrit word satsang is derived from satsanga, which means “in the company of the Truth or the Wise.” The root sanga means “to join.” Satsang or satsanga is “keeping company (joining) with those absorbed in unchanging truth or eternal wisdom.” To declare “I am seeking higher wisdom” as a form of cultural identity shows great humility; it is professing that you have been identifying with the unwise (avidya) and are looking to attach yourself to a culture of eternal wisdom.

Austin Sanderson, Urban Sadhu