In the Kabbalah, there is a realm of consciousness called Yetzerah. It is a rung up on the evolutionary scale because it is self-reflective. However, there is a point where self-reflection becomes staring at your navel, pretty self-indulgent. You spin your wheels, analyzing yourself and others along the way but still stuck in the same old places. This is what happens when we stay in the root of the yoga practice, diligently spinning the perineum, making a valiant effort but not getting much of a result. This is where it gets tricky because you don't do the practice for a result. That is like chasing after rainbows. However, you want to know that your yoga practice is changing you, totally.
There is another quality of consciousness in the Kabbalah called Briah. Briatic thinking is bigger and more encompassing. It is big mind with no boundaries. When you access the wisdom of the higher centers (chakras 6,7 and beyond), you reach Briah. It includes Yetzerah so it contains all your personal material but the personal is no longer isolated. Yetzerah is ego, Briah is Self. Briah connects you with all life, all archetypes, the conscious and the unconscious. Here, your story has a broader context. You understand trends, human nature and human frailty. You become the compassionate observer, not the victim.
This is where a good winter practice can get you. The wheel has turned. Another cycle of Spring, Summer and Fall's doing has been followed by a winter of being. Yes, your practice has kept you supple and strong but it's also given you a deeper sense of meaning and belonging. You may not really KNOW yet but you have an unmistakable SENSE of purpose stirring within you.
Coax it, sing to it, like you are charming a snake out of its dark basket. Don't just take in the world through your vision; it makes us too reactive. Listen deeply, like you are hearing the faint strains of a song, slowly making sense of it, trying to remember. Listening is the sense associated with the kidney, the organ of winter. We can hear in the womb. We can hear before the Self is obscured by layers of experience. Listen with your inner sense of hearing to the unstruck chord, to the song of your soul, calling you to swim in the vast sea of consciousness, calling you home, calling you OM.
To be continued...
Dear Elizabeth, I appreciate very much the teaching on differentiating between what is solely self-reflection and what is getting to a place in which the self is included but no longer isolated. This is key for me because I realize that I am often reactive to others and judge them sometimes harshly, not because I am a bad person, but because I am still in the perception of being separate from others (and often, I have to admit, of a perception of being better than or more mature than or harder working than others) and of having to fight for what I want and get people to do what I want rather than inviting people in with an open heart to further my vision. I suppose not all insights I receive within this process will be joyous - some insights will be of the painful nature of realizing where I fall into self-absorbed egotism, but I am committed to all the aspects of this process and have to honor where I am, and, as you said in class on Monday, honor the organic nature of this process. It seems overwhelming at times, but the words and concepts you speak of because you give tools that are engaged in the practice as well, give me hope, and I feel that on some level I do feel the potential of receiving the wisdoms that you relate. I feel sometimes after reading the teaching, almost embarrassed, that I am such a egomaniac mess, and am so far from living these wisdoms. But I do go back to what you have told me before: "Keep remembering who you are." - that I already know all of these things. It brings me deeper into the experience of what it is to remember if I try to listen inside myself, and I am happy that you put the act of listening into the kidneys, because that helps me keep the act of remembering and listening out of my head, or relegated as a brain activity. I have realized over the past few days that the breath is the least involved part of my practice, so I have been paying more mind to that, and using the sound of the breath as part of my listening process. I will work with that now and write more later. I hope that these comments are helpful to your own process. I wish that more people would comment. I sometimes feel inhibited to display in writing some of the elements of my process, but I do feel that putting it into writing apart from private journeling is an important part of my process. I pray that others will take the time and have the courage to share their processes and experiences, because it does build my courage to put my process into words and to divulge despite some of the unsurity of how what I might write might be received. I feel that getting past the worry of being perceived a certain way is an element of moving toward the big mind where all is one.
Posted by: Tim Driscoll | February 14, 2008 at 01:35 PM