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Besides playing online chess and watching Battlestar Galactica (you can read about my exploits in these areas by reading whatever few posts I have written in this month and the last), I have also been spending a large part of the summer reading stuff that I haven't had time to read during the course of the regular school year. Right now, I am reading Isaiah Berlin's famous essay, "The Hedgehog and the Fox", which is a very accessible and engaging analysis and commentary on the life and work of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, in particular, of his novel War and Peace. I am having so much fun reading it, that I am now inspired to go reread War and Peace.

Anyway, earlier today, I came across this rather long passage from "The Hedgehog and the Fox" which I find very intriguing, fascinating, and... yogic in nature; yogic in the sense that it alludes to this larger medium or reality which is beyond rational analysis but yet is all around us, kind of like the way in which water is all around the fish which swim in it (now, that was a pretty bad metaphor, wasn't it? Talk about bad poetry...). In any case, if you would like to read the passage, here it is:     

"We--sentient creatures--are in part living in a world the constituents of which we can discover, classify and act upon by rational, scientific, deliberately planned methods; but in part (Tolstoy and Maistre, and many thinkers with them, say much the larger part) we are immersed and submerged in a medium that, precisely to the degree to which we inevitably take it for granted as part of ourselves, we do not and cannot observe as if from the outside; cannot identify, measure and seek to manipulate; cannot even be wholly aware of, inasmuch as it enters too intimately into all our experience, is itself too closely interwoven with all that we are and do to be lifted out of the flow (it is the flow) and observed with scientific detachment, as an object. It--the medium in which we are--determines our most permanent categories, our standards of truth and falsehood, of reality and appearance, of the good and the bad, of the central and the peripheral, of the subjective and the objective, of the beautiful and the ugly, of movement and rest, of past, present and future, of one and many...

Nevertheless, though we cannot analyse the medium without some (impossible) vantage-point outside it (for there is no 'outside'), yet some human beings are better aware--although they cannot describe it--of the texture and direction of these 'submerged' portions of their own and everyone else's lives; better aware of this than others, who either ignore the existence of the all-pervasive medium (the 'flow' of life), and are rightly called superficial; or else try to apply to it instruments--scientific, metaphysical--adapted solely to objects above the surface, and so achieve absurdities in their theories and humiliating failures in practice. Wisdom is ability to allow for the (at least by us) unalterable medium in which we act--as we allow for the pervasiveness, say, of time or space, which characterises all our experience... It is not scientific knowledge, but a special sensitiveness to the contours of the circumstances in which we happen to be placed; it is a capacity for living without falling foul of some permanent condition or factor which cannot be either altered, or even fully described or calculated; an ability to be guided by rules of thumb... where rules of science do not, in principle, apply. This inexpressible sense of cosmic orientation is the 'sense of reality', the 'knowledge' of how to live...

We cannot describe it in the way in which external objects or the characters of other people can be described, by isolating them somewhat from the historical 'flow' in which they have their being, and from the 'submerged', unfathomed portions of themselves to which professional historians have... paid so little heed; for we ourselves live in this whole and by it, and are wise only in the measure to which we make our peace with it. For until and unless we do so (only after much bitter suffering, if we are to trust Aeschylus and the Book of Job), we shall protest and suffer in vain, and make sorry fools of ourselves (as Napoleon did) into the bargain." 

Isaiah Berlin, "The Hedgehog and the Fox"     

Reading this passage, I can't help getting the sense that there is a certain futility to yoga blogging. When one writes about yoga, one is using linguistic tools (words) to take apart and give expression to something (whatever the experience of yoga involves) that ultimately cannot really be taken apart and given full linguistic expression to. To write or blog about yoga, then, is to try to measure the depth of a large body of water while being submerged in the water itself... hmm... another bad metaphor here. Ah, but what can you expect from a bad poet? Perhaps what this means is that the best yoga bloggers are (good) poets. Because poets do not use language to try to take apart reality; rather, they open themselves and allow language to flow through them as water flows through a vessel. Thus, through them, language reveals/un-conceals reality rather than fragment it. Now who said this? Heidegger? Hmm...

But there is really no use crying about what a bad poet I am, is there? So I'm going to switch gears here, and give you a headsup about an upcoming event here on Yoga in the Dragon's Den. James Altucher has very generously agreed do a Skype interview with me on this blog. The actual interview will take place via Skype tomorrow (Thursday, July 18th) at 12 p.m. EDT. Very soon after the interview, I will post it on this blog, for your entertainment and possible edification. I hope you will enjoy it; if nothing else, it is really not too often that you get to witness a Chinese guy living in Idaho having a conversation with a Jewish guy in New York over God-only-knows-what; well, actually, I anticipate that most of the interview will center around James's ideas in his latest book, Choose Yourself. But given the way past interviews on this blog have gone, anything is possible. So stay tuned...      

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I mentioned in my update/addendum to my previous post that I found Patrick's recent post on the ambiguous relationship between yoga and mainstream contemporary American culture (and maybe even mainstream western culture at large, although I cannot say for sure, since I have never lived in Europe...) to be most insightful and brilliant. I have been meaning to say a few things about this wonderful post for the last couple of days, so I'll do it now.

First, if you'll bear with me, I'm going to start by quoting Patrick at some length. He writes:

"You will see a double tendency [in the western yoga scene].

One branch of it is that the yoga is political, or feminist, or engaged with culture. The yoga can DO THINGS, man!

The other branch of it, which oddly comes as sort of a package deal with the first one, is that the yoga is separate from culture. Is above culture, more noble than culture, and in particular, CLEANER than culture. And in this branch of thinking, people get so, so very upset when yoga "proves itself to be dirty" and sure, that's my language, but that was very much a thing in the recent yoga scandals. Look around the rhetoric surrounding the John Friend scandal or the Bikram Choudury scandal. There is a clear flavor of "these men have corrupted yoga" in there and it's not at all hard to see.

So then.
 
If we wanted to see these two tendencies as one unified thing, we'd do it this way:

The yoga comes from far away and/or long ago (you know, like Star Wars), and it can HELP US, man. It can redeem us from our corrupt Western culture, and we so badly need enlightenment, we MUST HAVE THE YOGA. But (and here's the surface-break of the other half of it) we have to make sure that the West/false gurus/the NSA/unclean people/bad teachers/some other threat-du-jour doesn't CORRUPT OUR YOGA so that it does us harm instead of good."

As Patrick goes on to observe in the rest of his post, many people in the western yoga scene are either unconscious of this double tendency, or are conscious of it, and have wholeheartedly embraced it as a good thing. And why, indeed, wouldn't they? After all, if yoga is really this wonderful spiritual panacea that has come to us from long, long ago, from a galaxy far, far away (a.k.a. India), and it has helped us find relief from such physical ailments as back pain and insomnia, as well as attain a measure of spiritual contentment on an individual level, it must surely stand to reason that if more people in society were to practice yoga, we should expect to see nothing less than a drastic transformation of our presently corrupt western society into a yogic heaven populated by yogic beings for whom the observances of the yamas and the niyamas come as naturally as breathing air or drinking water. Such a yogic heaven must surely be a Utopian paradise. And who in their right mind wouldn't want to live in such a world?

Sounds good so far, right? So what has gone wrong? Well, for starters, people of such a Utopian bent of mind will quickly discover that although the yoga can do things, it cannot do things on its own; people must go out there and spread the good word. And the good word we are spreading isn't merely relief from back pain or being able to get a good night's sleep, or even the sort of temporary yogic sugar-high one gets from a brief experience of Samadhi in one's deepest meditative practices. All these things are cool things to experience, of course, but they are merely small change compared to the truly society-transforming potential that truly empowered feminist/social-justice-conscious/"smart" yoga can accomplish in this world.

And of course, if you are somebody who is enlightened to this Utopian potential of yoga (an "enlightened one", if you will), it would be totally naive and irresponsible of you to just assume that others are just as enlightened as you are. So, being the un-naive and totally responsible enlightened one that you are, it falls upon you to educate the benighted masses of gym- or shala-going yogis who have tragically yet to awaken to yoga's truly Utopian potential. So you would, among other things, take it upon yourself to write smart-sounding articles on websites like Yoga for Smart People, in the hopes that at least some of these benighted folks out there will awaken to the stupidity of their uncomprehending ways, read what you have to say, absorb it like amrita, and, well, get with the program.

But what's wrong with any of this, one may ask? After all, again, if yoga really has such Utopian potential, and all that is needed is for a bunch of resourceful, enlightened and indefatigable cadres to get the word out and educate the masses (and, maybe, in the process, send a few really recalcitrant stupid people to re-education camps located somewhere in the New Mexico desert), why not get with the program and do it?

Well, being rather tragically benighted myself, I can't really answer these questions properly. But I'll just go ahead and say a couple of rather confused things here anyway, and you decide if you can get anything out of what I have to say. First, if yoga really did have such Utopian potential, why didn't the ancients (you know, the Sadhus practicing in their Himalayan caves or the Brahmin householders) recognize it? I'm no yoga scholar, but I really have never heard or read of any such ancients forming cadres of enlightened activists to change the world in the name of feminism/social-justice/smartness (or whatever the ancient Sanskrit names for these progressive terms may be... perhaps herein lies the problem: My Sanskrit isn't up to snuff either, so if these ancient activists existed, I would have no way of knowing about them. Note to self: Need to go take some classes to brush up on Sanskrit.). In any case, if yoga really has such Utopian potential, and the ancients either did not know about this or did nothing about it, wouldn't this mean that our contemporary western enlightened cadres are way more enlightened than those benighted ancients, that they have single-handedly taken yoga to heights that our benighted ancestors cannot even dream about? Damn, yoga really is evolving, isn't it?

If it is indeed true that contemporary yoga activism has brought yoga to heights unprecedented in its five-thousand (or however many thousand) year-old history, then this would be cause for nothing else but celebration and rejoicing (yay! Smart Yoga...), and I should just sign off here (indeed, I probably shouldn't even have written such a reactionary article in the first place; I'll probably get sent off to New Mexico tomorrow...). But there is another possibility: What if yoga was never meant to be a tool of mass social change or revolution? Could the ancients have known something we don't? What if trying to use yoga as a tool for Utopia-engineering--indeed, as a tool for anything at all--is like trying to eat dinner with a hammer (or trying to cut vegetables with a chainsaw--pick your favorite non-metaphor)? What if being benighted and stupid (or whatever) is simply part of the human condition, and what yoga can do (if it can do anything) is simply to offer us a way to look at this condition with some measure of equanimity and perhaps live with it in a more-or-less productive manner? What if trying to get yoga to do things it's not built to do is like that story of the innkeeper who tried to make all guests fit into his beds by sawing off their limbs or forcibly extending them (ouch!)?

As always, I don't have answers to any of these questions. But being the rather tragically benighted being that I am, I nevertheless am unwilling to look stupid. So I'm going to try to sound a little bit more smart by quoting the following words of some smart person whose works I've been reading lately:

"If we are told that these contradictions will be solved in some perfect world in which all good things can be harmonised in principle, then we must answer, to those who say this, that the meanings they attach to the names which for us denote the conflicting values are not ours... that principles which are harmonised in this other world are not the principles with which, in our daily lives, we are acquainted; if they are transformed, it is into conceptions not known to us on earth. But it is on this earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act...

Happy are those who live under a discipline which they accept without question, who freely obey the orders of leaders, spiritual or temporal, whose word is fully accepted as unbreakable law; or those who have, by their own methods, arrived at clear and unshakeable convictions about what to do and what to be that brook no possible doubt. I can only say that those who rest on such comfortable beds of dogma are victims of forms of self-induced myopia, blinkers that may make for contentment, but not for understanding of what it is to be human." 

Isaiah Berlin, "The Pursuit of the Ideal"

Whew, that was quite a (benighted) rant. Thank you for reading, if you made it this far. I'm going to get some something to eat now. More later--if "later" is not a time where I find myself somewhere in New Mexico, that is.    

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"I am free if, and only if, I plan my life in accordance with my own will; plans entail rules; a rule does not oppress me or enslave me if I impose it on myself consciously, or accept it freely, having understood it, whether it was invented by me or by others, provided that it is rational, that is to say, conforms to the necessities of things. To understand why things must be as they must be is to will them to be so. Knowledge liberates not by offering us more open possibilities amongst which we can make our choice, but by preserving us from the frustration of attempting the impossible. To want necessary laws to be other than they are is to be prey to an irrational desire--a desire that what must be X should also not be X. To go further, and believe these laws to be other than what they necessarily are, is to be insane." 

Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty"

Over the last few days, I have been reading Berlin, and this passage in which Berlin describes positive freedom--the freedom that comes from my imposing a law on myself and choosing to direct my life in accordance with this law out of my own autonomous self-direction--jumps out at me. Berlin himself is ambivalent about this notion of positive liberty. On the one hand, this notion of freedom as rational self-direction can be found in the works of a long line of liberal-minded thinkers (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, to name a few), and expresses the lofty ideal that being free is not just about not being restricted in one's actions, but is ultimately about being able to direct one's life in accordance with an ideal of one's own choosing.

On the other hand, however, positive freedom becomes morally problematic when one tries to translate it into a systematic political arrangement. First, if people are truly free only if they are able to live their lives in accordance with an ideal of their own choosing, then, assuming that freedom is the most important thing for people to have, having this ability to live self-directed lives must be what people really want, even if some people are too benighted/ignorant/stupid to know this on a conscious level. And it is not enough for the state to leave these benighted/ignorant/stupid people alone to their own devices; left to their own devices, these people will probably do things that are not only harmful to themselves, but might also threaten the freedom and lives of more enlightened folks. So, for the good of all, these benighted/ignorant/stupid people who do not know what is best for themselves must be educated and, if necessary, coerced into becoming truly free (Fichte: "Only the truth liberates, and the only way in which I can learn the truth is by doing blindly today, what you, who know it, order me, or coerce me, to do, in the certain knowledge that only thus will I arrive at your clear vision, and be free like you."). And we all know how the story goes from here. Much of the excesses committed in the names of the many "isms" (communism, fascism, even liberalism) of the twentieth century can be traced at least in part to what are arguably at least initially well-intentioned efforts by a group of intellectual elites to "educate" the ignorant and bring them up to shape for the new world order of absolute freedom that is soon to come.

Scary and depressing stuff, if you think about it. How can something that is so noble and lofty on the individual level become so monstrous when applied on a large scale? I don't have any easy (or difficult) answers to this question, and I don't want to gloss this issue over by spouting platitudes, so I'll leave it at this. But here's something else to think about: Aren't we subjecting ourselves to a similar process in our Ashtanga practice? Assuming that the goal of the practice is moksha or liberation, and that only the truth liberates, and the truth is presently not within our field of vision, wouldn't this mean that in doing our daily practice, we are, in a sense, blindly putting ourselves through a process of coercion--to be sure, we are talking about self-directed, freely imposed coercion, but it's still coercion, nonetheless--in the certainty (?) that only thus will we one day arrive at a clear vision, and be free like... Sri K Pattabhi Jois?

On a further note, I sometimes also wonder if this blind trust in a guru/teacher that will lead us towards moksha might be related to all those guru scandals that have been gracing the yoga world of late. Again, one can respond to all this with all manner of platitudes about how trust should not be blind, yadayadayada, that one should choose and question one's guru/teacher carefully, yadayadayada. But if the whole point of having a guru/teacher is to follow somebody who supposedly sees the light in a way that one doesn't, wouldn't this mean that a certain relative blindness on the part of the student is built into the very fabric of the guru-student relationship?   

Hmm... where is this going? I don't know. Again, I have no easy (or difficult) answers to these questions. But I guess I'll continue to do my practice tomorrow. And probably the day after tomorrow as well. Maybe the blindness will lift soon. And then what? Again, I don't know.     

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