In order for all the juicy fruit associated with yoga to manifest, what most needs to be seen through is this whole process of claiming physical and mental activity as your own. Imposing proprietory rights over actions, feelings and thoughts that happen to happen specifically within or to or through or by your organism, your body-mind. Patanjali gives us a blueprint for understanding this process of the personalisation or the identification of actions at the beginning of the yoga sutras. In the first chapter he is defining the process of going beyond duality in cognition. Transcending the duality of cognition, closing the subject object split. Then he says that the problem of being human is a splitting of subject from object. A split within which you feel cut off, you feel separate from objects of perception. Then you feel the need to control them. Patanjali says this split rests upon five things which he calls the hindrances or the afflictions: the word in sanskrit is klesa.

The thing about the five hindrances is that they are just there and all you can do is see through them. They are not to be got rid of. When you see through them they lose their power. The five hindrances are: avidya, asmita, raga, dvesa and abhinivesa. Of course they can´t really be translated one word to one word. Avidya, is a negation of vidya which means understanding, seeing clearly. Avidya means no understanding or ignorance. But it particularly means no wisdom. It doesn´t mean no knowledge, it means no wisdom. No understanding of the way things are is the first hindrance. The second one, asmita, is translated normally as egoism, that which creates the sense “I am something”. I am alive. I am conscious. But within the I am something, asmita is the I am. The principle of identifying with the vehicle of experience. With the bodimind. Body and mind are not separate so asmita is the principle of identifying with the bodimind: which also means identifying with the label of the bodimind or the name. So it´s identifying with name and form

The next two are attachment and aversion. These are obvious; you know what attachment is and you know what aversion is. And the fifth one is abhinivesa which means literally self clinging or, egotism as opposed to egoism. A little ‘t’ in the middle making a big distinction between egotism and eogism. They are both part of the same process whereby egotism feeds and expresses egoism. The dynamic of this process is the oscaillation between aversion and attachment. All of which rests on and feeds ignorance. This is the dynamic between the five.

But it all arises from ignorance. As long as there is ignorance there is identification with the body. As long as there is identification with the body you have attachment or aversion. “I like this, I don´t like that”. But this is a statement of ignorance. There is no liker or disliker in the body. The body itself likes the taste of this food and not of that food. This body likes beer this one likes shandy. The mind also has its likes and dislikes. Bodiminds have attachment and aversion and what happens when the consistency of attachments and aversions become evident then you start saying, “ “I like beer” or “I like blue eyed blond guys who do really good Uddiyanabandhas”. Or whatever. So attachment and aversion are quite simple. But Patanjali makes it very clear where they come from. They come from pleasure and pain. Obviously pleasure creates attachment and pain creates aversion. Very simple, a child can understand that.

Egoism is identification of consciousness with its instrument: the human body. It´s not a big problem. It´s not inherently a problem. Not only is it not inherently a problem that consciousness is identified with the body, but it is necessary. Otherwise if I say “Lily”, she ain´t gonna respond if there isn´t identification of consciousness with the instrument. The problem comes with abhinivesa which can be defined very simply as identification of the instrument with its actions. So you´ve got two layers of identification or two levels of personalisation and the first one is not really personalisation. You could say that it is but in terms of my language and how I´m using it, it´s the second one, when you identify actions with their instruments or you identify instruments by their actions that is personalisation. The former, egoism, is just the necessary recognistion of the separateness of the instrument. Without this recognition the organsim can not only not relate to other organisms, but it cannot survive.

The identification of consciousness with the body is one thing and is not inherently a problem. It´s a little problematical because it leads to the other but it´s not inherently a problem. But identifying the bodimind with those actions is the problem. Those actions are not the problem. The instrument is not the problem. The body is not the problem. The mind is not the problem. The action is not the problem. The problem is personalising the actions as if they belonged to, by some kind of proprietorial contract, the instrument whereby they become evident.

I took no thought whatsoever to raise that cup to my mouth and to drink the tea, so as far as I am concerned I didn´t do anything: but as far as you´re concerned I did. That´s the assumption that you´re likely to make: Godfrey just took a sip of tea. But actually there was no Godfrey participating in that. There was a body, there wasn´t even really a mind. And the body made that action because it had to. Because its own understanding of fluid levels and hydration levels in the body was such that it had better take some more liquid and so it did. The body taking care of itself. Now that doesn´t mean that my mind could not have gone, “oh I think I´m thirsty perhaps I need some liquid. I think I´ve got some tea, let me have a look. Yes I do. Maybe I´ll let go of the stick and take it”. This happens sometimes. When you´re really not in a trusting relationship with life and your body, this happens all the time. You reckon that things can only happen effectively if you think about them. Whereas it´s not the case and at other times you know it´s not the case: that things only happen effectively when you don´t think about them. You know that when you are driving a car, when you think about it it´s not happening effectively. When you no longer have to think about it´s happening effectively

So this morning all of you came into the dome. Some of you perhaps didn´t really feel like it. Tom! So he wakes up and after a certain amount of time he remembers he is in Ibiza. You don´t necessarily remember where you are straight away when you wake up just as you don´t always necessarily remember who you are when you wake up. Just as you don´t remember what you are, man or woman, is not self evident immediately. Your personal identity is not self evident immediately. That you´ve even got a body is not immediately self evident. Sometimes all these things come on really fast, sometimes they don´t.

Awareness, consciousness, is not dependent on identifying itself with the body or any of its aspects, DNA, chromosones, x and y. But anyway, Tom woke up this morning and “oh fuck I´m still Tom”. And then he goes, “oh shit, I´m still in Ibiza”. And then something happened. So what happened to Tom was he thought, “oh shit but it would be such a waste of money, no I don´t care about that. But oh shit Godfrey will think I´m a wanker, I´d better go. I´d better go to the class because he keeps catching me down town when I haven´t been to class looking really chilled and having a good time”. So Tom has this little debate and as a result he comes to the dome instead of going down town and doing what he thought he really wanted to do. You can look around you and you can see there´s a few spaces and some people didn´t make that choice. Perhaps in this debate that Tom had, perhaps the reason why he came to the dome was even though it might have been the harder option than rolling over and going back to sleep he actually felt like it more. Now like it more doesn´t mean going to the dome. Like it more means what happens as a result of going to the dome also. How he´s going to feel in his body after having done the practice. How he´s going to feel in his mind after having done the practice.

In other words the so called decision to go to the dome was not about going to the dome. The so called decision was about his quality of life. And the so called decision which was really about the quality of life rather than about “ah, must make myself go and sweat for two hours”, this so called decision to do that can hardly be really said to be a decision when it´s looked at really closely. It´s just the inevitable recognition of a preference operating in the moment with greater insistence than any other preference. I would rather that than anything else.

In other words a decision is just the mental recognition of the inevitability of an action. But many actions are taken, such as mine to lift the cup, which have no decision. No thought. No consideration, no apparent choice: roll over or go to dome, pick up the cup or not. But it´s still desire, prefernce driving the action. When desire drives the action without a decision, without a sense of a choice, without a sense of freedom of choice to make a decision, there is no decider. There is no thinker. Not only is there no thinker because there is no thinking, but there is no arm mover. Arm is just moving. There is no tea taster. Tea is just going down. And this is all that it means, the absence of the self. Godfrey is not there. Tom may have been participating in his discussion about going to the dome. But when he got to the mat there would have been moments when Tom was just not there. The impact of that decision no longer requiring any more conscious decisions for some time. So then Tom can go back to sleep where he wanted to go in the first place: while the body continues in action and the mind continues taking stock of those actions and sometimes taking stock of them with the help of Tom, but not always.

So when Tom says “I´m doing this” or when you say “Godfrey picked up the cup”, this is abhinivesa, this is self clinging. This is identifying an action with its instrument, which means that you are attributing the action to the instrument. This process very often is taken to imply a choice. That maybe it didn´t have to happen. In other words if Tom broke his neck in headstand, it would be quite likely that he would say “shit, I should never have gone to the dome, should never have listened to that bastard”, or whatever. Those kinds of thoughts are likely to arise as a result of a situation like that happening. Yet this is just pure speculation that he could have not come to the dome. All that can be actually said is that something happened. He came to the dome and that can be said to be true and he broke his neck. That can be said to be true. But if he is attributing the breaking of his neck to the fact that Paul fell out of his headstand and dislodged his elbow and is thinking about if there is a lawyer present that he can get onto the case and sue Paul or Godfrey, then he is extracting Paul´s falling from the whole and Paul´s falling was not a consequence of anything other than the moment as a whole; the heat, his genetics, his available energy, what the last thing that was said to him last night was which affected his sleep in unpredictable ways, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, going back to the beginning of time. In that extraction the action is identifeid with its instrument. It is personalised.

So this is what Patanjali is talking about when he is inviting us to investigate actions. It doesn´t just mean, “who hit me?”. It means investigating how hitting happens, how hitting arises, how feeling, how receiving the blow arises. And into the investigation of the interconnecting web of factors and forces that coalesce in an action, that inevitably coalesce in an action, into that recognition of that network the claiming of the actions or the attributing of actions to instruments disappears. And when there is no attribution of instrumentality to an action, that an action belongs to its instrument, when that isn´t happening, then the happenings of life happen very easily, very freely without serious complaint. Now it doesn´t mean without liking and disliking. You might go “oh shit, I don´t like this”. But not personalising it means you don´t go, “oh shit, I wish it hadn´t happened” or “oh shit, I wish I wasn´t doing it”. Well if you really wish you weren´t doing it, don´t do it. And if you find that you can´t not do it then you are seeing through the illusion of volition and personal self and you´re seeing that that´s just a picture that´s being painted by your perception because your perception is by its nature limiting. Perception is limiting and through habit is focussing on isolating a few objects whether they are actions or objects that you are extracting from the whole field of the happening of life. And you are saying that this, this, this and this exist in a linear, exclusive relationship and they are the cause of this action. Because awareness has become limited. Because awareness has shrunk, contracted. But when you start to relax and the body becomes more spacious and the mind becomes more spacious and there is more room for awareness to open then you see that this line of cause and effect is just a tiny fraction of a multidimensional web of cause and effect.

This is the web which in Zen they call the OneBody, in Hinduism they call many things, Indra´s net for one. This is the net, the web, and the nodes of the net are the actions or the instruments that you are extracting. My net has different nodes from yours because my extraction is different from yours. When you get used to seeing this web, in the seeing of the web, in the seeing of the whole, the significance that you gave to the part disappears and you can no longer attribute causation into a narrow field or a narrow line. And causation in seen to be distributed evenly throughout the whole network. Throughout the whole web.

Philosophers, they have their distinctive terminology for different kinds of cause. The instrument is what is normally called the immediate cause, but it´s not the primary cause, it´s not the true cause, it´s not the essential cause, you know and you´ve heard of the word first cause. That´s what philosophers are looking for. First cause. But there is no first cause, that´s why philsophers can´t find it. Because wherever you go in the net it´s multi-dimensional, you can´t see the beginning. The so called first cause is total causation. The cause is the net. There is no single part of the net that can be extracted and said that´s the cause of life, or that´s the cause of my life or that´s the cause of my action. Each aspect of the net, each action that arises is an inherent expression of the whole, is generated by the whole and is necessary to the whole. And into the recognition of that wholeness, separateness, is seen through. Now this doens´t mean that separateness disappears; I can still make a distinction between all of your different bodies otherwise I wouldn´t be able to help you. But, you know there was a time not so long ago where I couldn´t really see through separateness and so I might have hit Sarah, as I hit Sarah today, with anger instead of hitting her more with amused affection. Because I would have thought she is being willfully stupid. She is stupidly ignoring what I am saying and not responding, is how I would have interpreted it in the past. But now I can see well, for some reason that it is happening like that; maybe if I slap her on the head things will change and she´ll start to realise that left means left and foot means foot and knee means knee and that they all have their particular relationship to each other. And maybe not: lets just see what happens. And of course this is not happening in the minds thinking but in the dynamic of instantaneous action as I drift round the dome responding to your collective and individual truancies.

So in Patanjali´s presentation of the five hindrances he is giving a slightly technical but very clear insight into how we personalise from and into ignorance; how we personalise actions by attributing actions to their instruments within the context of having identified consciousness with its instrument. So that part of it leads to the idea that there is a separate consciousness in here. When consciousness identifies with the instrument identification means, and this is the impression that we have but it´s not the conclusion that need be drawn, the impression that we have is that the consciousness operating within the instrument is different from the consciousness in other instruments because the instruments are different. Because the instruments are separate and because the actions done by the instruments are different but more importantly because the mental activity of each instrument, because the perception, because the content of consciousness is different. So then instead of actually looking at consciousness we are looking at its content and in seeing the difference and the separateness between content we are assuming a difference in consciousness.

But just to take something that you are all familiar with, when you say “oh let´s go and see Bill”, “oh, I was just going to say that”. This is an indication of no separateness in consciousness. Happening within separateness within the instruments of consciousness and it´s only through the instrument of consciousness that consciousness can have any content. Without the instrument there is no content. Without the instrument there is no conciousness-of. So that means when you drop the body in asana, when you let go of the body and you drop the breath in pranayama and you drop the mind, there is no content. You have these moments of no content to your consciousness but you are not unconscious. You are still awake. But there is nothing to be said about being awake because consciousness no longer has a content, so consciousness then is no longer being identified with its instrument and asmita is not working and because asmita is not working avidya is not happening.

I know I´ve actually discussed habit before but it continues to interest me. It seems to be to have an opportunity for a false experience of autonomy in the sense that the breath can be autonomic. People can feel that they are not controlling and that they are not the doer inside the habit and in that situation the habit would have to be reassociated with the person, you know, re-clung to, in order to work on it or do anything about it or let it go. I´d like you to talk more about habit.

You can´t really let go of habits, in the sense of getting rid of them. They finish when they finish but the letting go or the surrender that Patanjali talks about is just releasing the identification with it. So then the habit in its continuation is no longer problematical in terms of your appreciation of your life. It can be still be problematical to your lungs if it´s a habit of smoking cigarettes. But there´s a level of the problematical experience that´s not there when you are no longer saying to yourself “this is a bad habit. I must give it up”. This fails very often anyway, as you know. Sometimes it succeeds and sometimes you get the impression when you succeed in breaking a habit that you did that through the force of will but it may not actually be like that. It might just be that force of circumstance was leading to that point, elicited that desire now, “why now to give up the habit?”, in the recognition that it was about to stop and then applying will out of habit. The habit is then I will stop this habit. And then it stops. And so then there is an identification with the stopping, the stopping is identified with the thinking I must stop it and attributed to it.

So all I would really like to say is you don´t have to worry about stopping your habits. All you can do to give up a habit, or to invite the letting go of a habit, is to see into it, to see the habit. And some habits you don´t realise how harmful they are and very often in the seeing of the harm, they start to be undermined just by the seeing. So a lot of people don´t really realise, they have heard but they haven´t experienced that smoking is bad for you, but then one day, after having smoked a lot you get up in the morning and you do your pranayama and you feel something. If this happens day after day after day you are going to give up smoking from the desire not to have that unpleasant feeling in your practice which is so precious to you. Each time you have that desire you say “I must give up smoking” and eventually when you do, you can tell yourself that you stopped because you kept saying “I must give up”. Whereas perhaps it was just simply you had to give up because of the seeing into the harm that was doing being done and the innate, you could say integrity of all organisms to survive was operating.

So one of the most difficult things I think, which is perhaps why this question interests you, one of the most difficult things is to understand how to relate to habit. Because if you go with the idea that you are not in control then you think “oh my God, then I´m at the mercy of my habits”. Which you could say that you are, but the question that you are looking at is what is at the mercy of what? And then what happens is when the what that is supposedly at the mercy of the habit is no longer given its authority of power then what´s the problem with the habit, one, but two, what has the habit got to hold on to? It´s not just us holding onto habit, but the habit has to hold on to something also. So as the centre to which the habit clings dissolves the habit is less able to assert itself.

That´ll do till the next time!

It´s going to become a habit isn´t it! You see not all habits are bad and that´s the thing, we consider habit as a bad word, but you know you as a climber, Simon as a dancer are necessarily operating out of habit, training we call it. But its habit and that´s not bad so when people use the word habit in the way that you introduced it, it´s more like so called bad habit like smoking or biting your finger nails or always being rude to people who look a certain way or whatever. But habit in itself is a part of life and necessary to effective functioning. That´s what training is. That´s what yoga training is. That´s what anybody who trains for anything is using: the principle of habit so that you can become unconscious of that, so that you can become conscious of something else: the delight that you have in dancing or the delight that you have in climbing. If you had to think about everything then you wouldn´t have the delight.

I think you have uncovered a real confusion of truth in that type of unconsciousness.

Well the thing is there is a deep confusion in spiritul practice about spiritual maturity, freedom, enlightenment, wisdom, peace, whatever. There is an almost universal assumption that there is a direct relationship between that, whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, and consciousness. And that this as it increases, consciousness increases. Now that´s true but as consciousness increases, consciousness-of decreases. And when it´s true that consciousness increases people assume out of habit that consciousness-of increases and therefore you become conscious of more and more and more and more things and you become enlightened. How hellish that would be. How absolutely hellish that would be. So consciousness does increase, consciousness-of decreases.

You know you get a lot of people who walk the spiritual path and they try to become more conscious-of. And in becoming more conscious-of they assert their authority over people who do things unconsciously like knock a glass over. Not very aware. You´ve heard that, “you´re not very aware”. That´s one of the first things Anita said to me, I knocked a glass over, “not very aware”. It´s a spiritual one upmanship going on. Not very aware but look at me. I´m aware of everything. Well that´s very foolish.


Can you give an example of this self clinging that you talked about, simply because you said something like, say like, Lily hit Godfrey. Well, that actually happend. It didn´t but you could make it happen …

The Lily hit Godfrey, the Lily bit is asmita. Identifying consciousness with the instrument, which is okay, you have to do that in order to navigate. It´s necessary. But hit Godfrey, if the hitting is like that, Lily hit Godfrey, if Godfrey goes Lily hit Godfrey out of some kind of sense of recrimination, then that´s abhinivesa, then I´m attributing the action that did come through that instrument as originating in that instrument. So you chose to hit me but if you chose to hit me you were not free to do anything else. And if I´m able to see that then how can I possibly hold it against you? That doesn´t mean that I don´t avoid you. I might well avoid you because I might see that the factors and forces that bring that about are likely to occur again. You know, maybe you don´t like the way I say something, or whatever, so then I´ll avoid you but I won´t go around saying that to other people “you should avoid Lily she´s a bitch she hits people”, I mean you are a bitch and you should be avoided but not because you hit people!

But isn´t that aversion though?

Yes, but aversion and attachment are just a dynamic of reality. They´re the dynamic of embodiment, they are the dynamic of separation. Aversion and attachment or desire and aversion. You can´t escape them.

So wait a minute, if you go back to the five, wisdom, understanding life and you mentioned aversion attachment, if you get too involved with them …

So all these things are not to be got rid of, but to be seen through. And when the seeing through deepens the last one, abhinivesa, can be totally seen through so that it doesn´t really happen but before that happens what can happen is, and there are people here that I know this is happening to a lot, you have all of a sudden an action, let´s say it could be one that you take but it´s more likely to be an action of which you are a recipient that you don´t like and you have this momentary attribution of it to the instrument and then you remember that that´s an illusion and then you relax and you stop and, you know, thats happening all the time. So eventually that momentary attribution doesn´t happen. And then the dynamic of aversion and attachment becomes different but it´s still there. And then difference is that you still have your preference, moment by moment, always you desire something more than you desire something else, always. So this is still there but when that fifth one, abhinivesa, has gone then if that desire is unfullfillable, you do not mind even if you are actively asking it to be fulfilled. So let´s say it´s your day off, you are a karma yoga apprentice at some horrible place on the top of hill on a beautiful hill surrounded by sea and really gorgeous guys on the beach and all you really want to do is go to the beach. Finally you get your day off and you manage to persuade the guy who owns all the cars to lend you a car. Half way down the track it breaks down. You just fix it. You want to go to the beach but you don´t get caught in a “fuck, I wanted to go to the beach. Why didn´t the bastard give me his new car”, or whatever. You just fix it. And if you get to the beach, great, enjoy it. And if you don´t get to the beach, great you enjoy it.

The washing up is exactly the same.

Yes. Exactly, exactly that. Like and dislike is still there and aversion and attachment do drop away, but pleasure and pain are still there and like and dislike are still there.

Can I just give you a quick example? I had an ex girlfriend working in the same town that I was living in. So rather than drive past the fucking shop she worked at I would drive right, in order to get where I was going to in my job, I would take a huge detour.

What a wimp!

Yeah, but things had happened that made me feel ….. Now that was identifying

Absolutely, identifying the actions that came through her instrumentality as being hers, identifying the experience that you had of them as being yours, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So it´s as soon as there is attribution of action to instruments the whole thing kicks in, aversion kicks in, attachment kicks in, ignorance kicks in and egoism becomes a problem. Egoism kicks in also. You are not normally walking around saying “Adam is conscious, Adam is conscious, Adam is conscious. I wonder what he´s going to become conscious of”. And then all of a sudden it´s “Adam doesn´t like the way he is treated by this woman”. And all of this just dissolves into the net when you see the net, Indra´s net, or the OneBody, operating way, way, way beyond our ability to actually influence it, even though it can seem as though you can. And we are living in the appearance, we are the appearance so there is nothing wrong with it seeming like it can. And what Ramesh says very nicely is live your life making decisions as if you had the free will to do so but within the recognition that it is always and only consciousness that is making that decision. So then it feels like you are making a decision so you make it but the recognition that it´s consciousness allows you not to get your knickers in a twist about the result whatever the result may be. So that´s a halfway house, when you haven´t really totally accepted the way things are. You can use that as a reminder; okay, as if, I´m living as if, but I´ll try to remember that it´s always and only consciousness. Or always and only God.

In the Bhagavad Gita it also explains that the doer of a deed is the gunas and the gunas means the dynamic of the net. It´s the dynamic of the net that does every deed. So you don´t have to rely on Johnny comes lately´s like myself or Ramesh. You can go right back to the Bhagavad Gita or the Buddha. The Bhudda says events happen, deeds are done, but there is no individual doer thereof. But there are instruments thereof. And it´s the association of the action with the instrument that create the personal doer or as Ramesh says creates the sense of personal doership that is at the heart of everybody´s life and is at the root of everybody´s suffering. And is so cherished by everybody and yet it is that that is so deeply cherished that is at the source of all our suffering.

Well it´s just so incredibly powerful, do you know what I mean?

It´s habit. The power of habit is amazing and thank goodness. Otherwise we wouldn´t be able to do so much. So it´s not a bad thing. It´s just the way things are. Habit, when it is reinforced, becomes a power to be reckoned with. A huge power.

can am, ibiza