Manitou Night Life (click to enlarge)

the Grace is missing

Where oh where have I left thee?

Where have your whispers gone?

What silence has crept in when I wasn't looking.

The song remains, while I linger
and my spirit casts about.

Art thou thee in another form?

gf2 testing

Yoga - Sources of your pain

There are five major sources of your pain and they are cumulative, meaning they build upon each other.

These sources of pain are primarily tensions or holdings in your thoughts and manifested in your body.  A newborn child is tension free both in the mind and body.  Everything is malleable.

The conditions of life surrounding the child create tensions within its body allowing it to stand up and move against gravity.  Additionally the mental perceptions of its parents and guardians set up tensions in its brain.

If the child has malformations or incurs significant injuries in its formative years, its body must develop compensating tensions that often put long-term strain on the these compensating muscles, tendons, bones, organs, ...etc.

If the child is subjected to mal-informed or injurious mentalities, then its brain develops compensating mechansims to deal with these unknown and potentially dangerous thoughts.

Yoga addresses five primary pain-causing mental conceptions (KLESHAS) that most, if not all humans are born with.

Each KLESHA is built upon the other and in order to address them you must take them in baby-steps, working through the most external first.

The external  KLESHA is named ABHINIVESHA and stands for your desire to sustain your life, or your "fight for life."  This klesha commiserates with a fear of death.  This fear of death, ABHINIVESHA, is universally held by all creatures.  

From ABHINIVESHA stems the klesha DWESHA.  DWESHA not be adequate explained without discussing its underlying klesha, RAGA.  Dwesha is in essence the equal and opposite response to RAGA. 

RAGA is the desire to repeat a pleasurable experience again and again.  DWESHA is the desire to never repeat the pain experienced from the loss of pleasure.

They are two sides of the same coin and all stem from an underlying attachment to 'feelings' or states of being induced through your senses.  This attachment to your 'sense' of self is the klesha, ASMITA.

ASMITA produces your sense of I-ness.  I am this, I am that, etc.


ASMITA is really the paradox of seer and seen.  Are you the senses of the objects or are you that which senses?

You build attachments to all the things you think are important to your existence, those ideas and concepts which you think define you.  These attachments are capable of giving you pleasure when validated and pain when contradicted.  


The attachments of your defining thoughts (ASMITA) lead to desires to repeat the pleasures of validation (RAGA) or avoid the pains of rejection (DWESHA).

ASMITA stems from the root klesha AVIDYA.  AVIDYA is a psychosis where your perception doesn't match reality.  


Have you ever been walking in the dark and mistaken a shadow as something dangerous lurking in the night?

A stump is mental transformed into a hulking bear and AVIDYA is thus experienced.


Whatever concoctions of ideas brewed up a mistaken identity, a falsehood, are not real and are but a symptom of mental phantoms....perceptions gone awry.

By turning a consistent focus on your kleshas the mental tensions they create can be reduced and potentially eliminated all-together.  They can only be altered and removed through significant focus and open attention.  

Open attention is a must.  You must be able to hold the uncomfortable thought in your mind without allowing emotional responses, such as sorrow or anger.   To do otherwise is to allow your emotional compensations to overshadow your logic.  


You must hold cognitive dissonance until it bothers you no longer.  You must sit with the shadows of yourself to free yourself from fear or judgment.

To start, confront all the attachments you are holding onto so fiercely.  Those attachments that produce your fear of death, your desire to repeat pleasure, your repulsion from pain and how they mix with your perceptions or "senses" of self.

Yoga - Overview

Yoga is not the simplified western exercise practiced primarily as a mode of exercise and tension release. Yoga is a system which expands beyond a simple fad and consumer cycle and to consider it as such is a grievous miscalculation.

Yoga is a Sanskrit term, indicating a practice of physical and mental conditioning capable of producing significant physical and mental changes.

On the physical conditioning side, the postures or ASANA (in Sanskrit), which you see popularized in the west are meant to maintain physical health and train the mind to focus. There is nothing better than rigorous exercise to bring you back to basic survival thinking. To push, stretch and breathe at the edges of your comfort in a cool and collected manner takes a single-minded focus and helps keep joints, tendons and muscles in prime condition.

It is thus in these two ways that ASANA practice provides physical endurance and improved mental focus.

The mental conditioning of yoga requires consistent, focused, and long-term self-analysis. The ancient yogis of lore had nothing but time on their hands and could thus devote entire lifetimes to such development of self-awareness.

During those extended periods of self-analysis, the origins of fear, attraction, repulsion, ignorance and the egoic I-ness were discovered. The nature of the observer and the observed were scrutinized, and the source of cognitive dissonance was sought out.

In the upper system boundaries of yoga, a yogi could develop a clear mental holding of the union & separation paradox from which expanded understanding springs.

In truth, yoga is a science of idiosyncratic self-discovery. Its methods shed light on your attachments to ideas and personae. It questions those attachments and challenges you to rethink them. It disrupts your patterns and analyzes their existence and usefulness in the first place.

The conclusions you draw from yoga are both intimate and universal. The side effects of which can be more love, more patience, more directness, more firmness, more action, less talk, better health, more peace, less discord, deeper character, more compassion, less delusion, more simplicity, and greater stamina to name a few.

The only barrier is your self.

which came first....

feature or manifestation?


Was it the multitude of forms manifested or their features which came before?


....or was it neither?


the nearly synonymous nature of the feature-manifest relationship makes it hard to tell if they exist separately or are two sides of the same coin.

without idea, does or can form exist?



what changes the game is truly the perceiver

it is within the act of perception that a formulated feature takes specific manifestation.  

therefore across the spectrum of perceivers available at any given moment, a singular formulated feature could take a myriad of manifestations.

question is whether formulation must necessarily beget form.

from a vedantist perspective the formulation is eternally existent while all manifestations are time-bound.

it is the mental perception of an eternal feature which breeds form into existence.

so time needs eternity and eternity needs time; both are consequential to the other.  two sides of the same coin.

...so why does the coin exist? 

:)
 

Operational Sensors

Given that the human structure is of bio-electro-chemical construction and perceives through the senses, it seems logical to conceive of our existence simply as operational sensors.

Proper categorization or inclusion of perceived senses 

leads to wisdom.

 

  

Wisdom is eternal and permeates all.

The depth of every boundary is wisdom-set.