Take your non-dominant hand and try to press the index finger and middle finger together and separate them from the ring finger and pinky which are pressed together, a V shape with two fingers on each line of the V.  Spock used to do this. Make it flat. Not too hard? Now press the ring finger and middle finger together and separate the pinky off by itself and the index finger off by itself. Make it flat. Can you do it?

     Apply yourself for a moment and you’ll get these. They require a bit of concentration as we tease muscle groups apart which usually work together. This act of leaning into our nerves so we can come up with something novel, by teasing apart something that usually works as a composite piece, is an act of tapas and I will call the region upon which it works a tapas-field. Tapas is a Sanskrit word which means “glowing fire” or “heat” and is used by yoga to convey a transformative act of concentration. The fire that will burn you clean, will burn you toward higher development. The tapas field here is: that moment where you can’t quite get the fingers apart, the fingers don’t just jump to it because they don’t know how, yet; an act of learning something we can’t do yet.

     The Ashtanga system seems designed to always have us up against this field. Learned through teacher assisted self-practice setting (Mysore style), the student basically gets the green light to progress through the asanas until she encounters something that she can’t do. At this point, progress through the series stops and she stays there until she learns at least basic competency with the difficult thing; she learns to do something that she can’t do yet. An act of evolution.  As the progressive series unfold in Ashtanga, the degree of asana difficulty becomes an insurmountable curve, and even the most willing and able yogi eventually peaks out and gradually slides back down. Tapas is built into the system.

     After succeeding at the Spockfinger thing, we can move onto greater tease-apart challenges. A good one is Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, Up Dog: try to tease apart firm squeezing of the thighs with total relaxation of the buttocks. (For people with tender lower backs, this is a good skill). Mula Bandha goes further. If Ashwini mudra is the anal complex of muscles, and Vajroli mudra the uro-genital complex, Mula Bandha is recognized as the cervix for women and muscles further back at the base of the penis for men. Try teasing those apart: 1. genitals from anus, and 2. for women, the cervix from the muscles that hold back urine, for men, isolations between the front and the back of the root of the genitals. (Check Mula Bandha by Swami Satyananda Saraswati for more than you ever thought you wanted to know about this).

     We can move into the lungs and pranayama: hold your breath until you feel the urge to breathe, notice the nature and quality of this set of urges and the associations that can come with it. Tease apart a deliberate relaxed decision to resume breathing from the desire to react to the urges. In many ways, I see this as a very easy way to get right at the heart of yoga: a deliberate exercise of pushing ourselves right to the edge of life, in a very safe and contained manner, to open a laboratory of reactions in which we can train ourselves. Every little reaction-urge not acted upon is growth of yoga. Hold your breath long enough and the grim reaper himself shows up: what better teacher?! And how cool that you can get him after only a few minutes.

     And then moving to the biggie: teasing apart what I will call yogamind from discursive mind. This too requires that sense of bearing into, a quality which will be a joy and a rapture at times when we are up to it, and a burden requiring discipline when we are less inspired. It is the sense of taking on work. Why? I will argue that yogamind, although an aspect of the experience of all of us throughout life, is a way of being in time that comes only after a degree of competence is gained in discursive mind. True yogamind is born from the state of a mature discursive mind that has learned to value the benefits of yogamind but ironically, has a terrible time getting out of the way to allow yogamind to happen; too much of a klutz. And periodically even engages in heated debates with the ego, attempting to talk it out of practicing yogamind; jilted former favorite son. The practitioner has to fight through all this just to get yogamind established.

     But first, let me characterize my understanding of these two minds. Roughly, they can be divided between the two hemispheres of the brain, although higher states of both yogamind and discursive mind certainly integrate both hemispheres. But yogamind corresponds more closely to the right brain, which is less analytic more organic; less linear, more weblike; less about distinctive differentiation, more about relation and connection; less about survival, more about radiant delight. Human development goes through oscillations between these two poles, and people are spread across a continuum, in terms of their disposition, somewhere between hard right and hard left.

     Discursive mind can use different types of analysis, from the highly structured mechanizations of logic, to poetic flights of fancy. Mathematics is pure logical structure at its root, but higher math gets into more poetic states of mind without losing the foundations of its structure, and the same with physics; Einstein mastered horrid amounts of calculation capacities before he got wild with them. And in those fields, if the calculations ultimately don’t work, the wildness is considered pointless frittering. Great poets often never get good at math, and make a career out of such frittering, but may have a large command of the palette of multiple languages with all their grammatical structuring, or even language sum-total, the ur-language itself, as a means of expressing the vast vision they perceive, or the vast sound they hear, touch, taste, smell. So, both the scientist and the poet here begin from a mental disposition which is left or right but eventually think their way toward integration of the opposite pole. 

     All of these are discursive mind. None of these are yogamind. Yogamind, as I see it, is the great OTHER to discursive mind, to language and logic mind, to both mythopoetic and mathematic mind. This post that you are reading is not yogamind, although it is attempting to point it out. As such, yogamind is the great OTHER to almost all of that which has been generated by Western culture. Visual arts, music, dance, athletics and some religious rituals and rites use lots of yogamind but they haven’t been grounded in it. Some cloistered monks, manual laborers and bizarre alchemists have gotten close, but their expressions of it haven’t been as clear as those that have come from the East, although the final highest stages of realization may have been equally realized. (The yogamind I’m getting at in this post is not to be confused with the highest stages of spiritual realization although it is an excellent path to them- more on that later). (Also, from the sixties onward, the East became a significant part of the story of the West, and cultural productions have never been the same since. Thus, many pot smokers have gotten a strong taste of yogamind; Eastern yogic cultural items had a funny way of popping up in stoner circles of the West with the advent of the hippies.) As a basic human capacity, yogamind isn’t something all that strange to Westerners so much as it never really had the analytic aspect truly teased out of it so that its own intelligence could be seen in its purity.

     So, although the spiritual life is often associated with right brain poetic mind, the yogamind I’m getting at here is closer to non-discursive mind, which is less about right or left brain and more towards somatic brain learning to differentiate itself from the other data streams in the mind. A move away from thinking toward feeling, or a kind of thinking which uses somatic data as its primary material, not words, not visions. The one tendency that is almost universal in spiritual literature of higher states is that we must feel our way into the higher state of being; thinking about it is not going to cut it.

     Yogamind is a state of focused attention to the experience in the present moment exactly as it is projected by our perceptual capacities. At first this can be a seeing of the field in front of us as it is, just looking without interpreting; this can also apply toward hearing or touching or tasting or smelling. But at a certain point, these outward senses are folded into an inner sensing which is based on internal sensation, based on the data that the nerves take in from inside, ie: the feeling that we feel in our belly when it is full of food, or the stretch sensation in our hamstring as we do forward fold, two examples of the most rudimentary forms of internal sensing. That is to say, the somatic cortex is the part of the brain that is the locus for yogamind.

     Raw sensation such as full belly or stretching muscles is the predominant form of cognition in infancy. Needless to say, this begins to gain in sophistication, eventually giving rise to an intellectual way of viewing the self and the world, which includes internal sensate data in the calculations it makes. We could call this a mature adult cognitive capacity, an ability to turn attention to various fields and begin to work them out, with the help typically of both hemispheres. Again, some people are more right brain, some more left, some more in touch with bodily sensate data, some less. But the essence here is that the stuff of yogamind is somatic data, represented by the somatic cortex, often in synesthesia with other cortexes, in particular the visual; data directly gathered from what we feel inside, without discursive interruption. Mature yogamind thinks by constructing complex sensation representations in response to perceived feilds. Yes, the implication here is that the mind is a sense organ, and the fields it begins to sense go way beyond the business of the basic mechanical functions of our own body, although it begins with that. What does yogamind sense?  This I’ll reserve for another time, but my basic answer: psychic fields, received in ever increasing scope, strength and collectivity as yogamind matures. The heart which appears to be the stepping stone from which to access the highest states of Samadhi (which drop all cognitions, heart and mind) is part individual, part collective.

     Yogamind relies on the emergence of the independent inner witness that was born with the maturity of discursive mind. This witness can put its attention capacity wherever it chooses, although total freedom as such is quite an accomplishment; most common is a witness that is free on surface levels, (ie: I can read this if I will it), but is often riding larger waves of self-inflicted karma over which it has no control. If such a witness were to turn its attention away from discursive noticings about events and actually hold in attention the deeper movements of the psyche which supports that witness itself, it may very well begin to get a bit shaky; this is material that discursive mind can take notes on, point out logical processes about, recognize images and themes, refer to what came before and predict what will come next, and so on. But it is also material which has such a strong psychic charge that discursive mind is helpless to take it and transform it. For this, the ego needs a mind which can contact felt reality itself, learn its valence in a wordless manner, and build the strength to begin the work of transforming it. 

     And here we come to the next step, and a radical move it is, and apparently not for everyone at this point in time. It involves the psychological concept of fusion which I was getting at earlier in this post: fusion is a condition that is necessary and unavoidable at each point in development and is only viewed as fusion when seen from a higher state of development. So, if you never tried to do Spock fingers, you would never wonder about your inability to do it. But the moment someone shows it to you, you become aware of a fusion of muscle groups as you take a moment to tease them apart. Only when you began reaching for the greater differentiation of hand muscles did anything like a fusion become apparent. Before that you were simply happily (or not so happily) fused. Let’s draw the concept into finer material: as a two year old, it was entirely appropriate to scream out “MOMMY!!”. As an adult, if you get off the phone with her and aspects of yourself are still screaming this at some level, you get curious about it, you recognize that some parts of your personality are still fused with Mom. A little fusion item is noticed, drawn into awareness as a result of the basic psychological urge to individuate from our parents, a process that many people never get very far with.

     And here is my claim for the teasing apart of yogamind from discursive mind: having arrived at the state of mature adult mind which is mature discursive mind, we remain there for a while before we begin to get itchy for something more. The process that presents itself as a solution to this crisis is the act of existing simply in the present moment and letting go of the mind that needs to think its way through everything. This strikes us as somehow a higher way of being, partly because we begin to get just a glimmer of how such a way of being allows a bit of traction on the deeper material in our psyche; and indeed, this is getting at the ways of being in time that the spiritual traditions of the East overtly advocate and those from the West obscurely so. Having spent some time just being, and recognizing the benefits, we suddenly begin to perceive intrusions of discursive or analytic mind as fusions, as something we would rather not have but can’t control…yet. And so the urge, when we are inspired, is to lean into the tapas field of mind control, and to seek tools and teachers who can help us with this. I see the Western movement toward yoga as a way of addressing this emergent developmental thrust.

     What form does it take? Mature adult discursive mind, now seen as a state of fusion, gives way to the work of seperating itself from yogamind. So what is yogamind? Much of the previous posts in this blog are attempts to get at it. It is the feeling substrate which gets marked up, affected, determined, by thoughts. Free it from discursive mind, then it soars. It engages felt objects directly and it transmutes them, the greater the focus, the faster and more complete the transmutation. Focus can be intensified with practice over time and the great yogis attest to how far this can go. Again, analysis and poetry can express all this, it can paint it or compose it in sound, but such representations aren’t actually doing it as yogamind can do it, just as this piece I’m writing can’t. Great art can inspire us to… engage reality directly.

     What does yogamind engage? What kind of reality is that? Well, if we see an outward visual field, that tree over there, we can’t really do much to it, without picking up a real chainsaw and going mad with ancient antagonisms toward the great mother. But, following the fifth limb of the eight limbs of Ashtanga, Pratyahara, which tells us to take outward vision and turn it inward, then we can begin to work on the fields that present themselves. The Tibetans would have us establish inner mandala-like visions, and then begin manipulating them. Acute outward vision can help put this in place, but it is the inward theater where the work happens. So, yogamind is inner work. Likewise with sensation, which is closer to the Hatha Yoga way (I’ve called this radiant heartfelt somatic vibrational presence, and it is a state of higher and deeper feeling. It is not a negation of the Tibetan tantra which relies heavily on the visual cortex, or nad yogis who go with the auditory cortex; for those ways, look up one of those teachers): the capacity to feel a full belly matures into the capacity to feel subtle emotions, matures into the capacity to feel the feeling substrates to intellectual work, on up to highly subtle and powerful perceptions of cosmic processes, etc. These sensings begin to move beyond merely the somatic cortex and begin to  manifest in the cerebral-spinal circuit and project from there into the larger cosmic body, teh body outside of ourselves. Such work typically manifests as concrete samskara fields of varying density and quality which can be transformed with yogic focus.

     Here is where the alchemical roots of Hatha yoga assert themselves: samskaras become seen as fusion items which begin to take elemental form, and like the complexities of chemistry, many forms begin to emerge along with a qualitative aspect, ie: this here samskara is definitely not gold, but a little bit more like shit, or static, or the crud in the drain of my kitchen sink. But, I clearly sense it, and I’m willing to bear attention into it, I’m willing to work with my body in the recognition that the body is the theater in which this transformation process must happen. (Thus updog, mula bandha, pranayama, energy of  teacher, energy of a community of at least a few others doing the same, etc: various methods to get the energy level up so that we can do the work of yogamind). The samskara undergoes the alchemical process of purification, of teasing apart the strands that are mushed together, of feeling the greater energy that emerges from it as it becomes a finer substance, of feeling the energy that is released as that which was locked up in the crud is revealed and goes to work, of feeling the cosmos come in as another doorway of perception is opened, of feeling the heart quicken  and come to life as it instinctively senses something exciting happening which opens its desire to love and feel.

     This is the kind of thing happening inside the life of sages who are sitting there “doing nothing”. Such work can go on into evermore subtle sheaths infinitely, and it may altogether cease at times as the realm of Vedanta’s Brahman is entered (a state of apparent nothingness recognized by many traditions  by many names as the creative matrix itself). Of course, those who come near such a sage will feel something, because intense inner work like this registers in the energy fields of various material locations, including almost always in the general vicinity of the sage’s own physical body.

     A couple notes here: the yogamind I’m referring to here is not absence of cognition. It is rather yoga cognition, or alchemical cognition. Pure awareness divorced of cognition comes later. When Patanjali delineates yoga, we can see this at three levels at least: 1. freedom from distraction, 2. freedom from discursive analytic mind, 3. freedom from any manifestation at all: Brahman (if we follow the thread through to its Advaita conclusion).

     Yogamind and discursive mind are not enemies, although, as we pick sides in a sports contest just to have fun in that realm of entertainment, so we can pick sides between the two minds as we go through the arduous winnowing of coming to higher awareness. The bodymind seeks to move fusion towards differentiation, and such a need will continue to assert itself until purified elements can stand on their own and both minds get a chance to do their work, which eventually will give way to a higher integration. Once yogamind has been established to a degree, the correspondences between the two minds remians intimate. Busy intellect makes yogamind’s work much more complicated- the play in which discursive mind may take delight can result in long hard labor for yogamind as it tries to sort out the vibrational chaos left by intellectual experimentation. Or, if the psyche is caught in an old negative pattern, discursive mind may be playing old ridiculous tape loops while yogamind desperately digs down into the psychic dirt endeavoring to root up the mess once and for all. But, for the most part, a more sophisticated intellect will allow the potential for a more sophisticated yogmind, though it makes yogaminds’ work more daunting. And a deep masterful yogamind will make for truly compelling discursive expressions should the individual choose to do them.

      And there is no need to get ahead of ourselves and worry about whether to integrate or tease apart because the direction will present itself as a compelling urge when the time is right. How do we know which urge is compelling and which is not? Discernment of this kind I see as a great labor, but it’s again essentially alchemic: learn to determine the quality of the combination of elements which make up the urge, or even look for the pure element itself, which is gold. Because there is such a thing.