In fact… I just came back because I needed the link to send to some friends.

Some may have checked out because it’s not polemical, but others just read more mindfully, doing something like the receptive, non-reactive listening that Thic Nhat Hahn teaches.

Kind of scary when the students stop talking back… but here more a tuning in than a tuning out I suspect.

They were just supposed to check if my address book included any matches to current members. I deselected all of the names when I got the screen about inviting others. Despite this, they sent it to my entire address book. This has been a huge waste of time as well as quite embarrassing, as personal invites to be my friend went out to tons of people I barely know but are in my address book because my address book automatically keeps track of people even if I only send them one email. Hi5 is a terrible operation. I have asked them to send a retraction to my entire address book.

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.

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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.

It happened to me and several people I know.

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.