BYC Newsletter #37

Dear students of yoga and wisdom's way

Writing this newsletter has become an impulse kind of thing; I’m going along and suddenly there is an impulse to write to all of you who have expressed in interest in yoga. We have been having this dialogue for some months now, and since no one has asked to be taken off the mailing list, I assume that there hopefully is an I-Thou relationship here.

Do any of you recall Martin Buber, the famous Jewish philosopher that coined the phrases I-Thou and I-It as a way of distinguishing the two state of consciousness that humans manifest. To be brief, our modern culture, which grew out of the Enlightenment and bloomed into scientific materialism and industrialization, is an I-It relationship with the external world.

We are an I and the external world, including the contents of our mind, is an It. We live in a subject vs. object worldview and we believe because of that worldview that the world of things and processes experienced through our senses is the one and only true reality.

But this is a flat world without meaning or depth, a dead world where truth is relative and our subjective consciousness is sent to the back seat of the bus. This is a segregated world where nothing exists if it can’t be measured and named; our interior I-consciousness can have its opinions, but even they are turned into an It. Everything is the flatland becomes an It. We view our world like astronauts in a space suit, connected to the body and nature but separate from it, aliens in our own world. This existential split creates a deep hunger and spiritual longing for connection, for the sacred, and the I-Thou relationship where Oneness integrates the many and where nothing is excluded because all the parts and pieces are necessary parts of the totality. When nothing is excluded, our lives become full of meaning and each moment is enough.

But our modern culture in its rush to name and conquer nature through the rational mind has erased all the paths to the interior of our being. Everywhere in the world of It, the maps are all flat, even in religion, where you would think the maps could be found. There is only one true map to this lost interior where the creative spring of our joyous life can be found, and yoga is just one of them.All the wisdom teachings— from Buddha, to Jesus, Plotinus, and Vedanta, and all the mystics and sages throughout history—have been pointing to the way out of the flatland. The maps just appear in whatever cultural context the wisdom occurs. Every enlightened being has to use the language of his time in order to communicate, and each language brings its own unique strengths.The one constant in all the teachings is meditation. .

We see everything in our modern world as an It; what can It do for me; what harm will It bring; why should I do It? But the wisdom of the I-Thou is a seeing which comes from the surrendering of the I-It relationship as the dominant world view. Wisdom is learning to live in both relationships at the same time. Awakening comes to each of us in small and large ways when we suddenly have the insight that the world is not an It but a Thou. We call these “spiritual experiences,” and they profoundly affect our lives—just one experience can turn us upside down.

But what happens in our It-world is that we translate these moments of light into the limited language of Its: we make the experience external to us and cram it into some safe preconditioned category that is acceptable (if we can find one), or we think we’ve had a “sinful” experience and repress it. By not understanding our interior experience in a context of the depth wisdom teachings, we retard our own spiritual evolution, if not stopping it in its tracks.

So I guess the point of this newsletter, now that I am at the end, is that while I practice under a sign that says yoga, what I’m living and sharing is all the wisdom teachings that have helped transform my life from a flat shallow existence to the rich depth of my being where any moment can reveal itself as the totality of my existence.

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
6/5/07
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