Showing posts with label yoga and beyond. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yoga and beyond. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Yoga and Horror

I just spent the weekend at MO*CON, a horror/fantasy writers convention. Why was I there? Hopefully to further my writing skills. While there I just happened to have been chosen to be part of a panel that discussed the use of religion, translates to me as spirituality, in the horror/fantasy genre. My response to the question, "What's your religion?" was, "a Yogi (if only aspiring - between you and me), and a monist." The panel moderator found that intriguing, and I promptly found myself seated on a panel with the likes of a magician, a humanists, a former Presbytarian minister now Jewish authoress, and a self-proclaimed atheists amongst others. A part of our discussion revolved around the idea of faith. Faith, per the atheist, is non-existent, there is only calculated risks. When I suggested that calculated risks is virtually the same as faith, there was a disagreement. All in fun, I was reminded of a conversation that I had with my teacher long ago. I had a strange request then, as did others in my group.

"I want to see god."

He said, "Who told you that? You read that in a book. No one really wants that." I balked, but he made sense, after some explanation.

What you really want," he continued, "is to be free from suffering."

I hadn't really thought about these things as deeply as the sages had in days gone by. The three sources of suffering were 1)what I caused myself, 2) caused by beings around me, 3) caused by unseen forces, not gods or demons per se, but maybe the planets and such. In any case, I never asked about seeing god again because I saw that this just wasn't that practical. My friends on the religion and horror panel thought that was a fair assessment of things. The discussion continued on for some time along other lines, but all in all MO*CON, the conference, was interesting experience for a yogi who writes.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Instinct, Intellect, Intuition

A few thoughts on the place of the instinct, intellect and intuition in yoga. If we stay with the definitions given in the Perennial Psychology of the Bhagavad Gita we find something interesting. Instinct is that gut feeling that we have about something. Intellect is our reasoning ability, our ability to decide on something. That's my final decision, like in who wants to be a millionaire. Intuition is a spiritual thing and what we aspire to develop even though we may not be able to acknowledge it. The goal of human life is happiness and true happiness is living from our intuition, and meditation is a way to develop it.