Daily Quote, Sunday March 1, 2009
Good morning everyone,
Hold onto your hats today for some freezing rain!
Today's quote takes a look at concentration.
Here are my reflections and the quote is right underneath.
The quote for Krishnamurti asks: Do you ever notice that when you concentrate you exclude? I want to try to relate this to some of the other things we've looked at, some of the other ways into the same question that we've explored in our study groups. Do you see that you create an image to maintain that concentration rather than observe what is? We could say that the effort of concentrating is remembering, holding an image or idea there in the mind, so it always excludes what is. The facts of the matter, actuality, what is left when we see without images, are what are excluded. So is order, space, energy, freedom, affection and love, and the possibility of relationship that is not based on an idea and therefore dependency.
To put this differently again, in concentration the part becomes the whole. Let's take an example. Have you ever heard a yoga teacher tell you to concentrate on this or that part of your body, do you do it yourself automatically as a student, or as a teacher do you see yourself telling your students to concentrate? Do you exclude the fact that your whole body is a total movement in every posture, do you lose a feeling of affection and move your attention away from how your muscles and joints feel? What does this identification, the whole identification process, do for you psychologically. Can you go into yourself and observe identification and concentration as a reaction and to what? Is it possible for you to be sensitive to all of this, both the outward and the inward? Can you observe and let your sense of your reaction widen and deepen? Can you observe what is and also the whole image creating, concentrating process together? Can you go through it all from the first observation of your reaction to the origin of your fear, and all identification? Can you do it then and there? This would be awareness and meditation.
Look forward to reading your reflections if you have a chance to make a post. :-)
I also mentioned some thoughts about yoga in my comments on yesterday's quote if any of you missed it and might like to take a look.
Robert
Awareness takes place when one observes.
You know, concentration is effort: focusing upon a particular page, an idea, image, symbol, and so on and so on. Concentration is a process of exclusion. You tell a student, 'Don't look out of the window; pay attention to the book.' He wants to look out, but he forces himself to look, look at the page; so there is a conflict. This constant effort to concentrate is a process of exclusion, which has nothing to do with awareness. Awareness takes place when one observes - you can do it; everybody can do it - observes not only what is the outer, the tree, what people say, what one thinks, and so on, outwardly, but also inwardly to be aware without choice, just to observe without choosing. For when you choose, when choice takes place, only then is there confusion, not when there is clarity.
Collected Works, Vol. XVII - 82
I think I am beginning to understand this in the context of my yoga practice. I am becoming aware that if I concentrate on the postures as per my mental image I feel am doing this wonderful practice where I imagine I must look just like Shiva Rae :-), and the result is that I am sore for the next few days. Yesterday, by practicing without images and through inquiry I had one heck of a messy looking practice, which felt extremely difficult at the time, yet I don't feel sore today. I had similar experience in teaching a new yoga student this morning who dislikes down dog. It took two weeks of inquiry and awareness until the insight appeared. She told me she was told to concentrating on getting her heels to the ground.
ReplyDeleteI think yoga is a perfect way to 'practise' JK's teachings because if you do the asanas without concentrating on what you think they should look like or what you think your instructor expects of you, then you can open your mind to the wholeness of the practise and let your reactions widen and deepen as Robert mentions. It makes the observing become both outward and inward at the same time.
ReplyDeleteWe were just talking in the study group this evening a little more about the relationship between Krishnamurti and Yoga. I mentioned the other day on the blog about yoga being skill in action. In yoga philosophy this idea of yoga is generally associated with Bodhi Yoga, which is also sometimes called the yoga of discernment. So discernment is like having good judgment. We could say that it is the ability to see what action is needed in any given situation.
ReplyDeleteIn the language of Krishnamurti that we have been exploring, this would mean to act without images, without the past, a plan or a motive, without prejudice or opinion. It would mean to use intelligence rather than knowledge, which is always the past projected into the present. To be intelligent, for Krishnamurti, is to have sensitivity to everything and to see what is appropriate in any moment. It's important to see that you are not working with any knowledge here. Intelligence is like Krishnamurti's idea of responsibility, which as he has put it is simply the ability to respond adequately; where an adequate response to any situation or person can never be to respond from an image, a plan, or any reference point.
In contrast, in a text like Bhagavad Gita, responsibility is put forward as the need to follow your dharma. To respond intelligently to any situation, to discover the right course of action, to be skillful in action, is to follow your dharma. Dharma is your place in the universe, your duty. It is fixed and can never be changed. Life's journey is about discovering what you are born to be. It's linked to karma, so that by following your dharma you avoid building karma and can remove some or all of your accumulated karma.
The difference between the two positions, Krishnamurti's and that offered in the Bhagavad Gita, is that for Krishnamurti intelligence cannot be directed along any single path. In fact, dharma is an escape from what is. It is an idea, an image, something that someone invented a long time ago. The idea of a true self, which is another way of talking about dharma, is an attempt to avoid pain, sorrow and hurt. However, just as truth is a pathless land so intelligence is a pathless response.
The only truly adequate response you can have is to see the right course to follow on a moment by moment basis. You have to be totally attentive and totally aware of yourself all the time. You have to go into every hurtful word and observe your reaction to it, let the observation widen and deepen, keep asking intelligent questions, until you have moved all the way through your reaction to its very beginning.
Ted and I was talking after everyone had left the study group this evening and one of the things I mentioned was that you can understand how to practice every yoga posture just by understanding how to practice one posture, if you can truly understand it that is. This means if you can look at it without images, without mistaking a part - like the heels on the floor in downward facing dog for example - for the whole.
The idea in each posture is to see the part that is representing the whole, the place from which you see that you can't see, and then let that awareness widen and deepen, which it will if you just keep observing it. Don't concentrate or your mind will narrow and start excluding again; just observe. Let your mind stay pliable and you'll see whatever is there to see.
Once you can do this in one posture you can look at them all intelligently. You just have to observe your fragment, the part that you, out of anxiety and fear, take to be the whole, and let your awareness expand. Let it expand until you go all the way through the fear that underlies the fragmentation of the posture, so that the whole posture is visible. Then the relationship between all the different parts of your body in the posture will reveal themselves. The seeing is the understanding is the doing. As Krishnamurti says, clarity of perception is action.
The point is that practicing the postures is not about knowledge. It's not about knowing the postures, how to do downward dog, upward dog, triangle, upward facing bow, shoulderstand, etc. as if they are different from each other. Knowledge is from the past. Seen on its own each posture is the response of memory to thought, and by creating walls in your mind thought fragments your experience. This is why many yoga students believe that each posture requires its own "how to do it" list. And so they want yoga classes that explain how to practice each posture.
However, once you can observe without images, your intelligence can discern the intelligence that is present within every posture, the reason and logic underlying the geometry of each shape, which is also the direction in which it requires you to move so that the action of your body in the posture is an adequate response to that shape.
So although I'm saying that you can learn how to practice every posture if you can truly understand how to practice one posture, it's not the case at all that there is a single plan or a method for practicing every posture. There are no universal principles, no foundation to work from. It's just a case of intelligence recognising itself.
Thanks, Robert. Those are great observations and help put Krishnamurti's words into perspective.
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