| Cougar Press PO Box 894 Meadview AZ 86444 |
| Self-Study |
Professor Ernest E. Wood, in his translation of Patanjali's aphorisms, speaks briefly on the
subject of self-study. Along with body-conditioning and attentiveness to God, it is one of the
three practices in the Yoga of Daily Life. The purpose of these three disciplines is to weaken the
Five Sources of Trouble, which are Ignorance, Desire, Aversion, Self-personality and
Possessiveness. This weakening is not accomplished by dwelling on the five sources of trouble,
but rather by focusing on the health of one's body, mind and spirit.
So what is self-study? There is no clear division between the body and the mind. Nor, in these
modern times, do we draw a distinct line between the mind and the soul. We are left with a puzzle
as to whether, in any profound terms, there is really any distinction at all among the three ways of
looking at human reality.
There are actually at least seven ways of looking at the interplay of body, mind and spirit.
Philosophers, theologians, mystics, thinkers of every stripe, as well as your everyday woman and
man, might at any one time consider any of the following combinations to be real:
As a way of conjecturing the essence of life, reality, the universe, the self, creation or whatever
you want to call it, each of these positions has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let's take a
moment to look at each of the different concepts.
1. Body, mind and spirit:
2. Body and mind:
3. Body and spirit:
5. Mind and spirit:
6. Mind alone:
7. Spirit alone:
All of that said, we are left with the continuing illusion or reality of body, mind and spirit.
Whether any or all of them are real can be a little beside the point. We have to deal with our
experiences as we receive them. Pragmatism, doing what works, might be our last refuge.
This reminds me of an early episode of "Star Trek." Captain Kirk and a young woman who may
have been a member of his crew are imprisoned on an alien planet. More than that, they were
befuddled by illusions created by their captors.
In one rather touching scene, Kirk and the woman find themselves by a campfire somewhere out
on the plains of the American West. The setting is familiar to Kirk, largely because the aliens
have retrieved it from his memories of his youth. Wonder of wonders, there is his old horse
standing patiently tethered a few feet from the fire. The skipper goes and pets him softly on the
neck, speaking in soothing tones. He begins to apologize for not having the horse's favorite treat
to offer, when he checks his pocket and finds, more wonder, that he does have the sugar cube or
carrot.
Captain Kirk soon sees through all this, realizing that this imaginary world is being manufactured
in order to manipulate him and the woman into doing the will of the alien beings who are creating
the illusions. He decides not to play along.
The scene changes. Now there is a gruesome monster, and Kirk is expected to fight it, to protect
the woman and himself. With folded arms he announces to their captors that he can see through
the illusion, and that he is not going along with it. The response from the aliens is that he can do
whatever he wants, but the price will be to see the woman tortured and killed, and then he would
experience the same fate himself, complete with the pain.
There's the rub. It would be so easy to dismiss all of the illusions of our lives in this world, except
for the fact that it hurts. Pain and loss are constant companions of all of our learning, healing,
growth and change.
Did you ever awaken from a dream with a broken heart? For a moment you lay there in your bed
feeling so blue about the loss of a loved one who never even existed. But we get over it, and we
get over the real disasters as well. Maybe it takes longer, but sooner or later we reach the point
where we can look back on anything and laugh.
The actual mechanics of the practice we call Self-Study are wide ranging, yet concrete. These
days, there is a vast library available in the "Self Help" category. Some of this material can be
worth looking into. One must be guided by one's needs and curiosity. Philosophy, psychology,
politics, economics, ethics and history are all subjects that might serve to enlighten one on the
quest for great understanding of the self. Reading, conversation, observation and introspection
are tools that can yield insight into our own reality. The answers to questions about who we are,
what we should do, where we want to be, when will we get there, why we should care and how to
do it will come in time. And, as time passes, these answers will change.
subject of self-study. Along with body-conditioning and attentiveness to God, it is one of the
three practices in the Yoga of Daily Life. The purpose of these three disciplines is to weaken the
Five Sources of Trouble, which are Ignorance, Desire, Aversion, Self-personality and
Possessiveness. This weakening is not accomplished by dwelling on the five sources of trouble,
but rather by focusing on the health of one's body, mind and spirit.
So what is self-study? There is no clear division between the body and the mind. Nor, in these
modern times, do we draw a distinct line between the mind and the soul. We are left with a puzzle
as to whether, in any profound terms, there is really any distinction at all among the three ways of
looking at human reality.
There are actually at least seven ways of looking at the interplay of body, mind and spirit.
Philosophers, theologians, mystics, thinkers of every stripe, as well as your everyday woman and
man, might at any one time consider any of the following combinations to be real:
- body, mind and spirit
- body and mind
- body and spirit
- body alone
- mind and spirit
- mind alone
- spirit alone.
As a way of conjecturing the essence of life, reality, the universe, the self, creation or whatever
you want to call it, each of these positions has its own strengths and weaknesses. Let's take a
moment to look at each of the different concepts.
1. Body, mind and spirit:
- In ancient times, humanity had little to work with in terms of hard science. Nevertheless, it
was easy to come to the conclusion that the physical reality of our body did not explain
everything. Thoughts and dreams seemed to be incorporeal. Back in those violent days,
there were plenty of opportunities to look inside the skulls of humans and animals, but these
examinations revealed nothing more than bones, membranes and the mass of cellular tissue
called the brain. It was good to eat, but there was no evidence that this lump of grey matter
had anything to do with our thoughts, dreams, emotions, hallucinations or visions.
Of the three concepts, body was the clearest, yet it seemed like there had to be something
more. As a result of accidents, war, corporal punishment or disease, a person was sometimes
left without a hand or an arm, a foot or a leg. Even when all four limbs were missing, the
unfortunate victim still retained his mind.
On the other hand, there were and are cases where all of the equipment, hands, feet, arms,
legs, skin, guts, neck and head are intact and apparently healthy, yet the subject is mindless,
existing perhaps in a coma or as a raving lunatic.
Then there were our thoughts and dreams. Observers watching a sleeping man would have
no clue about what he would report on awakening. They had seen him lying there, eyes
closed and motionless, yet he would claim that he had been engaged in travel, adventure and
romance.
The physical body was there and could not be denied. Our thoughts and dreams also
seemed very real, at least when they were happening, and they couldn't be ignored. In
addition, there were the ineffable experiences, the intuition and the preternatural experiences
that defied both physical and mental explanation.
The result that the ancients came up with was the concept of a world wherein the physical
body, the mind and the spirit or soul were three separate entities. A body without a soul was
dead. A soul without a body was an incorporeal spirit, a ghost or perhaps a resident of
another world such as heaven.
2. Body and mind:
- As science made its way into the future, it was inevitable that some would begin to see no
reason to postulate the existence of a soul, or a god for that matter. Everything was
explained quite handily in physical and mental terms. We came to realize that the emotions
were functions of internal glands. Any experiences of supposed divine awareness could
readily be dismissed as illusions created by the interplay of the mind and the body. The soul
was extra baggage; its abandonment simplified all of the theories of chemistry, biology and
physics.
3. Body and spirit:
- Just as popular in some circles was the dismissal of the mind as a separate entity. Even
today there are many scientists who consider all mental aspects to be the result of the
physical interplay of energy, nutrition and nerves. Granted, they say, we don't know
everything yet, but we can see where we are headed. So much is explained about how the
whole neurological system works, the chemistry, the synapses and the hormones, that there
surely is no need at all for the idea of the mind's being anything but a function of the body,
just like the five senses, muscular motion and digestion.
The soul is not so easily discarded. It's a matter of faith, to be sure, but in many that faith is
deep. The reality of God, Divine Will, Redemption and Salvation all hinge on the fervent
belief that physical observation, theories and experiments can not and never will be able to
explain and account for everything. There just has to be more.
The mechanistic theory of everything adopts both of the above rationales. To wit, both the
mind and the soul are or will be explained purely in the languages of physics, chemistry and
biology. Psychologists who refuse to come along for the ride are dismissed to the realms of
parapsychology. Philosophers who insist on reality beyond the findings of hard science are
relegated to the study of metaphysics, magic and astrology.
This is largely an atheist point of view. Of what use is a god, the reasoning goes, when
everything is explained by the laws of physics? Smug superiority and vain conceit account
for all of the ideas that humanity might have something profoundly different from the beasts
and the plants. To be sure, we have evolved to levels of philosophical awareness, scientific
knowledge, engineering triumphs and socio-economic order that leave the ranks of zoology
and botany in the dust, but evolution is all that it is. Survival of the fittest. Mutation and
natural selection explains every bit of it, or will, someday.
5. Mind and spirit:
- Idealism has been around since the time of ancient Greek philosophers such as Plato. In
modern times, the discoveries of quantum physics, as well as progress in the art of creating
virtual reality, has led some thinkers to reopen the idea that maybe everything exists only in
our subjective awareness. We have come to realize that what we see and take for real has
little to do with what our scientists tell us is actually there. We don't see electrons, quarks
and neutrinos; we see trees and houses and people.
And then there are dreams. When we are dreaming, we frequently believe that our
experience is real. We might know that we are actually lying in bed, asleep. These are called
"lucid" dreams. But usually we don't know. The important fact is that it might be either
way. We might know that we are asleep and dreaming, or we might believe that what's
happening is real.
There is also a phenomenon known as "false awakening," and I have experienced this
myself. I awoke from a dream, and I suspected that perhaps I was still asleep, still dreaming,
so I did the usual things to check. I looked around; I pinched myself; I shook my head and
my body, and yes, there was no doubt about it. I was awake...
...and then I awoke!
Experiences like these have led some of the philosophers, scientists and mystics to conclude
that it is the physical world that is unnecessary, and that includes the body. Perhaps
everything is a dream. Something is going on, for sure, but just what it is we can never
know. We exist in our minds, in our spirits, in our souls, and our bodies are only part of the
pictures that we paint to amuse ourselves.
6. Mind alone:
- As easy as it is to leave our bodies behind in the search for what is real, it is just as easy to
abandon the spirit or the soul as well. Who needs it? If we can make up, in our minds, the
world, physical reality, the sun and the wind and the rain and this lump of meat and bone
that we think we see and feel, then we can also imagine the ghost within. Everything exists
within our mind. Whether anything exists outside of our mind, we can never know, for as
soon as we know about something, it is by definition in our mind.
7. Spirit alone:
- It's even easier to conclude that the mind is itself a part of the imaginary unreality. After all,
it is our soul, our personal being, our deep self, that we know for sure exists. We turn
Descartes around and say, "I am, therefore I think." Thought is the function of the brain,
which is part of the body, which does not really exist except as part of the illusion. It would
be very hard to convince any of us that we don't exist in some sense. The self is undeniable.
All of the questions lie in the details.
All of that said, we are left with the continuing illusion or reality of body, mind and spirit.
Whether any or all of them are real can be a little beside the point. We have to deal with our
experiences as we receive them. Pragmatism, doing what works, might be our last refuge.
This reminds me of an early episode of "Star Trek." Captain Kirk and a young woman who may
have been a member of his crew are imprisoned on an alien planet. More than that, they were
befuddled by illusions created by their captors.
In one rather touching scene, Kirk and the woman find themselves by a campfire somewhere out
on the plains of the American West. The setting is familiar to Kirk, largely because the aliens
have retrieved it from his memories of his youth. Wonder of wonders, there is his old horse
standing patiently tethered a few feet from the fire. The skipper goes and pets him softly on the
neck, speaking in soothing tones. He begins to apologize for not having the horse's favorite treat
to offer, when he checks his pocket and finds, more wonder, that he does have the sugar cube or
carrot.
Captain Kirk soon sees through all this, realizing that this imaginary world is being manufactured
in order to manipulate him and the woman into doing the will of the alien beings who are creating
the illusions. He decides not to play along.
The scene changes. Now there is a gruesome monster, and Kirk is expected to fight it, to protect
the woman and himself. With folded arms he announces to their captors that he can see through
the illusion, and that he is not going along with it. The response from the aliens is that he can do
whatever he wants, but the price will be to see the woman tortured and killed, and then he would
experience the same fate himself, complete with the pain.
There's the rub. It would be so easy to dismiss all of the illusions of our lives in this world, except
for the fact that it hurts. Pain and loss are constant companions of all of our learning, healing,
growth and change.
Did you ever awaken from a dream with a broken heart? For a moment you lay there in your bed
feeling so blue about the loss of a loved one who never even existed. But we get over it, and we
get over the real disasters as well. Maybe it takes longer, but sooner or later we reach the point
where we can look back on anything and laugh.
The actual mechanics of the practice we call Self-Study are wide ranging, yet concrete. These
days, there is a vast library available in the "Self Help" category. Some of this material can be
worth looking into. One must be guided by one's needs and curiosity. Philosophy, psychology,
politics, economics, ethics and history are all subjects that might serve to enlighten one on the
quest for great understanding of the self. Reading, conversation, observation and introspection
are tools that can yield insight into our own reality. The answers to questions about who we are,
what we should do, where we want to be, when will we get there, why we should care and how to
do it will come in time. And, as time passes, these answers will change.
| Yoga for Carnivores by Jay Dyck |