small change

of luminous matter

On this day, and in a forum like this, custom demands some form of expressive meditation on the year that passed. If not that, at least a quick ledger of days in which the god and the bad, the memorable and the drab take their place in the credit and debit side, balancing the book of life, at least in the currency of one year. And if one is a poet, rather than an accountant, one should, of course speak of the flavor of experiences that have distilled from the cluster of days crushed and marked as 2008 vintage.

These days I am no longer a poet (since I write so little – OK, no – poetry). Neither am I an accountant, just keep some books, both of numbers and words, I suppose. A bystander in my life, and also the “author,” in as much as circumstance permit, I look back at 2008 and see, well, standing here on this day, looking – simply looking a few feet back and string at the blur that is the future for nearsighted creature.

Blame the Nova program I watched on neutrinos last night. Blame my love of physics and a corresponding inability to have mastered the math required for the study of it. Above all, blame my imagination, for here I am, on the last day of the year, wondering about the interpretive connection between “ghostly” neutrinos and the “indivisible” Self of The Upanishads. Not so much searching for religion in physics (after all, these two do have a long, long history of connection), as I am searching for the physics hidden in religion.

Here is a passage from Nickolas Solomey’s “The Elusive Neutrino”:

The neutrino is one of the most perplexing of [the] elementary particles. It is a close relative of the electron, but carries no charge and has extremely little mass, if any at all. These are some of the characteristics that make the neutrino so elusive. Neutral particles of substantial mass or charged particles of any mass interact with matter when they encounter it. But the neutrino passes through even our most sophisticated detectors as if it did not recognize that matter was present.

And here is Yama, the king of Death from the Katha Upanishad teaching Nachiketa about the ways in which the Self takes shape:

As the same fire assumes different shapes
When it consumes objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self take the shape
Of every creature in whom he is present.
As the same air assumes different shapes
When it enters objects differing in shape,
So does the one Self take the shape
Of every creature in whom he is present.

Or, more to the point of the analogy:

Above the senses is the mind, above
The mind is the intellect, above that
Is the ego, and above the ego
Is the unmanifested Cause.
And beyond is Brahman, omnipresent,
Attributeless. Realizing him one is released
From the cycle f birth and death.

He is formless, and can never be seen
With these two eyes. But he reveals himself
In the heart made pure through meditation
And sense-restraint. Realizing him, one is
Released from the cycle of birth and death.

So, there you have it, I suppose: on this last day of a year marked as 2008, I am thinking of the unmeasurable, the invisible, and the indivisible, both the smallest and the grandest, since, in physics, as in religion, size really is immaterial.

Sutra Readings -- 17 (Intermezzo)

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)

Sutra Readings - 16

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.

Chapter 2: Treading the Path (Sutras 15-17)

Lest we should think that a settled mind brings peace to those have attained that state, the Yoga sutras warn us that with greater understanding comes more suffering:

15. Life is uncertain, change causes fear, and latent impressions bring pain – all is indeed suffering to one who has developed discrimination.

The catch here is “discrimination,” which is, after all, an activity of the mind. Quieting the mind with only the mind in focus, is bound to lead to the problem of a mind in knots over itself. Jean, over at tasting rhubarb, has an excellent post about this very same issue of suffering that comes from the deep silence of a mind that is well on its way to settling with eyes wide open and a clear vision.

She asks a poignant question, one that needs to be asked, even as mindfulness therapy currently is gaining currency as a panacea for a range of mental health issues:

I cannot but question, though, whether this way, right into the heart of the pain and through it, is the right one. Is it just masochism? Can choosing to be more self-aware, even more raw and unprotected, be a good thing for people who are already by temperament highly sensitive or exceptionally neurotic (choose your definition – which one I choose depends on my mood, though Elaine Aron’s work on the trait of high-sensitivity has certainly had a big impact on my thinking)? We should always question. The thing is, I haven’t found another way. Suppression, pretending I’m not here, certainly hasn’t worked. But will I ever be ‘perfectly willing to be there’?

Patanjali’s answer comes in the next sutra:

16. But the suffering yet to come should be averted.

Ah, indeed… but how do we avert the suffering that is yet to come? How do we make that “should” into “done.” The “how” of those steps is both incredibly (and I do mean incredibly) easy and difficult. Easy, because it is already within us, and difficult, because it is nothing that has to do with what we think is us. Here is Patanjali’s take on it:

17. The cause of suffering is that the unbounded Self is overshadowed by the world.

The answer, of course, is not a retreat from the world. Nor its rejection. A rush of radiant light is no guarantee of enlightenment. In fact, it’s likely to make you temporarily blind. Enlightenment comes when you can see beyond the light and beyond the shadows – or so it seems to me. The view from that place was good enough for Rilke, so let me quote him again:

I, 3 (Sonnets to Orpheus)

A god can do it. But will you tell me how
a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?
Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing
of heart-roads there is no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,
not wooing any grace that can be achieved;
song is reality. Simple, for a god.
But when can we be real? When does he pour

the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,
it is not your loving, even if your mouth
was forced wide open by your own voice – learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

(Rilke, 1989)

Works Cited

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

Rilke, R. M. (1989). The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. (S. Mitchell, Trans.) New York: Vintage International.

stony path. (n.d.). Retrieved May 29, 2008, from tasting rhubarb: http://tastingrhubarb.blogspot.com/2008/05/stony-path.html

~ to be continued

 

Sutra Readings - 15

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.

Chapter 2: Treading the Path (Sutras 10-14)

Emptying the mind does not guarantee the end of suffering. An empty mind is still a container of sorts, and as the next set of the yoga sutras indicate, suffering ceases only when the mind has, in a way, gone beyond itself, or "merges back into the unmanifest":

10. The subtle causes of suffering are destroyed when the mind merges back into the manifest.
11. The gross effects of suffering are discarded through meditation.

From this, it seems that meditation is but a step toward the release of suffering, and not the ultimate path towards it. By saying that "the gross effects" of suffering are addressed by meditation, the sutra draws attention to the role mind has as a filter between desire and action:

12. The impressions of past action, stored deep in the mind, are the seeds of desire. They ripen into action in seen and unseen ways – if not in this life, then in a future one.
13. As long as action leaves its seed in the mind, this seed will grow, generating more births, more lives, more actions.
14. In these too, the fruit of wrong action is sorrow, the fruit of right action is joy.

Meditation trains the mind. It does not quiet it, the way drugs might quiet the symptoms of a disease, for example. Then again, it is nothing new that I am saying here, as recently there has been much written about the ways in which changing one's mind changes one's brain. Rather than start listing some of my individual references (from Charles Barber [author of Comfortably Numb] to Jon Kabat-Zinn, to name just two), I suggest you take a tour of the many links to fascinating articles referenced at Mind Hacks (Mind Hacks).

Invariably though, and in spite of the plethora of sources and resources for training the mind in the work that will help it chart a course beyond suffering, what cannot be had through any of this wealth of materials is the patience and stamina that's required to train the mind. And, even more than the mind, the heart:

Be ahead of all partings, as though it already were
behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.
For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Be forever dead in Eurydice – more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be – and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world's full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

Sonnet II:13 -- from Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke, 1989)

Works Cited

Mind Hacks. (n.d.). Retrieved May 26, 2008, from Mind Hacks: http://www.mindhacks.com/

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

Rilke, R. M. (1989). The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. (S. Mitchell, Trans.) New York: Vintage International.

~ to be continued

 

Sutra Readings - 14

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.

Chapter 2: Treading the Path (Sutras 4-9)

The next set of sutras elaborates on the five main causes of suffering: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and the fear of death:

4. Ignorance of our real nature is the source of the other four [forms of suffering], whether they be dormant, weak, suspended, or fully active.

5. Ignorance is the failure to discriminate between the permanent and the impermanent, the pure and the impure, bliss and suffering, the Self and the non-Self.

6. Egoism, the limiting sense of “I,” results from the individual intellect’s attributing the power of consciousness to itself.

7. Attachment is clinging to pleasure.

8. Aversion is clinging to pain.

9. And the fear of death is a spontaneous feeling, deeply rooted in us all, no matter how learned we may be.

(Patanjali, 1982)

When you start to think about it for a while, you realize that ignorance, the ego, attachment, aversion, and fear, are all creatures of the mind. Born of the mind, they also derive their sustenance from the mind. I get that. We all get that – and easily, too, at least when it comes to our wit’s end, that space far from the heart. The hard – no, make that the seemingly impossible part – is discrimination. It is the part that takes some into the damp forest for years of contemplation, others into the arid desert, or to wherever they undergo that trial by the fire of temptation, weakness, self-delusion, or whatever it takes to reach beyond the confines of suffering.

Not much of an illustrative example, but for the one who experienced it, it was a deep foray into what lies beyond attachment and aversion. The one I am talking about had come to yoga – or rather, retuned to it after decades – on the heel of illness and pain, none of which dampened her desire to outdo herself, given her fiery ambitions. This meant that each yoga pose she undertook was a special challenge, not to stay on the path, but to the ego, which had an endless appetite for proving things. Headstand, of course, was the prize that had eluded her, even back a couple of decades ago. And so she undertook the challenge with great gusto, not to mention much fanfare. As soon as he had a taste of the world upside down with her head on the floor, she seized every opportunity that was given to propel herself into this position.

But, as her practice deepened – in spite of herself, mind you – and as she studied with more teachers who gently nudged her to work deeper in a sense that was foreign to her body, she started to hear her bones speak, as they have before, back in her youth when she decided not to do headstand. As her bones, especially her cervical spine, claimed more of her attention and focus – though there was no pain as such to bring her attention to it – she decided the best course was to take another step toward discrimination: an X-ray done of her neck and shoulder. Sure enough, C4 of her cervical spine sported an ungainly spur and a large gap….

Does she care that she won’t be doing any more headstands? Not at all… In yoga classes, she stands with the therapeutic students at the wall by the ropes, and she focuses on the poses she is given with as much pleasure as she had for headstands. Well, pleasure is the wrong word, because she is not emotional about this process.  It’s as if a layer in her body has been shed lately, as if she had loosened a notch on the tightly wound reins of her bones. And yet, given that glimpse of freedom in the way in which the bones move, her movements are much more reined in, they are much smaller, and more subtle. As she stands in them, minding not just the bones, but also the breath, she listens to her companions labored breathing and notices the strain pooling in various parts of their bodies. The way they grip the ropes is heard in the rattle of their breath, the way they hold on for dear life is manifest in the reluctance of their bones to let the muscles move.

The wall and the ropes, for her, are not so much props, as reference points that help her gauge the small movements, or, in some cases, actions, of the various parts of her body. When she is in a pose now, she tries to focus her mind (and breath) on the process of the pose, that is, on the way in which the pose is movement, rather than pose, or destination. That’s because, she has finally caught on that the aim of yoga is not the perfect pose, but the experience of freedom that comes from yoking body and mind in the moving through the pose.

 Works Cited

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

~ to be continued

 

 

Sutra Readings - 13

Chapter 2: Treading the Path (Sutras 1-3)

Having defined the nature of the settled mind in chapter 1, the sutras of Patanjali now turn from description to instruction – or from map to walking guide.

1. Purification, refinement, surrender. These are the practical steps on the path of yoga.
2. They nourish the state of samādhi and weaken the causes of suffering.
3. The causes of suffering are five:

• Ignorance of our real nature
• Egoism
• Attachment
• Aversion
• And the fear of death, which makes us cling to life. (Patanjali, 1982)

The Iyengar-style yoga classes I attend generally start with an invocation to Patanjali, recognizing him for the sage who "gave yoga for serenity and sanctity of mind, grammar for clarity and purity of speech, and medicine for perfection of health." (B.K.S. Iyengar - Yoga - Sage Patanjali). This is not a prayer in the traditional – or religious – sense of the term. Yoga, ancient as it is, is not a religion. It is, as Alistair Shearer writes in his introduction to his translation of the sutras, a set of techniques that lead the practitioner to an experience of health through balance and a set of truths on which religion may or may not rest. (Patanjali, 1982).

The "practical steps" hinted at in the first sutra of chapter 2 are not invocations for ritualistic activities. On the contrary, they are meant to be "performed" on the "grossest" of all levels, on the physical and the material. In contrast, seems to me, those five causes of suffering, which we take so personally and looming so large in a physical sense, are to be seen as illusions.

"The techniques of yoga," says Shearer, "are methods of purifying the nervous system so that it can reflect a greater degree of consciousness and our lives can become an increasingly positive force in the world." (Patanjali, 1982). So why not just circumvent all that practicing and go straight for the effect of a settled nervous system by taking one of the myriad pills Big Pharma has been pumping out regularly? Ativan may be more effective in averting our fear of death than years of headstands… Zoloft, I hear, has cured many of the suffering they endured because of issues of attachment.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating against medication here. A damaged nervous system can hardly be rendered whole by practices of purification, be they headstands, breathing exercises, or meditation, alone. But these practices, along with the proper medical intervention at the right time, can bolster an experience of wholeness – which is what health is, after all. In our rush to cure suffering through the shortcuts offered by fixing the brain, we forget that the mind is something more than the sum of neural networks.

Here is what Iyengar says in his introduction to his book, Light on Life:

Yoga recognizes that the way our bodies and minds work has changed very little over millennia. The way we function inside our skin is not susceptible to differ either in time or from place to place. In the functioning of our minds, in our way of relating to each other, there are inherent stresses, like geological fault lines, that, left unaddressed, will always cause things to go wrong, whether individually or collectively. The whole thrust of the yogic philosophical and scientific inquiry has therefore been to examine the nature of being, with a view to learning to respond to the stresses of life without so many tremors and troubles. (Iyengar, 2005)

Note that Iyengar makes a link between individual troubles and collective problems. That is because yoga, to simplify here, is about balancing yourself so that the world will balance too. Unlike Western psychology, which is mostly concerned with fixing yourself so that you will fit in, without feeling stressed, into a world to which you may or may not feel a connection. Or, unlike my understanding of tikkun olam, the aspect of Judaism that is about fixing the world. (Tikkun olam - Wikipedia)

Works Cited

B.K.S. Iyengar - Yoga - Sage Patanjali. (n.d.). Retrieved May 17, 2008, from B.K.S. Iyengar: http://www.bksiyengar.com/modules/IYoga/sage.htm

Iyengar, B. (2005). Light on Life. Rodale.

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

Tikkun olam - Wikipedia. (n.d.). Retrieved May 17, 2008, from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam

 

Sutra Readings - 12

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.

The Settled Mind – Chapter 1 (sutras 49-51):

Once the mind settles on the fourth level, according to the yoga sutras, the knowledge gleaned from this space of awareness is qualitatively different from anything that deduction or induction can produce in the way of both knowledge and enlightenment.

• The knowledge gained through ritambharā, is qualitatively different from that gained in the usual way through testimony and inference. The former means is intuitive and sees things as they are in their totality, whereas the latter means is partial.
• The impression born of ritambharā, prevents the accumulation of further latent impressions.
  
• And when even the latent impression of ritambharā, has been brought to a settled state, then all activity ceases and nirbīja samādhi – the unbounded consciousness of the Self – alone remains.
  

The aim of settling the mind, then, is to reach a state in which activity has ceased so that knowledge and awareness can merge into an apprehension of the total nature of the Self. And, it seems to me, this apprehension is something akin to the universe becoming conscious of itself. As if consciousness were another dimension, in addition to space and time.

But what does this say to those whose minds bolt at every spark like spooked colts, or whose sense of awareness extends only to the tracks covered by a mind trained to run with one's awareness fixed on a prize at the end of the race, that finish line that gets further away with each new lap that has been run?

More than those who hate you, more than all your enemies, an undisciplined mind does greater harm. More than your mother, more than your father, more than all your family, a well-disciplined mind does greater good. (Easwaran, 2007)

But, I have a sneaking suspicion that disciplining the mind doesn't require more study.  Knowledge, as we all know (or better yet, may be aware of) is not the same thing as wisdom. To put it simply, knowledge is the accumulation of facts, while wisdom is an action based on those facts.  The accumulation of knowledge can be a mindless activity, when you think about it – and yes, the pun was intended. Wisdom is never mindless, for its heart is a mind alive with awareness.

Sometimes, as I am learning, wisdom is the action not taken, or the awareness that the best one can do in a situation is to leave it alone….

Works Cited

The Dhammapada (Second Edition ed.). (2007). (E. Easwaran, Trans.) Tomales, CA.

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

~ to be continued

 

 

Sutra Readings - 11

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.

The Settled Mind – Chapter 1 (sutras 45-48):

Once – and only that one time in my life – as a child, I had an extraordinary experience. Truly “extra” ordinary. Here is what I remember:

I was sitting somewhere on a rock. I think it was summer, and we must have been on one of our Sunday outings into the oak-studded hills near the town where I grew up. I remember the clear blue sky bound to the earth by the line of the hills. I can still feel the grainy heat of the rock on which I sat. But what I remember the most was a sudden sliding of my childish consciousness into a vast space in which I had this vision of the world (well, the universe,) so utterly independent of me and my understanding that it made me feel, well, I had no words then, but practically one with everything in that universe. And that universe, in my 9-year-old's mind, was infinite, with the one in which I lived a speck on the thumb of someone in a vaster universe, and with that someone on someone else’s thumb in an even vaster universe… and so on.

So, naturally – or maybe with my mind in which the only thing settled so far are the heavy residues of memory – I read the next set of sutras as that progression of awareness from one’s thumb’s through all the thumb’s in the universe in order to arrive to a complete view of the world, and so perceive the only thing that is possible to see from here: the truth.

45. The range of subtle objects includes all the levels of creation, extending the limit of the gunas[1].

46. These levels of samādhi are concerned only with external objects.

47. But on refinement of the fourth stage of absorption, there is the dawning of the spiritual light of the Self.

48. This level is ritambharā, where consciousness perceives only the truth.

In effect, these sutras say that the settling of the mind, as it goes through the four stages, from the world of objects to that of energy, then light, is a process that brings expanded knowledge of both the nature of world and the nature of consciousness. In this, yoga is not about self-absorption through the body, or trough an awareness of self, or even self. Above all, yoga is not about taking that spiritual bypass to avoid congestion and metering lights on the tangle of roads in life.

 

Works Cited

Iyengar, B. (2005). Light on Life. Rodale.

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

---

[1] The gunas, according to Vedic philosophy, are the three qualities of nature and translate, roughly, as solidity, dynamism, and luminosity

(Iyengar, Light on Life, 2005)

. Or, mass, energy, and light, if you are scientifically inclined….
~ to be continued

Sutra Readings - 10

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.

The Settled Mind – Chapter 1 (sutras 41-44):

The settled mind, according to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, is like the flawless crystal. Not because it is clear, but because it absorbs what is placed before it, including the process of the “absorption”:

41. As a flawless crystal absorbs what is placed before it, so the settled mind is transparent to whatever it meets – the seer, the process of seeing, or the object seen. This is samāpatti – the state of mental absorption.

This state of “mental absorption” is also the ideal state of scientific inquiry, as posited by Western science, is it not? There is no rapture in this state, no union or even communion with any of the major or minor gods of the pantheon teeming with the products of the human mind’s proclivity to get distracted and taken in by its own image-making capabilities. This is a state in which nothing escapes awareness, not even the process of the awareness itself.

The yoga sutras -- coming as they do from the place that also gave the world the concept of zero -- are the earliest forms of a science of the mind. But more than that, they are deeply concerned with the investigation of the processes of consciousness itself. Steeped as we are in a post-enlightenment view of the self as ego on the one hand and nothing more than just a bunch of neurons firing, on the other, it might be hard for us to appreciate the subtle levels of distinctions the sutras urge us to keep in mind when we are dealing with, well, the mind.

There are steps, or stages, of “mental absorption,” or in the study of the mind’s journey deeper into the vast realm of consciousness;

42. The first stage of absorption is when the object of attention is gross [as in physical, or material … or empirical] and its name and other thoughts are mingled together in the mind.

43. The second stage is when the memory is purified and the mind is quiet enough to be absorbed in the object of attention [as being in the zone, I suppose…]

44. In the same way the third and fourth stages of absorption are explained: these occur when the object of attention is subtle.

So, at the highest level of mental absorption, an object ceases to be the object of the senses, as well of the intellect. I suppose, one can say that it ceases to be an object altogether, at least in the sense in which we understands objects to be the solid contents of the world and of our awareness of them as such.

Many artists (and athletes, and gardeners, and, and … well, the list goes on) know that second stage of mental absorption in which the mind is infused with attention, and in which an object is utterly transformed, though really, it is the mind and awareness that are changed.

All this is very abstract – that is, unsettled in my mind. Outside the window, it is dizzyingly bright with sun. Inside, the dehydrator’s fan is turning and turning, and the kitchen is permeated with the scent of onions and sweet potatoes giving up the water from their cells. As I write this, the phone keeps ringing, with my sons checking in from faraway places… And I can’t seem to untangle my wanting to understand the yoga sutras and all the distractions, small and big, welcome and feared, in the way of my being able to do so. And then, there is the question, too: why bother with this at all? Who cares and how is this of any help when it has been said by so many others so much better … including the poets:

Flying a Kite

It seems to me the kite
Has all the fun,
The view,
The weightlessness,
The wind,
Ecstatic shudders,
Tail streaming out,
The urging higher,
The exhilarating dives,
and me down here,
Left holding the string.

(Elson, 2001)

Works Cited

Elson, R. (2001). A responsibility to Awe. (A. B. Cintio, Ed.) Oxford: Carcanet.

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

~ to be continued

Sutra Readings - 9

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.

The Settled Mind – Chapter 1 (sutras 35-40):

If yoga is about the integration of consciousness, as the Vedic philosophers have said (Easwaran, 2007), then settling the mind becomes the key that opens the door to the path. It’s a key forged from ores that run the deeply veined stratum of what may be the geography of awareness:

35. Experience of the finest levels of the senses establishes the settled mind.

36. So does experience of the inner radiance that is free from sorrow.

37. So does being attuned to another mind that is itself unperturbed by desire.

38. So does witnessing the process of dreaming or dreamless sleep.

39. So does any meditation that is held in high esteem.

40. The sovereignty of the mind that is settled extends from the smallest of the small to the greatest of the great.

(Patanjali, 1982)

The sutras of this section weave back and forth, from here to there, from inside to outside, from I to Thou, from sleep to awake, twisting these seeming dualities into a knotted rope, which is the meditation “that is held in high esteem” -- and which is bound to yoke mind to awareness.

As I write this, my mind is scattered and easily spooked. Contrary to the teachings, but in line with modern life, I am doing three things at once just now: writing this, thinking about new recipes for crackers and flat breads to make in my dehydrator, and catching snippets of the Nova show on PBS, which happens to be about the making of Samurai swords…

A Samurai swordsmith, as I learned just now, is a magician of sorts, and perhaps also a yogi. Through the long arduous process of creating and honing the sword, the master swordsmith changes the atomic structure of the steel in parts of the blade.

Imagine that – changing the atomic structure of steel with nothing more than a slight, but constant and measured, touch of the finger – like a conductor lifting his baton to orchestrate the cacophony of flaws into a soaring symphony. Introducing flaws and weaknesses into the metal to make it, not harder, but tougher!

In this, the Samurai swordsmith knows something about that “sovereignty of the mind” and the way it extends from the smallest of the small, from the atomic structure of steel, to greatest of the great….

 

Works Cited

Patanjali. (1982). The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. (A. Shearer, Trans.) New York: Bell Tower.

~ to be continued