Thoughts while watching the first 17 minutes of The Life of Yogananda.

(Love is the opportunity to admit someone else into your energies, to wrap them, to contain them, and for them to contain you.)

i.

I was born an artist with an gifted sense of the sublime in our everyday, the awareness of our constant Divine everydayness.

I was weaned from the spiritual elitism, from a sense of spirtitual entitlement, and found a more refined sense of the diamond mind in all places. Much of the maturity was found in following the footsteps of poets and writers, of philosophers and thinkers, of mathematicians and architects, of the great runners, warriors. I learned from those who already perched in elevated stations and it was easy to see their greatness framed by culture, framed by analysis, framed by a vague sense of idolization and hero-worship. I also matured a spiritual awareness in watching the facets of life in everyday America. In the raw country sides of poor America there is the most eleveated and celebrated of faith. In the dilapidated mountain cabin that belches with hunger and cold. From the detox units of various insitutions I regularly found myself for a decade. I met countless prophets and teachers in the darkest denizens of chemical dependency, of sexual depravity, of the desperate plights of the american impoverished. “each one teach one” was a mantra I learned from the mouth of an ex-con who learned it in meetings.

Faith tends to be strongest in times of struggle and doubt. Faith blooms best from wreckage and massive shift.

I came to realize that the highest awareness of America was the basic worker who performs the daily tasks without need of greater things, without want of greater things. The farmer who works in contentment across his land, feeds animals, watches the seasons manifest and take from the earth, who watches the waters travel across her magnificiently diverse realms, from mountain to ocean to glacier cascade.

The question only remains: does American life a conspire against a higher consciousness? Does it hold hostage the higher spiritual experience of this Life?

Is It possible to be a pure artist, that is a seeker of Light and a sharer of Life’s Light, is it possible to be truly in touch with Divine works? Does the erosion of Will to occupations, the constant bombardment of fashionable wants and fake Newness of material excess, the sexual cravings of advertisting, the wearied barrage of sadness and vacuous need that is our daily experience at the covers of magazines, at the loss of deeper drives and explorations, at the Higher Hopes of Discovery, does America want its artistic aspirations?  

Do we cease seeking the truer things because we must have rents, foods, fuel, travel, medical care, child support?  Enlightenment in Mecca, in shalas, in Himalayan caves, in ganges drapes of water. Know that you contain enlightenment that you are always in its invironment/environment.

To recognize that all spaces are sacred, that all lands contain God and the potential for Higher Light, is a level of enlightenment.

ii.

What if I said that, in pursuing our higher callings, all things of the material world would be resolved and satisfied? What if I said that, in pursuing God, God satiates all those Beings that would draw from our Life source? The society is jealous, is envious, for many of us have disdained our own truer aspirations for a new car, a body that holds well a fine cut suit or dress, the number of likes of a picture on Instagram, a short moment of honoring for an earthly accomplishment?

Everything in the worldly realm has been moved into the theater of Lust and vice. To run, we now acquire numerous tools and gear, the right shoes with the right science that alters our bodies into a different functioning.

We can learn, but we can also lose.

Can we participate in the American world and still find a true englightments? Or must we break away into a hermitage of sorts, a removal of Self from the lusts of a capitalist society? Can we balance the needs of a capitalist society with the needs of a Spiritual pursuit?

I was born enlightened and through the hard-mountain path of growth, from the arms of an angry lost mother into the arms of the angry lost world, the small mind of the child still wet with the ocean of consciousness, the small infinite mind of the child, the connectivity and receptivity of the mind of the child. The infinite child. To search, to discover and to integrate.

We do not search for God above and beyond us, but we search for the God light within and around us. The God is Us. We search for the infinite synapse of our own cosmic experience to connect to the sphere that elevates us. To push our clay pots of water into the magnificient river of Being and into her refined states.

As we dirty the Earth and her Oceans, so do we dirty ourselves and our Minds. Our mind is filled with the needs of Oil and profit and we lost essential knowledge and the ability of Prophecy. We are born to share God and instead we take from each other that we might gain the lesser valuable. The valueless.

How to manifest God. Have I lost too much of the wisdom and knowledge, the constant verve of my Youth? Have I lost that innate sense of Divinity? How do I manifest it?

Practice sexual restraint. Be beautiful, be sensual, be sated, be horny, be erotic and charged, be natural and contain one’s sexuality. But know the meaning of it. Know the purpose of it. Understand the results of it. And know that many of us are the Children of God, not of our Earthly parents.

Practice the restraint of material want. The glossy magazine world of America is a madness of Want. We must remove ourselves from the moshpit of Lust. The mind of the consumer is a tiny microcosm that chokes on its own suffering the whims of media heads. Let collapse the need to appear well fashioned, well-heeled. 

Disregard the fears of worldly need. Do not worry about foods, shelters, basic safety and needs. If we perform the work of higher things, basic needs will be provided. This is the most challenging of manifestations of faith, that we not follow the fears of our fathers and mothers.

Drugs and alcohol. To be curious of these experiences is natural. To move our bodies and minds through new shapes and perspectives is beautiful and powerful. To become addicted is a spiritual opportunity if one finds the path of awareness in detoxing and suffering. One must eventually move away from it however, and the experiential wisdom is the most beautiful of gifts from such lives.

Know that the cultural world, the societal world, in its construction and in its deepest dynamics, would have you fail your pursuits of God. The envy and greed of figure heads is too great to idly watch other’s find enlightenment for free. Even the path of enlightenment has been hijacked and exploited for glories and profits. Ignore the false claims of the material spiritualism that dominates the New Age. Move away from the false prophets, the fake Gurus, the ersatz teachers who speak from the lower mind about the Higher Being. They will atrophy and rediscover God upon such failure. It is also a valid path.

Do not judge your or anyone’s path to enlightenment. We will all wrestle our Jacobian angels and we will resist and we will admit. The push-pull of spiritual versus worldly will haunt our entire existence perhaps. But to continually investigate, to continually recognize our our small and powerful belonging to realms beyond the immediately identifiable, to remove one’s self from places that are not healthy or even real, to constantly reclaim the placeof the Divine within and around us, to preserve that place for the shred of God we are and we represent. What part of the ocean are you? Which fish do you feed? Which bird does your fish feed? Which plant is made new by the bird your fish will feed? Which bee will carry the song of your most significant role? Which lick of flame are you across which bark of which tree in which forest?

How to move one’s self back into the realm of God. But, to know we never leave the realm of God for we contain it, we are always in that ocean, like a runner sweating into a rainstorm, we are always a part of the cycle of release and absorption . to be an empty vessel of such life. To move into such life. To be profoundly a part of said life.

Do no tbe surprised by the smallness of people, the feeble mind of people. Many have no idea of the limitlessness of life. Neither should we judge that, or alter that. The path will bring them to higher pursuits in due time. The machine will spit them out across the feet of pilgrims. We will find and preserve the light and share it freely, without malice, without want, without thought of gain and profit and glory. That is the role of the light seeker. To truly hold light, to not tint it into our own ego. But to thrust that light into the spaces where it has been lost, where it is forgotten (even as it pours itself across eyes, mouths, bodies, hands)

Liberate the ego. Be proud, be joyful, be whole. But do not confuse with work of the higher calling with the sense that you are a higher Spirit. On the spirit, all things are equal, all things respond to each other with equanimity. It is a burden and a gift. Great tragedy is equal to small tragedy when one moves into the mind of the Spirit. And then there Is no tragedy, but only a happening. A part of the thing that moves across another thing like a chord of music.

To allow for the passage of light and rivers of awareness thorugh the body without jealousy and without fear, without question or hope of gain. To find oneself in the open fields of discovery. To allow for the chemical needs to sweat from the body, to diminish from the mind, to not press into unnecessary harms of endurance. There will be enough to endure without forcing our own suffering. That said, to practice endurance in things that are hard, that challenge us for long periods of time, be it running marathons, be it yoga, be it gardening, be it working 10 hours, allow for any suffering one feels to be preparations for higher levels of suffering we may yet endure. Learn to be still and quiet in the most vicious of places, learn to not be distracted by a constant shouting of the carnies of the cultural body, the flesh of the lustful senses.

To find the overwhelming Being in one’s own body, in the Light of Mind, in the service of this fleshed existence.

iii.

(This essay has little to do with asana and absolutely nothing to do with monthly subscriptions or Jade mats or yogitoes or SUPY or any of the trends associated with Yoga.  I do not profess an advanced understanding of Yoga. However, I believe we contain Yoga, we contain Buddha, we contain the love of Jesus and various Teachers. We are perfect beings wrapped up in imperfect confluences of Being. Numerous rampant devils work among and against us.)

iv.

Love is the opportunity to admit someone else into your energies, to wrap them, to contain them, and for them to contain you.

We explore this life, each other, and we pursue expansions of Being through discovery and inspiration. It is a natural process of yearning, cultivating, harvesting, and of burning.

However there are times when our explorations lead to a sclerosis, to the forming of prejudices, to our own self-isolation. Those seasons we must own, we must wholly contain, but we must also deconstruct with creativity, with passion, with an enduring movement. We roam these fields with a grateful, playful sense of simultaneous detachment and inclusion. We look for a still center, resisting yet observing our tendencies of ever-forming prejudice and preference.

We seek to serve as a nexus, an axis, to hear and amplify the purer rhythms among the chaos of identity and desire. We see primal patterns and we recognize something familiar.

To contain and express the Ephemeral in the Contemporary.

We seek to let form the shapes of the shores of Consciousness and know they will be changed in ways that are subtle, ways that are violent, ways that are artistic and metaphysical. We are that transient formlessness yet we hallucinate things as permanent, as shape.

Identity is the poem of how we feel to the music of what we desire in a language of the bodily Now.

Spirituality is the magnificent simple miracle, the prayer, in each breath.

A kiss is the connection, the exchange of that breath.  A kiss can have everything or nothing to do with the mouth and the body. A kiss can touch or not touch.  The body can have everything to do with the spirit, or nothing to do with the spirit. I am not implying erotic intimacy, but a moment between people. Maybe I am speaking towards the erotic, but I also simultaneously move away from it. Culture frequently confuses sexuality with intimacy and this is why we must draw the body from a deeper space.

In a question of bodies, Yoga draws from the innermost.  A posture becomes a suggestion of that deeper undercurrent, the push-pull of bone and muscle against Mind and breath.  So should an artist’s tool perhaps.

Posture is not bound to sanskrit definitions here. Everything becomes a posture when admitted as such.

The saturation of sexuality in our culture should not permeate the sense of the body in Yoga, Yogic philosophies. To become caught up in the shape of a body, to miss the deeper expression of body, is to lose the exchange of the body.  The obsession of the shape of body and the touch of flesh is the a symptom of the very superficiality that I want to rage against in my work and Life.

(While also including that superficiality ... Yoga is perhaps the whole body of contrapostures, balance, including contradictions.)

Meanwhile, to vigilantly maintain a sense of the Empty Vessel in this uncapturable Mind/Body of Self. To offer it back, to proffer it outwardly, freely and without reservation. And to practice always with the notion of Progress not Perfection.

v.

I slipped into the act of writing something very important and now I have no idea what to do with it, where to take it, how to even hold it, let alone manifest it. Few will read it and less will care and even I will forget I wrote it.