Page numbers refer to the PDF of Unexpurgatory
Yoga. Sitting, breathing with ujjayi pranayama sounding
through my nasal pharynx, throat and eustachian tubes, doing it with “nectar” (khechari
mudra), feeling the ajna chakra connecting the area between my eyebrows
with the base of my skull. Feeling my spine, relaxing, vibrating.
This is deconstruction in one form, one way, manner, fashion, as
written of and by this body, as I think of the Hindu notion of karma and debt,
retribution, guilt, social networks, eschatologies, euthanasia and the “free
play of meaning” relating to Kashmiri concepts of the alphabetic and linguistic
matrix of reality being Sanskrit, the essence of the language and its written
form being one, and being one and the same as the minds that individually
conceive thoughts which in themselves are nothing apart from matrika, the
“little mothers” of all and everything, the Matrix, the ground of being; yet
these concepts rigidify readily with caste and culture weighing heavily upon
those who try to transmit the living heart of the teachings, which is just each
one’s own breathing, pulsing embodiment.
The beautiful abyss of what death means to me is solace and
refuge from I, my selfing unthing (and Kohut’ selfobjects, and everything
else). Death, yes. And psychophysical deconstruction by glossolalia.
(pp. 10–11)
Because the ego is concerned with perpetuating its existence,
while all about one others have died and others continue to die, one naturally wonders
from time to time, “Do I survive death?” Vividly convincing accounts of those
who have survived near-death experiences and the glowing, ecstatic reports of
transcendence by mystic saints do not necessarily quell one’s fears and doubts
regarding life after death, perhaps because one suspects that the portion or
aspect of the psyche that remains to observe such ethereal phenomena will
itself perish in the inevitable event of actual death. Such suspicions can
persist and even increase in the aftermath of one’s own transcendence of normal
experiential bounds. Fear of death and its attendant doubt do seem to submerge,
if not irreparably shatter, in the wake of one’s ego-death, an episode in which
the innermost I ceases to identify anything at all, no longer delivering
reports of any observations of even the subtlest phenomena, which have
altogether vanished without a trace, with no I remaining to in any way reflect
upon this occurrence or self-reflect upon itself. With the post-episodic reappearance
of the ego, self-concern once again arises but in a markedly changed psychic
environment that will not readily admit of limitations such as mortality. This
grandiose, inflated phase may persist for years, until the humbling
hammer-blows of life, ringing on one’s hollow, puffed‑up idol of a
self-image convulse it to the ground and awaken one from the dreamy worship of
oneself as an immortal god trapped in a human form that is, as such an incarnation,
special. Or one can go crazy, as Nietzsche did, stuck in his
Zarathustrian grandiosity.
(p. 38)
I have trouble putting Nietzsche in a category. I suspect that
his view of himself was as penetrating and multi-layered as were his insights
into anything else. Yes, Freud said that no one ever knew himself better nor
likely ever would. Anyway, who indeed knows? I too am categorywise agnostic,
but I imagine that Nietzsche’s “self” was spread along the pathetic-tragic
continuum—unevenly probably. Language fails to offer me useful distinctions
here. Here once again. A few credos: I think human beings are complex,
and “a complex” is never simple. I don’t believe in pure cases. It seems that a
lot of “responsible thinkers,” be they psychoanalysts or economists, don’t believe
in them either, giving out disclaimers of a few phrases before going on at book‑length
lavishly fictionalizing their admittedly merely “ideal” cases. Implicit in this
is the understanding that this is how types must be defined—and the belief that
they ought to be defined—or invented—in the first place. Some of these people
are masters of characterization, like good novelists of the traditional mold.
They emphasize, reify and circumscribe patterns of thought, feeling and action that
may predominate in a given person or socio-economic group for a time or at
times. Then, suddenly, standing alone, seemingly self-incarnate, is a type.
Here the social scientist becomes a dishonest artist: “Behold the type!
I didn’t create it—I discovered it, for I am a scientist!” And, “—hence I am a great
scientist!”
As people once identified with the heroes and/or villains of
their cultures’ epics and legends, so do many people today, in their search for
an identity, incorporate in their self-image the many details of a type to which
they initially feel akin by virtue of some striking correspondences of a few traits. For many readers of
psychological works this sense of kinship soon becomes a sense of identity. For
a fuller understanding of themselves and their psychological intricacies they
read more of the authors who speak to them, who illuminate their nooks and
crannies. Thus people read(!) for “self-discovery, ‑understanding,
‑realization.” This is like trying to shave by looking at a painting
instead of looking in a mirror. This is life imitating science—like the medical
student who gets the symptoms of half the diseases he studies. But the medical
student has the benefit of mentors to tell him what’s happening. For all their
self-severing dialectic and rhetoric, Nagarjuna and Nietzsche didn’t sever
themselves from the sangha and the reading public, the entangled masses who
need not a mirror but a sword: the requisite operation isn’t the deluded
shaving themselves; it’s something more fundamental, a procedure that doesn’t require
a mirror—their self-decapitation.
The methods. The melting of self-imagery, the dissolution-dissonation
of self-description, the deconstruction of discursive constructs and their
constructing. The methods without metaphysics and morality. Without the guilt
that will inhibit the process: the slow, painful severing of the head. But
guilt is part of the package that must be unwrapped; guilt is woven into the
collar around the neck that waits to be vivisected, cut clean through. The
slicing is so slow that at times it seems to cease, even move backwards as the
neck apparently heals for a time. But we persevere, intent, obsessed. Never is
a mirror needed, but mirrors—and paintings—distract us. Everything distracts
us, even descriptions of the task at hand-at- throat. Nietzsche can take us
far, reminding us of many things and showing us new ones but, finally, he can
take us only so far; then, if we meet him on the lonely road of our essential
suicide—mustn’t we kill him as surely as we’re killing ourselves?
Yes; as surely and perhaps as slowly. I, for one, am having a
hard time getting rid of him: having pretty well digested most of his magna opera,
he hides in my bones. He may finally die only when the sword breaks through,
whistling into thin air as my head falls free. “Freedom?. . . From what?
(Forgotten.)”
Nietzsche characterizes—having himself typified—the scholar,
the ascetic, the scientist, the artist, the philosopher, even the priest. He caricatures
types and he traces their attitudes to root level, but he doesn’t pretend to
portraiture any more than a radiologist does. He paints his characters in broad
stripes with dyes that soak to the genes, then he turns them inside out to see
what they really mean. He’s left a colorful, graphic record of his own
well-executed self-deconstruction. “He’s” and “his”— where “he” “is” between
these and this w-h-o c-a-n t-e-l-l o-r s-p-e-l-l?
He made distinctions, he put up solid transparent walls in which he observed his specimens flourish in a naturalistic environment. The most deft of surgeons, he could vivisect an animal that would then live a normal span, its innards exposed all the while. Its descendants, and those of others like it, live today in the same terrariums and aquariums that he constructed, or, rather, pointed out, uncovered, excavated from beneath structures that he removed by deconstruction. But we are who we are, and we are not found as such in his zoological notebooks. His methods are powerful and we may use them to great advantage; they are intimately related to a point of view, however, and here we must be certain to make our own observations once we’ve attained an ecstatic height or a despairing, abysmal depth. If we rely on descriptions of the view—even those of a master traveler or a worthy guide—there’s every danger that we’ll imagine something according to the description and take this for the reality of our excursion—and so, for all intents and purposes, it will be that reality. We’ll recall that, and the memory of the nausea of our high- or low-altitude sickness that let us know we really were “there” at the time it gripped our stomachs, forced us to ask what we were looking at, and compelled us to answer in the fanciful terms of similarly stricken geopsychologists of the past, who themselves may have been blinded by the dazzling, raging poetry of a guide who’d excoriated such posturing “science” and counter-science.
Poverty and chastity, impoverishment and forced celibacy. Whatever.
I’m going to freesociate a little here (hear?) to your journal quotes,
fresh-blood red and alive with the viperous pit’s hiss and rattle as they are:
“There is no exit.” BPM II, but why am I telling you? To promote the struggle;
it’s no time to take in the “view”—that was sentences ago, across the
indentation, the chew. The view you took, or it took you. Now what to do? “This
fearful attitude which cannot effect an escape from itself, . . . cannot destroy
. . . the armor which has become a prison, . . . and take joy in the unknown.”
Attitudes escape themselves when they are embodied, felt, and emoted fully. In
the animal kingdom fear completes itself by fight or flight. Failing that, a
cornered animal shivers in wide-eyed paralysis as shock sets in to ease in
advance its death that soon follows as the jaws of its predator tighten around
it, the teeth snapping its cervical spine. In humans, deep chronic fear effects
a partial paralysis of the will, a psychological cornering, an “impoverishment”
that expects the worst and—surprise?—sometimes gets it. What’s the remedy, the
therapy? Work backwards, out of the shell-shocked shelter of your mind (which
psychophysically is your head: not just your brain but your scalp, face,
eyes, ears, tongue, and, especially, jaws) down through the neck into
the shoulders, etc., all or any of which need to shiver, then, yes, convulse
until suddenly a murderous rage will seethe through you with surprising
strength. Let it. That’s Mother Nature finally awakening. Or perhaps at the “fight”
point you’ll run like the wind—ecstatically—instead of flailing with lethal
gaiety at . . . dissolving unrecollectable memories. (Free at last. . . . From
what?) As therapy this stems from Reich; as theory it has roots in Darwin and
common sense. From shivering to rage might take less than a second, by the way.
Now, where to do this? It might involve some fierce growling or howling. . . .
(pp. 165–7)
Now, sitting at the Mac, I listen to the victorious [Skt. ujjayi] sound of my breathing while the tip of my tongue rests on my uvula. My fingers write this as the voice in my head, “my” “thinking,” dictates. My breath stops and I feel into my diaphragm and grunt and grind forth more raging fire with which to illuminate the world that had grown dark and had abandoned me, like a bad mother. I squirm, my pelvis pitches, rolls and yaws; my feet tap, my toes and soles clench and release; I concentrate on the voice in my head then once again hear my breath as the voice in my head, my “self,” “the ego,” “the I,” tells me—“I” tell “myself,” “I” “think”—why not think out loud, with feeling, with melody perhaps? “I” “silently” “ask” “myself” “this.” Suddenly I say out loud in baby talk, “Jay, I want somebody to hug . . . ” and I sing, “Can’t I hug my heart? Can I hug my heart? May I hug my heart?” Then I soulfully scat polyphthongic exhalations, leap out of the chair and turn the light on; while I wail nonsensically I think, “I’m walking across the room just like Lua!” I laugh, never having identified with Lua before, thinking that he—or I—must be in an exalted state at which point I sit back down and in my stasis take inordinately long—let’s be accurate: frightfully long—to compose this sentence, having to deal with a fear of losing my connection to this feeling, to this breath/sound, to this creative aliveness, the pelvic pulse of this . . .
I did the hong-sau technique (SRF’s name for ujjayi pranayama) for fifteen minutes at a stretch, which is the suggested length for practicing this “concentration” technique when sitting prior to practicing the “meditation” technique of Om (which is essentially what Maharajji calls “music,” hong-sau being virtually the same as his “word” and “light” techniques combined).
Hong-sau may be practiced any time, Yogananda tells us, even while
eating. And especially, I might add, while wheezing, to which ujjayi bears a
resemblance I noted last night after hours of off-and-almost-always-on ujjayi
during which time I ate while hearing my breathing and chewing, for a change,
through my Eustachian tubes which had opened with the action of my jawbone.
After my meal of a sandwich of cream cheese and mustard on toast, and tortilla
chips, the ujjayi coarsened to a wheeze. I was amused as I observed this new
occurrence for a few moments, then I relaxed into my body, feeling my torso and
spine; my head snapped back, I felt and heard a pop in my neck, and the
wheezing was gone: ujjayi washed on, like waves on the shore.
In the midst of divorce proceedings has my arranged marriage to
the guru blossomed into love? Lacking macrons and other diacritical marks for a
full orthography I reproduce to the best of the Mac’s ability the
penultimate stanza of “Jyota Se Jyota” from Sri Guru Gita (Gurudev Siddha Peeth, Ganeshpuri, fourth ed., 1978), p. 69:
Saci
jyota jage hrdaya men (2X)
So’ham
nada jagavo
Sadguru
jyota se jyota jagavo
(Refrain)
The true flame is alive in our
hearts.
Awaken us to the So’ham-music.
And from the preceding page:
Refrain:
Jyota
se jyota jagavo
Sadguru
jyota se jyota jagavo
Mera
antara timira mitavo
Sadguru
jyota se jyota jagavo
Light my lamp from thy lamp, O
Sadguru,
Light my lamp from thy lamp,
Remove the darkness covering my
heart.
After reading, hearing and singing about hong-sau/Word/so’ham
for so many years I’m beginning to appreciate the basic technique that
is as advertised: simple and natural. It seemed forced, not simple, until I accepted
the naturalness, the OKness, of the stuff that it brought up: grimacing,
contorting, grunting, shaking, screeching—ugly physicoemotional kriyas.
Allowing myself this, I’m beginning to spontaneously hear so’ham:
ujjayi is doing itself. This, I suppose, is what’s called ajapa-japa. I’m in a position of
having to confess that Siddha Yoga at some point or points does become a
spontaneous yoga. It’s blissful, it’s freeing. I’m
tasting the bliss of freedom, muktananda, and I appreciate Swami Muktananda in
a new light, in the light, if you will, of the flame of the lamp of my heart.
Can I sincerely chant the last stanza of “Jyota Se Jyota”?
Jivana
Muktananda avinashi (2X)
Caranana
sarana lagavo
Sadguru
jyota se jyota jagavo
(Refrain)
O imperishable Muktananda!
Let our lives be dedicated to thy
feet.
Yes, given: the status of the guru’s feet as a recognized mystery of Siddha Yoga; the notion that these “feet” (surely not the feet of the dead Baba buried in Ganeshpuri with the rest of his body) encompass the totality of existence; the nature of Muktananda as the muktananda, the blissful freedom, of anyone fortunate enough to hear about it and experience it due to the dedicated efforts of people like Baba and myself. What, then, is such a fortunate one’s due? His due will be his pleasure, which is communicating the source of his pleasure. The communicating— the saying—and the source are the same: the breath, whose inhalation and exhalation are sometimes called the feet of the (here I restore the honorific upper-case G) Guru. “I salute Sri Guru, whose two lotus feet remove the pain of duality and who always protects one from calamities. I salute the Guru’s two feet, which are within the reach of speech, thought, and contemplation, and which have different ers—white and red— representing Shiva and Shakti.” (Guru Gita 43, 45) If I consider that Shiva = jiva (soul), the imperishability (from jivana) of the soul of muktananda is no problem. I recall Kshama Zeta—Arjuna’s wife and editor-in-chief of Darshan—saying that Gurumayi kidded her about not believing in reincarnation; it seems it was no big deal.
Do people want to be kids of a physically childless Guru who kids? Are we kidding when we chant the second verse of “Jyota Se Jyota,” which means: “We, thy children, have come to thy door. Show thy auspicious form”? Yes and No, respectively. This is the desire for and the acknowledgement of a transference. As we once, in our infancy, worshiped our parents, “We worship thee, bowing our heads low. Shower the nectar of thy love.” (Third verse) We worship the object of our transference, or at least obsess about her, lowering our heads into our infantile stuff. When we taste the love we know its all right to let it all out, even though “It has been sleeping within us for ages—Awaken that Chitshakti.” (Fourth verse) Let Chitshakti’s kriyas heal us. That brings us to the flaming heart and the So’ham-music-awakening, which leaves only the first verse unconsidered: “O Lord of Yoga, O Lord of Knowledge, O Lord of all, O Supreme Master! Shower thy grace.” That’s a good thing for the aspiring children of a Yoga Master, of a Guru, to call out on her doorstep.
I’ve come full circle, all the way back to Yogananda, Maharajji, Baba and Gurumayi—even back to Rajneesh, who gave me a name I’ve thought of several times today: Prem Avadipa, which he told me means Bursting Out In a Flame of Love. An incendiary bomb! From a card at the feet of Gurumayi and her brother (speaking of ) I received the name Raghu, a progenitor of Rama. A glance at the accumulated empty spaghetti sauce bottles in Tron’s kitchen shows Ragu to be a favorite brand—along with Progresso. So one pilgrim not-so-humbly progresses, recirculating less along the lines of a particular path than around the cycles of the breath-cycle that I ride over the face of the dancing and playing field of the world, always between the goal posts.
From my present vantage point I see Yoga sadhana as being an opening
to the breath—an
opening of the body to the air that it constantly exchanges between the inner
and outer atmospheres. Yoga is the union of the tangible, sensible elements of
the body with those of the world: when “I” vaporizes,
we/you/he/she/they/it’s the world of: flaming sight and warmth; solidity
and smells of earth; liquid tastes and textures of nectars mundane and cranial;
fluid, melodious flows of air in wind, breeze and breath; etheric echoes and
auroras of imagination and conception.
The Guru serves as teacher, , guide, provocateur, priest, pretender, perpetrator, president—whatever we make of her in a tango of one. But has her I completely evaporated? Gurumayi, reluctantly perhaps, is a shrink; Baba, who penned the lyrics of “Jyota Se Jyota,” certainly set the stage for that role to play out, not that transference-susceptibility isn’t inherent in positions of authority, and especially in the position of authority deified: Guruhood. But counter-transference problems (such as the therapist falling in with the client) may be waved away by faith in the Guru’s I-lessness and/or by positing a crazy/holy/avadhuta metamorality. But as Feuerstein, I believe, and others point out, the accounts of (once again honoring Siddha Yoga usage I here revert to a lower-case g) gurus’ victims are not so easily dismissed—by me, I hasten to add. Loyalists of raping gurus adduce the perfection/avadhuta arguments to explain away these most damning of incidents. Who knows? The initials GM bear new significance when following On the Genealogy of Morals. Mustn’t the way out of the swamp resemble the swamp from the perspective of the swamp dwellers? Maybe it’s a jungle out there/in here and we should tell each other, “Go get ’em, tiger!” Just remember, tiger—the Goddess riding on your back is your own Kundalini.
What of the Guru as the grace-bestowing power of God, the grantor
of Shaktipat? I’ll
do some algebraic simplification and equate God with Shakti so as to not have to factor
God as is. (This will avoid extensions involving Gödel and his results.) This
leaves us with the Guru and Shaktipat, for elucidation of which I suggest
considering an analogy of a husband (the Guru) impregnating (bestowing
Shaktipat upon) his wife (the recipient). The husband may be potent, the wife
may conceive, and the child may be born regardless of, even in spite of, traits
of the husband’s
personality. He may be a horribly abusive husband, but that doesn’t
mean he’s
not a father. If the pregnant wife can find shelter and nourishment apart from
an abusive husband, she may successfully bear and raise her child without ever
seeing the father again. The child is analagous to the mother’s
awareness of the Self; when the child is full-grown, the mother/Shaktipat
recipient is then a Guru herself. The existence of Shaktipat is no more in
doubt than the existence of human conception and birth; the values that we
attach to its bestower are culturally biased, as are the metaphysical
explanations of the bestowal. In these cultural biases Guruhood is like
fatherhood: in many cultures the child—as well as the wife—is
the property of the husband. And oh! the colorful explanations of conception
that abounded prior to microscopic investigations—investigations that don’t
dispel but enhance the mystery.
Shaktipat may involve—seemingly require—many
things: the right mood, lighting, music, fragrance, food, drink, pictures,
attire, furnishings, feathers, television, with a satellite dish perhaps. The
makings of a romantic weekend. Or a weekend with a favorite aunt, the one who
likes to go to amusement parks after sharing a pot of her favorite tea—peyote.
Things may seem paranormal—they may be paranormal: “There are more things,
Her-rays-show, . . .” She may be paramoral.
Baba warned yogis against giving Shaktipat before they’ve
“stored
up the maximum of Shakti.” The Buddha said that a buddha has infinite karma,
inverting the Hindu idea of a liberated being. I equate Baba’s
maximum and Buddha’s infinity; I locate them both in spirit, in the fathomless
depths of breath.
To nearly conclude, I think: You, Jay, might wonder how ujjayi/so’ham
can, other than with poetic license, be called music. That’s
how I thought about it, until I got into it, it got into me, and it began coming
out of me on its own, which feels good. That’s the basis for comparison: I
hear music and feel good, I hear the so’ham-sound and feel good, very
good. It’s
a surprising kind of music, absorbing, lulling, then expressive of exactly what
I’m
feeling, even before I’m aware—in thought—of
feeling it. It’s
making the music that’s making me, or you. You, Jay: u-j-Jay-I: I think
you’ll
like ujjayi, as I do, along with humming and, well . . . I still like
glossolalia, too—at
least it pops out of me sometimes—but never inappropriately: it’s never embarrassed
me. “I” must
not be an avadhuta. “I” am still in control, but the control is broadening,
widening, deepening, climbing cosmically and chaotically by turns, like sleep
and waking. Nityam jagrad-avasthayam
svapnavadyo’vatishthate. “Always in the waking state, he
abides like one asleep.” (Sri
Avadhuta Strotram 10)
Letting snoring happen while awake, letting
hums occur on the inhalation +/or exhalation—these are gateways to deeper
ujjayi and to ajapa-japa. Sincerely! This is the future of megalomania and the
breath is the time machine of the ego. I know it! It’s huge, Jay, ujjayi!
It’s
the long-sought victory that Maharajji handed to us, but how could we have
known? Baba tried, with utmost dedication, to inspire us: he urged us to
complete our sadhanas as quickly as possible—advice that kept on and keeps on
encouraging me. He said that sadhana picks up speed near the end. I feel the
momentum gaining! I suspect that it ends in an endless beginning of dawning
moments.
(pp. 182–8)