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Binary Half

This is a lengthy response to a comment from one of my readers, Duff. His comment was to my recent post about creating a new vocabulary of enlightenment, and my response simply became too long to post as another comment. Here is the original comment:

Flow is certainly related to enlightenment, but I’m not sure that it is equivalent to it. Flow as defined by MC Flow is a high-energy state where the exterior demands of the environment perfectly match the abilities of the person in it. I wrestle with how to integrate this understanding with low-energy states where there are little-to-no exterior demands at all, for example when sitting in meditation.
There is also a conception of equanimity regardless of state that I find an important piece of the puzzle. Since all states, including flow states and other spiritual experiences are temporary (subject to impermanence), they cannot be the ultimate aim, for all temporary experience has an unsatisfactoriness to it. In addition, one can develop craving for such states and aversion to “ordinary” states such as doing one’s taxes, or going to work in the morning. I think you are seeing this when you talk about not being interested in ascendancy or transcendency.
But then what is enlightenment? A spiritual attitude of equanimity with all things? And the dialogue goes on….

First, thanks for your thoughtful comment, Duff. Do keep them coming. As for my response, I’m not really familiar with MC Flow, though I sampled a bit of her music and found is quite compelling. My understanding of flow comes from another MC – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try saying that 5 times fast!), and my own experience. Flow, from Mihaly’s book, is “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.” That seems to apply to a large number of low-energy experiences. I can’t help but think of many a yogi expensing the high cost of isolation for the sheer sake of meditation.

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For those of you keeping score at home, it has been a bit over two weeks since the last post. One post a week was my goal when I started this blog 6 months or so ago, and up until now I have surprisingly been able to keep that pace. Now, however, work has begun in earnest on my book, I’m in training for a Prasara yoga instructor certification at the end of the month, and I’m working with my cameraman Robert to develop a 6-part Brickhouse Bodymind TV series chronicling his transformation from stressed-out, pot-bellied twenty-something to peaceful, hard-bodied heartthrob using the Brickhouse Bodymind Blueprint as it will be laid out in the book.

In the mean time, the amount of posts will probably diminish a bit, but rest assured that if you maintain your subscription, you’ll be among the first to be privy to the exciting new content coming later this summer. In an effort to keep some content flowing, I came up with the following post. It is an adaptation of a thread I started on the Tao Bums forum today in conjunction with some stuff I’ve been developing for my book. Hopefully y’all will get something out of it. As always, I encourage anyone to comment below if you have thoughts.

I believe we in the post-modern age, particularly those of us in the Western world, have done a wonderful job of compiling and translating ancient and foreign ideas about this thing called enlightenment. This is fantastic, but I fear that a largely borrowed vocabulary lacks enough relevance in the post-modern world to be as effective as it was all those centuries ago. These terms are more likely to make enlightenment seem like some distant thing than part of our fundamental nature. Let me be clear that I know the value of these ancient systems, and that I myself practice some of them, and am influenced by them. My purpose here is not to poo-poo these traditions but to frame their conceptual foundations in terms more familiar to those of us who have survived the Technological Revolution.

The terminology I’m talking about would be integral - both comprehensive and balanced - comprehensive in that it would take into account pre-modern, modern and post-modern sources alike, and balanced in that it would not leave behind any aspect of the individual (mind, body, spirit being the three major aspects).

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Amy Walter

Anyone who owns a dog knows the amusement to be had when one of them takes off on a slumbering romp through dream-land. Even just five minutes watching their paws flutter in a sideways “jog-in-place” and their lips flap and furl in an attempt to pursue some imaginary squirrel beats the hell out of a whole night of American Idol. I find myself wondering what forest he’s sprinting through, what stream she’s swimming across, or what mailbox he’s pissing on.

Last week I was reminded of all this while listening to this story on NPR’s All Things Considered. The basic gist was that college students everywhere are awakened in the middle of the night by dreams of failing their last final and being unable to graduate, or of tripping on their way across the stage at their graduation ceremony, or of arriving at the show naked altogether.

This sort of dream, according to the story, seems to be stress-induced, triggered by anxiety surrounding the event of graduation, an event looked forward to and toiled over for many years. But these dreams don’t just pop up in the midst of the experience. They can show up years and years later. The theory behind this is that college in general and graduation specifically can be very stressful, so when we encounter stressful situations later in life, and our brains try to sort those situations out, our dreaming selves return to the images of college and graduation in an archetypal way.

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Editor’s Note – What follows are my personal impressions and interpretations of Scott Sonnon’s latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Without Thought. My use of the term “integral,” both in the title of this article and throughout the body of it, to describe Coach Sonnon’s work is not meant in any way to confuse it with nor to marginalize Sri Swami Satchidinanda’s Integral Yoga Hatha or Sri Aurobindo’s The Integral Yoga, both of which stand on their own as seminal works. I only mean to indicate how Scott’s approach employs the primary integral strategy (which produces the All-Quadrant integral model described in my article on Integral Fitness) of assimilating truths from all sources available, whether ancient, modern, or somewhere in between, in order to present the most complete picture of human development possible.

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I’d like to start by thanking one of my readers, Duff (of fallingfruit.tv and precisionchange.com), for turning me on to the work of martial arts champion and Circular Strength Training® developer Scott Sonnon. For a voracious seeker of light like myself, personal development can be charted along a path upon which the most significant twists and turns are tied to landmarks such as the reading of a specific book or the discovery of a specific writer or teacher.

At age 29, my own path has several of these major landmarks – Roshi Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillar’s of Zen; the wonderful fiction of Tom Robbins, which led me to Alan Watt’s The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are; my first yoga teacher, Matt Krepps, who pointed me toward Godfrey Devereux’s Dynamic Yoga, and the work of Jed McKenna; the fiercely voluminous library of Ken Wilber; and now Scott Sonnon, who has empowered me to take yet another turn in my personal journey.

What Scott Sonnon presents in his latest book, Prasara Yoga: Flow Without Thought, is a digitally digestible, postmodern path to enlightenment. With the human body as the vehicle, it is an exquisitely sophisticated, integral approach to Hatha Yoga.

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This is the last of a 5-part series of articles called The Search. Start from the beginning here.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Clifton.

Alright, now I am going to ask you to do something for me. I want you to try to do something spontaneous. Go ahead. Try it.

The truth is, it can’t be done. Spontaneity has nothing to do with trying. Spontaneity is only about doing. One of the definitions of spontaneous is to be “said or done without having been planned or written in advance.” To be spontaneous is to be without forethought, and trying implies forethought. You can do something spontaneous, you can even spontaneously try to do something spontaneous, but you cannot simply and intentionally try to do something spontaneous.

Now you’re probably thinking I make no sense. You might be saying, since the spontaneous, moment by moment expression of God through one’s life is what we’re talking about here, it seems like nothing I’ve said so far makes any difference. All I’m doing here is teaching you how to try to do something spontaneous, and we just established that was impossible. And you’d be absolutely right.

But that’s only half the story. This is the paradox of awareness. See, each and every moment you are aware of consists of two elements: consciousness and light. Consciousness being this vast empty canvas, and light being infinite textures and colors of paint soaking in, and together they make up the piece of art we call existence. Without one or the other, this thing that we are aware of, every thing we are aware of, ceases to be. This is the same old dichotomy between agency and communion, male and female, depth and resonance.

And I will now introduce this as the ultimate and most fundamental paradox of existence: one cannot wholly sit back, observing existence as pure consciousness, as transparent witness and expect to get anywhere, and at the same time, one cannot grow through complete participation, existing as pure light. These are ideals, concepts set at extreme poles where nothing can exist.

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