Toward Ecosophy

In last week's Magic Monday, the conversation strayed into dangerous modes of magical and spiritual practice; I mentioned the hazards of practicing kundalini yoga without the guidance of a thoroughly qualified teacher. (The short form? It can drop you stone cold dead.) One of my readers, in response, noted that on a trip to India he spent time with yogis, who cautioned him that if you're going to practice yoga you need to give up caffeine and alcohol; if you don't, the result (to quote my reader) is "colorful mental instability."

I'm not at all familiar with serious yoga literature -- I read Patanjali back in the day, but that's about it. Given the very diverse readership of this journal, though, it occurs to me to ask whether anyone else knows more about these traditional prohibitions. 

The reason this interests me, of course, is that a very large number of people in America today practice yoga regularly while also consuming large quantities of coffee. (Put the search string "yoga and coffee" into your favorite web search engine and see what results you get.) A fair number of them, to judge by anecdotal evidence, also consume alcoholic beverages. If the yogins my reader met are right, this might explain certain things about the state of our society: it's possible that a significant number of people who practice yoga and drink coffee and/or alcohol are literally going crazy.