Patanjali defines the process of yoga with the statement: kriya yoga tapas svadhyaya isvarapranidhana .   Which means that the activity, the practice of yoga is a passionate investigation of the source of personal action.   He then says that this process has eight aspects or eight limbs, ashtanga: yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi and their purpose is to undermine the imposed sense of self through the clarification that arises in samadhi.   So what he is saying is that the process of enquiring into the source of personal action takes a particular course which reveals samadhi and undermines the sense of self.   That course consists of seven factors or limbs along with samadhi . Yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhayana and samadhi .   The last six of these are a description of a transformation in awareness that happens when the nature of personal action is investigated within the context of freeing the body from tension.   Which is the pragmatic fulcrum of yoga according to Patanjali: to free the body from tension; the beginning of asana is to free the body from tension.

When this is done as an enquiry into the nature and source of personal action, then the actions being taken to free the body from tension become the ground of your enquiry into the source of personal action. So that you don´t have to be operating in your mind. You don´t have to be operating in the abstract. You don´t have to be operating on the basis of assumption.   You´re operating on the basis of action in the moment. So the enquiry that Patanjali speaks of is not an intellectual enquiry.   That doesn´t mean it doesn´t have an intellectual aspect to it.   But it´s a pragmatic enquiry that´s based on the actions being taken in order to establish the body in certain shapes and then free the body from the tension that might be restricting the establishment of that particular shape.

These actions that are required to do this, to establish the body in the shape and then to use the shape to free the body from tension, depend for their effectiveness on yama niyama. Both in freeing the body from tension, and in revealing the nature and source of personal action. Asana depends upon the ten factors: sensitivity, honesty, openness, focus, generosity, commitment, equanimity, passion, self awareness and selflessness with regard to that which is actually happening; the actions being taken.   So these are the lenses through which the enquiry into the nature of the action is focussed into that which is actually happening.  

And this journey through the eight limbs of yoga to samadhi which is supposed to undermine the sense of self can be seen in a number of different ways.   Patanjali´s description of it is very technical and if you are not really familiar with dharana and dhyana then it´s very easy to get confused and lost.   However, familiarity with samadhi does not require familiarity with dharana-dhayana.   Dharana-dhayana just help to clarify the nature of samadhi .   So one way that you can simplify the technicality of the eight limbs is to see that the imposed sense of self is being undermined in different ways by the different aspects of the different limbs of yoga. This corresponds with the fact   that your sense of self has different aspects.   Most obviously your sense of self is your shape, your form, your body in its structure; I´m fat, I´m thin, I´m flexible, I´m stiff, I´m young, I´m old, I´m beautiful, I´m ugly.   You know, one day I´m one, the next day I´m the other.  

The sense of self as a physical object is undermined in asana .   But the sense of self also is embedded in the body not just in its shape, its form, but also its functioning, its activity: what we can do with the body, what the body is inherently doing.   And as far as yoga is concerned the most pertinent aspect of the activity of the body is breathing. And breathing is a very powerful tool because breathing can be equally voluntary or involuntary.   And it´s very easy to shift from one to the other whereas a lot of the processes of the body can never be voluntary, and a lot of them can not be involuntary. But the breath is inherently both.   So you could say the breath reveals the nature of volition very easily because it works perfectly happily without the will and it can work perfectly happily with the will, with intent, with volition.  

Pranayama is the process whereby the sense of self as the body´s activity, particularly breathing, is undermined.   So when the sense of self as a physical object, as a physical structure, as the body, is being undermined in asana this means that you are beginning to wean yourself from identifying yourself with and by the shape of your body.   And pranayama takes this weaning deeper into the activity of the body.   It´s easy to understand how we identify with the shape of the body and it´s easy to understand to a certain extent how we identify with the overt gross actions that the body can take.   It´s a little bit more tricky to see how we identify with our breathing.   But in that trickiness, if you start to see it, is the gift, is the invitation to freedom; when you start to see into the process. "My breath is deep.   My breath is smooth.   My breath is shallow."   Breathing action identified with the sense of self, through the claiming of perceived actions. And yet it´s not difficult to realise the state of your breathing, the quality of the inhalation, the length of the exhalation, etcetera, have actually got little to do with your intent, little to do with anything that you could control. Although of course you can put a huge amount of time and effort in learning how to establish circumstances in such a way that you can, in that context, and provided youre not doing anything else you can apply a bit of consistent and impressive control to your breath.  

And when you start to see into this, putting the claiming mind in front of the breath begins to look a bit spurious, a bit hard to justify.   And when you notice in your yoga practice that the breath does what it does according to circumstance and you might try as hard as you can to make the inhalation the same length as the exhalation on every breath, but it never ever happens.   Never. You can tell yourself that it´s happening, if you like to be dishonest, if you like to convince yourself that you are fulfilling your programme, but you can never know.   How can you measure your breath when you´re doing your yoga practice? How can you measure a second, two seconds? How do you know if your heart is beating at a constsnt rhythm: of course it isn't: its not a metronome its a muscle.   If you really, really want your inhalation to be as equal as your exhalation you just tell yourself it is and it will feel like it is.   So then is it?   Or does it just appear to be?   You can never know, you can never know whether your inhalation and exhalation is the same or different duration unless you deliberately manipulate it a little bit and you can make it that way with the help of a metronome thats outside you so your no longer inside. But when the breath is allowed just to be a natural expression of the circumstances of the body in the posture, you don´t need to be measuring your breath, you don´t need to be controlling your breath. Thts the job of the diaphragm and the nervous system.

Pratyahara , the next limb of yoga, is when the sense of self is being undermined more deeply, from the point of view of sensorial activity, sensory activity. Where you´re no longer saying my perception, my hearing, my sweat; my disturbance by the crickets or whatever. These things are just part of the general nonpersonalised happening of awareness in the moment. The effortless and impersonal flow of awareness is not being broken into specific extractions: extractions of specific perceptions, which within their specificity point, apprently, to a centralised perceiver, experiencer. There is simply an unbroken flow of awareness or perceiving that is simply pointing inwards, no longer labelling information coming through the senses. So here, the sense of self as a perceiver of sensory data is undermined, though that which produces the data is still flowing.
And dharana, dhayana and samadhi constitute different aspects of the sense of self being undermined from the level of the mind itself.   My thought, my feeling, my beliefs, my knowledge.

As you start to see that they come and go all by themsleves.   Especially you can see with thoughts, how can you say it´s my thought if it just pops up by itself? Okay, you could say it´s my thought because it happens here in this location.   How come you don´t know if it´s happening in another location at exactly the same time?   In fact you know perfectly well it does, a lot of the time.   When you say something and your friend who you are very close to says, "Oh, I was just thinking about that".   So who´s thought was it that was being articulated?   Only arbitrarily can it be called my thought.   But not honestly and not accurately.   "Hey, you´re reading my mind, don´t read my mind.   It´s my thought.   I was thinking about Jimmy.   You´re not supposed to be thinking about Jimmy without my permission."   Okay, that´s a bit foolish, but that´s what´s going on when you´re talking about "my" thought.   I have clear lucid thoughts.   I have really confused thoughts.   I´m so intelligent, so perceptive.   I´m so stupid, so confused.  

So this is the process of yoga that you´re being invited to by establishing the body free from tension in stiram sukham , joyful steadiness, tranquil stability, or however you want to see it.   And then this transformation into awareness where you start to see the foolishness of "my" body, "my" breath and "my" mind happens by itself. Then you start to just see things more as simply a flow of thinking, feeling, breathing, moving, without this deep identification with processes of which you have only apparent control. Your ability to control them, which is totally conditioned along with the impulse to do so, is just a tiny, tiny aspect of their arising, of their existence, of their being, which is also totally conditioned.   And when you get over the shock of realising that it´s not your thought, that they are not your feelings, that it´s not your breathing, that it´s not your body, and there is a lot of resistance to accepting that, but when you start to get over the shock of not being able to say, "here I am in this thought", as Descartes did, "I think therefore I am". A lot of space starts to arise, and into that space you just relax, you let go of so much worry, so much concern. But "I think" is not a given fact when you start to examine the process of thought from thought, not from intellectual analysis, but indside the action of the mind.   By relaxing into the action of the mind and seeing how the mind goes its own way.   You think you´re going to be relaxing into the flow of your breathing and you´re thinking about the beach.   Or whatever.

But when you do start to become more relaxed about not having to say "mine" all the time, "mine, this is mine, this is me" all the time, then you could say that you´re opening your mind to the possibility of finding out who´s actions are they, or to whom do these actions belong or from where do these actions arise, or from where do these thoughts arise?   And then what will happen, it´s bound to happen, if you´re curious and you´re bound to be curious if you´ve been shocked, if something´s been getting to you and you´re going, "wow, what´s this?", you´re bound to be curious to find out what it is.   If it isn´t me what is it?   If these are not my thoughts what´s going on?   And then you are in the investigation of the nature and the source of personal action.   And it´s in particular on the level of the mind, recognising thinking as activity, recognising feeling as activity, that the investigation of the nature and the source of personal action bears its deepest fruits.  

When you are in stillness, whether you´re lying down or sitting, whether you´re in a headstand or Pascimottanasana stillness is an invitation to meditation. Stillness is an invitation to recognise the uncontrollable nature of originating thought and feeling. Stillness is an invitation to recognise the involuntary and impersonal aspect of mental activity. Stillness is an invitation to undermine the sense of self from the level of the mind.   And the link from undermining the sense of self from the body to the mind is the breath.   Or pranayama .   Pranayama is the link between asana and meditation.   The normal understanding of the fragmented divided mind, when the fragmented and divided mind which is the usual mind, looks at yoga it goes asana is asana and is separate from pranayama.   Pranayama is pranayama and is separate from meditation.   So we do our asana practice, then we do our pranayama practice and then we do our meditation practice and none of them ever reveal their true nature.   Which is that they are simply three different aspects of the same thing.   The three different aspects of the same thing being awareness, embodied as a mind.   Awareness, body and mind. So actually being embodied, as long as awareness is in a body and therefore there is a mind, is an invitation to meditation. And that invitation is being accepted when you are still.   When you are quiet, when you relax.   And then the mind slows down and samadhi is revealed.  

According to Patanjali samadhi is apparent form radiating the singular significance of emptiness.   We went into this at great length last week.   What that means relative to daily life is that actions can take place, thoughts can arise without their source being obscured.   Actions, which are perceptibly separable events, and thoughts, which are also perceptibly separable events in the mind, can be focussed on so exclusively that that is all that is really noticed, that is all that is really experienced and it´s in that focus that you tend to feel a little isolated, you feel a little bit vulnerable so you say "mine, this is mine!   I´m ok here.   Here I am!".   And this is not samadhi .   Samadhi is when thoughts and actions which are simply the expressions of life in a bodimind, arise and the background context within which they arise, which is awareness of the whole, is not obscured.   And when the awareness of the whole is not obscured you don´t feel vulnerable, you don´t feel unsafe so you don´t bother to say "I am this thought.   I am this object" or "I am this action".

The whole is a difficult concept to understand.   It´s as difficult and absolutely equivalent to the concept of emptiness.   The whole means nothing in particular.   The whole means nothing specific.   The whole means emptiness.   You could take the w off the beginning of the English word whole and say it´s a hole.   Empty, you just drop into it effortlessly and there´s an infinite space.   Infinite spaciousness and lightness.   So it doesn´t mean that actions and thoughts, objects, arise in the context of some other thing that´s much bigger than them.   It means that they arise as expressions of the whole so actually your attention can be entirely on them.   But you´re not grasping and saying "I, me, mine".   You´re just aware of form as a fluctuating expression of emptiness or you´re just aware of a part as a momentary expression of the whole: this is an innate, conditioned disposition. It is not the perception of a super-object. It is an orientation or disposition within which obects and actions arise in their unique separateness without being taken to have separate or individuated origination or nature.   And in that awareness of the whole being expressed in the part there is no vulnerability, there is no sense of separation, so there is no need to say "I, me, mine".
 
So these kinds of moments when thoughts and actions arise without you personalising them and saying "I, me, mine", because you don´t feel cut off and separate, are in fact happening all the time.   These are not the result of yoga.   Yoga is just designed to show you this.   To show you that this is what is going on so that you can stop thinking that what is going on is isolated objects taking isolated actions.   One against another in some kind of chaos of conflict within which, if you can, you better try to establish a little lagoon of harmony.   Get friends around you and keep the door closed.   Because as you well know, it´s your friends that cause you the greatest pain.   So if you bring your friends around you and keep the door closed, that´s an invitation to suffering.   Your brother, your sister, your mother, your father.   They´re the ones that really give you the shit.   Your lover.   So this process, or this invitation, that is yoga is simply to see the revealed face of emptiness or the revealed face of God as form or life in all of its various multiplicity, manifesting in and as an expression of emptiness: as the parts occuring and arising as and of, as and in the whole.

Now this invitation is accepted only through relaxing.   Only through letting go.   Relaxing and letting go of something.   Obviously it doesn´t mean, if you´re doing a yoga posture, even if you´re just sitting still, it doesn´t mean letting go of all muscular activity.   But by examining the nature of the muscular activity that´s going on, and seeing the relationship between stability and ease and certain kinds of muscular activity being hindered by some and helped by others. Then finding that when you have these moments of stiram sukam, when you are comfortable and stable, and you are experiencing no tension, no resistance in the body to the extent that you´re not really feeling the body as a limited capsule any more, it can sometimes become obvious that this just happens by itself.   That these moments just arise.   The actions that allow the experience to happen are happening: but they are really happening by themselves, you could say out of habit, you could say out of training; but not as a result of you constantly applying your intent to those actions.   So when you are applying your intent to the bandhas , the bandhas are not there.   That means the bandhas are not present. It means you are looking for the bandhas .   When the bandhas become available, they happen by themselves.   When the postures become available, they happen by themselves.   Which means that what´s been let go of, what´s been relaxed, is the personalisation of action.   And the personalisation of intent, the I, me, mine, claiming the action, claiming the intent, claiming the result and identifying with the result.   "This is me.   I can do the bandhas now.   This is me.   I can do a headstand now."  

So if yoga is, and according to Patanjali it is, designed to undermine the imposed sense of self, all you have to do is relax. Which means all you have to do is see if there is any tension present in your body, and challenge it in the light of your awareness.   Don´t fight it, just challenge it in the light of your awareness on the dynamic of the bandhas . Then through that process over time, find out what the challenge was all about, what that tension was all about, where those actions came from, where those objects came from, and just see what is revealed in that.   In other words, doing yoga, living life, according to this perspective, is really just like going to the movies.   You just sit down and say "I wonder what´s going on.   I wonder what it´s like, this movie".   And then you walk out at the end of the movie and it doesn´t mean anything to you does it?   So you walk out at the end of this life dead, and what´s the big deal?  

The thing is you can´t make yourself relax because obviously then the effort is being made on the basis of claimed intent and desired result: so you can´t make yourself relax.   You can only relax when relaxation has to happen.   And to a certain extent you can invite relaxation by making yourself uptight.   That´s actually a possible way.   Because nothing lasts forever and if you keep winding yourself up you´re going to have to let go at a certain point.   I´m not really suggesting you wind yourself up totally.   But in a way that´s what you´re doing in the yoga postures because deep down you believe that you can improve matters.   Deep down you believe that if you just do a, b, c, then x, y, z will happen as a result of your doing a, b, c..   If you can just get that heel right, done right, then breathing will become free, samadhi will happen, life will get better, somebody will fall in love with me.   Whatever you think it is.   Deep down you are thinking like that.   "If I can just get it right it will become good."  

So you could say that yoga is just an invitation to see this.   To see these assumptions, and to see how these assumptions are generating tension.   To clarify those assumptions you have to bring them up in action.   Let them act.   Let them try to do their thing and watch them fail.   So you could say that yoga is an invitation to grab the bull of paradox with both hands, by both horns at the same time and jump onto its back and ride off into the sunset.   Effort and relaxation happening together.   No problem if you´re not personalising them.   Life and death happening together.   Not a problem if you´re not identifying with it.   How many people do yoga and become paranoid about death?   Mustn´t kill the cows.   Mustn´t wear leather.   Mustn´t eat meat.   Well ok fair enough, but why not the insects.   So you become a Jain, you get a brush and you sweep the path in front of you.   Yeah sure, how many insects get killed when you do that?   Loads!   Probably more than if you just walk.   What about bacteria in the air then. Shit, theres no escape from death. Life and death are the twin faces of manifestation.   You can´t have life without death so when you are trying to escape death you basically are trying to escape life.   So these are the two horns of the bull of life.   If you want only one you are likely to get gored by the other as it comes up behind you.
 
canam ibiza 2003