Still Water

Our sutra reflection assignment this month is in three parts. To answer the middle part first, I have to say that at the moment "persevering practice," or at least consistent practice (since I have no idea how long I'll persevere), is no trouble at all. I look forward eagerly to practicing every day, and enjoy it as much as anything else I might happen to do and more than most of what I do. Plus you can't argue with results, and the results of daily practice, which include dramatic and positive changes in health, appearance, and overall vitality, have been nothing short of amazing. So I don't have any trouble following a practice which is consistent, persistent, and dedicated.

As for the question of whether persevering practice or non-attachment could be the biggest help in my life, I don't know. But I suspect consistent and dedicated practice will help me more in the longest run.

If, as Sri Patanjali teaches, the reality of "the inner being establishes itself" only when the mind is completely focused, and if this total focus can only come once ordinary mental activity has ceased, then the experience of reality requires the cessation of thought, or "mental activities." Furthermore, Patanjali taught that this total focus that a person needs to achieve before he or she can experience unfiltered reality requires non-attachment, defined as "having no desire" for any thing, no desire to be any place, no desire to experience any particular outcome, because one's mind is stilled, has rendered itself capable of mirror-like reflection, and is at last aware of "the spiritual principle" (Sutra 1.16)*

In all seriousness, and not being facetious, I have to say that non-attachment sounds like a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. In fact, it sounds like a necessary place to visit, and frequently, for anyone who wants to enjoy even a minimal degree of mental peace and equilibrium. The problem with mental peace is it's not suitable for dealing with a world gone wrong. That requires attachment to outcomes, attachment to a vision of how things could be different, and a certain amount of righteous indignation. I don't want to be sitting blissed out in the U.S. when my mind becomes aware that a white phosphorus bomb fell on a group of little kids in Afghanistan and burned them to death. I want to feel emotions appropriate to that knowledge, and I need to be attached to certain outcomes to be able to mentally process this kind of knowledge appropriately.

Maybe an awareness of the spiritual principle could help me deal more effectively with the knowledge that it we don't do what's necessary to stop the processes causing the warming of the earth's atmosphere and oceans, the physical principles required to support human and animal life on earth will collapse. But I don't know enough to know how that could be.

It's a paradox, but my sincerest feeling on this topic is that non-attachment and passionate attachment are both necessary to a balanced life in the modern world, a world whose capacity for evil, destruction, and dysfunction, according to the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung, "puts everything that has ever agonized mankind in the deepest shade."

I don't mean to make light of Patanjali's very ancient and profound teaching, and in some ways I believe the truth of it is self-evident. A moving and active mind, like a disturbed body of water will never reflect the real world it exists in with anything approaching perfect accuracy; crystalline reflection requires absolute stillness, and absolute stillness requires cessation of desire. However, much of what Patanjali is talking about has to do with perfection -- perfect apprehension proceeding from the perfect stillness of the perfectly focused mind, and I don't know whether we're supposed to approach this concept as an unattainable ideal of perfection, or something we should aspire to.

I do know that a daily yoga practice makes me feel more emotionally positive and vital, but I don't know what part of the practice -- mental preparation with prayer, asana, savasana, pranayama, or the little bit of chanting I do at the end -- is responsible for that, or whether all of them together are responsible.

So I guess I have say, after all this long-winded digression, that of the two concepts dealt with in Sutra 1.12, non-attachment is more problematic to me than consistent practice.

All quoted paraphrases of material drawn from the sutras is from Bernard Bouanchaud's "The Essence of Yoga."

The quote from Jung is from "The Undiscovered Self," Bollingen Edition, p. 54.

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