RIP, Sweet Voyeuse · 3 January 2008
So I am back on the pranayama. I let it go exactly a year ago because I had enough else to do. I initiated a 200-hour teacher training and, the same day, began practicing with a teacher who would bring a subtle deep attention, and another shade of tapas entirely, to the ashtanga.
I figured I had all the practice I could do without draining too much energy off the research project. Also: pranayama is scary. Good thing to avoid.
I only practice the first, second and last of the sixfold ashtanga sequence. The other three are beyond my security clearance, thankfully. Returning to my notes on ratios and reps over the lunch hour, I ran across this passage from Laura Huxley in an old notebook. I’ve been thinking of her the past two weeks since she died. Sounds like she was bright and wonderful, like she is below, all century long.
The passage is a little demented/fermented—one of the chewy fragments which Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass’ initial book on meditation, comprises. And it is accordingly sweet.
Voyage in peace, old girl.
It is easier for me to tell you about non-meditation than about meditation. I sit or walk looking at myself non-meditating—absorbed in dramas and melodramas, heart-gripping tragedies, loneliness, shabbiness, delights. As from another planet I look at them, through a telescope. Then there is a little space between me and my all-pervasive feelings. Nevertheless, I still feel I am my feelings, as well as whatever it is that elicits them, plus a third entity looking at the drama of separation between subject and object. Is that the Eternal Triangle? After a short while of looking at the show I take off to a more distant planet and with a more power telescope I look at myself diligently looking at myself. Surely this self-fascination is not meditation. I get up and do something pleasant, useful or beautiful.
Then once again the voyeuse, I go back to peering at my consciousness. It is garbage! Garbage!? The word inspires me because I use my kitchen garbage aesthetically and usefully… (to make compost). What about applying the same principle to the content of my consciousness? I decide to recycle every bit of it into a thought of goodwill for anyone or anything which presents itself.
It becomes a fun game to look at a thought-feeling and convert it into a blessing for the subject of the thought-feeling. Even science agrees now that “thoughts are things.” Surely if random thoughts are consciously converted into a message of goodwill, only something worthwhile can result….
I understand that meditation is to be undertaken in purity of intention and not for results. If viewed as a utilitarian project like the one I propose, then meditation becomes but another, although higher, achievement of that ego about which so many seem to be worried. The garbage recycling game, then, is not meditation because it is ambitious and it has goals and results: the improvement of relationships, ambience, digestion, wrinkles, etc. It is not meditation but by playing it lightly and constantly, and if “as luck would have it that God is on our side,” it could happen (why not?) that one day garbage, recycling, thought, thinker, devils, blessings—all of it becomes one, all separation vanishing in a moment.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, having a body
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I must confess my utter love for all thinking which has the rainbow of psychedelics on it (yes, this in some cases lures me to utter crap, but it is worth the price). The non-meditative mind, doing the imagery “inside out,” priceless! Turin was also, I’m sure you recall, Nietzsche’s stomping ground back in the day. Correspondence, sister, when we both get the time: I miss having you in my head.
Posted by: patrick · Jan 3, 01:57 PM · #
I really can’t believe I never knew about Laura Huxley! She’s fascinating. Thanks for posting these links and pieces.
My teacher is adding on sequences to our little morning pranayama group. I prefer doing it in a group – groupthink (isn’t that a Huxleyism? or is it orwellian?) keeps me a little more meditative.
Posted by: katie · Jan 3, 06:04 PM · #
Oh wow. I see she was born in Turin not too long after he died there. Was it not there that he died? At least Turin was the site of his horse-embracing incident… brought on, I suspect, not by syphlis but by Gopi Krishna style disturbances. Capiche?
But it would have meant a 10-year tarry in the bardo for them to be the same soul; and something tells me Nietzsche wasn’t actually that lucky in his next life. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 3, 06:18 PM · #
Hee hee. “Groupthink” is actually from my world—social psychologist Irving Janis.
Group pranayama would be nice, especially because of the kind of meditation it would enable. (How great to be able to this and the chanting with G.) When I did the 108 sun salutations recently I found it put me in a unique headspace beacuse I had to hold to the count relentlessly. A strong focus for the mind, but it would also be nice to do the 108 with someone else counting so I could just place the mind on the breath. I hang my analog watch over my ear in pranayama, and the click of it dominates. Not bad, but another way would be interesting and maybe lengthen out the brain waves.
I’m guessing that later I won’t need the watch to keep track of ratios and will be able to feel my way through.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 3, 06:36 PM · #
Totally. For a philologist to turn genealogist (of morals, of all things!) and then to appear in what one might generously describe as nearly ALL twentieth-century continental philosophy, would indicate some powerful magic. There is a lot of interesting “insanity” in the last, say, 150 years, Nietzsche and Artaud probably the best-known two cases. See also the logorrhea of Whitman and Miller and those wonderful fever dreams in all of Dostoevsky and Rimbaud’s famous “line of flight” toward one-legged piratedom. Existentialism, however, never was quite as insane as it has been billed to be.
Posted by: patrick · Jan 4, 06:25 AM · #
Good morning!
Will you explain this to me sometime in person? I’m going out on a limb and will admit that I don’t understand it, and I would like to.
Posted by: Anna · Jan 4, 07:34 AM · #
Yes, I will explain in person soon. You’ll be intrigued! In essence, we are suggesting that both GK and FN tapped a power that outdid them horribly… before it made them masters.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 4, 09:58 AM · #
I have to find out about the line of flight. Piratedom is important.
You saying Hegel was not insane? We’ll have to consult the other owl about that!
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 4, 10:04 AM · #
Want to see a bad movie that’ll fill you in? Total Eclipse, with, now GET THIS, Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud!! I also, back in the day, fell in love with Paul Schmidt’s translation of Rimbaud; it’s much more faithful to the spirit than the letter (in some cases it’s a radical departure from the letter), but I love it. Hegel—hmm. Certainly he was a super hero, but nuts? Or maybe I just don’t know his bio well enough…tracking link now…
Posted by: patrick · Jan 4, 10:41 AM · #
Why is pranayama scary?
Posted by: Carl · Jan 4, 01:53 PM · #
Owl, on counting – one day we did 12 gayatri mantras and I noticed that my teacher uses his hand as a mala, placing his thumb in each finger joint until the breath or chant is over. So when you’ve gone over your whole hand (4 fingers, 3 joints each = 12) you do the other. And then you do the other hand. Both hands 4 times = 108.
Posted by: KATIE · Jan 4, 02:40 PM · #
Carl, for many people pranayama (especially rechaka kumbhaka) brings up fear of death.
The HYP (see for example Chapter 2, Verses 39 and 40, here) says that pranayama actually conquers the fear of death. Presumably this happens by the mechanism of making you experience hints of death itself? (See Chapter 2, Verse 3.)
I still fear death. Not in the same terrified, denial-filled, life-after-death believing way that I did a decade ago. But yeah, there’s fear. And it’s pretty interesting to come up against that in raw form, just sitting there on the floor of my office.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 5, 06:21 PM · #
I have jorneyed to the Bardo, and while it’s not Brigitte, it’s not so bad.
Posted by: eor · Jan 5, 10:40 PM · #
Oh. I understand now.
Welcome back.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 5, 10:55 PM · #
ooh, I cannot spell anyting! My favorite, or a favorite of lots about LH is when she outed Aldous for lying about his clothes in Doors of Perception; when they were living in L.A. and he described dropping acid and how his gray wool trousers looked all freaky. She said he was really wearing jeans but didn’t want his readers to think of him that way!
Posted by: eor · Jan 5, 10:56 PM · #
Ha! You must have met her before the Bardo… maybe in the pools at Esalen.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jan 5, 11:02 PM · #
Antonin was there, too! What Burke’s Piratage here? Nothing even close to Aristotle Tottle, “the feeble and timid pirate”.But I don’t get Dostoevsky and Rimbaud together; why?
Posted by: eor · Jan 5, 11:21 PM · #