ORDER AND CHAOS

Wed 10 Jun at 15:25

Macrocosm: Imagine Earth before people existed. Animal. Vegetable. Mineral. A chaotic and magnificent peace existed that didn’t need to be ordered by humans. Along comes human evolution. Mind evolves. Ego comes into existence. Order is established. The magnificent chaotic order is overruled by the human mind. For good or bad we have ended up where we are now! Microcosm: A unique individual human is born and is plunged into the world at a random point in time and history. The Parents and/or Guardians of said human then place their views of the world onto this being. Slowly but surely then the human is shaped into something via ideas and habits both good and bad. We call this a conditioned view of the world, Maya or illusion.  Neurosis: I’m not going into a long debate about Neurosis, there’s plenty of info available if you want to study it, but I would suggest Neurosis is something to do with the Ego/Thinking Mind/Personality dynamic trying to establish order over the aforementioned, underlying chasm of chaos that resides at the bottom of the well of our beingness. Yoga: seems to have become synonymous with finding a way to be happy in the world with all we currently find ourselves with – families and jobs, etc. But is that enough? For many it will be. If a person has suffered long and hard for various reasons throughout life, they will surely be relieved to find more peace and happiness. But if we care to look at the eight limbs of Yoga, the eighth and last limb is called Samhadi.

What is Samhadi then? You won’t hear many Yoga teachers talk about Samhadi and if they do it may be a vague description of some nebulous state of being that exists somewhere down the royal road of yoga at some undefined point in the future… if we are lucky.

From Wikipedia: Samadhi, in Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Sikhism and yogic schools, is a state of meditative consciousness.

Yoga is not about maintaining our existing neurosis at some manageable degree so we can limp to the end of our existence doing the best we can. And this lukewarm explanation doesn’t do justice to Samadhi! YOGA: Has been reduced to a marketable commodity. Many Yoga teachers, failures like myself… perhaps? find themselves with easy access to earning money, charging large sums of money to teach what they euphemistically call yoga. This is an unfortunate symptom of our culture, which, historically I’m guilty of to. But underlying the need to survive and earn a bit of cash is my personal experience of Yoga - as a transformational process.

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans,’ John Lennon, apparently said.