Sometimes when you do your yoga practice it really works. Everything falls into place, the body moves effortlessly into position, each part blending into the singular harmony of the whole. In that harmony is an effortlessness of being that rests upon the spontaneous effort of action sustaining it. There is a lightness of being despite being well grounded and cradled in the grip of gravity. This is an openness of being despite being restrained into a fixed immobility of form. and within that the hands, the feet, the arms, the legs, the trunk, the spine, the chest, the back, the shoulders, the anus, the throat, the lungs all participate. and yet the essence of their particpation is that they give you no bother, despite their very precise and definite articulation in space against all the norms of your habituated bodyuse. they present you with no disturbing sensations, no blocks, no restrictions, no pains, no aches, no trembling. So that, in fact, when that moment comes and eveything falls into place you really are not bothered by any of them at all anymore, they slip below the threshold of your awareness. all of them. And you are gliding in the brilliant, effortless quiver of having somehow lost the sense of being limited to, restricted by, defined according to the range of movement, the shape, the capacity of your very own body. You have used the body to go beyond the body.

But what does that quaint and hackneyed phrase beyond the body actually mean. Are you drifting away from your phsyical body on the astral plane? Has your physical body dissolved into ashes and dust? Have you escaped from this dimension into another? NO. All that has changed is your perception. Your perception of your self. Your sense of self is no longer delineated within a specific quantifiable three dimensional structure. But you are still using it. You can still see your arm and hand the outline of your nose as you gaze forward in virabadrasana II.

So, what is the nature of this change in perception?? Now, as you look at these words on the screen you can see many different entities. All of which you could categorise in to one of two arbitrary categories. Those that are part of you: hands, fingers, outline of the nose, wrists...whatever. And those that are not you: keys, keyboard, letters on the keys, screen, mousepad etc etc. Those that belong to you are part of the subjectfield, you, and those that dont are part of the object field. But this is only a distinction as far as our shared convention of processing perceived phenomena into categorisable schema of differentiation is concerned. It is not so as far as the mechansim of perception itself is concerned.

The perceptual mechansim is very simple. There is that which is perceived. There is that which perceives. There is the act of perception. And that is it. Three categories. Subject, object and action. I hit you with my hand. I and my hand are the subject , you the object, hit the action. I close my hand into a fist. I am the subject, hand and fist are the object, close is the action. So, hand can be subject or object. As far as action is concerned. But not as far as habituated conceptualisation is concerned. I see your face. I see my hand. I feel your skin smooth as silk. I feel my skin tingling.

My body is an object of my perception.
My feelings are objects of my peception.
My thoughts are objects of my perception.

They are all objects. Every single one: as far as the act of perception is concerned. And perception, unlike language, unlike philosphy, unlike religion, is not a product of the human mind, it is a function of something beyond our control, beyond our design, the human nervous system, and more importantly, that which animates it. Corpses have nervous systems. So, what is it that enervates the nervous system. No need to speculate fruitlessly. We dont have the data to be sure. But we can suspect that our habituated sense of subject and object may not be an absolute. So just who exactly do you think you are. Are you the one that can do a perfect virabadrasana? Are you the one that has such fine, soft skin? Are you the one who's legs dont shake in utktasana? Are you the one whose has such fine, soft hair?? and what if you have a car accident and your face gets burned, your legs broken. No longer do you have fine soft skin and hair. No longer can you even contemplate tadasana, let alone virabadrasana, utktasana. But, its still you in there right?

So, then who are you if you are not what your body can do, can be. Are you the one who knows the words of every elvis presley song? Are you the one who thinks that it would be a good idea to take out life insurance? Are you the one who likes serious french movies?? But did you when you were 12? And who were you then? Someone else?

NO: you are not your body, you are not your thoughts, you are not your feelings. Although you keep acting and insisiting that you are. But when you really examine it you find that you are not. But as you cant seem able to find anything that you actually are you freak out and grab hold of something and say well no, in fact i am the one that can do a perfect virabadrasana, the one that has such fine, soft skin, the one who's legs dont shake in utktasana, the one who knows the words of every elvis presley song, the one who thinks that it would be a good idea to take out life insurance, the one who likes serious french movies.

Yoga is designed to help us to overcome that fear, to overcome that tendency to jump back from the brink of the awful truth that we are not the objects of our perception, however subtle and refined they may be. It is designed to take us by the hand and show us, step by step, that we are what lies behind our perceptions. First it shows us that we are not limited to the body:(asana). Then it shows us that we are not determined by our breath, nor by our emotions: (pranayama). Then it shows us that we do not exist in the incessant clamour of our minds: (meditation). For most peple this is a long, long journey, prolonged by our fear of giving up the known, of stepping out from the safety of our assumed identity. Most people never finish it at all. They stay in the pitlane. Never even get out on the track. But some do get out there. And, yes, its a dangerous place. Every belief you have ever had about who and what you are, about how things work and what they mean is going to have to be stripped away if you are to get to the finishing line. And the biggest one of those, the one you are going to invent ever more numerous and sophisticated vindications of, is your belief in your self as a seperate centre of action and intent and a separate source of differentiated consciousness: simply because you are, according to your criteria of perception and categorisation, a definable centre of perception, intention and action.

And they are all just beliefs. Free will. Do you know? How could you? Or do you just want it to be that way? Destiny. Do you know? How could you? Or do you just want it to be that way? Can we be honest about this. About our inability to really know. Freewill or destiny is a false dichotomy. It is based on the belief that there is an individual self with a separate, autonomous existence. There is not. That is just a function of perception. Just as the body is. When you do a yoga posture properly you no longer perceive the body in the way that you have been habituated to. You have overridden that particular mode of perception and entered into a more expansive but less defined and definable one.

The perceptual mechanism of the human nervous system has innate paramaters. These innate paramaters determine the realm and range of human perception. This range can be extended by instruments. But we never can know how much further there is to go. We can only know how far we have gone. So it appears to us that we exist in a four dimensional world of height, depth, breadht and time. Within that world we perecive objects that move, and those movements appear as actions, events within which entities act upon each other. When these entities have nervous sytems we attribute to them the operation of intent. Now, there is no doubt that intent exists. Will exists. But the question is where does it come from?

When a man pulls a trigger and a bullet flies from the barrel of a gun and it explodes out the back of another mans skull, we know who to blame, dont we? The man who pulled the trigger. Or the man who paid him to. Or the dead man for raping the paying mans wife. Or the dead mans father for beating him and his mother when he was a child. Or.....and it goes on. It is not possible to accurately define any act, any event, and object, any person without exhaustively explaining its relationship to every other element of the entire fabric of existence past and present. Anything less would be less than the truth. And the truth is what we need if we are considering, in the name of justice, the taking of another life, or the removal of freedom from another human being. But we are not lawyers or judges, or politicians. We do not have to act as if we are party to truth. We are simply enquiring into the nature of action. To find out who we really are.

Of course where human organsims are considered to be separate entities they must therefore be taken to be responsible for their actions. And they are. Put poison down your throat, or anothers, and you will suffer the consequences. But the question remains unanswered. Who is doing the pouring and who suffers the consequences. For we discovered earlier the I is not the phsyical senstions, not the emotions, not the thoughts that come and go. Even though the consistency with which they come and go lends itself with great power to the notion that they are. I am angry. feel, think, say and especially act that out enough and you will be known as an angry person. By those who see it. But maybe your mother and your children never see that, they only see the warm, open generous you. Which one are you. Neither and both.

The fabric of spacetime is dotted with centres of consciousness. These centres (human organisms) appear to be constantly doing this and that to each other. But is it really like that? How convinced everyone was that the sun spun round the earth until further irrefutable data was available. How many times has that happened? We shape reality on the basis of the interaction between our available information, and our perceptual framework (which includes our belief system as well as the paramaters of our nervous system). And yet, despite being aware of the historical fact of that databank constantly growing, and thereby changing the perceived structure of reality, we are still convinced that the one we have is the right one. That we can see things the way they are. That we can trust the union of our perceptions and our collective cumulative data. That is the definition of folly. Or is it the definition of arrogance. Either way it is the nature of functionality.

Upon profound and sustained examination, it turns outs that we do not live in a spacetime arena of separate solid objects acting on each other. This is just how it appears from the specific, shared frame of reference of the human nervous system conditoned by the course of human history and its vast accumulation of data. There are other frames of reference equally valid. How about that of a neutrino, and there are billions more of them than there are of us? to a neutrino spacetime is a vast panorama of emptiness peppered with flashing quanata of energy (neutrinos) and various oddly indefinable shimmers in the fabric of spacetime itself (the solid objects so beloved of the human nervous system), as they go shooting through the vast ataomic spaces (we are 99.99% emptiness and 0.001% protons, neutrons and electrons which rotate and oscillate so fast that they create, to our perecptual framework but not to neutrinos, the appearance of solidity) of the structure of a socalled human organism, a socalled tree, rock, leadpipe. Whichever perspective you take, that of human beings, that of neutrinos, that of burning hydrogen clouds (stars), that of burnt out collapsed hydrogen clouds (blackholes), it can only be partial, incomplete, inadequate to define the way things actually are in and of themselves.

Patanjali says that the inner nature of every phenomeneon, every object of perception (every phenomenon is an act of perception) is formlessness or emptiness (shunyata): an object cannot be contained within the constraints of any definable form. So in asana you discover that as regards the body, it is not how it habitually appears. Then with the breath, with feelings, emotions, thoughts: all empty.

What does that mean empty:

all phenomena are impermanent. exist only and always for a limited duration. consider the lifespan of a feeling within the context of a life. the existence of planet earth. the duration of our sun. a mere snap. but how many lives have been destroyed on the altar of a single feeling of fear, rejection, hoplessness, desire?

all pheneomena are insubstantial. they do not in fact have any actual identity as something separate from every other so called object or phenomenon. to define one phenomenon is to analyse them all. every phenomenon is just a momentary bead of dew on the infiniteternal fabric of spacetime.

all phenomena are illusory. they exist as functions of a specific perceptual framework. change the perceptual framework and you have a different phenomenon. ( all phenomena are acts of perception).

The self is a perceptual phenomenon. Its reality pertains only to its perceptual framework, which is its own. Its reality is neither absolute nor permanent, and has no actual substance. It is mere froth on a daydream. Oh but what intoxicate froth it is. How compulsive its atttraction. How deadly its tendrils, where we lapse in anguish, guilt, shame, hope, longing and despair. The ocasional moment of delight notwithstanding.

Having destroyed the illusory identification with and as physical senstion, emotion, feeling, thought, what does yoga bring us to? They call it sat-cit-ananda: being consciousness bliss. When i say i am hot, that is wrong. The body is hot, hungry, tired. The mind is afriad, sad, in love. All of these states are objects of perception. They are not what we are. What we most deeply are is the I that has become identified with objects of perception, with acts of perception and with the perceiver of those specific perceptions, which is what we superficially seem to be. This identification is what yoga is designed to free us from. That freedom is the realisation that i am not the body. I am not the mind. I am not their actions. I am not feelings, emotions or thoughts. I am not their habituated unique, predicatable and definable coalescence. I am not any of that. I simply am. And in that being (sat) there is awareness (cit) and the nature of that awareness is delight (ananada). But as soon as i identify with any object of perception i am thrown onto the wheel of samsara, suffering, birth and death. But that that i am is neither born nor dies: is neither created nor unmade. That which i am is eternally unchanged by the multiplicity of its expression through the eternal and infinite fabric of spacetime.

Godfri is a bodymind. Thats all: born one day to die. But i am not that. I am not godfrey. I am being godfrey, for just a moment. But i am also being you too, and president bush and binladen, and david beckham. When godfri looks deep inside the sensations of his body, the flux of his emotions, the cascade of his thoughts and finds that core that has always been there and always been the same untouched and unchanged by any experience that is the very same i that you find when you go there in yours. There is only one I and its names are many its attribute one: God.

The body acts, but it is only the agent. Godfri participates in events, transmits actions: but only as an instrument, a tool. The source of the action, the cause of the event lies deeper than the oragnisms that carry them out. We are all pieces on the chessboard of Gods self entertainment. Some of us seem weak and impotent, some of us seem strong, some of us with daring and luck, seem capable of profound tansformation from weak to strong. But in fact the power resides all in the chessplayer. And there is only one.

There is only God. Manifest in a million million million to the power of trillion everchanging forms. Some of them appear to have free will. But only from a limited point of view and from that point of view also yes, they do have responsibility. But responsible people are not responsible for their responsibility. Irresponsible people are not responsible for their irresponsibility. Thats down to God. We are all as responsible as we are. Some of us more than others. but that is our conditioning, our karma, our programming: or Gods grace, Gods will.

When you know this beyond any doubt you can never again blame anyone for anything. Every one of us is nothing more and nothing less than an agent of God's incomprehensible grace. Not even yourself. You are not to blame, i am not to balme. There is no culpability: no blame, no guilt. Imagine how beautiful the world if everyone could live without personalsing actions, free from guilt, shame, blame, resentment, pride, manipulation. Imagine how much more free you would be if even only you could feel like that from the depths of your heart. Let your practice take you there, it is inviting you.

That from which all that appears to be arises, that which sustains all that appears to be, that to which all that appears to be returns: - the source, sustenance and womb of creation, (cosmic)consciousness, existence. That is God. Not a superpowerful person. Not a superanything being. How little of the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation is accessible to the human eye as light? Likewise how little of the nature of the infiniteternal source is accessible to the intellect of man.

When you say "i am awake, i am alive" that to which the word i refers is God. God is your fundamental nature. your fundamental nature is the eternalinfinite. But consciousness creates the appearance of a perceiving subject and a perceived object. This creates the apperance of a split, within which arises the sense of separateness. This sense is reinforced by every perception, constantly, until the perceiving has made an apparently intrinsic object of itself as a subject in that it takes for actual its existence by its opposition to other apparent objects to which it is istelf an object. Subject and object being two inseperable sides of a single coin. Then this subjectobject refines its sense of distinctiveness and separation by identifying with certain categories of its perception: "i am fat, i am happy, i am patient, i am considerate. Then that center of consciosuness loses touch with its deeper fundamental nature, the eternalinfinite. Whereas in fact the infiniteternalone perpetually, as far as time is concerned, manifests its nature as consciousness. This manifestation expresses in a movement of energy which like its source is infinite and eternal. Therefore every possibility is contained within it, without exception: most of these way beyond the comprehenson of the human nervous system.

One of these possibilities is the vibrational paradigm of the human organism: most pertinently the human nervous system. This is a very condensed, responsive and potent manifestation of energy and consciousness: having not only vitality, sentience, motion and reproduction but also, most importantly, selfconsciousness. This particular quality, selfconsciosuness, is the key to being human. Selfconsciousness is the dynamic whereby the eternalinfinite refines its localisation to its maximum potential. Each centre of selfconsciousness, each human organsim is an aperture of cosmic consciosuness. An aperture through which God becomes aware of itself: to one degree or another. Mostly only a little. However each of these apertures has the hypothetical possibility to open fully as far as its innate hardware is concerned (the nervous system). Yet each one is also unquley conditioned to a very sepcific actualisation of that possibility at any moment. Rare it is for this inherent potential to fully unfold.

Without the energetic patterns that create a sentient organism capable of selfconsciousness (human or otherwise) there is no awareness of. Human (and other similar) organisms are the medium of Gods awareness of, which is consciousness localised in approariate form. However the fact that they arise in the spacetime arena that is the context of manifestation means they are all subject to the coordinates of time and space: they have specific (even if mobile) location and they have limited duration. This means that they are limited in time and space. This limitation in time and space imposes a limitation on awareness. So, each centre of consciousness, or locomind (consciousness subject to location, but also because of being partial inherently tending towards a neurotic insanity) has a specific and limited framework of perceptibility. Each one also tends to identify with more intense, proximate and repetetive aspects of that framework, givng it a specific, differentiable sense of self that is conditioned by its conceptual framework which is itself conditioned by the locominds perceptual mechanisms and its location.

Yoga is desigend to reveal these perceptual mechansims and their conceptual fields. As it does so it revelas that all our perceptions are conditioned projections. They do not show us what actually exists but only what appears to exist to our peceptual framework. As our preceptions are revealed for what they are, their underlying perceptual mechanisms are revealed, then the tendency and its ingrained habit of identifying with our perceptions is undermined until eventually it is totally eclipsed. When a locomind no longer identifies with its perceptions the true nature of the self begins to manifest. That which underlies, and sustains the mechanism of perception, that to which the word i in fact refers becomes known to be that from which all that appears to be arises, that which sustains all that appears to be, that to which all that appears to be returns: - the source, sustenance and womb of existence: (cosmic)consciousness. God.

Everything always originates in, belongs to and points to God. Other than God exists not. You as an independent entity are simply a mirage emanating from a particular, transient vortex of shakti manifesting in a partial physicality as a particular, conditioned and transient configuration of psychobehavioural tendencies whose consistency in time, space and instrument spawns the illusion of an independent separate volitional self. This configuration of tendencies and the events in which it participates as if an apparently selfexistent entity in posession of the free will to make choices are, while appearing otherwise, actually nothing other than the momentary localisation of infiniteternal presence (grace), which is the infiniteternal karmic structure of spacetime which is the one body (buddhism) of consciousness in movement (advaita), or the body of God (theism).

The unequivocal realisation (not belief, not understanding, but the manifestation of its reality in terms of an innate disposition of perceptual and conceptual responsiveness) of this brings an end to all doubt, guilt, anxiety, shame, blame, envy, resentment,pride, manipulation and anxiety as the sense of self remains constantly revealed as nothing other than the appearance that is all that it is. Within the the aura of that appearence life goes on, but with a lightness of touch, a deep peaceful and spontaneous equanimity, that easily slips into delight, generosity, appreciation, gratitude, reverence, awe, compassion, playfulness and love, and a complete absence of the need to be in control of, plan or know anything, although such conditioned tendencies may nevertheless manifest .

What appears takes its existence within its own selfreferential realityparadigm. To the constituents of the mirage all is real. Birth, life, death. The body and its actions. The mind and its decisions. Within the human sphere, the making of these decisions, which are simply a precognition of imminent and inevitable eventuality, the taking of these actions, which are actually a localised coalesence of the infiniteternal karmic structure of spacetime which is the body of God, is dependent upon the instrumentality of phantasms arising (being born) and dissolving (dying) within the eternal flux of the mirage of maya. only by this instrumentality can existence take place, any thing exist.

You (in your partial reflectedness as name and form) do exist. You (name and form) do make choices. You (name and form) do take actions. But the choices and the actions are entirely conditioned by the one body of God. They are yours only in that you carry them out, but you do so on behalf of it all. You (name and form) are not the doer. Conventionally and pragmatically you are responsible, ultimately and psychologically you are not. In that they are appearences you also are only an appearence. In that that appearence exists you exist. In this paradox we live. And at the melting heart of this paradox the you that you actually are is not the apparent doer of the deeds that bears your name but the very source itself from which the total appearance arises. You ( in your original unfragmentedness as the unnamable formless consciousness labelled God) are not the doer. You (God or consciousness) are not defined in the deed. You (God or consciousness) are the doing of every deed there ever was is or shall be.

You are your name and form and you are the nameless formlessness from which all names and forms arise. Living this paradox effortlessly is freedoms insignia.

Full enjoyment of the role that you (name and form) are playing requires the recognition that it is a role scripted elsewhere by you (God or consciousness) and therefore utterly beyond your (name and form) control, and that it is a role absolutely necessary and essential to existence, and therefore fundamentally and inviolably perfect, and the recognition that it is a role that you (name and form) have no choice but to play perfectly from beginning to end, however you (name and form) may be scripted by yourself (God or consciousness) to perceive it.

All actions require the participation of the infiniteternal karmic structure of spacetime which is the one body, or the body of God, and the participation of the instrument (name and form) conditioned to carry it out. All actions consist of both an impersonal and a personal element. The personal is apparent. The impersonal is actual. Existence takes place in the realm of the apparent. To deny the personal appearence is to negate life and existence, which is all that there is to be known of God. To deny the impersonal actuality is to misrepresent the nature of that appearence, of life, of existence, of God. A misrepresentation that ineluctably spawns suffering. Dukkha. The cessation of dukkah is to see through the illusory nature of the great play, mahashaktilila, and its players, to that ineffable shunyata of which it is the spontaneous emanation, which seeing then frees the players playing from doubt, guilt, anxiety, shame, blame, envy, resentment, manipulation and pride and informs the players playing with delight, generosity, appreciation, gratitude, reverence, awe, compassion, playfulness and love.