Statuary Around Town


Gopi Krishna, in this book The Awakening of Kundalini, writes: “Yoga exercises can also be directed toward worldly objectives. There are exercises that are conducive to the health and efficiency of the mind, others that lead to psychic gifts, and still others that strengthen the will and improve the ability to deal with problems. However, no single achievement of this kind — or even several of them taken together — is Yoga.” He continues to state that “Yoga is a transhuman state of mind attained by means of the cumulative effect of all practices combined, carried on for years, and supplemented by grace.” Other texts say enlightenment comes to some just by “grace” with no need for the yoga practices. Others need various amounts and types of practices.
Me, I have no idea what is a “transhuman state of mind” but I want for myself and those around me being healthier and stronger, with an improved ability to deal with problems. (Imagine, for example, those gifts applied in the context of providing universal health care, while simultaneously educated and shifting our society to a healthier way of living). I don’t think anyone can judge or determine whether one’s self or someone else is truly enlightened or can lead others to enlightenment (whatever that means). But I am certain from my own experience that yoga helps me to be more grounded, more centered, more intentional, stronger, and healthier. Thus served by steady practice, I am more content and find it easier to be kind. I’ll take that for now.
Hops beginning to blossom. I hadn’t realized one can also eat hops shoots.

Kashmir shaivism, using the term spanda, talks of the ultimate pulsation of life itself, all being a vibration, everything a play of opposites, a constant dance of concealment and revelation.
Yesterday I when I went to see Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, I thought about about what a dance of moments, desires, emotions, motivations, opportunities, and relationships made Woodstock the phenomenon it became.
I remembered when I was a teenager asking my mother why we had not gone; I had some idea that good family friends had made the trek from Long Island. She said it did not seem sensible to bring three girls under 10. I am sure that if we had gone, my memories would have been of being dirty, hungry, tired, wet, and overwhelmed. Instead, I grew up with the instant nostalgia of someone who was just a few years too young to make it up there on my own. In this contemplation, I marveled nearly as much at the play of spanda in my own life as in the world around me.