If yoga doesn’t really have a Satan figure…what’s the enemy?
In this second part of my comparative theology series, I explore what Hindu philosophy names as the real obstacle on the spiritual path: ego, desire, delusion, and ignorance.
We continue tracing parallels between Jesus, Buddha, and Hindu mythology — but here the focus sharpens around one big idea: the deepest danger isn’t pleasure or power. It’s misidentification.
In this episode, I explore:
🔹 Why the “enemy” in yoga often sounds like self-doubt, ego, and identity insecurity
🔹 What Hindu myths reveal about spiritual power without humility
🔹 Why temptation often shows up right before transformation
🔹 How self-sabotage can actually signal a threshold moment
🔹 What Jesus, Buddha, and Hindu philosophy all teach about staying rooted in who you are
If you’ve ever felt yourself unravel right before an up-level — or noticed self-doubt get louder the moment you’re about to expand — this episode is for you.
💖 Want to keep exploring yoga philosophy in community?
Join me inside the Uplifted Membership for deeper study, spiritual conversation, and the Yoga Sutras Book Club → https://www.brettlarkin.com/uplifted/
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🎧 Also Listen to:
#297 – What is Samkhya Philosophy and How is it Different from Yoga?
#387 – Book 4 of the Yoga Sutras: The Mystical Path to Liberation Explained
#413 – Yoga Doesn’t Have a Devil. So What’s the Enemy? Part 1
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Transcript:
Brett Larkin:
Welcome to the Uplifted Yoga Podcast, where ancient yogic wisdom meets modern business strategy. I’m Brett Larkin, creator of Uplifted Yoga, where I’ve certified thousands of yoga teachers, built a multi-seven figure business, and guided over half a million students on YouTube. Here’s the truth.
You don’t have to choose between embodying deep yogic wisdom and building a thriving, freedom-based business. This podcast is your space to integrate both. Because yoga isn’t just what you do on the mat.
It’s how you show up in every part of your life. Whether you’re here to deepen your yoga practice, grow your teaching career, or align your energy with your purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
What is the real obstacle on our spiritual path? Is it ego? Desire? Delusion? Ignorance? Today, we’re diving into the second part of a comparative theology series I started on the podcast where we’re exploring the forces of evil in Hindu philosophy and also tracing parallels between Jesus and Buddha. If you’ve ever felt yourself unravel right before a big uplevel in your life or noticed self-doubt get louder the moment you’re about to step into a big expansion, this episode is for you. Keep listening to hear what Jesus, Buddha, and Hindu philosophy all teach about staying rooted in who you are and who the real enemy on the spiritual path is.
Let’s dive in. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to part two of exploring dark forces, Satan, across different wisdom traditions.
So maybe you caught part one of this episode and it was intense. I had to listen to it again myself because I took a break between recording that one and then this second part, so I had to refresh my memory and I was sort of on the edge of my chair. I was like, wow, this is really interesting, but I know that it was a lot.
So if you do want to listen to that episode first, you can absolutely go back and find it. We’ll link it up in the show notes for you. In that episode, we paralleled Jesus’s 40 days in the desert confronting Satan with three challenges that the devil gives him to Buddha’s encounter with Mara, a demon, right before he started or officially became Buddha and became enlightened when he was sitting under the Bodhi tree.
And then, of course, because I’m me, I had to like compare both of these stories to Genesis in the Bible and the story of the fall and how the original Satan, the serpent in the Garden of Eden, kind of seduces Eve. And all of these stories really beautifully parallel one another. And that’s essentially what part one of this episode was about.
And the query that really began this journey was, well, when we think something we don’t want to be thinking, like, is that our fault? Do we just need to control our thoughts better and work harder to silence the vritti? Or is that potentially evil that’s within us? And in that first episode, I talk a little bit about a particular author and some books that got me along this particular train of thought. As always, when I do these kind of comparative theology episodes, I’m not prescribing any belief system. I am just trying to find these similarities and commonalities across different wisdom traditions and seeing what might be applicable and actionable to my life and, if you want, your life too.
So as a brief, brief review, we looked at Genesis in part one of this episode. We talked about how in Genesis, God, the Father, created utopia for Adam and Eve and created Adam and Eve in his image. So we created this beautiful garden, basically visualize it as orchards upon orchards, fields.
I don’t know if any of you have ever been to Tivoli, which is a beautiful kind of medieval castle outside of Rome that has the most beautiful gardens I’ve ever seen. But I kind of visualize it like that. So Adam and Eve have infinite food.
They literally get to walk in the sunset shoulder to shoulder with God every night. They are made in God’s image, very similar to the idea that we are made up of the same stuff as the divine that we see in the yogic tradition, that essentially if we can silence our thoughts so that we can see our true self, we can see in that stillness that we are made up of the same stuff as the cosmos, as the divine, that we are bliss. Our true nature is bliss.
So this idea of your yoga and meditation practice about peeling back those layers of the onion, all those thoughts and limiting beliefs and samskaras and structures that essentially block you from seeing that your true nature is bliss. Adam and Eve, their true nature is bliss. They are literally with God.
They are in the garden. They are made in his image. And God, this loving, loving father, just like you might be, I’m going to use a mother analogy.
OK, so let’s just pretend God, the father in the Genesis story, just for this example, because I think it will really drive it home, is like a mother. Who’s to know what gender he actually was? I don’t know. But anyway, if you’re a mother, think about the boundaries and the rules that you set up for your children to keep them safe.
For example, my kids have freedom, but we have certain parameters and rules like no playing on the stairs, because I know if they play on the stairs, someone’s going to fall and the likelihood of a serious injury or concussion is going to be really high. Same thing, like if I have the garage open and they’re playing in the driveway, like they cannot go past this like certain pavement line on our driveway, because that’s where the street begins, where there’s cars driving by. So they’re allowed to play in the house.
They’re allowed to do a lot of what they want. But there are these parameters and boundaries in place that I, as a loving mother or a loving father in Genesis, have put in place to ensure that they survive and they thrive and they don’t get hit by a car or fall down the stairs. And what’s amazing about the utopia of the Garden of Eden is that Father God in that story really only gave Adam and Eve one boundary, like they were actually just so free.
But he said there’s this one tree that you can’t eat from. And of course, and what I talk about in detail in the first part of this podcast is, is the what’s wrong attention that we’ve been talking about throughout this whole year on the podcast, right? How the human brain has this negativity bias and we’re always going to focus on what’s wrong rather than appreciating what we have. And just like us, Adam and Eve, instead of thinking about the miles of beautiful gardens, lush fruit, beautiful fountains, rivers, animals, everything that they could cultivate, grow, eat.
In the moment when the serpent confronts Eve, she’s not able to think about all those things. The serpent plants this seed of doubt and says, well, what if your mom who tells you that you shouldn’t run in the street actually hates you and actually isn’t a good person and she’s preventing you from running in the street because running in the street is actually super fun and something that grownups do. Grownups get to play on the stairs all the time.
So if you want to be like a grownup and want to be as smart as your mother, who’s not setting boundaries and parameters because she loves you and has given you so many toys, so many rooms, so many other places to play. But actually your mother is evil. She doesn’t love you and your world isn’t perfect because she’s holding out on you from this on this one thing.
That’s essentially the theology that the serpent enrolls even, right? Instead of God looking out for their best interest, he sows doubt in his phrasing, which we look at more carefully in part one. He twists God’s words and says, oh, did God say you can’t touch this tree? Kind of like with my kids. Your mom said you can’t even go anywhere near the street.
That’s not true. I said they can go up actually all the way to the, you know, where the sidewalk starts. So he twists God’s words.
He sows doubt and Eve falls for it. She says the tree is pleasing to look at. It looks like it has great food.
So like it’s yummy. My flesh, like I desire it. I’m hungry for it.
Think about this in your life, you know, instead of being so grateful and noticing all the abundance of things you do have, you’re like, oh, but I got to get that new, you know, handbag or I must have that chocolate or that ice cream or or whatever it is. So she wants it because it’s yummy. And then she wants it because it’s pleasing to look at, like you, that new sweater you’re coveting or whatever, you know, instead of being grateful for all the sweaters you do have.
It’s just the what’s wrong attention. She’s not focused on Tivoli, the Garden of Eden, Utopia, the miles of orchards, streams, frolicking Bambi like creatures that are likely there. No, she just has to have this one thing that she can’t have, that she’s been told she can’t have.
And we spent a little bit of time there because that bodily temptation, something being pleasing to the eye and this distortion of God’s words are like the exact same themes that we see with Jesus and Buddha. So Jesus’s first temptation with the devil, the devil asks him to prove that he’s the son of God by turning stones to bread. This was during Jesus’s fasting time in the desert.
So it’s kind of like a one-two punch. He’s like, you’re not the son of God. If you were, like, turn these stones to bread for me.
And by the way, I know you’re super hungry because you haven’t eaten for, you know, 38 days or whatever. So wouldn’t it be really great to have some bread? And Jesus, of course, quotes scripture, doesn’t fall for it. Buddha, his demon Mara, kind of the version of the devil in that story, sends his daughters, these like very, I don’t know, I’m visualizing them, very, very snazzy and sensual and beautiful.
And there again, it’s the flesh temptation, right? Like, aren’t you hungry? Aren’t you lustful? With Eve, it’s like, doesn’t the tree just or the fruit just look so delicious? Like, don’t you just want the Mercedes or to overindulge on that, you know, food or wine or whatever? In the second temptation, Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the world. So he’s essentially offering a shortcut, telling Jesus that he’ll be in charge of the world if he follows Satan. Like, clearly, Jesus establishes a new covenant, a new kingdom, a new world that’s going to take him a lot longer to do.
But that’s going to be way more eternal and way more life changing than kind of just like the conquest that Satan is offering. So Jesus, again, quotes scripture and says that he worships only God, right? He doesn’t need material power. And in Buddha’s second temptation, an army of demons is sent his way.
So in the second temptation, there’s that theme of like power and fear. So while the first temptation for both of them was like about bodily lust, things of the flesh, right? For us, the equivalent of like handbags, clothes, food. The second temptation is more power and fear.
So like your status, right? Your promotion. And it plays into the same parallel we saw with Eve, where the serpent tells her, well, if you eat it, you’re going to be more like God. And she’s so blind in that moment that she doesn’t realize that she already is God.
She’s made in God’s image, living in the Garden of Eden with God. She couldn’t get more like God if she tried. And yet the serpent sows doubt in her, twists God’s words, tempts her with these classic manipulation techniques and tells her, no, actually, in order to be happy and like God, you need this thing you can’t have, which is basically like advertising 101.
Like think about the modern world and everything that’s being advertised to you. Every single ad or image you see, whether it’s a commercial for Dove soap or a car commercial, like all of them are trying to sell you or tell you that you’ll be more godlike, more happy, more fulfilled, more content, Santosha, when you have this thing that they’re trying to sell you, just like Satan’s trying to sell Eve the fruit of this tree. That’s the one tree she can’t have.
Moving on, Jesus’s third temptation is Satan says something basically like, OK, Jesus, if you’re really the son of God, climb to the very top of the super high temple and just jump off, you know, like suicide style. And if you’re really the son of God, angels will catch you. And that’s what scripture says.
And again, he’s twisting God’s words, just like he does in the Adam and Eve story. And Satan’s actually saying to Jesus, like, you should test your faith. Like if God really exists, you should test it.
And if you’re really the son of God, you should test out that theory by jumping off a building and seeing if God catches you or lets you die. But Jesus has faith. So he says, I have faith.
I know who God is. I know who I am. I don’t need to test God.
And then he quotes scripture, Deuteronomy again to conquer Satan. For Buddha, the final challenge is Mara questioning his right to enlightenment, which is like, who are you to identify as bliss? Or it’s very similar to what the serpent said to Eve. Who are you, Eve, to be like God? You’re actually not like God yet, not unless you eat from this tree, which is a total lie because she isn’t in God’s image.
So with both these final challenges, Buddha and Jesus’ demon, Mara, the demon is called in the Buddhist story and Satan in the Bible, are trying to force Jesus or Buddha to doubt yourself. And I want you to think about that, too. How many times are you doubting yourself, doubting your right to teach yoga, doubting your right to be here, to rest, to take a nap, to care for yourself? Both the Buddhist story and the Jesus story and the Eve story, these are challenges that are asking them to stay true, stay firm in who they are without needing external proof or validation.
And Eve fails this particular setup, but Buddha and Jesus make it through. Core difference is in Christianity, the evil is often externalized, meaning Satan as an adversary external to you. But again, I think that what Jesus was going through in the desert was likely a hallucination, him thinking things through.
I almost feel like it’s personified rather than externalized. In Buddhism, the temptation is definitely psychological, like Mara is that internal craving, fear and doubt. And then the purpose of today’s episode, thanks for bearing with me for the review, but I needed it myself.
Like, we’re on the same page now, I hope. Hinduism, the temptation is often egoic. It’s like the ego is the problem.
Sorry to interrupt, but quick pause. If you’ve ever felt called to go deeper into yoga, not just practicing it, but actually understanding it, my uplifted 200-hour teacher training is open year round and fully online. So you can move at your own pace, no pressure, no burnout.
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So in the Hindu myths that we’ll look at today, it’s like the danger isn’t so much sin and sin just really means anything that takes you away from God, but instead it’s getting lost in the body or power. Some of the common themes we’ve already seen instead of staying on the path of liberation and realizing that your true self is bliss. So the closest Satan figure we have in Hindu philosophy is Mara’s cousin.
Remember Mara? So Mara is the demon in the Buddhist story. Her cousin, we could say, is the ego, the ego itself. So those of you who studied Samkhya philosophy with me and 300-hour teacher training, you’re going to recognize some of these words.
The first is ahamkara. Ahamkara is your eye maker. It’s your ego identity.
We definitely need one. In fact, when we talk about Samkhya philosophy, we also have a Samkhya philosophy podcast. I’ll link that up for you in the show notes.
But basically in the division process in which we come into being in Samkhya philosophy, there’s a process of division, things splitting that create us as a unique individual. By the way, in the Genesis story, the whole opening part is also a process of division. You know, God’s separating and splitting the land and the water, the day and the night, etc.
But anyway, in this division process, when we become an individual, we get this ahamkara. It’s basically we are bliss, we’re the same thing as the divine, but with the catch of our individuality being attached to us. And that’s the ahamkara, our eye maker, our ego identity.
And we can’t really get through this world without it. You need a sense of identity. The problem is when you identify more with your sense of identity, the part of you that’s separate from bliss, God, insert your preferred word, the problem is with when we identify more with that, our individuality, than we do with God or universal consciousness or brahman, again, pick your word.
But it’s like in a given moment, am I identifying with me, Brett, and all my preferences? Like I like it to be warmer in my office than it is right now. I’d prefer to have the aisle seat rather than the window seat when I travel. Like am I identifying more with me and my preferences and my needs? Or am I identifying more with love, with universal consciousness, with God, with this expansive part of my identity that actually has no preferences, that actually is pure consciousness, bliss, sa-chi-tananda.
The other adversary or Satan-like thing that we see in Hindu philosophy is kama, desire, lobha, greed, moha, delusion. And I would add to this list avidya, who remembers that word from 200 teacher training, avidya, ignorance, right? The ignorance, like when I forget that I’m already bliss, just like Eve did, like whoops, I’m in the Garden of Eden, I’m in utopia, I literally am bliss, walking, hanging out with God on the regular with everything, all my needs taken care of for me, food, abundance, a husband, God hanging out with us, playing guitar, watching the sunset, we have everything I need. Oops, I’ve forgotten that I have all of that, that I am all of that.
I’m actually going to covet this one thing that I can’t have and make myself miserable and take down everyone around me and make them miserable, too. So avidya, that ignorance of who we really are, to put it in a different language, it’s like the avidya of I’ve forgotten that I’m complete, that I’m whole, that contentment is available to me in this moment, right now. I don’t need to buy a new car.
I don’t need to go on some fancy vacation. I don’t need the top teaching slot at whatever studio. What I seek and what I desire is available to me right now.
If I can just slow down and enjoy the beauty and the presence of the present moment. Reminds me of Sutra 1.1. Now the practice of yoga is in the now. One Hindu myth we have that parallels the Jesus and Buddha story is the myth of Vishwamitra.
He’s essentially a king and he renounces his throne and becomes a great sage, kind of similar to Buddha, who used to be a king and threw intense tapas. Tapas we talk about a lot, but if you’re new here, tapas is like that intentional friction, that heat, discipline, austerity. This king, Vishwamitra, gains a lot of spiritual powers or what you might know of as the siddhis.
Those of you who did Book 4 of the Yoga Sutras with me here on the podcast. And what happened is the gods in the Hindu myth became nervous because they looked down and they saw that this guy who used to be a king, who is now a sage, was gaining all of these spiritual powers and almost becoming like a god himself. And if he did, it would basically threaten the cosmic order.
So Indra, the king of the gods, sends Manaka, a celestial nymph, to seduce King Vishwamitra. So very similar to Mara’s daughters or this idea of like lust or bodily temptation. And Vishwamitra falls for it.
He breaks his vows. He loses years of progress because he’s seduced by this nymph. So he basically fails the first test that Buddha passed.
So he fails this sensual temptation myth. He also a little bit fails because he had a lot of ego. He was like, look at how powerful I am.
Look at how many siddhis I have. Look at how much like God I’m getting. And then he, of course, the gods were like, let’s shut this down.
And he experiences this spiritual derailment at the final stretch. Like Jesus and like Buddha, his temptation comes like right before like the biggest bang of his awakening. But unlike Jesus and Buddha, Vishwamitra fails.
So that makes the story in some ways more relatable, more human. I think the moral here is that awakening is fragile when the ego sneaks in. We see a similar theme of power without humility being very deeply destructive in the Rama versus Ravana story.
Ravana is a great scholar of the Vedas, similar to King Vishwamitra. He performs extreme tapas, extreme discipline. He almost becomes invincible.
And then he starts to think, well, like I’m above dharma. Dharma is righteousness. Dharma is non-righteousness.
We talk about this a ton in the episodes on the Bhagavad Gita that we have here on the podcast. But he starts to essentially also think I’m above the cosmic order. And then Rama defeats him.
So in this three-way comparative arc, we have the Christian tradition. The tempter is Satan in those stories. The nature of the temptation is, you know, give me the proof, like a lack of faith or give me the power or give me the thing that my body, my flesh wants, either because I’m hungry or I want something pretty or lust.
And the strategy that we see Jesus use is obedience, obedience to scripture. He quotes scripture. He just keeps coming back to the Hebrew Bible, which makes sense because Jesus was Jewish.
So he’s quoting, you know, this is what God said. And he’s redeeming. He’s like reenacting the Genesis story with Eve in that moment, which is why I put so much time into also talking about that, because he does everything she doesn’t.
When Satan twists God’s words, like what God originally said to them in the Genesis story, Eve doesn’t notice. She kind of just like goes with it and exaggerates God’s words herself. And Jesus is like, uh-uh, nope, I know verbatim what God said.
It was not that. And Eve did not have faith. She wasn’t like faithful, like, oh, God probably told us not to eat this tree because he’s our loving father and he knows that if we eat it, we’ll get hurt.
Just like a kid being like, oh, my mom probably told me not to run out into the street because she loves me and she wants to see me live to my teenage years. No, Eve is like, he’s probably keeping something from me or my kids. Right.
Like, no, mom’s actually secretly evil. She gets it all distorted. Right.
And instead of having faith in a benevolent universe, instead of having faith that the boundaries that God gave her were good, she’s like, I’m just going to make up my own rules. And again, this is it seems abstract, but it’s really relatable. Like how many maybe simple rules you have for yourself, like screen time or bedtime or certain parameters that you maybe as your own loving father or mother know are good for you.
Right. You know that you should eat a certain way or handle yourself a certain way. You know, those are the things that work.
Or maybe you believe in the Ten Commandments or you’re following the eight limbs of yoga or like you’re following a system that actually gives you rules. But then in certain moments, you’re like, you know what? I’m just going to rewrite. I’m just going to do it my way.
Like, it’s OK. Like just for today, I can, you know, stay up till midnight or switch it around or change it out on the fly. So Jesus’s strategy is really about like having rules to come back to.
And I think a lot of us think of like rules or disciplines or austerities as a bad thing. But what they actually are is a safe container, a boundary, a parameter, something that can keep us safe. All right.
And then second, Buddhism. We have Buddha under the Bodhi tree. His tempter is Mara, the demon Mara, and the nature of her temptation is desire, fear and doubt.
Desire with the daughters, fear with the army, doubt with the like, what’s your right to be here? And his strategy is mindfulness and grounding. So he stays steady. He’s mindful.
And then in that last desire, we talked about this more in the first episode, he touches the earth as a signal of like, no, I have a right to be here. I have a right to identify with the part of me that is bliss. And then in the Hindu myths, we see the tempter as ego, mainly, sometimes other gods.
And the nature of the temptation is usually power or those cities, those supernatural abilities and pride. And the strategy is to be humble, right? To have viveka, that clarity, discernment and to be humble. What’s interesting across all the traditions, temptation appears when transformation is near.
Let me say that again. Temptation appears when transformation is near. Do you know what the modern translation of that is? Let me tell you what it is.
Self-sabotage. When we talk about self-sabotage, this is what we’re saying. Temptation appears when transformation is near.
You’re actually, you have so much in common with like everyone we’ve talked about on today’s podcast, the different Hindu gods, Buddha, Jesus, Eve, like it’s the same. Every time you’re about to hit a next level or break through your proverbial glass ceiling or do the thing that really scares you, what usually happens? We get scared. We get anxious.
We start to question. We’re like, well, can I really do it? Can I really lead a yoga retreat? And then there’s going to be some sort of temptation. Maybe I should just co-host it with something, someone else.
That seems like a good idea. And just when we were about to do that big up level, instead we get derailed. This could look a million different ways.
Maybe temptation for you is like saying yes to a lot of things. So you’re so, so busy. And then when it’s your moment for the big transformation, you miss your mark or you don’t show up on time or you’re depleted because you went back into that self-sabotaging habit of people pleasing.
So I’m not trying to make you paranoid, but I am trying to say like right before Jesus started his public ministry, right before Siddhartha became Buddha, they were tempted in a big way. I think a lot of the times we think like an up level should feel good. Like, oh, you know, getting this new job at the studio or launching my first retreat or whatever the up level is.
It’s like, oh, it’s going to just feel all good and great and happy and smiley and be a good thing. And it’s like newsflash. When you’re up leveling, the demons are going to come at you, however you think about that.
Like all your past insecurities. I saw this with my first book, like all these insecurities that I thought I was over and had moved on from, like came back with the up level of becoming a published author and publishing my first book, Yoga Life. It was crazy.
I just felt like I was under attack, like all this stuff that I thought I had worked through was back. And I also say this because like if this is happening to you, just know that this is a normal process. We have archetypal figures, whoever you relate to from whatever wisdom tradition, who are who are modeling this for us, who are showing like, yeah, this is how it works and this is how you get through it.
Of course, temptation is going to appear when you’re about to cross this transformative threshold. Of course, it’s going to be the most painful it’s ever been right before your big upgrade. And here’s the last thing I want to say, which I think is really exciting.
The spiritual psychology beneath everything we’ve talked about is essentially that pleasure tempts the body, whether that’s pleasure for, you know, lust, sex, pleasure for food. That is something that as humans on this plane of consciousness, we have to deal with. Pleasure tempts the body.
Power tempts the will, right? Power just might be like, I want to look really great in the school pickup line or I want to be, you know, the most popular or best dressed yoga teacher. And thirdly, identity tempts the soul. Do you see how this mirrors what we saw Jesus and Buddha go through? Pleasure, tempting of the body, power, tempting of the will.
But it’s that third test, the identity test, that’s like the most brutal. And I think ancient traditions agree that identity level temptation is the most dangerous because once it hooks you, it feels righteous. Like Satan got Eve to buy into a new identity instead of identifying as God because she was literally made in God’s image, living in utopia with God.
He got her to identify with like, if you eat this tree, you’ll become like God, which was a total lie. Like we all fall for it. So if you’re interested in evil and dark forces, which I was, which is why I made this two part episode.
Here are some things to think about. This is what, you know, evil or dark forces sound like. It sounds like identity insecurity.
You can’t do that. Who are you to do that? Are you really confident enough to do that? You’re not smart enough to figure out email marketing software. You’re not flexible enough to enroll in yoga teacher training.
Nobody wants to hear what you have to say. There’s already so many yoga teachers out there, right? It sounds like that. In the desert, Satan doesn’t start with sin.
He starts with identity insecurity. What does he say to Jesus? He goes, if you are the son of God, if you are the son of God, Jesus, he keeps saying that if you are, if you are, if you are. He’s trying ultimately to shake Jesus’s identity.
The deepest thing he’s testing isn’t hunger or power. It’s like, do you trust who you are or do you need to perform for me to prove it? Each temptation asks Jesus to externalize his identity. Satan’s saying, prove it, prove it, prove it.
Turn stones to bread. Prove that you have divine power. Rule all the kingdoms with me.
Prove that you have authority. Jump off the roof of this temple. Prove that you have divine protection.
And Jesus refuses every single time. Identity that is rooted and grounded doesn’t need to perform. Having the Saturday morning slot on the studio schedule doesn’t make you an amazing yoga teacher.
What makes you an amazing yoga teacher is that you embody an amazing yoga teacher, even if you’re just teaching to one person. If you constantly need external results to prove to you who you are or prove to you that you are worthy, you’re going to be miserable. So listen up for identity insecurity in your thoughts.
Takeaway number one. Takeaway number two that we learn more from the Buddhist story is that evil sounds like self-doubt. Mara, Buddha’s demon, most subtle move isn’t like so much the identity thing, although she does do that at the end.
But it’s self-doubt. She’s like, who do you think you are to sit here and meditate? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are? This is devastating because for Buddha, it’s like attacking his legitimacy. It’s attacking his sense of belonging, his sense of inner authority.
And Buddha doesn’t argue back. He doesn’t defend himself. He just touches the earth.
And the earth touching mudra says, my life itself is the proof, which is essentially translation. Worthiness is not debated. It is embodied.
Mara loses all her power the moment Buddha stops narrating himself. And I think this is kind of as weird as it is to say, like, sometimes you need to drop down into the body, aka somatic work, somatic teacher training, all the somatic work. Like you can’t sometimes you can’t beat thoughts with more thoughts.
You have to touch the earth. You have to get grounded. So I feel like that’s like the big thing to think about from the Buddha story, like that self-doubt.
Do not listen to it. It is evil. That self-doubt in your head.
Do an embodiment practice. Lie down on the earth. Put your hand on your heart and belly.
Do something just like Buddha did to be like, I’m I’m here. It makes me think of root chakra, right? This legitimacy, this belonging. I have a right to be here.
And then in the Hindu tradition, the most subtle temptation is like spiritual ego. So when the sages or kings in these myths gain a lot of power, all of a sudden they think they’re special. They think they should be admired.
They think they have authority over even dharma, righteousness itself. They start to think, I’m better than everyone else. I’m not like other people anymore.
And I think what these Hindu myths are pointing to, it’s like you can be very advanced with spiritual tools and yet still be bound to your ego, still be a victim of your ego. It’s like kind of creepy, right? Because when you think of like cult leaders and things like that, which we often see in yoga, right, like these are people who often have incredible yogic skills. So when they start to think those skills are my identity and then I can kind of break the rules or control other people or, you know, whatever, it leads to a very, very dangerous place.
So in all three of these traditions, the the big obstacle is misidentification, right? With Christianity, the temptation is like perform for your identity. Prove it. You’ve got to get something.
Jump off a building, eat a piece of fruit, whatever to to be who you want to be. In Buddhism, it’s all about the doubt, right? Doubting your worth is the temptation. And in Hinduism, the temptation is like inflating your selfhood.
And I really want to make this point that I think the deepest danger on the spiritual path is identity because I don’t think it’s pleasure, right? Yes, there are some temptations that people go through in these stories about like overcoming carnal or earthly pleasure. But the deepest thing and, you know, the third thing about the stories is identity. The moment your attention is spent proving, defending or inflating who you think you are, you’ve already lost because you’re distracted from the fact that your true nature is bliss or you’re distracted from the fact that God made you in his image and loves you.
So analyze your thoughts this week. Do you find any spiritual ego in there? Do you find self-doubt in there? Do you find identity insecurity in there? And if you do know that that is not what you want and then use one of Jesus or Buddha’s strategies, get embodied or come back to your internal rules that you know are true and know that contentment and the bliss you seek is available in the now, in the present moment. You have nothing to prove.
Thank you so much for going on this cross comparative theological journey with me. If you enjoyed this episode or any of the episodes on the podcast, please consider spreading the word, sharing it with a friend. And I’m sending you a big hug from my heart to yours until next time.
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