The goal of raja yoga
Sometimes I am puzzled about the goal of yoga, or the kind of person that raja yoga is meant to change you into. Sometimes it sounds like a person that I would like to become, and sometimes it doesn't.The "enlightened" yoga practitioner who has reached the goal, is not emotionally entangled in worldly things. She doesn't get upset at misfortune or happy about good luck. She is steadily peaceful and contented regardless of external happenings. She isn't "attached" to things in the world because she knows they are not the deepest reality.
I'm not sure what it would be like to be this person. I like the idea of unshakable peace, instead of the big ups and downs that we usually experience but have no control over. But what would it mean to be no longer attached? Would I still love music? Good books? cooking? video games? my dog? my family? I know these things aren't "who I am" when you get right down to it. But there is something creepy and almost self-destructive about trying to love less.
Sometimes it sounds like becoming enlightened would be like becoming someone else, a different person. Maybe that person would be better than me in some ways, but I am not sure I am willing to change into her.
Are all enlightened people the same or is there still room for individuality/personality? It seems like the people and things that you love in the world are part of what makes you the individual that you are, and to let go of all of those attachments would be to lose something distinctive and precious.
Maybe you are meant to have moments of understanding when you see everyone is the same, but you don't walk around for the rest of your life like that. Satchidananda - the founder of the branch of Integral Yoga that I'm studying - says that the same energy/spirit is everywhere, in humans, animals, and inanimate objects. This sounds like the true perception that the Bhagavad Gita talks about, seeing that the separateness of different people and things is just an illusion. So the sense in which people are "all the same" is the same sense in which people, animals, and rocks are all the same thing, because there is really only one thing (the universe). But I don't think you could walk around every day not noticing the difference between a person and a rock.
posted by Jaime_sama @ 12:59 PM
2 Comments:
My understanding is that detachment from the baggage that is hooked on to our experiences actually allows us to experience our emotions fully - they're no longer obscured by all the weight of the accumulated Stuff that surrounds them.
If you're holding one of those luggage scales with a hook on it, and you add bag after bag, you stop concentrating on the scale, and you focus on the weight.
Keep carrying that around with you, and you focus entirely on the bags, and on how knackered you are from carrying them.
Add more bags over time.
Detachment, as I understand it, is a lifelong process that goes like this:
* Thing occurs
* Person has raw emotional reaction
* We are storytellers, pattern makers, so Person immediately attaches all previous experiences of Similar Incidents to Thing and hangs them on the hook of raw emotion
* Person notices this process
* Person kindly reminds themselves that the Thing is not the emotion
* Person separates Things from emotion, thereby allowing Person to examine both
* Person is able to respond to Thing appropriately from a place of clarity rather than confusion
* Because emotions are no longer obscured, Person is able to experience the full range of their emotions, which pass more quickly because they're not weighted down with clutter
* Person experiences joy, fear, sorrow, rage in a truly authentic manner; they are now consciously aware of them rather than being driven by forces they only dimly perceive
* Person is more centred and at peace because emotions are now fully felt
I might be wrong.
Pema Chodron says that she still gets tangled in her shenpa [www.shambhala.org/teachers/pema/shenpa3a.php], and that it's the process rather than the end goal that's the thing
Such a wordy way of saying,
"You're not detaching from feeling things; you're detaching from the rubbish that stops you feeling things, or even knowing they're there."
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