What it Takes (Two)
by Swami Ambikananda Saraswati
“ Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and heard the voice of the singer of eternal melodies. …I closed my eyes with this last thought in my mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber, the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars.”
~ Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)1
In January’s blog we explored the concept of śrāddhā from Sage Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra. Commonly translated as faith, śrāddhā is more than that ~ it is trust. Not simply a master of Yoga, Patañjali was also a master of language and always chose his words very carefully. In his first chapter, Samādhi Pāda ~ the Path of Samadhi ~ he explores what it takes to reach that altered state in which we know the depth of our reality. Śrāddhā gets the first mention: we have to trust that Being of our being enough to make the effort required to enter its consciousness.
śraddhā-vīrya-smṛti-samādhi-prajñā-pūrvaka itareṣām ||1:20||
Therefore, those living beings who wish to attain samādhi must proceed with
faith, determination, energy and awareness of past teachings.
~ The Patañjali Yoga Sūtra, 1:20
The next thing he speaks of is vīrya ~ energy, strength, power, determination. In listing them thus ~ trust and determination ~ our venerable Sage seemed to have an acute understanding of our state of mind and heart at the beginning of any journey ~ we put our energy into that which we trust.
I know of myself that when I’m driving to an unknown destination, I prefer to look at a printed map rather than rely solely on my car’s satnav. And if the map differs from the satnav, I tend to take the map’s direction. However, I have a friend who operates in the opposite way, putting her trust in the satnav and laughing at my clinging to the printed page. Whichever one of us is right or wrong is not the point ~ each of us is making the journey with what we trust. That’s where we will put our energy and determination.
In fact, there is a hint here in this verse of some valuable self-knowledge: perhaps right at the beginning of this journey into the unknown, we can ask ourselves what it is we are putting our energy and determination into ~ because that will tell us what it is we trust.
Going Against the Grain
“The human brain is not well adapted to understanding transcendent,
nonphysical phenomena, and largely screens out experiences that are not related to biological survival.”
We are trusting something, putting our energy into to something we know nothing of except that which is rumoured! No one can point to that which we are seeking in our Yoga practices and tell us exactly what it is; what its dimensions are; what it looks like, sounds like…. We have to trust a rumour! And that’s where virya comes in.
Think of the beautiful virabhadra āsana-s ~ again we have this word vira : brave, heroic, committed. Just as these āsana-s challenge us physically, remind us of the energy and effort required for heroism, no less do we have to take this commitment and energy into our meditation to change our inner landscape. To orientate ourselves in a direction that leads we know not where, we have to trust the ancient heroes of this path who walked it before us.
In his beautiful God ~ A History of Humanity the author Reza Aslan3 points out that historically our endeavours were not just to fill our bellies, keep ourselves safe and pass on our genes. He points out the many ways we engaged in other pursuits ~ pursuits that explored a different realm. Early humans hunted and gathered in the physical world to clothe and feed themselves. However, they also hunted and gathered in a space of being other than the natural, physical world ~ and seemed able to move beyond identifying Life with the activities of life.
Indeed, both Aslan and Harari4 in his best-selling Homo Deus ~ A Brief History of Tomorrow point out that this search for the unidentified ‘more’ had a greater impact on our direction as humans than the natural world with all its harsh boundaries, dangerous realities and austere limits.
So it seems we always had those in our communities who pointed to another way, an horizon beyond the limits of our vision. And enough of us believed ~ had trust in ~ their direction and to put heroic energies into it.
In his second chapter, Sādhana-Pāda, when describing the path of Kriyā Yoga, Patañjali uses something of a synonym for vira: tapas.
तप:स्वाध्यायेश्वरप्रणिधानानि क्रियायोग: !!१!!
tapaḥ-svādhyāya-īśvara-praṇidhānāni kriyā-yogaḥ || 1 ||
Self-discipline, self-study, and sustaining awareness of the Immanent Omnipresence constitute the practice of Yoga. (1)
Tapas means heat, and it also means asceticism. We have to bring to our practice of Yoga, of seeking, that heroic, burning effort. It is easy here to think of the effort of a wrestler or a fighter, but think rather of the effort of a musician or an artist faced with silence or the blank canvas. There has to be a certain barrier that is heroically crossed within oneself that speaks to our own burning need. In Yoga the need is to make the search for another way of knowing ~ ourselves and the world.
Retrieving the Self
Yoga is a search for that ‘more’. It is a questioning about our being and Being ~ about our essential reality. It is also the continuous reaching for the limitless beyond the limits imposed by living. It has always held that knowing this ‘more’ requires a state of consciousness beyond thought. “Yogaś-citta-vṛttinirodhaḥ” the Sage Patañjali says in the second of his 195 sutra-s: “Yoga is the stilling of the movement of thought in consciousness.” Only then, when thought is silenced, he declares, do we know that true identity: “tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe’vasthānam”(1:3). However, when dependent on thought, our reality is limited by it: “vṛtti-sārūpyam-itaratra” (1:4).
What we are seeking ~ and putting our trust and energy into ~ cannot be reduced to an object that can be measured and demonstrated to exist. Thought, on which measurement is entirely dependent, Patañjali points out, takes us only so far and no further in this. We put our trust and determination into our search because we are “aware of past teachings,” teachings that pointed beyond the horizon of our current limited vision of ourselves as a subject separate from all that is other, to a Self that permeates and encompasses, and in which there is no ‘other’.
The Sage is quite clear that Yoga gives us a ‘method’ to get us to the threshold of this altered consciousness, but it cannot take us through it because, as he says, thought must be silenced at the threshold. Objective questioning, measurement and exploration ~ all incorporated into the ‘methods’ of this search ~ get us but so far, then they actually become obstacles. From this point on we leave method and enter another realm altogether.
Here, at this threshold, our trust and determination take us to the stillpoint: the place where all the rules and methods fall away. As Tagore put it we trust the dance of life, that even in our deepest sleep, "will still go on … keeping step with the stars." Here, our work ~ our trust and determination as Yogins ~ is to "follow the breath to the path that will lead us home1."
The question we have to ask ourselves is, do we have enough trust to put our energy and determination into this search, and then close our eyes and surrender all effort?
References
1. Sadhana by Rabindranath Tagore, published by S G Wasani for the MacMillan Company of India Ltd., 1913.
2. One Mind by Larry Dossey MD; published by Hay House, USA.
3. God ~ A Human History by Reza Aslan; published by Bantam Press, 2017.
4. Homo Deus ~ A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari; published by Vintage, 2015.
©Swami Ambikananda