The Tree Of Knowledge

ROBERT STEVEN GOLDSTEIN is an author who lives in San Francisco. His latest novel, Golda's Hutch, was released in March 2025. Here he explores the relationship between the Eastern and Western practices of knowledge, yoga, and meditation, and discovers that they are not really different in concept.

- ROBERT STEVEN GOLDSTEIN

"But of the tree of knowledge... thou shalt not eat of it."

—The Book of Genesis

The spiritual discipline I cobbled together for myself in my late teens, and which has sustained me now for well over fifty years, has four major components: yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, and a code of behavior that comprises compassion and harmlessness, a concept known to Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains as Ahimsa.

It wasn't until long after I had pieced these things together that I came to understand that long ago, in places like India, the single term “yoga” actually encompassed these, and many other precepts. Today, though, especially in the West, yoga has come to connote primarily a set of postures and breathing exercises, devoid of other considerations.

Of the four components that have become the foundation of my personal spiritual practice, the one that proved most difficult for me initially was meditation. I remember first encountering the term “meditation” in old yoga books, when I was still a boy. These brief references to meditation alluded only to its benefits, they mentioned nothing about how it was actually practiced.

So meditation seemed to me, then, something utterly mysterious and alluring. Here was a way of manipulating the mind so that I could see God. But how, I wondered, was this accomplished? In my musings, I imagined that meditation must consist of extraordinarily complex mental convolutions and gyrations—labyrinthine cerebral reckoning akin to that of advanced physics or calculus to achieve such an unfathomable feat as spiritual awakening.

Humans desperately require knowledge, but also need to know how to turn it off at times.