Not that Patanjali’s magic charms–from clairvoyance to more superhero-type stuff, in the Fourth Pada–are what it’s all about or anything.

s

Recent Saturdays, I’ve been reflecting on your hypothesis after I emerge from the zone of spontaneity and self-expression (two qualities my ashtanga practice does not afford on an obvious external-bodily level, though both wild art and ashtanga are open to contemplative practice).

You said:I think two people can be doing apparently similar creative play, one from a primal state, one from high witness: the latter is more likely to generate true emergent forms.

This is really hard to judge, and yet the more I interact with others’ subjectivities amid wild art the more confident I feel about agreeing with you. Maybe wild art is a big Pre/Trans free-for-all. I’m still learning though.

The human nervous system evolves wildly, rapidly, with genius, in all of us who choose (or are forced) to live courageously. But our bones evolve slowly, over millenia. Sacred systems like Ashtanga are somewhere in between the two- unfortunately, looks a lot like Krishnamacharya assembled it in the twentieth century from 8th to 15th century asana systems, and some older stuff- yet his learning was truly profound and the building blocks he used were mostly old and still alluring, just needed a little dusting off.

But a legitimate change to Ashtanga needs to survive some test of time, which is very different from the genius of divine wild art. High witness in contact with basic bodily process is deep passion, gigantic love- what could be better than that? Also, I think two people can be doing apparently similar creative play, one from a primal state, one from high witness: the latter is more likely to generate true emergent forms. (A rebuttal to that might state that the youngsters coming up will spontaneously produce emergents simply by expressing what they are: the genius of history at its most complete in the present moment.)

Regardless, the forms which have been out there for a while and still remain compelling are those which might find their way into stable wisdom teachings. I won’t argue against playing around with Ashtanga, playing with it just serves a different purpose. Having spent much of our twenties in wild art, Michele and I both took to Ashtanga with delight: finally some sanity! Too much wild creativity reaches into big kookoo, increases the chance for catastrophe, is an exhilerating and exhausting way to live, often has panic somewhere near the edges if not out front and center.

Basically, when we don’t need to worry about the outward forms so much, we can turn attention to the inward: the mantra concept. And Ashtanga is a worthy physical mantra: open the pelvis, tune and strengthen the central channel, spend significant time upside-down, bring strength and life to the upper body heart region, all moves which conspire to reformat the nadi-net into greater moment-to-moment sensitivity and get it robust enough to take the larger themes. Certainly other asana combinations can have similar results, but spending time tweaking with the science of asana combination is different than receiving a good one, surrendering to it, and doing it into the heavens. As an Ashtangi, I’m obviously tilted toward the latter of these.

I am still working on cultivating the limbs for such an embrace.

And meantime, I won’t challenge you on the first long paragraph from your March 7 entry. I have been contrasting creative and contemplative embodiment for a while, asking whether in some forms they can occur simultaneously, and sensing that for all my love for the expressive… I’ll agree that contemplative, somehow “generalized” embodied practice is, well, “higher.”

Still playing and as you know dancing with this though… and finding that play, too, is divine.

Please educate me if this is not the case dear OvO.

And if Shaivites have to fulfill a lengthy study to gain access, then why should you be allowed to just waltz right in for a quick lookaround?

The parallel of temple sanctitude to that of the woman’s vagina is merely external. Perhaps it’s more useful to consider that the inner sanctums of the world are protected from casual disruption exactly the same way that you create for yourself a deep inner space by meditation, and within which you attempt the more significant “alchemy,” symbolized by the physical binding of male and female.

Perhaps you were forbidden access to the inner sanctum of the temple not simply to preserve the sanctity of the temple but rather to extend more deeply to you an invitation to go inside.

“if the prana is not moving in the sushumna nadi then all the talk of yoga is merely non-sense, merely babblings like that of a mad man.” hatha yoga pradipika.

i will defend and interpret tradition. interpreting is on ongoing and ever evolving process that unfolds layer by layer until only the true Self remains. the shastras are our guide, they are our map that steers us from the delusion and confusion by which we do not even know we are influenced to the dawning of clearer and brighter visions of Self.

time get back to mula bandha & sadhana. see ya!

One of the integral theorists–I cannot remember if it’s somewhere in Wilber? Seems like I read it somewhere else–makes a useful distinction about Kramer and Diana Alstad. That they are correct in their unmaskings of authoritarianism, but it’s crucial to remember that they also lack any insight into the “real” energetic or spiritual power of any “guru” because they simply cannot perceive on that level. It’s easy for them: they don’t have to balance the awakening/delusion quotients of given teachers because for they think awakening is a lone-wolfish kind of deal. Their project fascinates me. They seem libertarian by disposition and nearly existentialist by (anti-)cosmology, and here they are making a very important argument about the dangers of authoritarianism to people who share neither their politics nor their cosmology/metaphysics.

All my best.