As part of a regular Ashtanga Vinyasha practice, you end up meditating in the conventional sense of the word. Right at the end, after Yoga Mudra but just before Utpluthih, you sit in Padmasana, take Chin Mudra (if you're like me, resist the urge to make "glasses" with your hands) and do some mindfully mindful mindfulness – focusing all of your attention on the process of breathing. The sound of Ujayii, the feeling, the action – attempting to dissolve the churning fluctuations of the mind and glimpse the self-less consciousness within.
Honestly, I rarely get much out of this other than a much needed rest before the 25 breath Bandha Olympiad of Scales Pose.
The more super-naturalistic yogic thinkers believed this consciousness to be the Atman. Like a tiny drop of ocean water is also the ocean, Atman is imagined as a microcosm of the infinite Brahman, aka God, but God in a pan-deistic sort of way (not to be confused with the magical super-hero father figure usually associated with either the word or personal pronoun).
The goal of any yoga practice is to begin to unpack the layer cake of human experience; the body, the mind, and this…Atman, the watcher, the conscious un-self, achieving the mental state of Samadhi and the karmic release of Moksha. Although I’m not convinced that Moksha is a thing, I can attest that Samadhi, or at least a state of conscious un-selfness, does indeed seem to be an achievable condition.
I’ve only managed to approach it on a precious few occasions, and some of them sucked. Samadhi is described as infinite bliss, but the first time something that seems as described happened, it scared the shit out of me.
During a particularly long meditation session – probably 45 minutes in, which may be small-fry for Vipassana Ubermench and Uberfrau, but a Herculean effort for me, I experienced a gradual loss of awareness of the physical world. Birds may have been tweeting outside, cars driving by and so on, but the volume of these external events, not only the audio, but also their impact on my mental state, began to fade.
I experienced a sensation of no-sensation; aware of myself, but not of the world or my physical body. If you’ve ever made your way down a staircase in pitch-darkness, you know something about the experience already – a gradual decent into decreasing levels of sensation, but made tolerable through a strong grasp on something stabilizing; a railing in the case of the staircase, here my sense of identity. However, upon reaching what felt like the second to last step, the foot of my mind searched for a place to land, and there was none.
Without warning, I forgot, or perhaps lost track of, myself. I had slipped into a state where I had no sense that I was a human, that I had a body or a name that corresponds to that body, and all that goes with it. No friends, family, needs or desires. I was awake, but the world had momentarily ceased to be.
It really felt like stepping into the darkness, expecting firm footing and finding only emptiness. It wasn’t exactly what I would describe as bliss. It was actually terrifying, and after a brief few seconds, I instinctively pulled myself out of it, like when you’re about to fall asleep and your legs jerk. There’s a sense of relief as self-awareness flows back through the cracks and fills us up again.
Unlike many Yogic thinkers, I reject the notion that we can come to conclusions about the nature of reality based on subjective experiences. I super-duper reject any attempt to assign super-natural explanations to these experiences.
What I can conclude however, is that we are saturated, at every moment, with our senses of self and place. Our brains generate this identity and bath us in it always. The mind is as much the world-maker as the I-maker.
A joke: A dolphin swims by a school of fish, and says; “the water’s great today”, to which the fish reply; “what’s water?”
Since we’re surrounded, filled up and fully absorbed by this constant state of I am, we fail to recognize that it is less like an arm or leg, and more like a shirt. With some practice, we can take it off. Who doesn’t want to run around shirtless? Nobody, that’s who.
Since this uncomfortable initial glimpse into states beyond self-awareness, I have had better, less shocking meditative experiences. Occasionally, a middle ground is found between complete self-absorption and panic inducing loss of self, and it’s pretty interesting.
Unlike those ancient practitioners who believed that loss of the self leads naturally to release from worldly attachment, suffering, the karmic cycle, re-incarnation and so on, I really can’t say that there are any verifiable long term benefits when considering my own life and yoga practice. It may also be that those benefits, like progress in asana practice, are so glacially slow to manifest as to be nearly imperceptible at any given moment.
Conclusion: The brain is a weird organ. It constructs an imaginary world, complete with an illusory identity for us, through chemicals, 3 lbs of fat and less electricity than it takes to run a light-bulb; a world we feel is an accurate description of reality, despite the fact that we know very well that it isn’t. We're in The Matrix alright, but we built it. We're the humans and the robots. Weird shit indeed.
Honestly, I rarely get much out of this other than a much needed rest before the 25 breath Bandha Olympiad of Scales Pose.
The more super-naturalistic yogic thinkers believed this consciousness to be the Atman. Like a tiny drop of ocean water is also the ocean, Atman is imagined as a microcosm of the infinite Brahman, aka God, but God in a pan-deistic sort of way (not to be confused with the magical super-hero father figure usually associated with either the word or personal pronoun).
The goal of any yoga practice is to begin to unpack the layer cake of human experience; the body, the mind, and this…Atman, the watcher, the conscious un-self, achieving the mental state of Samadhi and the karmic release of Moksha. Although I’m not convinced that Moksha is a thing, I can attest that Samadhi, or at least a state of conscious un-selfness, does indeed seem to be an achievable condition.
I’ve only managed to approach it on a precious few occasions, and some of them sucked. Samadhi is described as infinite bliss, but the first time something that seems as described happened, it scared the shit out of me.
During a particularly long meditation session – probably 45 minutes in, which may be small-fry for Vipassana Ubermench and Uberfrau, but a Herculean effort for me, I experienced a gradual loss of awareness of the physical world. Birds may have been tweeting outside, cars driving by and so on, but the volume of these external events, not only the audio, but also their impact on my mental state, began to fade.
I experienced a sensation of no-sensation; aware of myself, but not of the world or my physical body. If you’ve ever made your way down a staircase in pitch-darkness, you know something about the experience already – a gradual decent into decreasing levels of sensation, but made tolerable through a strong grasp on something stabilizing; a railing in the case of the staircase, here my sense of identity. However, upon reaching what felt like the second to last step, the foot of my mind searched for a place to land, and there was none.
Without warning, I forgot, or perhaps lost track of, myself. I had slipped into a state where I had no sense that I was a human, that I had a body or a name that corresponds to that body, and all that goes with it. No friends, family, needs or desires. I was awake, but the world had momentarily ceased to be.
It really felt like stepping into the darkness, expecting firm footing and finding only emptiness. It wasn’t exactly what I would describe as bliss. It was actually terrifying, and after a brief few seconds, I instinctively pulled myself out of it, like when you’re about to fall asleep and your legs jerk. There’s a sense of relief as self-awareness flows back through the cracks and fills us up again.
Unlike many Yogic thinkers, I reject the notion that we can come to conclusions about the nature of reality based on subjective experiences. I super-duper reject any attempt to assign super-natural explanations to these experiences.
What I can conclude however, is that we are saturated, at every moment, with our senses of self and place. Our brains generate this identity and bath us in it always. The mind is as much the world-maker as the I-maker.
A joke: A dolphin swims by a school of fish, and says; “the water’s great today”, to which the fish reply; “what’s water?”
Since we’re surrounded, filled up and fully absorbed by this constant state of I am, we fail to recognize that it is less like an arm or leg, and more like a shirt. With some practice, we can take it off. Who doesn’t want to run around shirtless? Nobody, that’s who.
Since this uncomfortable initial glimpse into states beyond self-awareness, I have had better, less shocking meditative experiences. Occasionally, a middle ground is found between complete self-absorption and panic inducing loss of self, and it’s pretty interesting.
Unlike those ancient practitioners who believed that loss of the self leads naturally to release from worldly attachment, suffering, the karmic cycle, re-incarnation and so on, I really can’t say that there are any verifiable long term benefits when considering my own life and yoga practice. It may also be that those benefits, like progress in asana practice, are so glacially slow to manifest as to be nearly imperceptible at any given moment.
Conclusion: The brain is a weird organ. It constructs an imaginary world, complete with an illusory identity for us, through chemicals, 3 lbs of fat and less electricity than it takes to run a light-bulb; a world we feel is an accurate description of reality, despite the fact that we know very well that it isn’t. We're in The Matrix alright, but we built it. We're the humans and the robots. Weird shit indeed.