The pragmatic significance of yoga practice is simply to free the body from tension. Because of the inherent nature of body and mind this does automatically bring about deep relaxation in the mind. So joyful steadiness in the body free from tension equates very much also to joyful steadiness in the mind free from tension. And ultimately when that freedom in the mind matures it becomes free from intention, from intent, from personal intent. Which doesn´t mean that decisions are not being made, doesn´t mean the desires are not arising and sometimes being acted on and sometimes being acted on successfully, sometimes being acted on unsuccessfully: whether it´s the desire to get up and do yoga or the desire to go to the toilet or the desire to make more money or become more popular or whatever desire it is, or maybe even you begin to see that the arising of such desires is a function of that which has come before, so you could say the arising of the desire to go to the toilet to pee in the middle of the class is as a result of the desire to cool down during the practice which led you to drink.

So when Patanjali uses the word isvarapranidhana in the way that he does then he is inviting us to investigate the source of choice as the origin of action: he is inviting us to look at how these desires come about. Not so that we can select the ones which we think are more proper, more virtuous, more righteous, not on that basis at all; but just so as to see into the mechanism of action. There is a commonly cherished notion that spiritual practice, yoga, can make you free from your karma, or free from karma. That statement is either true or false according to your understanding of the nature of karma. And if your understanding of the nature of karma is in fulfillment of your wishful thinking that life can be turned into an endless bed of roses, then the statement is patently false. But if your understanding of karma is actually an understanding of how things happen, then the statement is true.

Karma means literally, directly, action, but in effect karma means the nature of causation, the nature of cause and effect which in terms of our daily experience means the web of conditioning from which we operate. The web of conditioning within which we act, within which we decide, within which we choose and within which we desire. That web of causation, that web of conditions, that web of tendencies is the world. That web is life. It can never go away. The net of karma can never go away. And even if you die to it, it is still there. Even if when you are dead it is no longer effecting you, nevertheless until you are dead, it is always, it has to effect you.

You could say that your life is the localisation of the web of karma in a particular moving place. The place being your body-mind. The body. Patanjali goes into the nature of karma and how to become free from it in quite a lot of detail in the yoga sutras but it´s technicalities are not really relevant and they are only really of interest once they´ve manifest, which they do in deep meditation. The key issue really is just to investigate the nature of action which is to investigate the nature of your karma. And within that investigation certain things become apparent. One is that all of the genetic determinants to which you are subject can either be accepted or resented. Resenting your genetic determinants in no way can change them. It is not hard to see how foolish it is to resent your height or the size of your bones. It can have no positive result. It can only have negative result of making you dissatisfied or dukha with yourself, with your life. That´s not so hard to see. The foolishness of resenting or resisting genetic inevitability. But there are many aspects of our lives that are changing in a way that genetically determined factors are not changing. And what Patanjali is asking us to do is to investigate these factors also.

When we investigate an action, even if we don´t go all the way into the investigation, we find out something about where it´s coming from. We´re finding out something about our tendencies so when you are sitting meditating, and you´re constantly thinking about money, sex, approval, in whatever way it is, then this is telling you something about your interests or your anxieties. This is not telling you that you are wrong or bad or not spiritual. This is telling you that right now you have some concern with or interest in money. Or sex, or food, or power, or fame, or whatever it is. And the investigation of these thoughts is the point, not the judgement of these thoughts. Not the repression, the stopping or control of these thoughts. Not so that you can get to know yourself in terms of I have lots of information about what I´m interested in, I have lots of information about what I´m anxious about. That´s fair enough, but that´s not the point of yoga. Self knowledge can give you a certain satisfaction, but it cannot free you from your karma.

The point of yoga is to try to see how these thoughts, feelings, attitudes or invitations arise and how they operate. And when you are doing yoga practice even though the line of the posture is important from the point of view of safety, and the presence of the bandhas is important from the point of view of experiencing the nature of the body and perception, the most fruitful thing, for this investigation into the nature of action and the nature of what it means to be free from action, or investigation into the nature of freedom is yama niyama. Especially yama. And this is why Patanjali puts them first.

So relating to what you are doing in your practice, relating to what is happening to your body, what is happening to your breath, what is happening in your mind, through the lenses of yama niyama is the key. It doesn´t really matter if your leg is bending or not, what matters really is that you are aware of the implications of that. And it doesn´t really matter that you are being sensitive or not, honest or not, open or not. What really matters is that you start to realise that when you are open, openness is just happening, and when you are dishonest, dishonesty is just happening. You haven´t invited it deliberately. Not to come and not to go: especially not to go. You would never invite the absence of sensitivity. And when you start to be confronted with that breath after breath, action after action, moment after moment, in your practice where there should be very little else to disturb you from the way things work inside you, then the idea that you are in any way fixed starts to be very deeply undermined. And when the ideas that you have that fix you as somebody who is more or less intelligent, more or less lucky, more or less skillfull, more or less beautiful, more or less likeable, all of this starts to become less and less tenable, as you start to realise that qualities, tendencies, energies are constantly coming and going without so much as a by your leave, and then this starts to suggest something, not conceptually, but you can see the suggestion being received in your actions. The suggestion is that this applies to so called other people also. And that lazy bastard over there is not actually really a lazy bastard after all, somebody else might think that he is the most active, committed, dedicated person that they know. Stalin was very much loved by his daughter. He was apparently a very kind and considerate person at home. Yet if your home was the Kremlin, you would definitely have thought he was a cunt, best avoided.

So when you start to see that senstivity, honesty, openness, focus, generosity, commitment, passion, equanimity, self awareness, selflessness, just coming and going and coming and going and coming and going and coming and going, despite your intent or desire to have them the whole time that you are on the mat, this undermines the belief that you are in control of your life. Which also undermines the belief that other people should be in control of their lives and should be polite whenever you are in their presence, or generous whenever you are in their presence, or understanding whenever you are in their presence. And when the idea that everybody is or should be in control of their lives starts to lose its authority, I´m not saying it´s being replaced with another idea, that you are not in control of your lives, but when that idea fades then life starts to open up and become a little bit more spacious and you give a little bit more latitude to yourself and to other people.

And into that latitude possibly arises a huge increase in your enjoyment of yourself and other people. Which is not based on extracting anything specific from yourself that you should become virtuous, or that you become enlightened, nor of extracting anything from anybody else, but just actually being open to whatever is manifesting. And if whatever is manifesting turns out to be unpalatable, it´s very easy to turn 90 degrees or 180 degrees on your heel and walk in a different direction without making any judgement. Accepting I don´t want anger rightnow or I don´t want confusion right now. But sometimes you go, “yeah, I don´t mind anger because there´s something going on between me and this person so I´ll go into the anger with this person and just see what it really is, or more importantly, see what it really isn´t. That it´s not really directed at me because I´m a bad person or I´m not being loved”. I think it was Aldus Huxley´s, was it Aldus Huxley´s wife?, who wrote a book called You are not the target, about this, about the arising of anger and things like that. That you are not really the target, you might be the trigger, but you are not really the target. So you don´t have to take delivery of the arrows, but we do when we think that everybody is in control of their lives and these arrows are coming to us because the person is intending to hurts us and they are intending to hurt us because they don´t like us, and they don´t like us because, whatever.

And your mind goes into a spin, your mind is spinning and it is spinning like this all the time, in what is really just a mindfuck. Spinning away (vrrti) from that which is actually happening into a story, a personal story. He said this because, she said that because, they did this because. And you can never really know actually so called motives or reasons for doing something. The other day, Anita heard from me, it wasn´t gossip or anything, but she heard from me that I had done something that she thought was not right, that was somewhat unfair and potentially harmful to her in the past. And at the time she didn´t say anything, but a few days later she said to me, “can you tell me why you did that?” and I said, “do you want me to be really really honest with you?” and she said “yeah, I know you can do that”, so I said, “well I don´t know”. And she just said laughed and said, “of course you don´t” and that was the end of the conversation. Now even I didn´t know why I´d done it, let alone anybody else who might have said, “yeah, Godfrey did this because … he was a shit to you because he is a fully fledged insensitive bastard”, or whatever.

So it´s that kind of spaciousness that she was giving to me by laughing and saying “of course you don´t”, that I´m talking about. A spaciousness that really has to begin at home. You can´t make yourself be spacious to other people if you don´t really believe that they are not in control of their lives and you can´t really believe that they are not in control of their lives until you really know that you are not in control of your life. That spaciousness, that openness, that sensitivity happens when it happens, and of course, it can happen as a result of you looking for it perhaps. But when it comes, how it comes, how long it lasts is not subject to your intent, not subject to your so called power. So then you can start to see that intention is just an appearance, that decision making is not how it normally is taken to be, and you stop arguing with what actually happens in terms of what could have happened, or worse, what should have happened. And what could have happened, and what should have happened no longer bothers you, and you are dealing only with what actually happened. And when what should have happened and what could have happened are no longer asserting themselves then there is no question any more about anything that happened and it´s very clear that what happened, happened because the forces and factors that coalesced into that moment of time and that place, demanded that it happened and you know this because it happened.

Anything else is speculation, speculation that can create guilt, speculation that can create blame, speculation that can create resentment, regret, guilt, envy, jealousy, anxiety, pride, arrogance. You could say that once something has happened there are a few things you can honestly and truly say about it: it happened ,therefore it had to happen, therefore it was inevitable. And if you can see something like that then you can see more clearly that it couldn´t have been otherwise, it couldn´t have been better, you couldn´t have done it better, there is nothing that you have ever done that you could have done better. And there´s nothing that anybody has ever done that they could have done better. In other words where is the space for blame?

That´s going backwards in time, but the implications can be taken forward in time, if you start to really see that, yeah, no choice about that, had to happen. No choice about that had to happen, then no need to worry about the choices about that which has not yet happened. The choices will be made in their own good time and how many times when something potentially tricky is approaching, you can spend hours trying to decide what to do and then when the time comes you just go and do the opposite. Despite everything that you thought about; despite what you decided. So there´s actually no need to plan in advance. Because you´ve never got enough data. There´s always more data when you get to the point of action. But of course planning is a habit and it´s a habit that you can´t stop just because you want to. Figuring out what to do in advance. You can´t stop doing that just because you want to but it starts to stop when you start to see that when something happens you don´t really have any choice. That it´s really an inevitable expression of the thrust of circumstance. Or what is sometimes called in Hinduism Indra´s net. The interconnected web of forces and factors, objects and actions that from the moment that you are in, needing to make a decision, in order to take an action, that from that moment extends backwards in time in every direction.

So if you just look at the genetic consideration of the action that you are about to take, the genetic consideration of the choice that you are about to make, is determined by your mother and father, determined by their mothers and fathers back in time but very, very specifically determined. If the father had ejaculated two minutes later, five seconds earlier, a different pattern would have come out of the DNA. You know this because you have brothers and sisters and they are not you. And you might say, “ah yeah, five seconds, two seconds, it doesn´t make any difference. A day for sure, a month for sure, six months for sure”. Sperm is totally different. Okay, egg might be the same, but sperm is totally different. So every time, all the way back to your ancestors that means your ability to make a decision was affected by how horny your great, great, great, great grandfather was on his birthday. Which was a result of how hard he had been working in the fields or whatever. And into this net, when you see into this net and you see that actually absolutely everything had to be there. That if you change just one circumstance in your past by one degree, the present changes likewise.

And then inevitability becomes obvious. And inevitability sounds like a lack of freedom and it is. But it is also a freedom. It´s a freedom from choice. A lack of freedom from being able to make a choice is also a freedom. And the freedom that it is is huge and even though you may have been living your life espousing the notion that you have freedom of choice, along with that came the bondage of guilt and blame and shame and resentment and regret and anxiety and pride and arrogance and manipulation and doubt. So you can flip the freedom round. You can become free from them and have no freedom of choice. Even if we are just looking at it psychologically, not looking at it from the point of view of truth, that is surely enough. I mean how can you ever honestly and truly know what´s true? You can only know what you´re doing. You can only know what you´re feeling in the moment. You can never know what´s true. You can like to think that what you´d like to think is true is true, but you can never know truth, but you do know guilt. You do know shame. You do know regret, anxiety, blame and pride.

And I think you can see very easily that you don´t have to. So who cares if what´s being said is true or not in some abstract sense, if it can free you from guilt, if it can free you from blame. What´s the big deal about the truth? You don´t live your life measuring everything by truth. Well, some people do. They´re the one´s who are up their own arses. You live your life according to how you feel in the moment. If you don´t feel relaxed you see if you can take some action to relax yourself. If you don´t feel really alive, you see if you can take some action to activate yourself, and that´s all. That´s going on moment by moment, oscillating between relaxation and action. Truth is the selfindulgent playground of philosophers. But we live, we actually live in a web of guilt, blame, regret, anxiety, fear and hope. And seeing into the inevitable nature of all actions, seeing that to change one thing in the past and the present changes completely; seeing that ‘the change one thing in the past’ is pure speculation, just the philosophical possibility and actual non entity and actual impossibility, then guilt evaporates. Eventually when you really accept it, when you really see it, not accepting it intellectually, when you just can´t take an action without recognising that it just had to happen and that thereby it was not something belonging exclusivley to you. You can see your instrumentality, you can see it was your hand or your voice or your finger, but why did that finger move in that way? Why does Leonard Cohen´s voice sound like it does? It´s nothing to do with him, that he has a fantastic voice. Well a little bit. He can affect it by smoking too much but generally speaking his ability to hit a note has got absolutely nothing to do with him. So why take pride in it? Why take it personally? Your inability to hit a note, likewise. I think he said somewhere, “I was born with the gift of a golden voice”. I was born with it. It´s a gift.

So this whole perspective, is opened in yoga practice through the lenses of yama especially, but niyama also. So there is no need to reduce yoga practice to flexibility, strength, alignment, even bandhas. Especially if they are not coming. If strength is not as much as you´d like, flexibility is not as much as you´d like, bandhas are not as much as you like. It doesn´t matter, you can still look through the lenses of yama niyama. And you can still discover the illusory nature of volition. Discovering the illusory nature of volition doesn´t mean you all of a sudden stop making decisions although for some people it does for a while just out of their confusion. Actually that means they haven´t really discovered the illusory nature of volition, they are just obsessed with the concept of the illusory nature of volition. But when the illusory nature of volition is truly seen through then action after action after action, decision after decision after decision, just takes place as a natural function and expression of circumstance. And so life is lived through action taking, through decision making, but without the claiming of them. Without the personalising of them, without the saying, “I am the decider of this decision, I am the doer of this deed, I am the taker of this action”, there is an understanding, not a conceptual understanding, there is an awareness, ongoing awareness, moment by moment that this action, these deeds, these decisions are the expression of impersonal inevitability; of the flow of historical circumstance going right back to the beginning of time. And if a decision leads to what actually happens, that means a decision is what was actually required. It doesn´t mean that you all of a sudden popped in and made a decision. The decision was made by forces and factors that extend back infinitely in every direction.

The Bhagavad Gita is quite a big long book compared to the yoga sutras and there´s all kinds of stuff in it, and a lot of it is just Hindu culture, but at the heart of it there is an understanding of action and there is a teaching about action and the word that is used in the Bhagavad Gita is the doer. And basically the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita is you are not the doer which means Gavin is not the doer, Isabel is not the doer, the body-mind is just the instrument. And in the Bhagavad Gita Krishna says that prakrti is the doer, prakrti is the manifestation of him. Prakrti means the matrix, the energetic matrix of manifestation. Totality. Everything that´s ever happened is the doer. And according to Krishna knowing that, living from that is the definition of wisdom, this is the definition of a sage. Not being able to flip a switch inside the brain and enter into a special kind of consciousness. Not being able to project energy from your third eye and give shakti pat. These are just tricks of the mind and body which some people have regardless of their understanding. Freedom is not about power, it´s not about personal power. Freedom is about the recognition that there is no such thing as personal power. There is no such thing as a personal action, a personal feeling, or a personal thought. Freedom is knowing that and yet, taking apparently personal action, having apparently personal thoughts.

Which means actions are specific to organisms, feelings are specific to bodies, thoughts are specific to minds, but that doesn´t mean that they belong to them. That doesn´t mean they originate there. So you normally think of yourself not just as a body, but as a configuration of mental tendencies. Your mental make up, your personality, however you want to look at it. And this is based on an assumption. That the thoughts and the feelings that you experience, that are experienced here inside originate there and are yours. But this is somewhat spurious because the causes, the forces and the factors contributing to those thoughts are a lot of them outside you, even most of them. And not only that. I´m sure you´ve all been in this situation, you can reach for the phone just as your friend calls you. The same thought being picked up by two minds in the same moment. It´s not one person reading the mind of the other, it´s both people reading the same part of the script of the matrix at the same time. So sometimes Shirrli and I travel a lot together so we´re cooped up in the car so there´s a kind of intensification of vibration you could say and I´m a little faster by nature than Shirrli, my words come out faster, my brain moves faster, my body moves faster, so quite often Shirrli gets the impression that she´s picked up on my thought because she´s thinking something and I say it. But it´s not my thought, I just happen to speak faster. We´re both picking up on the same thought. And I say, “I wonder if Gavin´s going to be at the workshop”. And she says, “God, I was just thinking that”.

So when you are sitting in meditation and you have such a thought, “I wish that Godfrey would go away and shut the fuck up”, where´s that really coming from? It´s coming from your whole personal history meeting mine. It´s not coming because you are critical, it´s not coming because you are impatient, intolerant, disinterested, it´s not coming because you are anything. It´s just coming and then it´s going. And then the next one, and then the next one and then the next one. Be it a thought be it a feeling, be it an action, be it an image, be it an event, be it a project, be it a relationship, be it a life. All coming in exactly in the same way, all coming from exactly the same place. Which is the matrix. Which is the form or the body of god if you are theistic in your attitude that´s how you could see it or if you´re not, in Zen they just call it the “One Body”. The world, the history of the world is the “One Body”. And there´s a well known maxim in Zen which is used to encourage and support people in their practice and it´s “one body one mind”. In practice this means, we´ll all do everything together. We´ll move together, we´ll chant together, we´ll eat together, we´ll sit together, we´ll do everything together so that it will seem like there´s just one body and one mind because there is. When looked at from the point of view of the whole. When looked at from the point of view of any part of the whole, if that part happens to be a looking that works through the human nervous system, through the eyes, then you think, ahh there´s millions of bodies.

Patanjali says that suffering can be avoided. But he says that future suffering can be avoided. He doesn´t say that past suffering could have been avoided. And he says that future suffering is avoided when you see the true nature of karma which means when you see the true nature of action, when you see that action is neither good nor bad but simply that it happened, that it was inevitable, and therefore impersonal. And that´s what freedom from karma means, not that you are no longer subject to conditioning forces and factors but that you are no longer identidying with action in the sense of attributing it to a person, whether it´s in this body that bares you name or whether it´s in another body that bares another name. That doesn´t mean that you don´t go, “wow, this is uncomfortable karma”, and then you move away from it. Of course you do that. That´s a natural response for the survival of the organism; to seek comfort, to seek safety. And it´s a natural tendency among many that we can come to regard as wrong or not spiritual, but they just belong to being alive. Because we are not just a body, we are not just a mind, we don´t just need comfort, we don´t just need food, we don´t just need warmth, we don´t just need shelter. We need company, we need meaning, beauty, we need love, we need these things so it´s natural to move towards them and this is not personal. This is just the nature of being embodied.

So life doesn´t just stop. Conditioning doesn´t stop. Needs don´t stop. Desires don´t stop. The impulse to fulfill needs and desires doesn´t stop. But if the impulse to fulfill a need or a desire is not met in action there is no problem, you just do the next thing. Which may be another attempt to fulfill it. It may not. In other words we have our preferences and when life says to our preferences, “no you can´t have it”, when we are taking things personally we stamp our feet and have a tantrum. But when life is not being taken personally we just go, “oh, okay. I´ve got plenty more options. Plenty more desires to act out”. And we have one very deep desire that´s there all the time: to become still. We have a very deep desire to become still, to relax, to open and to feel. And this desire can be overlooked by all of the other desires to act, to get, to grasp, to receive, to experience. But it is still a desire and when too many of the other ones are met with life by a “no” , then stillness tends just to happen and you go “ahh”, and then you go into that stillness and it´s “mmmm”. And it´s seriously yummy to be there. And so if you are listening to yourself when you feel like doing something but it´s not happening, if you just listen to yourself you become really relaxed about whether it happens or not. And it could be at the very moment that you relax about it not happening that it happens. But not because you say, “now I´m going to do it”. But because in that moment the forces and factors coalesce for that inevitable happening to occur.

canam ibiza 2003