Easy Question, Hard Question · 14 July 2009

What is yoga?

Come on, you know this one.

But RF is filmed in aporia over the question, as if he’s just been asked What is the universe? What is life? What are you? As if yoga, this ridiculous, historically specific creation of modern humans, is itself the mystery.

Five years I have cast about inside my mind and through texts ancient and modern, cast my legs over my shoulder and my tongue right up toward my brain; and still I write this journal to idle with the question. I let the question idle, let it mix with my waste and give off fumes. Useless.

And as long as I remain mystified about the nature of my practice, I disattend to a much better question: What is existence, life; what am I?

Our life is a faint traicing on the surface of the mystery allright, but I’ve just realized that I’ve substituted an easy mystery for the hard one. Because… the hard one is hard; and… the easy one is easy.

What is yoga?

It’s a stupid question!

I did a “teacher training” years ago: it opened with a sharing circle in which 40 people went around the room, reciting their names and their personal, precious answer to the easy question. Each question equally vacuous, emotive, a performance of self, a display of ignorance. Equally shallow. Mine included. All 40 definitions equally right in our happy, non-confrontational, SAFE pluralist world in which everyone is equally insightful, equally deep, equally qualified to teach. (As long as you can cough up the grand).

Here's an old bromide to dissolve the other 40:

Yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. Its goal is samadhi.

And, according to Gotama Buddha and about every aspect of mainstream eastern practice since, Samadhi is the basis for insight in to the nature of reality… it’s the starting point for answering the big question. (This is the interesting part…)

Technically, the old school definition of yoga is relatively wrong now because the 40 teacher trainees are relatively right. There are as many yogas as product brands and self-identity projects: choice and relentless, obsessive self-expression and affirmation are the logic of capitalism. Democracy and easy credit (not Nagarjuna) are why we say that everyone is already equally enlightened right now.

I am not nostalgic for the shores of the ancient Ganges; and I do not assume that Patanjali-era humans were deeper or smarter than we are now (they actually sound kind of facile, and didn't have good abs). But what if we "trainees" had been humble enough to set aside our little stretching hobby and take an interest in the simple project—the concentration project? Humble enough to let it just be that? Educated enough not to be mystified by the easy questions?

I don’t know.

Also: what if we didn’t mystify this “samadhi” as something irrelevant—restricted to the ancients and to RF—but actually just got our shit together and DID it?

That I do know, accidentally; and many people reading this know it too.

Or so I have been instructed this past week. Let me suggest, as per these instructions from various first-person mind researchers, that samadhi is a one-pointed concentration that anyone can learn simply by practicing it in a regular, dedicated fashion. Someone with the dedication to do asanas every day already has the baseline scheduling and tapas in place, and can choose to add mental training to her workout. It takes hundreds or thousands of hours or whatever to find samadhi, but then you’ve tasted it and can recognize it the next time. You can get back in to it within ten or fifteen minutes anytime you set your mind to it. It’s so accessible, even, that there is a whole modern literature and research programme dedicated to it: the work on flow states. And so common that all kinds of meditation teachers have a term for it: access concentration.

(Search term: "ACCESS CONCENTRATION".)

For what it is worth, this is not only a basic teaching that seems to be implicit all over the place; it’s also accurate to my experience. So is the first part below.

Two things about access concentration.

One: if you go there consistently, you will unwittingly open yourself up to even deeper states of absorption. In a mostly forgotten literature, these are called jnanas. On which more later. I can’t believe I’d never even stumbled over this old framework before, but it is incredibly grounding, comforting and inspiring. If MB is the key to the queendom, the jnanas are a crude interstate map.

Two: once you’ve learned absorption—not a particularly hard project if you consider ashtanga yoga itself doable and if you give it as much time as you give your backbends and stuff (or, I would assert to much disagreement…do it during your backbends and stuff) —there is something that comes after. Something to which this concentration yields access.

Most yoga hobbyists don’t want the next step because they’re doing the sense pleasure thing. That is completely ok. It's also why the ashtanga world is the insane, sometimes vapid, party it is. But for those who want the next step, or who cannot say no to it for stupid reasons they don't understand, there seems to be a specific (beautifully specific) way to use refined concentration to ask the hard question. The one about the nature of reality and who am I.

And, for someone who is already a super-skilled concentrator, the hard question is weirdly tractable. Workable. Askable.

Having open hips doesn’t hurt either.

::::EDIT:::: If you just got all the way through that and are wondering what I'm smoking today, that's cool. I just re-read it and am wondering the same thing. Not sure what to do with this, but since we've already generate a comment thread, I'll try to, er... play it as it lays. Good practice in recognizing the effort I am always putting in to doing-being-myself and looking like a unitary character here and elsewhere.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

Comment

1. Welcome back . . .

   Posted by: RE · Jul 14, 12:55 PM · #

2. “do it during your backbends and stuff”

   Amen to that. Except, am I just grasping at sensation and good abs? Am I multitasking?

   Posted by: karen · Jul 14, 02:52 PM · #

3. RE thank you. Karen, Oh my god!

   But mabye if you move from access concentration to thought-deconstruction you don’t have to respond to these questions… just strip them down to blips and flickers?

   Oh yeah… maybe this is how meditators become divorced from their emotions and end up with some seriously dis-owned shadow material. But that’s another problem for another day!

   Meanwhile, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s possible to fucking kick this practice up a notch. Actually make it a science. Actually make it a path to insight.

   Is this delusional?

   Currently it is pretty much neither science (a secular tool) nor insight (a self-reflective tool). Because there is zero instruction in how to focus the mind, and even a refusal to talk about mental states. We’ve hooked on to this lie that it is an “ancient practice” that is full of unattainable mystery.

   What is under the refusal? What is under the mystification?

   Fear? Laziness? Non-curiosity? Something as simple as a language barrier accidentally codified in to dogma?

   In my case, it’s just been a case of ignorance.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 14, 03:14 PM · #

4. Two things:

   1. If you hunt around www.theyogacenterofindiana.com long enough, you’ll find some sentences about “yoga.”

   2. When I was preparing to drop back after my Monday 2S, I said to myself, something closely resembling, “Dude, just kick up the pranayama and the enlightenment! Take the short road! Otherwise you have to do the godforsaken 3S!”

   Posted by: patrick · Jul 14, 05:10 PM · #

5. Dear Baby Jesus and Patanjali: Please just let me have enough realization that I don’t have to do ganda bherundasana ever again!

   You know, I just re-read this post and it is absolute nonsense. My concepts and sense of what the yoga is seem to have gotten all mixed up in the wash like a bunch of socks, and now I am not sure which emotions pair with which ideas.

   Conceptual writing is always bad writing (in contrast to just describing), but never moreso than today, eh? Funny.

   It seems the deconstruction practice did some good. I like it.

   Maybe I’ll try a do-over on this. Or not. I dunno. There was all this useful shit this week… too much to discuss even though my aim is to do just that: refine and pass on what’s useful.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 14, 05:38 PM · #

6. Is it possible the refusal has something to do with what Wittgenstein had to say about things that couldn’t be said?

   Posted by: Karen · Jul 14, 07:14 PM · #

7. I love LW, so want to agree with everything he says, but…

   Is thought impossible to describe?

   Zen says no. Vipassana enunciates it. Vajrayana shouts it!

   LW is starting to look sorta outnumbered…

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 14, 07:43 PM · #

8. Usually when I write, a main intention is to align whatever I’m saying with the feeling that is giving it momentum. Grad school taught me to kill the life in my language, and I started writing to bring that back in. In this journal, even analytical writing tends to have a muted emotional tone.

   So I realized when I re-read this that it was a covert rant. I was being analytical and lamely clever, not evidencing true anger, when really I was just frustrated that yoga is not WAY more emotionally and mentally beneficial to those of us who give it two fucking hours a day. I’d just spent a week with people who delight in others’ successes, live through pain and horrible tragedies with absurd levels of equanimity and style, and are absurdly balanced, ethical and happy. This post is written out of sangha envy instead of good intentions. Maybe I’ll come back to the nub of it when I’ve digested some more.

   This utterly specific version of Vipassana I learned this week: it deconstructs your subjectivity straight away. Or at least it does for your average ashtanga practitioner, since I’m bringing a baseline of high concentration muscle to the practice so don’t have to go through a period of sort of mushy, vague practice.

   Deconstructing thoughts is unbelievably rewarding and fascinating. I would recommend it to anyone, even those who know how to do far more blissful, fireworksy kinds of introspection or whatever.

   But the thing is, you can only dis-idendify from stuff you’ve at one point idendified with/owned. Oops, projecting again. :-) I mean I can only dis-identify wih stuff I can own. Just sitting quietly does seem to give shit from the subconscious ample opportunity to surface, but what about feelings that I’m actively repressing? I have a sense that doing a lot of this practice of dis-identifying with thought could potentially make my projections and my shadows even more wiley because they would be that much more divorced from my sense of self, not accessible in meditation.

   I know there are readers here who know my dark side better than I do. Blogging is the most leaky creative form ever! Maybe this time it afforded a little bit of self-awareness, the kind that other modes of introspection wouldn't divulge.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 15, 02:13 PM · #

9. blogging is a leaky creative form. i wonder what i’m leaking in my creations. humor and beauty, i hope.
   hugs, A.

   Posted by: arturo · Jul 19, 05:49 AM · #

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