| Cougar Press PO Box 894 Meadview AZ 86444 |
| Here and Now |
On the previous page, "The Center of the Universe," I posed the following questions:
I can make an attempt to dismiss these inquiries as rhetorical. I could provide the following answers:
These responses would be true in many senses. A person doesn't need to be a physicist or an
astronomer to practice Yoga. Much progress can be made, in one's physical fitness, knowledge,
understanding, and emotional serenity, without paying any attention to cosmology, origins, creation
or whatever we choose to call it.
As for the "hermit sitting on a mat in the desert," isn't that merely another erroneous conception of
Yoga? Doesn't it rank down there with celibacy, poverty and vegetarianism as a typical approach to
the successful study and application of Hatha and Raja? Aren't these examples of austerity and self-
denial qualities of asceticism rather than Yoga?
There is surely no connection between someone seated in cross-legged contemplation and distant stars
that are trillions of miles away.
Certainly the sources of trouble can be weakened without ever paying attention to the behavior of
quasars, galaxies and black holes.
One can practice the asanas and grow strong and limber without any help from the Milky Way.
Concentration, meditation and contemplation are intensely personal and inward. There is no
requirement for any attention to external illusions. After all, is it not all illusion, the stars and the
galaxies? We don't really know if they still exist. We can't even be certain that they ever did. We can
see them twinkling in the sky, but we cannot hear them. We can't feel the heat from their burning
hydrogen.
So, we are off of the hook, so to speak. We don't need to pay any attention at all to the universe.
But maybe it is not a need. When one spends energy in the practice of body conditioning, self study
and attentiveness to God, when one spends time in rapt contemplation, sometimes there is an
expansion of interest and awareness. The mundane world of jobs, homes, family and friends seems
unimportant. The concerns of the towns and counties, the states and nations, and the planet with all
its myriad populations become trivial. Growing awareness of and curiosity about the wider world
feed off one another. The more we know, the more we want to know. The greater our curiosity, the
more we seek to find out.
The beginning steps in any discipline can be tedious, confusing and boring. In chemistry, biology or
psychology, the students are told to learn the definitions of strange words. They are required to
memorize strange names. The history class memorizes endless processions of dates. In physics we are
guided through meaningless drills with weights and wheels. In arithmetic we had to memorize the
times tables.
Before we could learn to read we had to learn the alphabet, twenty-six meaningless symbols. But,
once learned, who would give it up? Who would abandon the ability to read the signs that decorate
our stores and highways? Who would choose no longer to understand the headlines on the
newspaper, the letter from a loved one, the intrigue of a short story or a novel, the beauty of poetry,
or the instructions about how to assemble and use a new tool or toy?
Who would prefer not to be able to follow the arithmetic involved in getting the right change from a
five dollar bill? Who would choose to return to ignorance?
Sometimes some of us move beyond rote learning, memorization, recitation and drills. We
experience the birth of curiosity and passion for a subject. Different people are attracted to diverse
disciplines. One may be consumed with learning and exploring the ins and outs of mathematics.
Another may be interested, not in numbers and calculations, but in the history of the Renaissance,
the properties of metal, the taxonomy of plants and animals, or the ins and outs of the stock market.
This can happen as one devotes time and energy to this thing we call Yoga. Attention to the Yoga of
Daily Life... body conditioning, self study and attentiveness to God... can awaken interest in
nutrition, anatomy, physiology, exercise, psychology or religion. Fascination can blossom in areas
like art, literature or music. Some will find that they want to know more about the planet, the solar
system, the galaxy and the universe. Others may be equally enchanted with information about
electrons, neutrinos, quarks and muons.
The universe may not have a center, but each of us does. A simple goal of Yoga is to learn to dwell, if
ever so briefly, at the focal point of our being. Those of us with busy lives spend a lot of time
projected away from our center and toward our goals, objectives and aspirations. This is normal, and
this is fine, but each of us needs to return to our center once in awhile.
We sit down in a comfortable place and pose. We have been living in the future, our plans and
ambitions extended toward the jobs we must perform in the next hour, day or year. We have been
living in the past, our attention corralled by memories good and bad, grudges and affection. Now we
let the past and the future go.
We are sitting in a quiet place, but we also are at our work places, our kitchens, our meals, our
chores, our beds. Now we draw our awareness and our attention in to where our body is. We are
here and now.
"Here and now" are variable terms. Specifically, mathematically, geometrically, one second ago is in
the past, and one second from now is in the future. The present is a dimensionless period in time.
"Here," this location, could be thought of as a point. But since we don't occupy a mere point, it's
not practical to think of here in that sense. We occupy a volume of space because we have height and
thickness. That volume of space is "here."
However, we move. Movement is subject to the dictates of time, but we can ignore that dimension for
now. We do the same thing with a map; we eliminate the dimension of height so that we can observe
the area, the product of length and width. On a journey we focus on the length, the distance we have
traveled, and how far we have to go.
Time is like that too. Just as we can take the time, height or width away from length. we can take the
height, width or length away from time. Just as we occupy a space defined by height, width and
length, we occupy a period of time called the present. It's not for our purposes an infinitesimal
instant squeezed between the past and the future. The present extends into the future and back into
the past, enough to make sense of our senses. Each of the waves, light, heat, ultraviolet, gamma,
sound, are defined by their frequency and wavelength. Without some space and time, they could not
exist.
When considering "here," we can mean this space occupied by our body, or we can mean this room,
this house, this neighborhood, this town, county, state, region, nation, continent, hemisphere, planet,
solar system, galaxy, galactic cluster, super cluster or universe. In much the same way, when we say
"now," we can mean this second, this minute, this hour, today, this week, this month, this year, this
decade, this century, this millennium, this era, this epoch, this eon or forever. The universe exists
now. How closely we focus on the time line depends very much on what we are doing at the time.
During an emergency like a car accident or a near miss, we are focusing on a very small speck of
time. Our adrenaline helps us to focus so that we can apply our skill, intelligence and resources
quickly enough to deal with the situation. During such events, time can appear to slow down. We
skid through the intersection in slow motion.
Time can also appear to speed up. The classic contrast has been told to us as the difference between
sitting on a hot burner, when half a second can seem like forever, and kissing your loved one good
night on the front porch, where fifteen minutes can seem like a few seconds.
As our brain activity speeds up in response to emergency, maturity or sensual bombardment, time
appears to pass more slowly. The faster process allows us to analyze the temporal passage in smaller
increments. Smaller means more, and we need to pay attention to each of these short spans.
If and when our brains slow down, the opposite sensation of time occurs. Time seems to speed up.
As we develop into adults, our waking brains operate at faster speeds. The frequencies range from
delta through theta and alpha to beta. In deep sleep, in delta, time passes in the blink of an eye.
After a few hours of that, we speed up into the dream world of theta and alpha. Time is passing more
slowly. Adventure and romance can seem to be endless. Then, when we become fully awake, time
slows even more, like an airliner taxiing across a runway. The day can be long. The stretch from
morning to lunchtime extends deep into the future. It can take forever just to make it to the mid-
morning break.
Fast or slow, our mental comprehension offers us a puddle of time to serve as now. As we age beyond
maturity toward senility, our brains begin to slow down. The puddle of time can expand so that now
means more than just this minute, this hour or today. It can mean this season. Now can mean this
year, or perhaps this time since I retired. Eventually our whole life can seem to be flashing past in an
instant. At the moment of brain death, when the frequency of the brain waves approaches zero, our
personal puddle of time approaches infinity.
The brain waves will also find the lower frequencies of alpha and theta during meditation. I have
always been fond of this exercise: eyes closed and relaxed, I imagine the room where I am resting in
tranquillity. Slowly I fill the room with my presence, and I let it expand. Like a cloud of vapor I now
occupy the house, and then the house and the yard. I picture my sphere of presence expanding to
include the neighborhood, and then the town. By then my point of view has become aerial. In my
imagination I see the fields and meadows, woods and rivers as I expand to include the county in my
bubble of existence. I grow to include the state and then the country, and then as I expand to contain
the planet Earth, I find myself floating in the solar system. Soon the sun itself becomes a shrinking
star as my feeling of here comes to include the galaxy. Eventually the whole universe comes to be
where I am. I am here.
It's only an exercise. I am still seated in a room, or maybe on a porch or a deck, or on a beach with
the sound of surf, or on a rock by the gurgling creek or the splashing waterfall. Perhaps I am in the
shade of a tree with a song bird performing in the branches, or maybe I am on a hill with the wind
whispering through the grass, or thunder rumbling in the distance.
Still, my location in the galaxy or the universe is no less real. The gravity of the most distant star still
tugs at the matter that is my body, and every molecule of me tugs back. I am still traveling with my
planet and my star on a complex journey of high speed and great distance through a course of orbits
and expansion. This cosmic dance has been going on for much longer than my short life as a human
being. Yet, I hesitate to say that this makes it more real, or more important, or more fraught with
meaning.
After all, one tiny virus can be the death of an organism millions of times larger than itself. Perhaps
worse, it can be the cause of a cold. An even tinier gene can make a creature go through life
enhanced or deformed. An assassin in Sarajevo can trigger a world war. A planet like Earth might
destroy the galaxy.
The cosmologists may tell us that there is no center to the universe. But imagine during the early
expansion of the universe when all of the matter and energy was still crammed into the size of a tennis
ball. From the point of view of that concentration, it would be easy to declare that all of what there
was qualified as the center. At least, in contrast to the size of the modern universe, it wasn't large
enough to be a pencil point. At what point, we have to wonder, does the situation change? When
does the center disappear? When does it become somewhere else but not here?
When we meditate, we sink towards our own center. It has been suggested that, when someone finds
the center of anything, a work of art, a skill, an understanding of a subject, they find the center of
everything. For that moment the universe is at our disposal. What wakes within us turns out to be
curiosity and passion. Our minds and our emotions become transfixed by the beauty, the mystery
and the wonder.
This is when we realize that we started billions of years ago as a timeless point. This is when, even
isolated in some cave, ashram or on top of a mountain, we revel in the observations and speculations
of the astronomers. As we dwell in silence, we discover that all of the stars, quasars and black holes
are right here. As we patiently engage in the yoga of daily life, we can no longer ignore the reality
that now is the consequence of that huge event called the Big Bang. Bending, stretching and twisting
our bodies, we are emulating the warping of time and space that is reality.
As we contemplate the depths of nothing, we find that everything is here and now.
- Who needs to know that the universe started as a pinpoint of infinite density?
- What do the findings of celestial observation and analysis have to do with a hermit sitting on a
mat in the desert? - Where is the connection between distant galaxies and meditation?
- When does body conditioning, self-study and attentiveness to God include the comprehension
of events that occurred billions of years ago? - How does the size and shape of the midnight sky have anything to do with bending and
stretching? - Why must we pay any attention to the vast cosmos when we seek to contemplate our own depth?
I can make an attempt to dismiss these inquiries as rhetorical. I could provide the following answers:
- nobody;
- nothing;
- nowhere;
- never;
- not at all; and
- no reason.
These responses would be true in many senses. A person doesn't need to be a physicist or an
astronomer to practice Yoga. Much progress can be made, in one's physical fitness, knowledge,
understanding, and emotional serenity, without paying any attention to cosmology, origins, creation
or whatever we choose to call it.
As for the "hermit sitting on a mat in the desert," isn't that merely another erroneous conception of
Yoga? Doesn't it rank down there with celibacy, poverty and vegetarianism as a typical approach to
the successful study and application of Hatha and Raja? Aren't these examples of austerity and self-
denial qualities of asceticism rather than Yoga?
There is surely no connection between someone seated in cross-legged contemplation and distant stars
that are trillions of miles away.
Certainly the sources of trouble can be weakened without ever paying attention to the behavior of
quasars, galaxies and black holes.
One can practice the asanas and grow strong and limber without any help from the Milky Way.
Concentration, meditation and contemplation are intensely personal and inward. There is no
requirement for any attention to external illusions. After all, is it not all illusion, the stars and the
galaxies? We don't really know if they still exist. We can't even be certain that they ever did. We can
see them twinkling in the sky, but we cannot hear them. We can't feel the heat from their burning
hydrogen.
So, we are off of the hook, so to speak. We don't need to pay any attention at all to the universe.
But maybe it is not a need. When one spends energy in the practice of body conditioning, self study
and attentiveness to God, when one spends time in rapt contemplation, sometimes there is an
expansion of interest and awareness. The mundane world of jobs, homes, family and friends seems
unimportant. The concerns of the towns and counties, the states and nations, and the planet with all
its myriad populations become trivial. Growing awareness of and curiosity about the wider world
feed off one another. The more we know, the more we want to know. The greater our curiosity, the
more we seek to find out.
The beginning steps in any discipline can be tedious, confusing and boring. In chemistry, biology or
psychology, the students are told to learn the definitions of strange words. They are required to
memorize strange names. The history class memorizes endless processions of dates. In physics we are
guided through meaningless drills with weights and wheels. In arithmetic we had to memorize the
times tables.
Before we could learn to read we had to learn the alphabet, twenty-six meaningless symbols. But,
once learned, who would give it up? Who would abandon the ability to read the signs that decorate
our stores and highways? Who would choose no longer to understand the headlines on the
newspaper, the letter from a loved one, the intrigue of a short story or a novel, the beauty of poetry,
or the instructions about how to assemble and use a new tool or toy?
Who would prefer not to be able to follow the arithmetic involved in getting the right change from a
five dollar bill? Who would choose to return to ignorance?
Sometimes some of us move beyond rote learning, memorization, recitation and drills. We
experience the birth of curiosity and passion for a subject. Different people are attracted to diverse
disciplines. One may be consumed with learning and exploring the ins and outs of mathematics.
Another may be interested, not in numbers and calculations, but in the history of the Renaissance,
the properties of metal, the taxonomy of plants and animals, or the ins and outs of the stock market.
This can happen as one devotes time and energy to this thing we call Yoga. Attention to the Yoga of
Daily Life... body conditioning, self study and attentiveness to God... can awaken interest in
nutrition, anatomy, physiology, exercise, psychology or religion. Fascination can blossom in areas
like art, literature or music. Some will find that they want to know more about the planet, the solar
system, the galaxy and the universe. Others may be equally enchanted with information about
electrons, neutrinos, quarks and muons.
The universe may not have a center, but each of us does. A simple goal of Yoga is to learn to dwell, if
ever so briefly, at the focal point of our being. Those of us with busy lives spend a lot of time
projected away from our center and toward our goals, objectives and aspirations. This is normal, and
this is fine, but each of us needs to return to our center once in awhile.
We sit down in a comfortable place and pose. We have been living in the future, our plans and
ambitions extended toward the jobs we must perform in the next hour, day or year. We have been
living in the past, our attention corralled by memories good and bad, grudges and affection. Now we
let the past and the future go.
We are sitting in a quiet place, but we also are at our work places, our kitchens, our meals, our
chores, our beds. Now we draw our awareness and our attention in to where our body is. We are
here and now.
"Here and now" are variable terms. Specifically, mathematically, geometrically, one second ago is in
the past, and one second from now is in the future. The present is a dimensionless period in time.
"Here," this location, could be thought of as a point. But since we don't occupy a mere point, it's
not practical to think of here in that sense. We occupy a volume of space because we have height and
thickness. That volume of space is "here."
However, we move. Movement is subject to the dictates of time, but we can ignore that dimension for
now. We do the same thing with a map; we eliminate the dimension of height so that we can observe
the area, the product of length and width. On a journey we focus on the length, the distance we have
traveled, and how far we have to go.
Time is like that too. Just as we can take the time, height or width away from length. we can take the
height, width or length away from time. Just as we occupy a space defined by height, width and
length, we occupy a period of time called the present. It's not for our purposes an infinitesimal
instant squeezed between the past and the future. The present extends into the future and back into
the past, enough to make sense of our senses. Each of the waves, light, heat, ultraviolet, gamma,
sound, are defined by their frequency and wavelength. Without some space and time, they could not
exist.
When considering "here," we can mean this space occupied by our body, or we can mean this room,
this house, this neighborhood, this town, county, state, region, nation, continent, hemisphere, planet,
solar system, galaxy, galactic cluster, super cluster or universe. In much the same way, when we say
"now," we can mean this second, this minute, this hour, today, this week, this month, this year, this
decade, this century, this millennium, this era, this epoch, this eon or forever. The universe exists
now. How closely we focus on the time line depends very much on what we are doing at the time.
During an emergency like a car accident or a near miss, we are focusing on a very small speck of
time. Our adrenaline helps us to focus so that we can apply our skill, intelligence and resources
quickly enough to deal with the situation. During such events, time can appear to slow down. We
skid through the intersection in slow motion.
Time can also appear to speed up. The classic contrast has been told to us as the difference between
sitting on a hot burner, when half a second can seem like forever, and kissing your loved one good
night on the front porch, where fifteen minutes can seem like a few seconds.
As our brain activity speeds up in response to emergency, maturity or sensual bombardment, time
appears to pass more slowly. The faster process allows us to analyze the temporal passage in smaller
increments. Smaller means more, and we need to pay attention to each of these short spans.
If and when our brains slow down, the opposite sensation of time occurs. Time seems to speed up.
As we develop into adults, our waking brains operate at faster speeds. The frequencies range from
delta through theta and alpha to beta. In deep sleep, in delta, time passes in the blink of an eye.
After a few hours of that, we speed up into the dream world of theta and alpha. Time is passing more
slowly. Adventure and romance can seem to be endless. Then, when we become fully awake, time
slows even more, like an airliner taxiing across a runway. The day can be long. The stretch from
morning to lunchtime extends deep into the future. It can take forever just to make it to the mid-
morning break.
Fast or slow, our mental comprehension offers us a puddle of time to serve as now. As we age beyond
maturity toward senility, our brains begin to slow down. The puddle of time can expand so that now
means more than just this minute, this hour or today. It can mean this season. Now can mean this
year, or perhaps this time since I retired. Eventually our whole life can seem to be flashing past in an
instant. At the moment of brain death, when the frequency of the brain waves approaches zero, our
personal puddle of time approaches infinity.
The brain waves will also find the lower frequencies of alpha and theta during meditation. I have
always been fond of this exercise: eyes closed and relaxed, I imagine the room where I am resting in
tranquillity. Slowly I fill the room with my presence, and I let it expand. Like a cloud of vapor I now
occupy the house, and then the house and the yard. I picture my sphere of presence expanding to
include the neighborhood, and then the town. By then my point of view has become aerial. In my
imagination I see the fields and meadows, woods and rivers as I expand to include the county in my
bubble of existence. I grow to include the state and then the country, and then as I expand to contain
the planet Earth, I find myself floating in the solar system. Soon the sun itself becomes a shrinking
star as my feeling of here comes to include the galaxy. Eventually the whole universe comes to be
where I am. I am here.
It's only an exercise. I am still seated in a room, or maybe on a porch or a deck, or on a beach with
the sound of surf, or on a rock by the gurgling creek or the splashing waterfall. Perhaps I am in the
shade of a tree with a song bird performing in the branches, or maybe I am on a hill with the wind
whispering through the grass, or thunder rumbling in the distance.
Still, my location in the galaxy or the universe is no less real. The gravity of the most distant star still
tugs at the matter that is my body, and every molecule of me tugs back. I am still traveling with my
planet and my star on a complex journey of high speed and great distance through a course of orbits
and expansion. This cosmic dance has been going on for much longer than my short life as a human
being. Yet, I hesitate to say that this makes it more real, or more important, or more fraught with
meaning.
After all, one tiny virus can be the death of an organism millions of times larger than itself. Perhaps
worse, it can be the cause of a cold. An even tinier gene can make a creature go through life
enhanced or deformed. An assassin in Sarajevo can trigger a world war. A planet like Earth might
destroy the galaxy.
The cosmologists may tell us that there is no center to the universe. But imagine during the early
expansion of the universe when all of the matter and energy was still crammed into the size of a tennis
ball. From the point of view of that concentration, it would be easy to declare that all of what there
was qualified as the center. At least, in contrast to the size of the modern universe, it wasn't large
enough to be a pencil point. At what point, we have to wonder, does the situation change? When
does the center disappear? When does it become somewhere else but not here?
When we meditate, we sink towards our own center. It has been suggested that, when someone finds
the center of anything, a work of art, a skill, an understanding of a subject, they find the center of
everything. For that moment the universe is at our disposal. What wakes within us turns out to be
curiosity and passion. Our minds and our emotions become transfixed by the beauty, the mystery
and the wonder.
This is when we realize that we started billions of years ago as a timeless point. This is when, even
isolated in some cave, ashram or on top of a mountain, we revel in the observations and speculations
of the astronomers. As we dwell in silence, we discover that all of the stars, quasars and black holes
are right here. As we patiently engage in the yoga of daily life, we can no longer ignore the reality
that now is the consequence of that huge event called the Big Bang. Bending, stretching and twisting
our bodies, we are emulating the warping of time and space that is reality.
As we contemplate the depths of nothing, we find that everything is here and now.
| Yoga for Carnivores by Jay Dyck |