Popcorn & Patanjali
YOGA AT THE MOVIES
Theater Goer 1: Samsara Moe
On the edge of his seat, Moe munches popcorn, so engrossed in the film that he forgets himself and identifies completely with the film’s main character, Capt. Chauncey Lambheart. Chauncy’s ups and downs are Moe’s ups and downs. So total is the identification that, late in Act 3 when Lambheart is eaten by a sleuth of rogue bears, Moe has a heart attack and dies. On his headstone is engraved 'It All Seemed So Real".
Theater Goer 2: Nirvikalpa Larry
It doesn’t take Larry more than a few seconds to realize the movie is merely patterns of light and shade on a screen. He loses interest in the film, having no more emotional investment in what happens than he would have in a dream after waking and going about his day. Larry becomes so absorbed in what lies behind all appearances that he remains immersed in a formless-timeless-spaceless Samadhi for 2.5 billion years. When he comes out of, it feels as though no time has passed. It is not necessary, concludes Larry, to be anywhere at all.
Theater Goer 3: Sahaja Curly
Though engrossed in the film, Curly understands it’s a fictive enterprise with not a single, truly alive self-hood to be found anywhere in the plays of light and shadow onscreen, nor wherever that is he happens to be looking from. Curly willingly suspends disbelief to savor and enjoy the spectacle; the good, the bad, even the gruesome rogue bear parts. Leaving the theater at film’s end, he encounters an elder monk in an ochre robe seated near the exit. The monk asks Curly, ‘Are you leaving or entering the movie?’ Curly smiles and inclines his head with respect. The theater rings with laughter that sounds remotely like a Big Bang singularity.
On the edge of his seat, Moe munches popcorn, so engrossed in the film that he forgets himself and identifies completely with the film’s main character, Capt. Chauncey Lambheart. Chauncy’s ups and downs are Moe’s ups and downs. So total is the identification that, late in Act 3 when Lambheart is eaten by a sleuth of rogue bears, Moe has a heart attack and dies. On his headstone is engraved 'It All Seemed So Real".
Theater Goer 2: Nirvikalpa Larry
It doesn’t take Larry more than a few seconds to realize the movie is merely patterns of light and shade on a screen. He loses interest in the film, having no more emotional investment in what happens than he would have in a dream after waking and going about his day. Larry becomes so absorbed in what lies behind all appearances that he remains immersed in a formless-timeless-spaceless Samadhi for 2.5 billion years. When he comes out of, it feels as though no time has passed. It is not necessary, concludes Larry, to be anywhere at all.
Theater Goer 3: Sahaja Curly
Though engrossed in the film, Curly understands it’s a fictive enterprise with not a single, truly alive self-hood to be found anywhere in the plays of light and shadow onscreen, nor wherever that is he happens to be looking from. Curly willingly suspends disbelief to savor and enjoy the spectacle; the good, the bad, even the gruesome rogue bear parts. Leaving the theater at film’s end, he encounters an elder monk in an ochre robe seated near the exit. The monk asks Curly, ‘Are you leaving or entering the movie?’ Curly smiles and inclines his head with respect. The theater rings with laughter that sounds remotely like a Big Bang singularity.
note on 'Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha.'
GATE is pronounced 'Gah-Tay'. This mantra, found at the end of the 'Heart Sutra' is often translated as: "Going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always becoming Buddha." Please don't think of this as going somewhere in time and space, not even as going somewhere in terms of progressively higher, more expanded or more bliss filled levels of consciousness. If one has to use spatial referents, the 'going', as Wei Wu Wei argues, might more accurately be termed a 'coming.'... coming more into free, natural, integral harmony with What IS. Nothing external or phenomenal has to change. In fact, when asked what the circumstance of awakening was like, the Buddha replied, "Nothing has changed. There is just a tacit understanding." The Buddha was a master of understatement.
GATE is pronounced 'Gah-Tay'. This mantra, found at the end of the 'Heart Sutra' is often translated as: "Going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always becoming Buddha." Please don't think of this as going somewhere in time and space, not even as going somewhere in terms of progressively higher, more expanded or more bliss filled levels of consciousness. If one has to use spatial referents, the 'going', as Wei Wu Wei argues, might more accurately be termed a 'coming.'... coming more into free, natural, integral harmony with What IS. Nothing external or phenomenal has to change. In fact, when asked what the circumstance of awakening was like, the Buddha replied, "Nothing has changed. There is just a tacit understanding." The Buddha was a master of understatement.
Meanwhile, back at the swinging door between here and formerly...
You are not punished because you hurt others. You are punished by the very act of hurting others. -- paraphrasing the Buddha
Turns out there are some very practical reasons why the more awakened members of humanity recommend cultivation of virtue and avoidance of harming others before one attempts to abide in the ordinary miracle of an awakened disposition... (continue)
In the home stretch of an arduous Hatha Yoga class, our wild woman teacher asks questions that sink the mind in the heart...
Unclear Reactor Meltdown
Do you react to what you are experiencing? Of course, we all do, almost all the time. The push-pull of grasping and rejecting keeps us locked into karmic processes as surely as a snake trying to loosen itself from its coils by tightening them.
Have you noticed, however, an aspect of your awareness that simply observes both your experience and your apparently subjective reactions?
One of the great benefits bestowed by meditation practice is that it helps facilitate letting go into uncontrived, unpremeditated awareness. This 'part' doesn't think. It's just aware. It notices your thoughts. Your thoughts never notice it.
Many of humanity's foremost artists, scientists and visionaries have recorded that many of their most original, creative ideas emerge spontaneously from an inner silence that lies in the direction of this naked, open awareness beyond the snake coils of ego involvement.
Most of us spend our lives reacting with concepts, strategies and no shortage of soap opera drama to what we experience, identifying with and as the reactor. Falling sick and dying in such a state is a grim fate, feeling trapped in a movie that hurts and is getting worse. If such suffering, which many of us characterize as the unavoidable downside of reality, is only endured without noticing that which simply watches, then it's pretty damn awful. Meditation, over time, greatly enhances one's ability to 'see' the utter mechanicalness of the stimulus-response closed loop that we guesstimate to be the sketchy sum total of who we are. Generally, we have little appreciation of how conditioned we are. Believe it or not, it is a gross mismanagement of our potential to view the world as a maze or gauntlet through which we are required to think, connive, cheat, weasel ... or react... our way.
Human condition tunnel canaries called sages point out where freedom lies. Nisargadatta Maharaj spent the last four decades of his life identified with the formless absolute of awareness, not with the feverish concatentations of a three pound human brain. What's it like, living from the eternal watcher and beyond? Read any of Nisargadatta's books, all of which are transcriptions of his conversations with visitors at his little flat in Mumbai. You'll get it. It's not a faith, a religion, a trip or even a spiritual path with the cultish connotations that often pertain. It's the stripping away of everything that stands in anyone's way; the experiences, inner and outer, that we all react to, unconsciously allowing those reactions to define personhood, then striving to maintain the resultant thought constructed identity come hell, high water and aging. Meditation helps us to realize that this very entity -- who-we-think-we-are -- is itself a product of conditioned reactions to experience, resembling more a mirage than an independent someone endlessly reincarnating in pursuit of The El Dorado Enchilada of Enlightenment.
Understanding our relationship to experience is far more important than understanding what we are experiencing. We've experienced millions of occasions. How have they served? Have any of those experiences compelled us to look into WHO is having the experience?
Awareness IS. Thought and sensation appear to what is. They also appear within what is and as what is, which kind of leaves us to draw boundary lines with disappearing ink.
Have you noticed, however, an aspect of your awareness that simply observes both your experience and your apparently subjective reactions?
One of the great benefits bestowed by meditation practice is that it helps facilitate letting go into uncontrived, unpremeditated awareness. This 'part' doesn't think. It's just aware. It notices your thoughts. Your thoughts never notice it.
Many of humanity's foremost artists, scientists and visionaries have recorded that many of their most original, creative ideas emerge spontaneously from an inner silence that lies in the direction of this naked, open awareness beyond the snake coils of ego involvement.
Most of us spend our lives reacting with concepts, strategies and no shortage of soap opera drama to what we experience, identifying with and as the reactor. Falling sick and dying in such a state is a grim fate, feeling trapped in a movie that hurts and is getting worse. If such suffering, which many of us characterize as the unavoidable downside of reality, is only endured without noticing that which simply watches, then it's pretty damn awful. Meditation, over time, greatly enhances one's ability to 'see' the utter mechanicalness of the stimulus-response closed loop that we guesstimate to be the sketchy sum total of who we are. Generally, we have little appreciation of how conditioned we are. Believe it or not, it is a gross mismanagement of our potential to view the world as a maze or gauntlet through which we are required to think, connive, cheat, weasel ... or react... our way.
Human condition tunnel canaries called sages point out where freedom lies. Nisargadatta Maharaj spent the last four decades of his life identified with the formless absolute of awareness, not with the feverish concatentations of a three pound human brain. What's it like, living from the eternal watcher and beyond? Read any of Nisargadatta's books, all of which are transcriptions of his conversations with visitors at his little flat in Mumbai. You'll get it. It's not a faith, a religion, a trip or even a spiritual path with the cultish connotations that often pertain. It's the stripping away of everything that stands in anyone's way; the experiences, inner and outer, that we all react to, unconsciously allowing those reactions to define personhood, then striving to maintain the resultant thought constructed identity come hell, high water and aging. Meditation helps us to realize that this very entity -- who-we-think-we-are -- is itself a product of conditioned reactions to experience, resembling more a mirage than an independent someone endlessly reincarnating in pursuit of The El Dorado Enchilada of Enlightenment.
Understanding our relationship to experience is far more important than understanding what we are experiencing. We've experienced millions of occasions. How have they served? Have any of those experiences compelled us to look into WHO is having the experience?
Awareness IS. Thought and sensation appear to what is. They also appear within what is and as what is, which kind of leaves us to draw boundary lines with disappearing ink.
- Note: Buddha and Parashiva, respectively in Buddhist and Vedantin texts, indicate fully awakened awareness; the awareness that is the sole support of all perception everywhere, in all the three times and ten directions. This awareness is not a thing. It is not to be found inside any thing, including a Buddha body, a Shiva body or an alien body. Looking for it inside the body makes as much sense as looking inside a radio to find the announcer. The 'Being Thing' is one of the ways in which this awareness essentiates or shows up, but there are no limits as to how, when, what, where or why this awareness shows up.
Back to the inadequate movie theater analogy. Think of the characters in the movie starting to wake up to the realization that they are all made of light; the SAME light. Plastered as they are on the screen of manifestation, they have no way of getting to the source of the light to see exactly what the heck is going on. All they know is that each of them owes their very existence to the light. One of the characters, frustrated by the paradoxes and limitations of his existential situation, takes up meditation and discovers that he, the other cast members, the screen and its source light all depend on a prior absolute stateless state -- an awareness beyond being and non-being of which he and they are unique expressions. For the first time in his life, his head bows, not TO anyone or anything, but because he gets it.
Ganoosh Ji comments
How can we presume to know how or why the dance of creation emanates?
We don't know, yet we keep making up creation stories, complex equations and analogies to account for it. But, in truth, it is beyond us. Mental concepts about what is going on merely add to the clutter of mistaken, irrelevant and sometimes brilliant concepts that we have been creating, archiving and killing each other over from time immemorial.
Conceptual explanations, no matter how brilliant or true, are ever equal to this unfolding alive aliveness here and now. One of the most popular and gripping concepts we ever came up with was the one that announced we had a Divine Savior in our midst. We liked that one so much we called it the Immaculate Concept, er, Conception.
We don't know, yet we keep making up creation stories, complex equations and analogies to account for it. But, in truth, it is beyond us. Mental concepts about what is going on merely add to the clutter of mistaken, irrelevant and sometimes brilliant concepts that we have been creating, archiving and killing each other over from time immemorial.
Conceptual explanations, no matter how brilliant or true, are ever equal to this unfolding alive aliveness here and now. One of the most popular and gripping concepts we ever came up with was the one that announced we had a Divine Savior in our midst. We liked that one so much we called it the Immaculate Concept, er, Conception.
Bend It Like Fido
In genuine Yoga practice, the physical participates in an awakening process that renders transparent the boundaries our conceptual minds draw between body and spirit, mind and feelings, intuitions and sensations, lust and love. As we loosen our vice grips on judging and self-referencing, we become more appreciative of the miracle of participatory being; less preoccupied with monitoring and thinking about our experience and more integrated with being who we actually are, which turns out to be more wonderful than anything we could have imagined and more ordinary than any melodramatic projections concerning enlightenment that we might have made.
Yoga attunes people to a kinder way of relating to self and others. A commitment to lifelong learning supplants the cravings a consumer culture mistakes for the route to happiness. Working with our personal limits, opening to life enhancing and other-inclusive ways of showing up in the world, heartfelt community develops among practitioners, producing deeper levels of acceptance as a healthy side effect. If these things are not happening in your Yoga practice, quite likely you've been attending an exercise parlor not a yoga center.
At some point in this practice, one begins to suspect that yoga originates at levels of insight far beyond the capacities of the reasoning mind.
"I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature." -- Albert Einstein
Making Ens Meat
(note: in Philosophy, going back notably to Aquinas, 'ens' is the term for the 'concrete' aspect of being, 'esse' for being in the abstract.)
"Once you have seen beyond it, ordinary thought is of no more interest than a rock rolling down a hill or a crystal growing by accretion." -- David Bohm, Physicist
Here's a fun game that can prove rewarding beyond expectations: Watch your mind rather than identify with its content. The better you get at this, the more you notice that many thoughts come and go without you making willful effort to think them into or out of existence. Almost all of us can relate to waking up in the morning with thoughts steaming through our minds all by themselves, until we suddenly 'kick in' and make a conscious decision to take over the reins of whatever this is that seems to be working quite on its own. If we're alert, we realize that automatic pilot thinking happens many times during our day. If we're really alert, we notice that most of what we experience as OUR LIFE is generated by this internal stream of thoughts, feelings and attitudes that often seem like a movie over which we have little or no real control.
It's a burden and it's unhealthy to so identify yourself with your thoughts that when you are having them, they are having you. If you think that any object is you, including your own thoughts and feelings, you overlook the most important aspect of yourself; that you are the one unto whom thoughts, feelings and objects occur. Do you really think your meat sees itself, as atheists must assume? And even if it does, who registers the seeing? A deeper level of meat?
For a humorous examination of this subject that goes straight to the bone, please check out:
Bisson on Meat
The tricky part is that your thoughts are also not other than who you are. There is only Oneness. The really tricky part is that Oneness Itself is also occurring unto you. You are prior even to consciousness. Consciousness and its objects all come and go without asking your permission. I know, I keep emphasizing this point in dozens of ways on this site. I take my cue from Nisargadatta, who relentlessly pounds this essential point home over and over, since a.) it's so damn important and b.) it seems to be extremely difficult to really get it. If his core insights, as rendered here, appear to describe a rather strange relationship between self and other, then, well, appears is the operative word.
Questioner: Why does consciousness come and go?
Nisargadatta: It doesn't. It appears to come and go.
"Once you have seen beyond it, ordinary thought is of no more interest than a rock rolling down a hill or a crystal growing by accretion." -- David Bohm, Physicist
Here's a fun game that can prove rewarding beyond expectations: Watch your mind rather than identify with its content. The better you get at this, the more you notice that many thoughts come and go without you making willful effort to think them into or out of existence. Almost all of us can relate to waking up in the morning with thoughts steaming through our minds all by themselves, until we suddenly 'kick in' and make a conscious decision to take over the reins of whatever this is that seems to be working quite on its own. If we're alert, we realize that automatic pilot thinking happens many times during our day. If we're really alert, we notice that most of what we experience as OUR LIFE is generated by this internal stream of thoughts, feelings and attitudes that often seem like a movie over which we have little or no real control.
It's a burden and it's unhealthy to so identify yourself with your thoughts that when you are having them, they are having you. If you think that any object is you, including your own thoughts and feelings, you overlook the most important aspect of yourself; that you are the one unto whom thoughts, feelings and objects occur. Do you really think your meat sees itself, as atheists must assume? And even if it does, who registers the seeing? A deeper level of meat?
For a humorous examination of this subject that goes straight to the bone, please check out:
Bisson on Meat
The tricky part is that your thoughts are also not other than who you are. There is only Oneness. The really tricky part is that Oneness Itself is also occurring unto you. You are prior even to consciousness. Consciousness and its objects all come and go without asking your permission. I know, I keep emphasizing this point in dozens of ways on this site. I take my cue from Nisargadatta, who relentlessly pounds this essential point home over and over, since a.) it's so damn important and b.) it seems to be extremely difficult to really get it. If his core insights, as rendered here, appear to describe a rather strange relationship between self and other, then, well, appears is the operative word.
Questioner: Why does consciousness come and go?
Nisargadatta: It doesn't. It appears to come and go.
EYE RUN MAN DUALATHALON
Next time you're walking or running through the park or along the street, try to see the outer landscape going by you one way WHILE seeing yourself moving forward through the landscape. See the flow of both movements simultaneously. If you succeed at it and if you can abide the paradox of simultaneous two-way movement, you will notice that landscape moves, body moves, mind moves and... here comes the one that's hard to sustain for more than a few seconds (speaking for myself only)... YOU are not moving at all.
The Adventures of Concept Guy
Once upon a time, Urizen, one of the gods at large in the great beyond, got the novel idea of creating an alternative to Eternity. As there is no Void in Eternity, none to speak of anyway, Urizen concluded that the best way to establish his alternative would be to create one. Positing it, he then entered in and immediately wondered if perhaps he hadn't made a mistake. Urizen couldn't tell where he was. He had no idea if he passed the same point twice because there was nothing to distinguish a point. He wondered if he were simply imagining the Void, but then, there were no markers to distinguish reality from imagination. Urizen began to entertain a vague, subtle intimation that perhaps a split had occurred somewhere, but between what and what? How could nothing separate itself from everything without becoming a thing? You know, the nothing thing; an identifiable thing defined as the absence of all things. Among the gods, Urizen was about to have the first migraine headache.
But the Father of Empiricism was not about to give up without a fight. Intent on making his mark outside What Is, Urizen came up with the grand idea of creating a Solid SOME THING upon which he could start building his alternative to Eternity in the Void, sort of like 'upon this rock I will build my church,' So he created a massive Solid. It didn't matter of what it consisted. In a Void, a solid is a God send, although Urizen would not have used those words. What mattered was that the Solid gave him a reference point. It extended a good distance into the void and he could pace back and forth upon it while contemplating his next move.
The Solid kept Urizen occupied for a very long time. He measured it every which way, constantly inventing new integers of measurement and new tools with which to measure the Solid in the hopes of establishing the ultimate true position of the Solid in relation to the immeasurable void. When that failed, he broke his Solid up into tiny pieces, thinking that if he could find the smallest unit piece that made up all the solid pieces in his new Void World, he might discover the absolute integral relation of that tiniest piece to the Void itself and thereby achieve something like a unified field theory that would enable him to explain to himself what he was doing. The pieces got so small and elusive that he could no longer see them, even with his god vision and began to rely upon fancy collider machines that were themselves made from portions of the original solid.
Further, Urizen was tormented greatly by the fact that, unlike in Eternity, nothing in his universe seemed to have any life of its own. He had countless solid pieces and a void, but both seemed, well, frankly, dead. He prided himself in having created both space and time in his universe, because it was obvious that space was what filled the void between his solid pieces and it took time for him to journey from piece to piece, but, alas, nothing was living!
He was stuck and furious with Whoever or Whatever in Eternity was behind allowing him to get himself into such a mess. Here he was in a perfectly constructed universe of his own creation where everything visible against the backdrop of the void could be measured with scientific precision, almost; but nothing was alive! He realized to his horror that if he were to have any chance of bringing life into his world, he was going to have to borrow it from Eternity. But he was much too proud. In fact, his pride was so great that he chose to ignore the significance of the fact that he himself was alive due entirely to the Energies of Eternity.
For a very long time, stubborn Urizen kept occupied, making ever finer, more exact, more abstract, scientific measurements of the presumed solid pieces in the world of his own design, until slowly over eons of the very time in which he had englobed himself, he found, to his horror, that he himself was beginning to solidify. Poets and Artists kept calling to him from Eternity to look up from his tiny pieces and take a deep breath, but bah! What did they know? bunch of tulip tip-toe air heads.
Colin Yardley
2.12.2014
Y O G A A S A N A O F T H E W E E K
Harjeet Prabapadhu demonstrates The Downward Bending Ostrich
Punditoid Reflections by Sri Maha Baba Ganoosh
Yoga means 'Union'. It is a means of uniting oneself with the Divine. This presupposes, of course, that one is separate from the Divine in the first place, which is patently absurd. If it were possible to be separate from the Divine in truth, the Divine would be limited in ways that would render it a rather dodgy Cosmic Omnipotence, to say the least.
We only think, assume or believe that we are separate based on thoughts, beliefs and assumptions that are, in fact, the fabricated conveyances of the illusion of separation in the first place. The truth is, we are forever one with the Divine even when we don't feel Divine at all. To get rid of those crappy feelings of non-divine existential doom, we do Yoga, eat pure sattvic food and practice reverence for all life. Properly understood, we do not do these things in order to find or unite with the Divine. We do them because this is how the Divine shows up in the world, completely without anyone or anything forcing us to do it.
We only think, assume or believe that we are separate based on thoughts, beliefs and assumptions that are, in fact, the fabricated conveyances of the illusion of separation in the first place. The truth is, we are forever one with the Divine even when we don't feel Divine at all. To get rid of those crappy feelings of non-divine existential doom, we do Yoga, eat pure sattvic food and practice reverence for all life. Properly understood, we do not do these things in order to find or unite with the Divine. We do them because this is how the Divine shows up in the world, completely without anyone or anything forcing us to do it.
Ganooshji: Arriving on Time
We impose measurement on time. It doesn't have those measurements. We put them there. When you think about it, we could put anything in their place. What if an hour were composed of 5 gooners rather than 60 minutes, not to mention all those irritating little seconds? It could make life a whole lot less stress filled.
"I'll be there in a gooner" would give you a lot more time than "just give me a minute." The final gooner of an exciting hockey game would yield far more ripping action than a final minute. It would sound impressive indeed to tell a friend that your new sports car accelerates from zero to sixty in ten one thousandths of a gooner.
Of course, there could be some minor downsides as well. A three gooner egg would most definitely be overcooked. A clock that ticks once a gooner might prove even more annoying than one ticking every second. A partner who cried out, "Keep going, baby. One more gooner, I'm almost there!" might be placing too high a demand. Overall though, it would be a sweet dream day to look at the friendly five gooner face on my smart phone and know that time was on my side in this nit picking tick-tick-tick world.
"I'll be there in a gooner" would give you a lot more time than "just give me a minute." The final gooner of an exciting hockey game would yield far more ripping action than a final minute. It would sound impressive indeed to tell a friend that your new sports car accelerates from zero to sixty in ten one thousandths of a gooner.
Of course, there could be some minor downsides as well. A three gooner egg would most definitely be overcooked. A clock that ticks once a gooner might prove even more annoying than one ticking every second. A partner who cried out, "Keep going, baby. One more gooner, I'm almost there!" might be placing too high a demand. Overall though, it would be a sweet dream day to look at the friendly five gooner face on my smart phone and know that time was on my side in this nit picking tick-tick-tick world.
