The focus of the month is about consciousness and intelligence, human intelligence, God intelligence, artificial intelligence. It’s an exploration of different levels of awareness.
There are those who believe that consciousness is absolute and definitive and material, a result of our neurons being able to perform certain actions. There are others who see consciousness as a mystery, taking on a broader view that all of us have consciousness, and all our consciousness are connected in some way. Can you guess which one the yogic view is? The second one, that all are connected. Now, how do we explain consciousness as an experience? We can think of it as having a movie in our mind. We are able to feel emotions, like infatuation, love, longing, fear, grief, guilt, anger. We are able to experience our senses, we see, we hear, we touch, we taste, we feel. We are able to make interpretations about our interaction with the world, the dialogues we have with each other, the thoughts that come up when we look up the sky, the sense of wonder in watching a shooting star. Here is the question, do you think we are programmed or we have free will? In this movie in our mind, are we merely pressing the play button and letting things unfold, or are we active participants in choosing this adventure called life? What do you think? Has anyone seen the TV series West World? It’s mind-boggling right? If it were the first scenario, and we are pre-programmed, it means even our perceptron of free will is preprogrammed, it’s part of the script, and we may be very convinced that we have free will, even if we don’t. The second possibility leaves more room for exploration, in that we do have free will, and the actions and consequences we find ourselves in the midst of is our own doing. Karma in action. I don’t have a definite answer but I think it’s interesting that we pose these questions.
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Back when we were all still using Yahoo Messenger, I got a message from my sister’s account. “Hi Nancy”, the message said. With those two words, I knew that it wasn’t my sister speaking to me, but my niece sitting in front of the computer, using my sister’s account, speaking to me. So I replied to my niece with “Hi Sharleen”. She was very impressed. How did I know it was her? To be honest, it was just a feeling. I read those words in my mind and it was my niece’s voice that I heard, not my sister’s. I was very proud of myself then, that I have outsmarted the trickery.
But Yahoo Messenger’s popularity is long gone. And since then, technology has changed from being a mere platform to being artificial intelligence in itself. Apps can predict how we respond, YouTube recommends videos it knows will keep us hooked, Facebook shows us ads that trigger our buying habits. In other words, technology now knows us better than we know ourselves. We think only our laptops and computers can be hacked, but in reality, it is we who are being hacked right under our noses. Because technology knows us well, even as we think I’m just going to watch this 1 video then I’m done, we end up staying awake all night, pressing the play button again and again and again. We are hacked! So then, in this world where it seems technology is in some way manipulating our behavior, do we stand in chance in acting from our own true free will? Can we truly make informed choices? We still can. We can become more conscious, more aware, more deliberate, more awake. And one of the tools that we can tap, a technology more ancient than artificial intelligence, is meditation— to study the self, to know the self, to meet the self. Then our own intelligence stands the chance to supersede any artificial intelligence. Sit in a comfortable position. Close your eyes. Allow the emotions of love to arise. You can think of one person whom you love, and feel that emotion. Focus on the emotion now, instead of the person, and let this emotion occupy your inner world. Let this love become more and more dominant, until you become surrounded by this love, and you become nothing else but this love, until you can no longer distinguish between the object of love itself and the emotion of love. You become That. Atha yoga anusasanam. Now this is yoga. Now this is the state of love. Now this is oneness with all. Now this is consciousness. In the field of science, consciousness is one big question mark. It remains a material scientific mystery just exactly how consciousness works. The brain is involved, but we don’t know exactly how. Yogic teachings hold that the inquiry must be done inwards. That if that part which is lost is inside of us and not outside of us, then the searching must be done inside of us. While it is true we cannot prove consciousness, it does not mean it is not real. We also cannot prove love, and yet this emotion is real and is central to the human experience. Consciousness is the same. “The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is at the root of all true science. That deeply emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, is my idea of God.” Our minds fluctuate, holding on to thought after thought after thought, identifying with the past, anticipating the future, restless and relentless. But every so often, either in deep meditation or through a glimpse of quiet grace, the mind stops, and not only that, we stop identifying with the mind. In that space, it is as though we’ve entered a realm where there is no longer any separation. Even as we know we are wearing this body like a piece of clothing, we have at least temporarily left it behind. We are in tune with the awareness that we are boundless, we have broken down the divide between the skin that contains us and the world that we have labeled as outside of us. We are one with everything else. We watch the consciousness, at the same time that we are that consciousness itself. We are no longer human, we just are. Our breath is the breath of everyone else. Our existence is the existence of everyone else. Our vibrations are the vibrations of everyone else.
Yogas citta-vrtti nirodhah. Who likes being called average? I know that if someone were to say to me after class “Thank you for this average class. You’re such an average teacher” it’s not something I’d feel very happy about. We don’t like being average. We don’t want to be the average husband or average mom or average lawyer or average girlfriend or whatever. We want to be stellar, we want to be amazing, we want to kick ass. We want to come up on top. We want to be the best. Here is the thing though, how can all of us be the best? It’s impossible. And yet, because we have this ideal in our minds to be the best, we revolve our lives around becoming the best. We join an external competition with everyone so we can be...not average. What happens is we begin to insist our own way of doing things and seeing things as the better way of doing things and seeing things; we begin to put others down so they could be average—below average even— and we could be better; we begin to listen to external measures of what it means to be above average and we lose ourselves in pursuit of it. Then we wake up one day and we wonder why we have no sense of inner peace.
The antidote to this is building our self-worth through self-love and self-compassion. It means we accept our human imperfection and we embrace it. When we struggle in our relationship or our family life or our work or career or anything else, we often feel bad, beating ourselves up thinking it should be some other way. And yet, what other way is there? It is perfectly human to have those struggles. We all have them. Name one person who’s had the perfect life who never struggled in any way. There is no one. Our shared human experience is that being human is imperfect. And that’s okay. We learn to see our worth just the same, not based on where we are on a scale we’ve imagined for ourselves, but just because. We accept ourselves as we are, not because we’ve accomplished something and proven something to someone, but just because. We love ourselves just because. Self-esteem is an external thing that is based on a sort of competition with others; forget about that. It’s a trap. Work on self-worth instead. Because seeing our own value is the only way to make peace with ourselves. It is what will set us free from this matrix of competition and separation. It is what will drive us to be in touch with the most vulnerable part of ourselves that need the most attention. Are there people who, for no apparent reason, push your buttons? Psychologist Carl Jung said, “Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.” The parts of ourselves that we have denied, when we see it in others, create a strong negative reaction in us because it reminds us of our self-denial.
There are recurring concepts in yoga that point to wholeness. The word “purnam” refers to wholeness, like how the moon is whole even as it goes through different phases. The word “hatha” refers to the joining of the sun and the moon. The gesture “namaskar” where we put our hands together symbolizes the union of the opposites, the left and the right, the masculine and the feminine, the light and the dark. The idea of wholeness is teaching us about acceptance of all that we are— not just the parts we put forward, but the parts we tend to hide. Think of the image that you project into the world. Who is this “I” you want people to see? Accept that. Appreciate that. See it as part of the whole. Now think of the parts of yourself that you tend to hide, parts of yourself you tucked into a corner, shadows of your hidden self. Maybe you were once told to change that part of yourself, so it was never brought to light. Now, accept that as part of yourself too. See it as part of who you are. See yourself as the whole made up of those parts that you love, and the parts of yourself that need nurturing the most. May we accept all that we are, without denying or shaming or rejecting parts of ourselves. May we see that we are whole, not in spite of our perceived flaws, but because of it. Our wholeness is not a goal to be fulfilled, but an unconditional starting point. We have always been whole, we are whole, and we will persist to be whole no matter what. |
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March 2020
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