Nathas · 23 October 2009
One has to sing the song of nonentity using one’s meagre body as an instrument.
One’s self has to be entirely absorbed.
You will never be able to understand jog.
What is the use of asking for it?
Child, listen, spirit has made an abode in this body of dust.
Spirit is in everything as a thread through beads; it is in the breath of life of the living….
Spirit permeates everything as blood runs through the bodies of women and men.
…………………………………………………………………………….
Cleaning my desk this afternoon, while you-tubing to The Nature of Consciousness by Alan Watts. Beautiful. It's a bit like running across youtube footage of the Hindenburg's explosion: how has my life not yet intersected with this crucial historical document?
Anyway, in the bottom of a drawer, I found a notebook with the above written on the last page.
I was writing, or trying to write, an article about nothingness last week. I'm not really ready to be writing about nothingness. This and AW might have helped a bit.
I don’t remember when or why I wrote this in the notebook, or where I read it. Google doesn’t help. But it feels a little like the HYP.
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Categories: esoteric shit
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The Nature of Consciousness
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 23, 01:29 PM · #
I read AW’s ‘The Game’ about 20 years ago and it was huge for me. I will put that link on tomorrow whilst I tidy up, thanks : )
Posted by: susananda · Oct 23, 03:24 PM · #
Lucky to find him so early! The lecture above gets good in part 4.
Comparing cadences and aspiration, I conclude that RF has internalized much of AW. Is it true, Richard?
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 23, 04:14 PM · #
Thanks for this. It lifted my spirits after a rough day with a “wiggly” toddler.
Posted by: Liz · Oct 23, 04:18 PM · #
This is great stuff. I’m anxious to listen to the whole series and catch up on your site here.
Bob Weisenberg
http://YogaDemystified.com
Posted by: Bob Weisenberg · Oct 23, 05:49 PM · #
having listened to countless hours of rf and aw (these are my lullabies) ican say that I love both of their elocution styles but find them quite different and yet so similar. Watts “and so inthe same way”, Freeman “therefore”... RF embodies the message, AW is a messenger. RF is the great metaphorian, AW is is prickly goo or gooy prickles…
Posted by: yogasanas · Oct 23, 10:21 PM · #
btw: AW is broadcast on KPFK every Sunday, starting at 8:30 a.m., just as practice is ending… It’s what I’m listening to on my way home.
Posted by: KNL · Oct 24, 06:04 AM · #
Nice!
Wiggly prickles. Who can say this stuff and still keep that beautiful clipped rhythm? AW is God for 10 minutes.
Bob, Alan is apt to enable you to feel more comfortable with the Mystery in the yoga…
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 24, 06:50 AM · #
There was a young man that said “damn!”
For it certainly seems that I am
A creature that moves
in determinate grooves
I’m not even a bus, I’m a tram”
-aw
the art of living is letting paradox be – rf
Posted by: e&sj · Oct 24, 06:50 AM · #
The art of living is letting the paradoxes be.
This afternoon I’m working with an insanely brilliant client who has changed the world for the better with his stressy production levels. But… he can’t turn it off. I don’t want to devalue the way he works because it’s the most beautiful stuff I’ve witnessed. This helps… allowing the “stress” to be what it is even if some meditation is introduced to the mix.
Meanwhile, I am confused? E&SJ is not the same person as YOGASANAS? You are virtual brothers? And LIZ is not our usual tick-tocking craftswoman Liz in Austin, but an articulate yogi about 2 thousand miles directly north of her? I just googled RF AW, and the reviews of the Yoga Matrix compare the two. Doppelgangers everywhere.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 24, 08:05 AM · #
Oh what a conflation of giants! The Reverend Alan ‘Wittery’ Watts and Dopamine Dickie Freeman – what a fine pair of doze-inducing dullards. The parson smokes a reefer and buys a kaftan, the indigent loafer learns to hoist an eyebrow and cashes in. I admire these two for their arch-camp acumen, if for nothing else.
Fortunately, no-one (not least you lot)takes their ‘thought’ seriously at all – a bit of occasional background prattle. Neat aphorisms for the ez-net intelligensia, langourous images for Lululemon loll-a-bouts…and, I might add, NOT on Prem’s approved list of Ashtanga-aggrandized, supra-masters.
I rest easy in the knowledge that this sort of samyama swarfega (real ‘prickly goo’) will soon be flushed down the drains of you collective asaninical ambitions, for if such worthy referents should win you easy access to the upper-reaches of Advanced B, then they should not fail to fall (as it were).
Now get back to your mats, you delinquent donuts. Do you think those twists wil be bound by stuffing your face with such spine-stilting, spacecake sweetmeats?
Posted by: catygay · Oct 24, 11:16 AM · #
You are seeing the many in the one, and equanimity and sympathetic joy and yogasanas are one in the many paths that lead to Truth and the review of all matrices yogic Brazil style. Ok, is that enough clue-age for wise owl and friend.
And also I am a listener of Shinzen ( Roy of Hollywood played him every friday early am on KPFK 5-10 years ago and I taped a lot of those shows to listen at a more reasonable hour) – although not as much these days. Its uncanny the how seemingly divergent streams in space /time can lead to the same river.
Sometimes the auto-fill text is just a lot easier.
Posted by: e&sj · Oct 24, 03:48 PM · #
Heh. Nope, let me introduce myself: Liz, from Coney Island, Brooklyn. Perhaps I’ll start calling myself Liz2 for clarity. Though, of course, she and I are both the Big Bang, so maybe it’s all the same in the end.
Love the site, the thoughts. And btw, I’m Yoga Works teacher-trained and so very pleased that you feel as I do about them. I’ve stopped teaching for them because I will not feed the teacher factory by working for slave wages. But that’s another rant entirely.
Posted by: Liz · Oct 24, 04:46 PM · #
More AW – did you see this youtube one?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXi_ldNRNtM
the prickly goo and gooy prickles reference.
Posted by: e&sj · Oct 24, 05:34 PM · #
this all seems akin to john daido loori’s “the wind chime doesn’t seek to know the nature of wind…”
a kiss to youtube, for it has redeemed itself.
Posted by: Sara · Oct 25, 04:05 AM · #
Liz1 (?) here! Hi Owl. You know I don’t comment on these entries because I read them and it’s like the tv went to static. Talk to me about moose in the yard, describe creaky wooden floors that feel like old friends, or show me praying mantis who are waving hello… that I get. But I love reading you anyway. Liz2 can be the intellectual Liz, I’ll be the Liz without a toddler, but who lives with a cat who may have a higher IQ than many humans.
Henry blows a kiss.
Posted by: Liz · Oct 25, 09:52 AM · #
Ok… YA is a Dharma devotee who met E&SJ moonlighting ashtanga at the great rock, or maybe on the little island.
Yes, I’ve heard of Shinzen’s early days on Roy of Hollywood. That, and through his work on chronic pain, is how a lot of early students found him. Anyway, you sent me deep in to the AW youtube presence. Here is something great.
Sara! The JDL you sent (this one) caused a great stir in my friend H’s FB thread when I linked it. Very good. It is a delight to see you and read you.
Liz… you are the diva of immanence. People (and cats) with that kind of immediacy to experience are the best for this dream-lover. The moose in the yard was a fourteen-point buck elk this time (not such a surprise for Sara, maybe), though both are a somewhat menacing… albeit not as much as they are beautiful. I’ll get back to floorboards now…
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 25, 11:41 AM · #
JDL: best book about koans ever:
http://www.amazon.com/Arrows-Meeting-Mid-air-Library-Enlightenment/dp/0804830126/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpi_8
Posted by: karen · Oct 25, 12:16 PM · #
This looks incredible. I keep not getting excited about koans because then I won’t do anything else…
~C4Chaos just transcribed the passage from Shinzen that made me really attune to him…
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 25, 02:41 PM · #
FYI if you want to stir up the flicker crowd too—actually, “flicker” could be a great synonym for reality as we experience it— hunt down the JDL clip on photography. the gist: sensing into a kind of resonance with “object.”
and if yoga isn’t bringing you enough relaxation you could try reading thucydides for the nitty-gritty on naval battles with aforementioned spartans. like the yoga sutras, reading T in its ancient greek original yields optimum benefit.
Posted by: Sara · Oct 29, 12:27 AM · #
Awesome! I have only read the translations of T and Herodotus (several years ago we did a section on the Battle of Thermopalye in a class I taught here… the undergrads loved it.)
More interestingly, you read Greek? My dad tried to teach me Koine (for obvious reasons) when I was small, same time I was learning the alphabet from a book that began like this:
A. All we like sheep have gone astray.
B. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.
C. Children obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
Clearly I should have paid attention to the Greek instead. At this point, as they say, “It’s all devangari to me!”
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 29, 10:59 AM · #
Alcman: “She looks at me more meltingly than sleep and death”— Greek Lyric Poet Gettin’ the Drsti ON. I don’t think he was talking about Kali or the Spartans but I could be wrong. Thucydides: ten years ago, just myself and one other keyed-up, verb-conjugating classics fiend, at 8 a.m. We were coaxed through the saga by a brilliant professor who treated each naval enterprise like the last (floating) supper….
Posted by: Sara · Oct 29, 11:37 AM · #
That is pretty hot. Sara, for two terms, two friends and I tried to read the OT in Hebrew. It was kind of a disaster. (Hebrew is also Greek to me.) Seven a.m., PST. I wonder if those were the same days you were meeting at 8 in the mountain zone.
Posted by: (0v0) · Oct 30, 06:34 PM · #
“Reading” the Hebrew might be a kind of osmotic experience. Can one snuggle with letters? Maybe the bija mantra are something akin to that. The understanding that surpasseth grammar.
As for RF and AW, as has been pointed out above…there is considerable similiarity in the eye-brow moves, punctuation of punctuations, which is taught, I think, in the 5th series. It’s like the final relish on the grapheme of AUM. Or it’s like a get out of jail free card in monopoly that you never, never turn back in.
Posted by: Sara · Oct 31, 01:07 PM · #