This post is part of a series I am writing as I read the The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. All posts in this series can be found through the "Sutra Readings" category.
Intermezzo
I hit a small snag in writing commentaries on my readings of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, partly because of lack of time, and partly because of a lack of enthusiasm that trailed in the wake of a series of fascinating exchanges I had with a number of people on the nature of meditation, mindfulness, and other topics related our presence in the world and the presence of the world in us.
Needless to say, through these exchanges, many ideas have rushed past through my brain, some kicking up a great deal of dust, others fluttering, like leaves in a breeze. Deep thinking (that is, the kind that requires time and space) is antithetical to blogging, at least to the way I blog these days. Deep thinking is also antithetical to the way I must live these days, rushing from job to job, and from task to task at home, while maintaining a yoga practice that allows me to do all this rushing around so that I can afford to think about, if not the ideas, the deep thinking that it requires to makes sense of them….
So then, why keep on writing these commentaries on something so essentially removed from my life as the saying of some ancient Indian dude? Why that set of texts, instead of something other, even within that tradition?
Perhaps because Patanjali’s approach to life, in the form of an individual’s experience of it, and of the universe was one of integration, rather than that of isolation and opposition. But more than that, the sutras attributed to his name saw in yoga not just a discipline and a prescription for life and being, but the art in healing. Life may well be all about suffering, and science may well be very good at isolating and analyzing these forms of suffering, including their origins, but it takes something deeply human to weave the gentle ropes that can yoke all of this together in a way that lifts the mind, the spirit, and the imagination into what, for a lack of better word, I call the soul.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but when I was first introduced to religion, I argued a lot – mostly in my own mind, being the polite child that I used to be. I wondered what free will meant if we were born in original sin? I wondered why God had to have chosen people? I wondered why God had to act like a petulant child and demand the sacrifice of a child he had granted in the first place?
As the years went by, I formed an opinion of “God.” Invariably it was a he, and he was never much older, at least in the emotional sense, than a 2-year-old child, who is both precocious and spoiled rotten. I concluded that “God” needed us as much as we needed him, perhaps a bit more, for he had no one to play with, and the void, that gap between being and non-being, scared him as much as it did us.
Then again, I also had another image of “God,” also a as a he. An old man, a master of crafts who had grown tired of tinkering. And we here and the world we know, a project he had long abandoned, now sitting in the twilight-lit motes fluttering all over us wildly in the shed.
Then again, I thought of the divine as the breath. Not the way I move my lungs or abdominals, or whatever part of my body is involved in a breath, but as I am moved by it. As if my exhalation were the intake of a universal spirit and my inhalation, the filling of my lungs by the exhaling spirit….
San Francisco skyline from the shores of Belvedere, CA (to see larger view, click on photo)
