Samsara
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Both the beautiful and the beastly archtypes. Dwell together inseparably within us. No light without shadow. No shadow without light.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I have been indulging in reading the thriller Angelology (complete with stories of angels and the war between good and evil), which I picked up at the Books for America shop in Dupont Circle a couple of weeks ago for the kind of night of reading that is the equivalent of a night of watching television if I had a television. Relatively early in the book, a professor says to one of the brilliant students who is a central character to the plot: “I have found that our texts will speak deeply to someone or they will say nothing whatsoever. It depends upon your sensitivity toward the subject. The mind and spirit become ripe in their own fashion and at their own pace. Beautiful music plays, but not everyone with ears can hear it.”
This statement encapsulated the ongoing thinking I do about my attraction to yoga and the tantric philosophy. I was contemplating especially deeply this week on my return from California, with no particular insight arising, what has drawn me in to this world of meditation and yoga. What am I doing, having been born in New York City and working as a civil servant in DC, coming from atheist Jewish grandparents and converted to Quakerism parents, finding such joy in learning Sankrit chants and working with energetic principles described in these ancient and medieval Indian texts? I do not doubt that the practices resonate and the texts speak to me and that the attraction is energetic, just as we are drawn to certain tastes and colors and entertainment and people and no interest arises from others. I just wonder why these practices and texts and not something else and why they hold me to such a degree that I am moved to teach them.
Both the beautiful and the beastly archtypes. Dwell together inseparably within us. No light without shadow. No shadow without light.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
One of the six fundamental aspects of being (sat) in the “Shiva-Shakti” tantra that is the foundation of Anusara yoga is svatantrya — freedom. (The others are cit, ananda, spanda, purnatva, sri). Freedom in this sense is an ultimate freedom — the very cosmos is unconstrained and freely creates what we recognize as the fabric of being out of its own play (lila). We, as inseparable from being, although in some ways confined by our embodiment, are essentially free — free to choose whether to recognize our essential nature, to find bliss (ananda) in our embodiment, to recognize the fullness (purnatva) of being, and to honor the essential auspiciousness of being (sri) in ourselves and all that is around us.
In having that freedom, we can also turn away. We can stay cloaked. We can choose violence and anger rather than nurture and love. We can choose, out of our own essential freedom to remain cloaked in ignorance, to throw bricks and threaten death because of a perceived socialist tyranny because of the passage of health care “reform” that denies the right to choose, does not provide basic medical services for all (no single payor or even public option), and gives the pharmaceutical industry a pass, but does some modest regulation of insurance companies and employers. (“Better than nothing, I guess,” as one friend wrote on the internet.)
I see the t-shirt “it’s all good,” and I think, “not!” I also know that I have the freedom for myself to recognize and remember sri, to try and see it in all, including the play of freedom that includes the freedom to turn away from the light. It will be a lifetime of practice.
