The Pittfalls of Yoga

I would be a liar if I told you that the path of Yoga was perfect and without it's pitfalls.  These obstacle exists solely to keep us pressing on to the final goal.  Yoga itself is a means to an end, but it's easy to get caught in some of the quagmires listed below.  The list is in chorological order in which I have experienced them.

The first pitfall is the initial novelty of meditation wearing off.  The first time I sat down to do Kriya Yoga, I got a taste of what it was like to do self introspection.  In a sense, the feelings that I had that first time were a tease.  It's like having a juicy steak slathered in butter dangled in front of your face, but then having it ripped away.  This is a test of dedication.  Medication is very "two steps forward and two steps back" process. I have come to the conclusion that there are no real setbacks, just different sides of the whole we need to see.  The key here is to not get caught replicating the same results.

The second pitfall is the inevitable amount of repressed subconscious crap that comes to the surface.  Take a few minutes and read

this article

.  Take note that the prisoners taken on meditation retreats where calm, but still exhibited signs of psychosis and mania.  When I read this, I slapped my palm against my forehead and thought:  Gee, you take prisoners on a retreat and make them self aware,  what the hell do you think was going to happen?  I predict there will be a story about how cooperate meditation retreats result in a loss of employment and productivity.  This will of course be blamed on the meditation and not the fact that the employees realized their jobs suck.  Whatever baggage you have will come to the surface and you may not even know what the hell it is.  The key is to address it, no matter how painful it is.  You will have to address it at some point when circumstances trigger the same emotions to come to the surface.

The third major pitfall is the bliss experienced after meditating for a while.  Yoga activates certain centers in the central nervous system that are responsible for intense pleasure.  It's better than any drug you could possible think of, you can access it whenever you want, and you never run out.  This is mistaken for enlightenment, but it is not.  I remember this would happen to me when I was working help desk at one of my jobs.  Here everything was melting down around me, but all I could do was sit there in blissful paralysis.  It's hard not to get stuck here, but if you keep working in the world, you will adjust and be able to carry out your daily routine.  Cravings for materialism will diminish and this is natural.  We live in a material world, so stay a material girl if you feel fulfilled.

The final pitfall is isolation.  It's inevitable that we will want to be alone when we turn inward.  Some schools of Yoga teach that extreme isolation and meditating hours a day, is the way it should be.  We see pictures of Buddhist and Yogic monks sequestered in the Himalayas, envious of their solitude.  As we become more isolated, the less we are able to do good in the world.  We need to stay in the world to teach, help others and live out our lives.  Working and raising families are no less of a divine path than sitting in a cave on a mountain top.

I'm not trying to scare you away from doing Yoga, but I have to be honest.  That is another symptom: It will become very hard to lie. 

Taking Control of Your Personal Narrative

If we were to write a story about ourselves, what would it look like?  I like to refer to this story is our personal narrative.  It's a script that we follow based on the story of our lives as we perceive it through our memories.  Recently, I stumbled accrosse an interesting You Tube channel called

Spartan Life Coach

 run by a man name Rich Gannon.  I like his videos because they combine cognitive behavioral techniques with Buddhist philosophy.  He also has a take no BS approach to his coaching.  He mentioned the subject of changing our personal narrative.  For instance, if you were to write your life story over again, what would it look like?

From a Yogic perspective, we do something similar.  Instead of writing a new story, we erase the pages all together so that the book of our life is blank.  Have you ever seen the show "Once Upon a Time"?  This last season, there was a character called The Author that was responsible for writing down the narratives of each character in the TV series.  If you have not seen it, it's basically about Disney characters coming to life in the real world, with flashbacks to their lives in the fairytale world.  Kind of like Lost, but with wizards.  The villains of the show hijacked The Author so that he could write them their own personal happy endings.  In the end, the characters destroy The Author's quill so that the future could never be writing again.  I guess it's some sort of free will analogy.

When I was attending Kriya Yoga Seminary School, Goswami Kriyananda mentioned an interesting technique.  He suggested the we write down all the painful memories we had in our lives and go through them one by one in meditation.  During the meditation session, you visualize a different outcome to these painful memories, so that the cumulative effect changes the person who you are now. 

It makes sense.  We live in the present, but the past is a collection of memories and the future is nothing more than expectation.  Others like to hijack our personal narratives in the form of judgments against us.  Some of use have control of our own personal narrative, so the opinions of others will not effect out self concept.   Most of us do not.  Society grabs a hold of the magic quill of our perception and begins to write the narrative for us.  Deep down we may know that this narrative is wrong, which causes us to live in fear, doubt and states of anxiety. 

Think about who you are.  Are you happy?  Do you base you decisions on the past?  If not, it's time to take control of your narrative.  The story you write in the present will determine who you become in the future.  I think we all deserve our happy ending.

Why Dudes Don't Do Yoga

The start of Yogic tradition cannot be dated because the ancient Vedic traditions were passed down from teacher to student in the oral tradition.  I was not until around 250 AD that the Yoga Sutras were written by the author, or authors Pentanjali.  Gurus could be either men or women, but men made up the bulk of teachers.  I could go further into the social structure of Vedic culture, but I won't for brevities sake. 

Flash forward to the 20th century.  Gurus from India came to America to spread the word of Yoga.  You had Paramhansa Yogananda, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and Swami Vivekananda to name a few.  When Yoga was embraced by the counter culture movement, it was stripped of it's traditional aspects like spiritual discipline and shunning of intoxicants.  What was the original eight limbs of yoga, became one mainstream branch of Yoga, called Hatha Yoga.  Now, when I mention Yoga to people, they think of it as a bunch of stretches and poses.  I don't know how this happened, but somewhere between 1970 and now, Yoga became entwined with feminism.  Maybe it's just the ideological alignment with the counter culture and it's roots back to liberalism. 

So what is a dude to do?  If you want to build body mass, Hatha Yoga is not the way to go.  From the outside looking in, a Yoga class looks nothing more like a ballet class.  This is why I try to focus on the Yoga Sutras.  Hatha Yoga is introduced around 1500 AD as a method to prepare the body for long bouts of meditation.  It's not a means to an end in itself. 

If you are a man, consider this:  Yoga works to help us overcome emotionality based decision making, and replace it with rationality.  How often do we see people making decisions based off emotionality?  We are so conditioned to be in tuned with our feelings, that we mistake them for a reliable compass for decision making.  Are you following your true instinct, or your emotional instinct?  If you do not do the work to become self aware, you will never know. 

If there are other reasons why, please comment below.  I would like to know so that I can make traditional Yoga more palatable to men.

Sutra 2.7 - Attachment.

2.7 Attachment is that magnetic pattern which clusters in pleasure and pulls one towards such experience.

What does it mean when you are attached to something?  What is detachment?  In Sutra 2.7, we see that this Sutra equate attachment to a magnetic force, not something that your are stuck to like glue.  I like this analogy because it shows there are differing levels of attachment.  The closer a piece of metal gets to a magnet, the stronger the attachment.

Our attachments have roots in biology.  The pleasure centers of our brain release dopamine to reward us with pleasurable sensations.  Things like drugs and exciting experiences build up cravings in our biology, giving us the desire for repitition.   See my blog post

Happieness and the Persuit of Novelty

. 

When we start doing meditation, two things happen: we begin to feel a sense of mindful stability and all the things we were repressing begin to surface.  Out attachments surface as thoughts in our head of things we would rather be doing, music we like, or thinking about what just happened on the last episode of The Walking Dead.  It's very hard to get these thoughts out of your head.  Once the seed of a thought is planted, it germinates into a plant, that grows into other thoughts.  Before you know it, you went from thinking about some TV show to "what's for dinner?".  When you first start meditating, it's not that the mind is noisier, you are now aware of what is going on at the surface.

So how do we detach ourselves?  We work on letting the thoughts go through the mind like a river.  You sit at the bank of the river and let the thoughts flow by without putting any effort into stopping them.  See, thoughts are like the waves in the ocean, they rise and fall.  If you try to get rid of a thought, you will just be throwing more rocks into the pond. 

A detached life is not an apathetic life.  We confuse excitement for happiness.  True happiness is something that does not stop after the experience has ended.  It roles on from moment to moment.  We call this ananda in Yoga and it loosely translates to "bliss".  We can hang on to this bliss in our daily lives, and feel fulfilled.   This is not enlightenment though.  We still have to work in the world to fulfill our karma.  Unfortunately, many people get hung up on this bliss and withdraw from the world altogether.  These are the people that run off and join a beat farm and change their name to Stardust Happyfeet. 

As 311 Said "Keep my feet on the ground, keep my head in the clouds"

Sutra 2.6 - PC Load Letter

2.6 Egoism is the identification of the power that knows with the instruments of knowing.

Umm...  Say what?  Yeah, more Yoga double speak.  Don't worry, Office Space to the rescue!

This cult classic basically got popular over time, to the point it was quoted ad nauseum.  I was cool before it was cool because I saw it in the theater!  I walked out of there kinda meh, because it was just as I got out of college and before I entered the work force.  Five years later, while working at a realtors office, the people became a self parody by making stupid computer jokes based on the movie.  If you have not seen it, do it.

So Peter does his whole hypnosis thing and wakes up and his I-don't-give-a-fuckery ensues.  Day after day he has being going to the same job as a coder, working on the formerly apocalyptic Y2K bug fix.  His ego, or sense of who he think he should be based on his experiences, gets fundamentally altered to what he wants to be.  So the ego is a construct of the memories and experiences it identifies with.  In Peter's case, that's working a job he thinks he needs to survive, but never really wants.  After his hypnosis, his ego identifies with his true desires to do nothing.

The power that knows is the bridge between the instruments of knowing, which are the five senses.  Yoga differentiates between the senses and the mind.  The senses operate on a subconscious level, and as we meditate, we bring those operations into our awareness.  This gives us more control over how we react to situations, or, make us stop leading a double life. 

I give you full permission to destroy the printer in your office.  If it's like the one in Office Space, it probably should be replaced.

A proposition for mental health care reform.

Our mental health care system is a mess here in the United States.  First we have the shame of having to deal with mental illness in an unforgiving society and secondly, access to mental health care has become unreachable.  Most psychiatrists have become glorified pill pushers, more then eager to put a label on patients.  If you are lucky, you may find a drug that will help you with your depression, bipolar or anxiety, only to have it not work.  Time to move on to the next drug and ride the shitty-go-round of detox.

I think it is time for us in the spiritual community, especially us in the meditative and holistic areas, to give back.  The problem is that our practices tend to fall into the fuzziness of mysticism and spirituality and are dismissed a new age hoopajoo by the established psychiatric community.

Do not get me wrong, there are a lot of therapists out there that do a great job of teaching cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, but access to these people are limited to those who can afford them or those who happen to find them.

I have developed a program to deal with PTSD.  Like I have said in many of my posts, it is possible to induce a delta brain wave state of consciousness, then use various techniques to remove subconscious blockages.  This in turn rewires our neurobiology.  Over time, we can teach people to use different techniques, internalize them, and eventually cure their condition.  Yes, I said cure. 

I am going to volunteer at a local veterans center to try this program on some of our returning veterans.  If you have noticed the sorry state of the VA, you will see what a giant clusterfuck the whole thing is.  Hopefully, overtime, the Yoga community can come off it's spiritual high horse and do some good.

Sutra 2.4 and 2.5 - Ignorace is Bliss

2.4 Ignorance is the breeding place for all the others whether they are dormant or attenuated, partially overcome or fully operative.
2.5 Ignorance is taking the non-eternal for the eternal, the impure for the pure, evil for good and non-self as self.

Paramahansa Yogananda once said that ignorance is the greatest sin.  The simple fact that we do not know something, or do not bother to get to the correct answer ourselves, leads to much of the suffering we experience. 

An example I can think of is narrative.  We all have some sort of personal narrative that we run through in our daily lives.  It is the narrative of our own being as lived through our cumulative experiences.  With every passing day, we add to our own narrative, but most of us tend to keep adding pages to the same old story. 

Sutra 2.5 states: we mistake the non-eternal for eternal.  How much of an impact does a traumatic event have on us throughout the rest of our life?  Anyone with post traumatic stress disorder can tell you that they re-live them as though they happened the same day.  Soldiers returning from battle are so hard wired with adrenaline, there is no realistic way they can ever reintegrate back into civilian live.  Or is there?  We can actually go into our subconscious and break down hidden barriers within ourselves to dramatically change at the surface level.

These differing levels operate as active or inactive.  In Yoga, we try to live our lives in the present and overcome these obstacles as they are placed in our path.  As we become more aware, the obstacles seem to get bigger, but we are just noticing them more.  My first car was an old 1986 Ford Escort station wagon with power nothing and an AM radio.  Since the car did not have power steering, I just got used to it.  When I got into a car with power steering, I almost tore the steering wheel off, not being used to using less force.  Years later, when my fuel pump blew out, I lost power steering that I had taken it for granted.  So it goes with digging through the mind.

Impurity in Yoga refers to any matter "tainted" by the association with our individual thought.  See, at it's basic level, all matter is the same.  Thought, energy and materiality function according to the consciousness we project on to them.  Mystically speaking, this is refereed to is "The Vale".  It's the vale of ignorance metaphorically pulled over our minds that blurs our inner sight.

In my post about "What Would Mumrah Say About the Nature of Evil"  I go into greater detail about the relativity of evil.  If we are able to get past our own biases, we can see the greater universal definition of good and evil.  Later down the path, the Yogi is even asked to transcend the attachment to both of these dueling forces.  I know that statement goes against the grain of what we are taught as children: Be good in all circumstances.  Too bad the world at face value does not give us the opportunity to do that without great cost.

Don't sweat this too much.  Everyone is ignorant at some level or another.  Ignorance is bliss, so enjoy it while you have it.

Yoga for Athiests and Agnostics

Religion Vs. Atheism.  This is one of those hot potato subjects that I don't understand why we even have a debate about it.  Maybe it has to do with control and the culture war we are going through.  I guess there are some who like to have control and push their worldview on to others.  In a perfect world (queue sparkle music) I think we would get to the point where we could at least leave each other alone to live our own lives as we saw fit, but were still able to have civil discussions.  I partially blame the infusion of emotion into debate, rather than relying on logic and common sense. 

So can one do Yoga and not believe in God.  My answer is, of course you can.  Anecdotally, I know of many people that do some sort of meditative practice and adhere to no religion what so ever.  We can even break Yoga's moral rules down into basic ethics, which the basics can be found in multiple religions.  It comes down to weather you are willing to look for similarity or difference in things.  I personally am wired to find similarities, which is why I look for scientific explanations to what may be involved with the Yogic process. 

The problem I have seen, all to often, is that people in the mystical fields tend to try to fit their practices into some sort of pseudo-scientific template in order to get validation from a skeptical community.  Some skeptics, on the other hand, will never bother to explore something with an open mind. 

The issue is that Yoga and spirituality in general is a personal experience and at best, you will get anecdotal evidence that will never stand up to traditional scientific scrutiny.  Spectral imagining equipment has gotten better pictures of brain activity in certain states of consciousness, so there is something going on at the biological level.  Traditional Yoga is woven into the Vedic tradition, which inevitably involves Hindu deities.  The question you have to ask yourself is: Can you see past that in order to work with it at it's fundamental level.  I try my best to keep my posts as secular as possible, but in some instances, I have to use God because it fits into my own understanding of what I perceive, however, I try to keep an open mind to the fact that it might be all invalidated. 

So, if you are reading my blog and are a natural skeptic, thank you for being there.  Spiritualists need to be kept in check because I have seen all to often the pliable state a spiritual seeker can be in.  People who are sincerely seeking answers to life's greatest mysteries are prayed upon by huskers all the time.  Too bad.  There is so much out there that is good.

Sutra 2.3 - Get a Clue

2.3 The five afflictions are ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and the desire to cling to life.

Time to start digging in and getting our hands dirty.  Sutra 2.3 states the five kinds of afflictions that all thought can be categorized into in one form or another.  As I stated in the last book, thought categorization is the second step that leads to deeper meditation right after being able to sit down and do it.  There is a set order to meditation, which we will get into later.  For now, I will go over how this thought categorization works when it comes to the five afflictions.

When we speak of thought as matter with concioness impressions attached, we are looking for the thoughts that cause us to take physical action first.  These are the thoughts that work their way into the material world.  Without any action, the thoughts linger in the consciousness and have little noticeable impact on our daily lives.  Let's use the movie Clueless as an example.

Ignorance is Yoga is simply the fact of not knowing.  We do Yoga in the first place to seek knowledge.  Cher is ignorant to anything outside her small constructed world.  How often do we seek to find things that fit our own personal narrative?  Have your heard the phrase "ignorance of the law is no excuse?"  Well, excuses aside, most go through life, living day to day out of oblivious habit.

Cher tries to set up two of her teachers, only to have it backfire on her.  The egoism associated with thinking that she could have done this in the first place shows that, like her, we have a strong sence of I.  If you look at my post about the map of the Yogic mind, the ahamkara is the identification of the limited self vs. the Bhudhi, which is untarnished intellect.

Cher has a huge closet of crap, uh, I mean cloths.  How easy would it be for her to give that stuff up?  Attachment is the main cause of suffering in the Buddhist tradition.  We work in meditation to face our attachments to objects.  How do you know if you are attached to something?  If you can think of something, probably the first thing that comes to mind is some sort of attachment.  Detachement is a larger subject which is covered in later sutras.

You would think that aversion would be the opposite of attachment, but they are one in the same.  When we go our of our way to avoid things, it shows that we still have some sort of attraction to them by means of giving the object of avoidance attention.  So Cher couldn't accept the results of her drivers test or whatever.  She tries to avoid the inevitable result.

The desire to cling to life.  This sounds kind of morbid, but when we put it into the context of reincarnation, the soul has no death or birth.  Advanced yoga practitioners, who have reached the state of Samadhi know that death is just another transition, like going to sleep.  What would happen of we did no know if we will wake up in the morning? Sweet dreams.

The Power of Shame

Shame is a powerful thing.  It's serves as a tool to manipulate us into action against our own intrinsic values by cutting us off from human connection.  That connection is something that is innate,   however, from a spiritual standpoint, can be one of the most damaging things we experience.

How powerful is shame?  Look at how many of us are forced to lead double lives out of fear of losing personal connection.  First, we need to have connections to others.  The more open an honest our connections are, the happier we are.  If we live in shame of who we are, what our truth is, we begin to lie.  These lies begin to weave a dark web of deception around our true nature, and we forget ourselves in the process.

It's saddens me that spiritual traditions have been used as a tool of shame and control for thousands of years.  Jesus was an example of a person who lived without shame and even whent out of his way to live with society's outcasts.  We have many who are cast out of our society in the name of Christ, ironically, becoming the modern day lepers.

Where does shame start?  With the parents.  I do not have any children at this point and I do portend that I know how to raise yours, so lets look at this from our perspective.  What in your life have you done or not done because of the values your parents have instilled in you?  In Yoga, often the major samksaras we deal with relate to our parents.  For instance, my father was a big believer in the school or hard knocks.  He was abandoned by his mother and father at an early age, raised in a Catholic orphanage by abusive nuns, then did a tour of duty in Vietnam.  You could only imagined how that made him feel about life.  He was intent on setting the bar so high for me, that I could not meet his expectations.  Instead of trying harder to reach them, I gave up, rebelled, and did whatever I could to get attention by going in the opposite direction.

As we grow into early adulthood, the influence of others on who we are begins to take shape through peer groups.  In middle school and high school, we form relationships with groups of friends that can lead us down a certain direction in life.  For instance, in my case, I ended up with a group of friends that lead me down the wrong path.  They gave me the attention and validation my father never gave me.  I did a lot of things I was not proud of and when worse came to worse, many of them bolted when real friends were needed.  When I was given the opportunity to do the right thing, the thing that I knew in my soul to be right but the shame of the peer group would often win out.

How often do we see businesses shut down for having an opposing belief?  In those cases, shame is used as a weapon to coerce people to take a stand or lose their livelihood.  Technology has made it easy for us to shame others like a swarm of bees going in for the kill, shrouded behind the cloak of electronic anonymity.  

Fear, novelty and shame are used by organization and businesses to coerce money out of us.  How many of you have seen that SPCA commercial using Sarah Mclaclan's "Eyes of the Angle" song with the shaking puppies to shame you into donating?  Yoga is just as guilty.  Look at the models used to sell everything from Yoga matts to Yoga pants.   Yoga is more about fashion then actual practice. 

Don't be ashamed of yourself.  Work on your inner self to remove layers of sham imposed on you through years of conditioning.  When the real you begins to emerge, shame will naturally fall away because you will intuitively know you are doing the right thing.  A life without shame is a life of freedom, a life we are all meant to live.

Sutra 2.2 - TBA

2.2 This discipline is practised for the purpose of acquiring fixity of mind on the Lord, free from all impurities and agitations, or on One's Own Reality, and for attenuating the afflictions.

Through the process of Yoga, thin mind will become pure.  I don't mean pure in a Snow White G-rated no more Rambo Movie type way, but free from attachment to all the reactions built up in the mind over time. 

I find it interesting that this Sutra translation has decided to capitalize the phrase "Ones Own Reality".  Generally, when translating the Yoga Sutras, capitalization is meant to represent the larger whole, or the esoteric meaning of the souls journey to that larger whole. 

What is your reality?  Yoga states that your reality is not the same as other's reality.  Of course there are some things that we all can relate to, but on a subtler level, these perceptions are stored in our subconscious mind as impressions that we may not understand ourselves until we dig them out.  I think I may have used this example in my commentary in book one, but it's worth repeating.  Yoga is like a shovel that we use to dig beneath the surface of the consciousness.  You might hit a power line and get zapped, or maybe a gas line blows up in your face.  The Sutras are the diggers hotline you should have called.  It's the fire department that runs to the rescue when you blow up the neighborhood.  It is the pair of rubber gloves that protect you from the electric shock.

The Lord is generic in Yoga.  It's not what you would consider the typical embodiment of the Judeo-Christian God.  Yogic teachers in the Indian traditions will tell a practitioner to use a particular deity from the pantheon of Hindu gods.  Buddhists are going for absolute annihilation of the soul.  Sounds like a good time huh?  The Absolute is as abstract is it can get.  Once it is put into words, it loses it's meaning because at that point, the Absolute abstractions has been boxed in.  It's boxed in by religion, narrow-mindedness, prejudice and even your own up brining. 

Book tow will give us specifics on how we can clear away the muck and understand.

Sutra 2.1 - The Basics of Spiritual Dicipline and Intro to Book 2

2.1 Austerity, the study of sacred texts, and the dedication of action to God constitute the discipline of Mystic Union.

Time to move on to Book 2 of the Yoga Sutras.  Book One focuses more on the philosophical side of Yoga, while Book Two focuses more on spiritual practices and disciplines.  Just like in Book One, there are not any specific breathing, poses, or meditation techniques given.  It's just another basic guideline for practice. 

Sutra 2.1 opens the book with a broad brush stroke, giving us the basic types of discipline one can use to reach enlightenment.  Some schools preach using one, parts of others or all of them.  I think any practitioner should use the vast array of techniques and methods to see which ones works best.  When you find one that does the trick, pound on it like a jackhammer.  The tricky thing about Yoga is that it's not a linear path.  Many times it will seem like you have taken two steps forward, only to realize that you lost what you had.  Sometimes things will happen out of nowhere and you can spend years trying to get the same experience only to find it was not as great as the first time.

Austerity, in Yoga has different levels.  Mental austerity is the process of changing unneeded though patterns.  Physical austerity is trying to get the most out of using the least.  I have yet to see a Yogi on Hoarders.  Verbal austerity means being conscious of our words and the impact they have on the world around us.  So we learn to do more with less. 

Study of sacred text does not limit itself to the Vedas.  I think of it as indulging yourself in anything that expands your self awareness.  If you are an engineer, have you bothered to read the Twilight series?  We love to mock it, but it is still something you have yet to experience for yourself.  It's the sacred text of sparkly vampires. 

Dedication of actions to God is another meaning of detachment.  Working in the world in the light of truth without regard to outcome and selfless action are examples, if not the same thing. 

Sutras 1.51 and 1.52 - Book One and Done!

1.50. The habitual pattern of thought stands in the way of other impressions.

1.51. With the suppression of even that through the suspension of all modifications of the mind, contemplation without seed is attained.

Here we are, the final two Sutras of Book One.  These two sutras sum up the rest in a very simple way, one which I have spoken about in many of my posts:  you are not the sum of all your thoughts.  In Sutra 1.50, the key work is habitual.  Our bodes do thing out of habit, and that is a good thing.  If we had to consciously make a decisions about every move we made, life would be impossible.  Habit gives us the efficiency to live a life beyond a physical existence.

Yoga gives us a powerful tool to change these patterns using our own will.  In my opinion, Karma will end up changing these patterns one way or another through circumstance or cognitive dissonance.  Through the study of this first book, we have learned that the ultimate goal of our existence it to connect with pure consciousness, or that little part of it that lies in all of us. 

Sutra 1.51 states that once we are able to suppress all these thought patterns, we reach that level of purity.  Once we can hold that level indefinably, we are free.  I do not like the translation in the sutra, specifically the word suppression.  It gives the connotation that we are trying to push down something.  That is not the case.  We are trying to let go of something: every habitual thought we have in our mind.  Going back to my post on "Losing Your Marbles" we become the jar in the analogy: clear of all attachments and able to see things clearly. 

So, now on to Book 2.  I'm going to approach that a little differently then these posts.  I will be using some of my favorite books and website as direct references to suggested practices that accompany each Sutra, if applicable.

Happiness and the Persuit of Novelty

How much of our lives have we spent on the pursuit of happiness?  The founding fathers of the United States enshrined it in the Declaration of Independence.  It's one of the most quoted line from the Declaration, other than "We the people."  Countless books have been written on how to be happy.  I don't even know how many times in this blog I have mentioned the word happiness.  Count it if you feel like it, it will up my page views.

Happiness is  as personal an experience as depression.  It's one of those feelings that is hard to put into works and comes in many forms: euphoria, excitement, elation,  relief and so on.  My journey on the Yogic path has been about the relief of negative feelings and not the pursuit of positive ones.  When I started to feel the bliss accompanies meditation, I didn't know what to do with it because I did not know what I was looking for.  When you are feeling depressed or anxious, it's hard to know what the opposite feeling is like.

Have you noticed how we are programmed to pursue novelty?  Every year it seems like there is something bigger, better or faster than the previous year.  So now that the new thing is here, the old thing sucks.  There is a scientific explanation this: novelty is a direct result of our brains limbic reward system.  I love the satire in South Park.  Watch the episode "Freemium isn't free".  In this episode, Stan gets hooked on fermium games released by the Canadian Ministry of Gaming.  It turns out that the Canadian Devil has rigged the game so that its novelty never runs out, and people feel compelled to pay to get more access in the game.

Joking aside, this episode does a great job of explaining novelty and how it works.  The brains reward system is rewired for short term pleasure and thus never finds fulfillment in ordinary life.  Yoga does something to the brain that restores the natural balance of the brain to allow it pleasurable experiences without the need for instant gratification.  In essence, life itself is gratifying enough as it is.  Have you ever been told to have an "attitude of gratitude"?  This is also used as a meditative technique and has the effect of eliminating a sense of lack from out lives.

Now, does this come at the expense of personal improvement?  Realistically, an argument can be made that lack of satisfaction can lead to self improvement.  I mean, why would anyone want to do Yoga in the first place if they did not get any benefit our of it?  I would say, if the effort in novelty pushes you to a self satisfactory goal, then it has served it's purpose well.  If we are never satisfied and keep pushing from goal to goal without enjoying the rewards, what have we done with our lives? 

Sutras 1.47 to 1.49 - If I Tell You What It Is, It's Not What It Is

1.47. On attaining the purity of the ultra-meditative state there is the pure flow of spiritual consciousness.

1.48. Therein is the faculty of supreme wisdom. 1.49. The wisdom obtained in the higher states of consciousness is different from that obtained by inference and testimony as it refers to particulars.

So we have reached the supreme state of Samadhi, a state of pure spiritual consciousness.  The Yogi that can hold on to this state effortlessly has almost reached the goal of final liberation.  Everything is running on pure intuition at this point, since the mind has been wiped clean of any obstacles.

So what is the supreme wisdom spoken about in Sutra 1.48?  Again, we are in no man's territory because the very next Sutra 1.49 basically means anything I would tell you about it is not actually like what it is, but I will try anyway.  Pure wisdom is the ability to act on any particular situation in life without any hesitation due to Samskaras that were previously lodged in the brain.  So, why would you not instinctively throw your TV out the windows while watching "Keeping Up With the Kardashians"?  I mean, that show does suck, right?  So throwing the T.V. out the windows only seems wise. 

When one is tapped in to the pure flow of spiritual energy, or pure consciousness, the feeling of oneness with everything leads toward a natural compassion.  The feeling of hatred toward the Kardashians has subsided, so you may not even own a T.V., or perhaps it's just sitting there collecting dust.  Even the state of Samadhi will change our view of our "Gut Instinct".  What you thought your felt was right will change. 

Sutras 1.44 to 1.46 - Getting Toward the End of the Line

1.44. In this way the meditative and the ultra-meditative having the subtle for their objects are also described.

1.45. The province of the subtle terminates with pure matter that has no pattern or distinguishing mark. 1.46. These constitute seeded contemplations.

So, as we come close to the end of Book One of the Yoga Sutras, we get a vague descriptor of what the near end of the finish line looks like.  Book Two describes the actual process of getting to this point, which is the reason why I am holding off on further practice instruction.  If you have already started your practice, or followed the links I have provided, that's great. 

Sutras 1.44 through 1.46 is a reference to a state of mind called Samapatti, or to put it in a differently, Samadhi.   Samadhi has differing states with blurred boundaries between them.  Through consistent effort, a Yogi will reach a state of meditation on their object of choice, that all will merge into one state of being.  So, the meditator, the object of meditation and the act of meditation become one.  This is something that is difficult to describe on paper.  It's one of those things that a Yogi strives for, but does not come after a set amount of time, effort or method. 

By this time, the sameness is everything is realized.  Nothing is really different from another.  A thought is the same as a bush is the same as the cosmos.  We have rid the mind of all our Samskaras, meaning that there are no more subtle impressions lodged in the unconscious mind.  This is what "seeded contemplations" means in Sutra 1.46. 

So this brings up and interesting and somewhat frightening question.  What the hell is left of me once I have eliminated everything associated with the Ahemkara, or your sense of self identity?  Why would anyone even want to give up their self identity in the first place?  Well, I can only tell you what I feel from my perspective. Peace of mind is all I ever wanted from life.  Once I got a dose of that, many other material things fell to the wayside.

The Vedas talk about four states of existence that we all most go through in our soles journey back to the divine: Dharma or Righteousness Duty, Artha or Wealth, Kama or Desire, Moksha or Liberation.  We all incarnate with a mixture of these four primary motives.  No one is better than the other, so if you want to lead a wealthy and hedonistic lifestyle, go for it.  Yoga's intention, at it's resolution, is meant to bring about Liberation of the soul.   I think some of us that are on this path are deliberately left unfulfilled by material life in order to push us in this direction.

It's interesting how Vedic Traditions tie into one another.  For instance, you can get a complete picture of your karma by studying Vedic Astrology.  I have studied it myself and still find things about it that I never knew existed.  If you want more information on how in depth in can be, see my post on what a Vedic Astrology chart looks like: a giant Sudoku puzzle.

Sutras 1.42 and 1.43 - Perception is Nothing Percent of Reality.

1.42. The argumentative condition is the confused mixing of the word, its right meaning, and knowledge.

1.43. When the memory is purified and the mind shines forth as the object alone, it is called non-argumentative.

It's all about communication, or the Benjamins, if you think money talks.  Sutra 1.42 is a reference to what causes disagreement on fact in the mind when we are speaking through our own limited perception.  I don't think we all can ever really agree on everything, except the fact that the Brewers suck so far this year. 

In Yoga, there are different ways of obtaining knowledge.  The first way is through word of mouth, or someone relating their perception of an experience though another medium.  We obtain most of our knowledge this way.  When knowledge is conveyed through someone else's perspective, however, it brings all the fundamental inaccuracies of their perception along with for the ride.  That is why the scientific method has control groups built into the process.  Good scientist will also put their work up for pier review and try to have other's replicate their findings. 

The second method of obtaining knowledge is through direct experience.  Going through the process of meditation, while digging through our own mind, this is the only compass we have.  You will find many books on meditation, but not many about the results of meditation.  My personal opinion is that the results are so personal and individual, that it's hard for anyone one person to understand them unless they go through their own process.  At best, even the Yoga Sutras are a guidebook.  Goswami Kriyananda said that if you try something related to Yoga three times and it does not work out for you, give up and do something else. 

So, Sutra 1.43 points out that if our mind has be purified of the obstacles listed in my "What Is Thought" post, the meditator sees all things as the same, and therefore there is no need to have arguments about the nature of any given part of that sameness.  This is why many will seek out enlightened Gurus to ask them questions.  In Hindu and Yogic traditions, one who's mind is pure cannot speak an untruth.  It's also a good way to pull a scam and make some money, so beware.

Is Yoga a Form of Reverse Entropy?

Looking at how awesome the world is, I marvel at its complexity, wrapped up in a form of unity.  From my simplistic understanding, entropy is the theory that the universe is moving toward ever increasing chaos, to explain the perception of linear time.  There is a lot more to it than that of course, but I would like to purpose an idea.

Yoga, as a practice, is meant to remove things from our consciousness in order to better perceive things as a unified whole.  As we delve deeper into the inner workings of the mind, we identify predefined obstacles hindering our perception by using certain techniques.   Yoga, as put forward in the Sutras, is a best a loosely defined process.  You can comb through multiple interpretations as much as you would like, and I invite you to, to find examples of specific techniques.  For instance, what Hatha Yoga poses are given in the Sutras?  None that I have seen.

I have been practicing meditation twice a day for about ten years now.  I have been through the gambit of multiple practices using different branches of Yoga, many of them claiming to be the best.  FYI, none of them are, they are all just a means to an end.

So, as my spiritual practice has developed, it has become less complicated.  My view of the world has changed dramatically in ways I did not even expect.  So when I bring up my theory that Yoga is a form of reverse entropy, I mean it from a conscious, individual perception of things, and not from direct observation in the materialistic scientific sense.

Looking at the world through a clearer lens, I have notices that there is a subtle unity to everything.  Not in that butterfly-my-fart-will-cause-a-hurricane-in-China sense, but that beyond our conscious perception, there is a fundamental, intuitive, underlying unity.  Chaos seems to be a differing form of order.  We see the chaos because we have a preconceived notion of what order is.  Even our actions being perceived as good and evil are just part of that over all system.  Without attachment to thought, time seems to slow down.   

I find Rupert Sheldrake to be a fascinating person.  I have not read his work beyond his "banned" Ted talk.  He does raise some interesting points about modern materialistic science though.  I feel it's always good to keep the door open for debate, even on the validity of Yoga.  I'll keep doing it for now until I find something better.

Sutra 1.41 - The Fortress of Mindful Solitude

1.41. When the agitations of the mind are under control, the mind becomes like a transparent crystal and has the power of becoming whatever form is presented. knower, act of knowing, or what is known

If there any Sutras that you should pay attention to, it's this one.  It's the most important Sutra in book one until I say something otherwise, which I'm sure I will.  I will break this one down into it's constituent parts because it contains a lot of esoteric information. The Fortress of Mindful Solitude

When the agitations of the mind are under control

All attachments to matter cause agitations in consciousness and drag it willing or unwilling in a certain direction.  The agitations of the mind are called Vrittis.   I don't know why water makes such a good metaphor for things Yoga related.  I don't even like swimming or boating.  Anyway, going back to my reference on the nature of thought in my post "Sutras 1.5 - 1.11:  What is Thought?"  I used a pool of water looking at the surface of the moon as a metaphor for the way the undisciplined mind perceives reality.  Now to read that, I'll wait...  Good for you smart Alek, you skipped it!  The stillness of the water is called Vritti Nhirhodah, or stillness of thought.  Practice will get you to this stage of awareness.

the mind becomes like a transparent crystal and has the power of becoming whatever form is presented,

Now that your mind has been stilled, it becomes clear.  Now you get to go back and read my post on loosing your marbles.  The crystal is like the glass jar.  The Yogi then uses this clarity to focus on the object of meditation, which is covered under my posts about My Flav.  

knower, act of knowing, or what is known

So here we have one of the holy trinities in Yoga.  The essence of you is the knower, which is separate from the action of knowing something, which is conscious projection on to the object of what is known.  Like I spoke about in my Cycles of Life posts, much of the logic in yoga runs in circles.  We first have to pull apart everything in the mind, to then understand it, to then get rid of it, only to put what is left back together to understand the whole. 

Sutra 1.40 - Particle Constituency, Boooiiyyyeee!

1.40. The mastery of one in Union extends from the finest atomic particle to the greatest infinity.

Thousands of years ago, the Vedic culture had a word for the smallest constituent particle in the universe.  It was called Anu.  People falsely translate this to atom, thinking that the ancients had some sort of knowledge of the atom itself as a fundamental building block to matter.  One of the eight schools of Hinduism is devoted to the study of the invisible that makes up the universe.  See here: 

http://www.hinduwebsite.com/jainism/atoms.asp

So, this Sutra is directly related to the results of actions taken in Sutra 1.37.  To meditate on the nature of Flava Flav is the know the nature of the larger whole Public Enemy.  If you know Public Enemy, you know the nature of Chuck D, Hip-Hop and so on.  By slowing ripping away the emotional and psychological associations we have with matter, we intuitively understand it's nature. 

I know that I have mentioned this in other posts and it seems redundant, but the sutras do this purposefully to hammer home the importance of fundamental points.  Part of this also has to do with the nature of the Sanskrit language.  There are no punctuation marks like an explanation point, so the writers had to resort to redundancy and hyperbole to convey important ideas.  Case in point: you hear YEAAHH  BOOOOIIIIIYYYY!! enough, it gets really irritating.