Blog on Love and Terrorism 5/2/11

Blog on Love and Terrorism 5/2/11

Who really knows what the best choices are? We may only make the best ones we can for any given moment. When someone chooses to kill and murder innocent people, when someone makes it their mission to destroy a people, a race, a culture, then who will stand for those victims? Is peaceful resistance available to encompass violence if that means that it will end more mass violence? How does one sit down and talk peacefully with a terrorist? How does one respond to others when they have created harm? Some say that the only answer is light and love. I submit that that light and love sometimes can come in laser ways, in incisive and even with some violence. The Bhagavad Gita teaches this and yet we may misinterpret. If all our Seals dropped their weapons, would our world be better? Can those of us who are starting to create peace within really say that there is no room for killing certain thoughts, living with others, cutting some off, releasing others-as far as I have experienced, I see that a sort of violence has helped to move into a higher wisdom. When I am sick, I have taken just tea and vegetable broth and other nourishing foods. If I don’t get better, I may bring in more heavy hitting remedies. And if I am really sick, I may take antibiotics or some drug that seeks to kill the infection. Should I allow the infection to live on in my body? And if I would die? Does this serve life? Gandhi has been a hero of mine since childhood, but as I look at this extreme example, I think of his celibacy. If all of us were to stop having kids, we would have no world. If we did not stand up for those without the ability to do so, would we feel peaceful still?

My dharma, as far as I can tell, is one that involves the facing of my innermost fears, being vulnerable with my ego out in the winds and elements and allowing it to transform, sometimes slaying demons, sometimes making friends with them--or at least tolerating them and keeping them as part of navigating the inner world of mind and heart. What I know about this process is that it can appear warlike on a one level, but beneath is that deep abiding peace. Inside that is that deep rooted desire and passion, and inside that is the stillness. Peace and passion have ever been intertwined. I know what it means to be battered, to be torn and violated, tossed out in the ocean with no one on the shores of rescue anywhere in sight. I know what it means to forgive and to want and hope for healing. But what of the one who has gone so far as to kill and murder so many, and one who’s life mission is to kill, to destroy people because he doesn’t agree with someone? And sliding back onto the continuum, I think of how I feel inside when I argue, sometimes measured and hoping to serve sri, sometimes out of it’s own power. There is only resolution when I finally decide inside myself that it is time to let it go. There surges an great ocean of peace inside, sometimes with regret that I wasted all that time, that I may have caused injury. If we all stand up and walk in the streets and march and call for peace, will it be heard? Can our passion back up our call? If each of us who are yogis sit in meditation with more urgency, roll out our mat to create more beauty, lend a smile to one who we call stranger, reach out to a friend, will terrorism be banished? Can we kill sometimes and still be yogis?

When I was younger, I thought that peace was the only way. Since I was a child, since I was a teenager, since I was in college, since I began practicing yoga, I thought peace. It is so simple and one can stand behind that, but something has shifted in my fullness of understanding. One could say that that understanding is worldly and not of the highest wisdom, but my experience of feeling the suffering of the world, the suffering of victims, and their families and communities is deeper each time my awareness expands and I can’t help but want to strive to grow brighter, to practice yoga because in the world others are doing things to create more power to use for bad. I want to create more power to use for good. And I think that soldiers in this world are necessary. I think that they serve the world. And I think that they each may choose to do what they are doing to bring goodness to the world. Certainly then they are not necessarily deluded. Is there ever a time when all diplomacy has been exhausted? Could we all walk up to Bin Laden’s compound and hold hands and surround the compound with our love? How many could he shoot down till they were out of bullets? Would he walk out and suddenly realize he had been wrong all this time? If we had not gone into the compound would he just keep giving orders for more terrorism? I have no weapons. I walk unarmed, but I have love in my heart, I have passion in my heart, I will stand up. I have those celestial weapons of the goddesses, at least in my imagination. I carry them with me inside, and whenever I need them I pull them forth. I reside in love even with these. I reside in love and want only that for all. I believe that I am authentic, and that if I try I can positively influence my children, my family and others. I realize and have no doubt that each individual must come to their own knowing in their own time. Even though I have written perhaps more questions than answers, I know that I believe in the power of love. What do you believe?

Sutra 1.6-1.11 Movements

Sutra 1.6-1.11
There are basically five movements of consciousness. They are:

1. correct knowing
2. errors
3. concepts
4. sleep
5. memory

Sutra 1.7 Correct knowledge is direct, inferred, or proven as factual.
Sutra 1.8 Illusory or erroneous knowledge is based on non-fact and non-real.
Sutra 1.9 Verbal knowledge devoid of substance is fancy or imagination.
Sutra 1.10 Sleep is the non-deliberate absence of thought-waves or knowledge.
Sutra 1.11 Memory is the unmodified recollection of of words and experiences.

When the vrttis occur we can basically categorize them into five categories. They are correct or incorrect, we have concepts, we sleep, and we have memory. Our correct turnings have to be in contact with our incorrect knowing. They influence each other. When we are erroneous in our thoughts, we do not know we are wrong until we do. It is very interesting how correct we can think we are, and then find out later we are wrong. Following “wrongness,” we may feel ashamed, sheepish, or even stupid. Sometimes, we are just plain wrong.

But the thing about correct knowledge is that it too is growing. If it is not then we have a stagnancy. In the tantra we say that consciousness is ever-expanding. If this is true, which we only have to look at the universe to know that it is, then this would lead us to knowing that knowledge will also ever-expand. If we limit ourselves to a certain knowing, we can’t really grow our knowledge. There are things we know in our hearts and this knowing keeps growing, keeps expanding. During this expansion, we have to let certain things, thoughts and concepts go

Knowing that is not based on reality is like day-dreaming, dreaming, reverie. While it may not necessarily harm or be negative, it can be ineffectual and keep us in a whilrling tide pool of unproductive, unconscious thinking. Substance is found in the depths, and part of our yoga is to draw it out and express it.

There will be more on how sleep is related to samdhi in sutra 1.19. The only way we know that we had a good night’s rest is how we feel after it. There is more on being aware even in sleep in the Sivasutra. I am called to remember the 4 states of consciousness, also delineated in the first chapter of the Sivasutra. They are waking, dreaming, sleep and turya. Turya means “fourth” and is the state of consciousness that is poured like liquid into the other states. It is always present-as the self, but we can live unaware of the continuous-ness of consciousness.

Memory is an incredible movement of consciousness. What we remember is always shifted as we grow. It is the same story yet somehow different each time. When we look at the Yoga sutra again, it is as if we have never seen it before. Where was all this before? Remembrance of consciousness itself happens for anything to even be here, for consciousness must remember itself to create.

Sutra 1.5

The movements of thought and consciousness are fivefold which are afflicting or not.

In the next few sutras, we find out what the five are, but even reading this for now, after sutra 1.4 knowing that we identify with our whirling thoughts, we say that this will either be disturbing or not. And the distress could be in any of the five categories. What is it that disturbs us? We may think that apparently the disturbance comes from the outside but it always arises from within in the mirror of our own consciousness.

Vrttis categorized, sorted and collated.
Here is the first sutra to look at that doesn't have a sort of meaty and direct message, rather it refers to the previous and the next several sutras to come. Yet looking at the categorization itself can be useful in the same way we can re-organize a closet. We clean it out, we give some things away, we throw some things away, we can see everything we have and so we have a new appreciation for those items. If vrttis are the ways that our thoughts can be collated and sorted and also we know will get cluttered again to be cleaned out again, we will also see in the organization that some are negative and some are positive. What if we only saw what was good and did not see the bad in the world? Would we be able to make choices? Would we think that everything was acceptable and good? At the essence, consciousness is beyond category, beyond labels of good-bad.

As Anusara teachers, we always look for the good first. We begin by seeing where the energy is flowing, where the pose is connected, open, and the beauty of the pose. Then we look at the energy of the pose and see where the major misalignment is. Seeing where the energy is misaligned gives us a choice. Now we can enhance the pose by one instruction. If we were unable to see the energy of the pose, we would not know where to go or what to adjust and so we may make an insignificant adjustment that doesn't really transform the energy of the pose into its fullest potential. The interesting thing here is the contrast-we see the essence flowing just as it is. And we can also see that underneath, somehow locked inside the pose, is one adjustment that will bring even greater energy flow to it. This is aligning along with the vrttis to the main source of energy in each pose.

Yoga Sutra 1.4 Identifying with Vrttis

Blog #5 Yoga Sutra 1.4
vrtti saaruupyam itaratra
At other times the seer identifies with the fluctuating consciousness.

Yoga Sutra 1.4 is the stepping towards what else happens when we are not in the experience of recognizing we are the delightful seer.

The deal with embodiment is that we have time, space and identity. We simply would not be here as embodied beings otherwise. The irony of yoga is that there would be no need for it if we were not condensed forms of One supreme consciousness. And for every moment we are having one experience. Within each experience, we are experiencing on multiple levels, some concealed, some revealed. If there weren’t concealment we would not be able able to experience what is revealed at any given moment. So even though we may be daydreaming of a place faraway or a place only in our imagination, in the past or the future, there we are thinking and feeling whatever it is that we are experiencing. Our body may be in one time-space, our mind sometime-somewhere else-but that combination of where our body is, where our mind is, where our heart is, is going to make the experience. Between what is revealed and what is concealed is a vast array of some things being in the forefront, some being in the background. Sometimes, our more subtle energies are in the forefront of our awareness. The previous sutra describes that experience-we dwell in our true splendor. So, the next question is, what happens when we don’t dwell in our true splendor? On one level we are always dwelling there, we are just not aware of it. On another level what is sat, what is, what we are experiencing as real is the experience of more fleeting and fluctuating waves, vrttis. Rather than dwelling in one’s swarupe, one’s splendor, one’s own true state, the seer is sarupya, identifying, being close or near to the vrttis.

We can go back to Rg Veda 10.90 about Purusha to remember that hymn that states that ¼th of consciousness reveals itself and ¾ths are always concealed. With three-fourths Purusha went up: one-fourth of him again was here. Then He spread Himself out to every side over what eats and what doesn’t eat (10.90.4-5). This hymn is a fascinating cosmological hymn describing how a cosmic person creates the worlds and also is somehow more than the world even as he too is created by it. Paradoxes aside, the yogin upon first practice may think the yoga is to uncover the ¾ths that are concealed, in the heavenly realms. But the Vedas have something far more interesting and expansive embedded in them than issuing a challenge to figure out some fixed measure of the ¾ths-in fact there is no fixed ¾ths because the universe is expanding. The Vedas teach that the universe is vast and expanding: This Purusa is all that has been and all that is to be (10.90.2). From the Rajanaka Tantric point of view, if we focus on the expanding ¼th, on the part that is here and revealed here now, we will have plenty enough to practice. We need not worry about what is concealed, but rather pay attention to what is being revealed. If we are always trying to figure out the ¾ths, we may miss out on the ¼th right before our eyes.

Today, as I am a little sick, I feel my sore throat, my lower energy, and I had a very full day and do again tomorrow, and so on. But the invitation of this sickness is to go deeper inside and feel the vibrancy on a deeper and more intrinsic level. Sometimes, when outer vibrant health is so present, we may not even notice, we can take our health for granted. But when we feel sick, we remember acutely what it is like to feel vibrant, but in a curious way we also forget what it is like, and so however the lens of sickness is allowing us to see the world, there we are, experiencing it just as we are. Sickness itself is not necessarily a detriment to spiritual practice, just as the vrttis are not necessarily a hindrance, just as the ¼ does not obscure that we know there is even more. Rather quite the opposite can be true, can be sat, can be what is our experience. Resting while being present in a full and active day-resting while acting fully: this is a concept of both identifying on one level with the fluctuations-and that the more we receive those fluctuations just as they are-for instance, sickness-vrtti, the more we can actually align with what their energies are offering us. If we are looking at the vrttis as more unsettled and anxious thinking that spins us away from accepting and receiving what ¼th is being offered in any given moment, then we could interpret this sutra ironically as this: we are splitting ourselves dualistically. We are identifying with the vrttis OR we are seeing ourselves as somehow separate from our vrttis and so we start thinking we should not be identifying with them and so then our thinking becomes based on what we shouldn’t do OR we are doing both of these!

The Spanda Karikas tell us throughout that each thought and emotion can be a gateway to the One. They also tell us that every thought and emotion is nothing but the One. May we bring ourselves fully to every moment so that we allow for each vrtti to be felt and thought fully. May we be present with every sickness, soreness, etc so that we may attend to what is. Today, a little sick, I feel the love of my family and their small gestures, their own vrttis swirling, unwinding, winding, I could sense my students’ sorrows and joys, know the fragility of health, acutely feel the delicacy and brevity of life, and that unconquerable spirit that pulsates and chants, “I am”, “I am”, “I am this and this and this”, and simply once more, “I am” no matter what or when. “I am” is eternal. “This” is infinite and whatever we as “seers” are able to “see” ourselves as in this ¼th revealed.

Sutra 1.3 Our Mind, our Splendor, Prakasha-Vimarsha

.Sutra 1.3 bestows remembrance of when we steep in our essence. Then the seer dwells in His or Her own splendor.

When does this occur? When do you dwell in your own true splendor?

I watch my son, Oliver, being tickled by his dad. That laughter and light shines. I watch my daughter belt it out on stage when acting and singing in her school play. Their lights are so purely radiating at these times. These are two instances of them shining in their own true splendor. For my experience of watching: of being the "seer" in this instance-the one watches other "seers" become and be themselves. A seer watching seers can lead to that seer dwelling in her true splendor. I bathed in the rays reflected upon the mirror of my own consciousness.

For a tantric thinker, to read this is to think of places in our tradition where words like "splendor" and "seer" and "consciousness" reside.

Prakasha is the power of the emanating light of consciousness, it is how we are “seers”. Vimarsha is the power of self-reflection. These are the powers of the divine to know itself. These are the powers within each of us to know our selves. Prakasha is not experienced without a mirror, without self-reflection. To empower our experience, we reflect. In the tantra, we say that the entire universe emanates within the screen of our own awareness.

There I was, reflecting joyfully watching my children being themselves. Yes, they are always themselves, yet sometimes we are somehow “more of ourselves”. Our children, and all of us really, seem to be ourselves when we are in our passion, when we are doing what we love, be it in nature, listening to or playing music, flowing freely in a challenging asana sequence, and so on. What is it about these circumstances that lend to the flow of consciousness somehow in a deeper alignment? Somehow the negative peripheral thoughts are quieter. Instead of being a league of overgrown antagonists, they become more like harmless, floating insects on a warm picnic day. They may still be there, but we are in the fullness of the experience of the entire shimmering landscape of our consciousness. Douglas Brooks of the Rajanaka tradition always says that “yoga is becoming virtuosic in being yourself.” Be yourself. Dwell in your splendor.

Sutra 1.2 and What IS Yoga?

1.2 yogas-citta-vrtti-nirodhah. Yoga is the cessation of the movements in the consciousness.

Patanjali gives us the tools to quell the whirling vrttis when a teenager says one phrase, no longer than a sutra, and my vrttis start to spin chaotically... It's an amazing phenomenon to behold. And it requires much self-effort to practice the yoga of quelling the thoughts before saying the reactive, impulsive, negative words--to pause and remind myself that Now is the time to practice the yoga I have studied. Each life situation is a chance to study yoga, to study and review what works. For life itself truly gives us the most creative and surprising exercises of yoga. Consciousness in Patanjali’s yoga is within the level of mind. As yoga progresses, the definition of consciousness changes into one that encompasses mind, and the power to desire, create, know everything and all things possible, a One source from which all Purushas are born. That One source is Shiva-Shakti or Paramashiva.

The tantra has a newer understanding of what yoga can be...In a tantric text called the Kularnava Tantra, verse 14.38 states Shaktipata-anusarena shisho anugraham arhati. It means by entering the current of Divine Shakti's descent into the heart, the true disciple becomes capable of receiving grace.

If I enter the currents of grace completely, then I won't be so unraveled by my beautiful daughter. Instead I can see her beauty and see that, in that moment, I have the honor of being able to guide this amazing being. By listening to her--for she is that flow of grace descending and ascending--I may guide. And since I have learned a few things about how to flow with grace, and since I aim to teach it, I have come to love this definition of yoga, of Anusara Yoga. A little Patanjali (a stilling of thoughts for a moment), a pause, so that I remember I am either aligning with grace or not--whatever She brings me--in each moment.

From some tantric perspectives, it is not at all necessary to still thoughts of any kind because when we are in that current, all time and no time simultaneously exist. In certain extraordinary moments, all we know is this current of grace, for we enter it and even as it is moving us from inside, it is somehow utterly still and complete, even for just a moment. There is no need to still thoughts, for every thought ever born or to be born is within that current as we ride it, and it is in its own way beautiful. All the beauty of the world is in that current. There is no beauty nor richness nor good thing that is not present within that current. Enter life, enter into the current, enter life with all our heart, enter into Grace. Deep in the current of scintillating calm, She sings us awake, She sings us asleep. She is the beauty of my children’s faces, their smiles gliding freely, their impetuous currents, all.

What is your goal of yoga? When you say you practice yoga, what is it that you are using that word to describe?

Shall we still thoughts? If we still the movements, how will we know consciousness? Shall we ride the currents of them into that rushing one that is Shakti descending in our hearts? Shall we see each thought as nothing less than that stillness that She is inside Her current? Is it necessary to go and out? Is it even possible?

Thankfully Grace doesn’t kick us out of the club. We can’t make one too many mistake. We can try again. She will smile at us each time, She will not throw us out. She will not tire of us, She will not deny us. We have the opportunity to align with Her, again and again.

1.1 atha yoga anushasanam. Now is the time to practice yoga.

What could be more applicable to life than the first sutra? When Patanjali invites us to gather ourselves and remember all we have done to now receive these teachings, we sit quietly and set ourselves to the task. What is truly remarkable is that even if this is not the first time we have heard these teachings, it becomes new once more. The process is totally natural when we are engaged. Now we are ready to receive the teachings, perhaps again, perhaps for the first time.

Truly great teachings just keep giving. They are like love that is tended, like flowering faces of children smiling up at us. When we move towards them, they freely offer their sweet fragrance. This first sutra is not to be overlooked, as I have learned from Douglas Brooks. It is in itself a teaching of presence, of the fullness of time, of what meaning we infuse into our lives. One of Iyengar’s defintions of atha is benediction. How wonderful--bene is Latin for good or well, and dicere is to speak. Ironically it is usually an invocation at the end of a service. This gives us a twist in meaning for the word “now”. “Now” becomes “then.” At the end of our processes, we can invoke Saraswati and any other deity of such prodigious wisdom, because the end of whatever we were just doing is the beginning of now.

What does it mean to start with saying “now we will commence the study?” Saying the word now means everything. It means all time, and so encompasses a sense of timelessness. Past has placed each of us right here in our own individualities, and as such we are setting our intentions for future study in yoga. We are about to study, so we ready ourselves. We center. Presently, we pay the closest attention as we do when we fall in love with something, mesmerized by the potential that will possibly unfold in the future. And, to ravel time a bit more, all those times we have studied ourselves in the past--all those insights that have marked our way--will turn their lights towards this present endeavor to study once more. Each time we have gathered, it is as if we have gathered light and the light grows in its splendor. This light is a gathering of strands of past efforts and reflections on change, lovely intentions in the present, and future promises. Looking into the future, we say this one word: Atha. Now.

Not tomorrow, not next year, but for however long we have traveled thus, we find ourselves at the feet of a sacred wisdom that is a map of our own souls, so much more than some old forgotten, inapplicable and inexplicable pedantic text. Let us make no mistake--whenever we study a sacred text we are studying ourselves.

And so we begin. Shall we? A Patanjali Party anyone? An oxymoron if you are a classical yogin, but a challenge well worth the effort for us Tantrikas. It’s my first challenge to myself: Can I make this fun without reducing its seriousness or effectiveness in any way? It sounds so much like a Pajama Party, I couldn’t resist. Much of this will surely be written when all the lights but this one at my desk have gone out, when the children are nestled. Justin has said “come to bed”. . .soon honey, but not yet.

Okay, now. . . atha, bed. Tomorrow will be the time, will be the now to study and contemplate sutra 1.2. It is the big one.