In lieu of the daily quote, Sunday March 8, 2009:
So no sign of anything from the KFA today, so I thought I'd put something up which relates to Saturday's quote and to Jackie's comment this morning.
It would be nice to see a few more contributions to the blog from people in the study groups. My suggestion would be to once every 2 weeks between meetings take a paragraph that interests you and write about it for a while.
Here is my thing:
Thought without the "me."
"Meditation is really the complete emptying of the mind. Then there is only the functioning of the body; there is only the functioning of the organism and nothing else; then thought functions without the identification of the me and the not-me." (p257)
I find this last part interesting. Is thought without the "me" intelligence and is inteliigence the true nature of the mind?
Maybe look at this in the context of finding the appropriate way to stretch into a yoga posture, or more generally how to find your way through some situation or address a problem. When there is just intelligence, where the me has been removed through self-observation, thought is used simply to find the appropriate way for the body to move. There is no reference to the status of that movement, for example good or bad, better or worse, and so no comparison to measure it by. The movement of the body then is what is, which is immeasurable.
Robert
The comments above brought back a key learning from the Rod Stryker workshop, where someone asked the question "How do you know if you are doing the right yoga practice? He replied that in his experience the measure of success in yoga is how well you can tolerate change in your life. He then lead us through a practice where we meditated on the statement "My mind is empty, my body like the vast expansive sky". It was the first time I actually could feel all parts of the posture coming together. The key, as you mentioned above was that the "me" was removed through the action of applying the statement to each posture.
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