Private Universe

Yoga, philosophy, and spooky stuff

Yoga

Part of what is appealing to me about yoga is the idea of a spiritual path that starts with a list of Things to Do instead of a list of Things to Believe. I like the practical quality, instead of the preachiness that I find in religions sometimes. Yoga invites you to try some techniques (8 limbs of them) and suggests what will happen if you do, but you are not asked to alter your belief system to start out. The goal is a quiet, joyful mind, which is something I can get behind.


Spooky Stuff

Spooky stuff (whether deities, afterlives, energy meridians, chakras, prana) irritates me, not exactly because I disbelieve or think it is nonsense, but I feel like I would just rather not deal with it. I never understood why I was supposed to care so much about whether there is a God or an afterlife. Honestly, I know that is weird, but I just don't feel the drama. Is it really going to make a difference one way or the other, as far as the choices you make *today*?


Philosophy

Philosophers place a lot of value on having a clean, minimalist ontology. By which I mean that you don't introduce new categories or kinds of Stuff to believe in. Different philosophers have different ideas about what categories of Stuff are okay to believe in. But everyone agrees that you'd better have a REALLY good reason to believe in a new category. After all, if you are willing to believe in *any* new categories of Stuff, the sciences would be pretty much destroyed. (Problem: how to reconcile quantum mechanics and relativity? Solution: Physics fairies!!)

Philosophers are also careful about using their own experiences or introspection as evidence. "I can just feel it" is not necessarily evidence. Feelings have to be interpreted, and it is very hard to pick apart the difference between what you are feeling and what interpretation or description you have placed on the feeling. My dissertation topic Charles S. Peirce wrote about this and calls the field "phenomenology."

I can feel the effects of pranayama (yoga breathing exercises). Some ways of breathing are calming and others are energizing. I'm not sure that fact needs to be explained, but if it does, I'm not sure that the best or only explanation requires hauling in a whole lot of theoretical apparatus about energy flows and chakras. Maybe I'll find later that I am wrong about that, and I *do* need the apparatus to interpret what I'm feeling at a more sophisticated level. If so, I might still decide that my interpretation is metaphorical or "storytelling" and is a useful tool for organizing experiences, but not a literal truth.

It's also possible that there is no clear line to be drawn between storytelling/interpreting/organizing experiences versus literal truth. Even processing the the input from our eyes is a certain sort of interpreting that happens without our conscious awareness. Peirce taught me that there is a blind spot right in the middle of your field of vision for each eye, which we don't notice because our brains fill in the gap automatically.

Peirce, from "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed For Man," (the man was a genius, but catchy titles he did not write) which you can read here if you really want to.

Does the reader know of the blind spot on the retina? Take a number of this journal, turn over the cover so as to expose the white paper, lay it sideways upon the table before which you must sit, and put two cents upon it, one near the left-hand edge, and the other to the right. Put your left hand over your left eye, and with the right eye look steadily at the left-hand cent. Then, with your right hand, move the right-hand cent (which is now plainly seen) towards the left hand. When it comes to a place near the middle of the page it will disappear -- you cannot see it without turning your eye. Bring it nearer to the other cent, or carry it further away, and it will reappear; but at that particular spot it cannot be seen. Thus it appears that there is a blind spot nearly in the middle of the retina; and this is confirmed by anatomy. It follows that the space we immediately see (when one eye is closed) is not, as we had imagined, a continuous oval, but is a ring, the filling up of which must be the work of the intellect. What more striking example could be desired of the impossibility of distinguishing intellectual results from intuitional data, by mere contemplation?

(By "intellectual results" he means interpretation, while "intuitional data" is direct untranslated experience. You might have thought that looking at something and seeing it was a direct experience requiring no interpretation, but look at how much interpretational work your brain is doing, even for something as simple as that...)


Non-spooky stuff

I place a lot of value on self-study after my experience in March, and as we covered the chakras and other Spookiness in class last weekend, a lot of brilliant, amazing self-study questions came up. First chakra: Do you trust the universe to provide what you need, when you need it? Second chakra: Do you feel safe creating intimacy with others? Third chakra: Do you feel a sense of personal power and autonomy in your life? And so on. Using the chakras, which have an order to them, starting at the tail bone and rising up the spine, placed these fantastic questions into a natural progression. In that sense, the chakra work provided me an outline for future self-study, for myself and my students. I don't know that it is important to me to think of a literal wheel of energy at each particular point. The meditations and mudras (hand gestures like so) that go along with each chakra can be seen as a way to help set and hold an intention. It's hard to sit with a challenging question long enough to learn something, and ritual seems like it would be helpful.

Labels: ideas, yoga

posted by Jaime_sama @ 10:23 AM