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The weather’s different (about 40 degrees cooler and way wetter); the roads are different (no speed bumps on the highway!); the food is different (a WHOLE cup of coffee, BLACK, in a mug, instead of a few drops, milk and sugar, in a glass), but the practice (although solo) is the same.

Surprisingly, it isn’t the “magic feather” of the AYRI shala or even of mother India herself that makes success in asana possible. Rather, here you are, 8000 miles, and a lost day of travel away, but once on the mat, at least at day one, you can still find the poses you discovered or rediscovered while away.

While I was in Mysore, we marveled, my Stateside correspondents and I, that even though nighttime was flipped with daylight, it was still the case that when the moon was visible, it was the same moon both places: a remarkably mundane observation, but somehow comforting.

And this is like that: the Ashtanga vinyasa yoga practice doesn’t require you (although perhaps it helps) to be in a magical room halfway around the world; you can move through the exact same poses and reap the very same benefits of it just 10 steps away from your very own bed in your very own hometown: a remarkably mundane observation, but somehow comforting.

That said, you can’t help but long for Mysore already.

Ten aspects of being there that will particularly be missed:

1) Yoga: the magic of the shala, the commitment of your fellow practitioners, the heat in the room
2) Classes: in Sanskrit, Chanting, Indian Philosophy, both from Laksmeesh at the shala and from Professors Jayashree and Narasimham at the Anatha Research Foundation
3) Flute Lessons: from Mr. Upadhyaya and from Hindustani flute God, Ravishankar Mishra
4) Cycling: on my Neelam bike, all round Mysore, anyplace you’d go on a scooter, you can get by human-powered two wheeler
5) Ashadayaka Seva Trust Orphanage: three times a week, the pleasure of playing with the kids from the orphanage; among other things, they taught me how to play cricket!
6) Food: less than a buck for your daily thali lunch, pretty much all you need to eat for the day
7) Ashrams: Sri Ganapati Sachchidananda Ashrama and Ramakrishna Ashram—oases of wisdom and calm amidst the craziness of city life in India
8) Drinks: Coffee, Chai, and Coconuts
9) People: the spirit and friendliness of the locals I got to know a little in Mysore, from the trickster boys working at the coffee stand to the friendly and welcoming professors at Mysore University
10) Shopping: I don’t go all that crazy, but I did come home with four new custom-made shirts, and a bag full of bike parts, all for well under fifty bucks.

Asmita

Asmita or “I-am-ness,” I learned today, is the error of mistaking the self that we experience ourselves as being for the real Self.

Apparently, it’s what all of us (well, me anyway) do all day long all the time: suppose that the person we think we are is who we actually are.

So in other words, I’m not actually a middle-aged, married, community college teacher on his last day of sabbatical in India, saddened somewhat at the prospect of leaving, but looking forward with great delight to seeing his home and family again; no, not at all.

Rather, I am Atman, I am Brahman, I am the One Thing in the Universe that IS the Universe and Pure Consciousness at the same time.

I’m not this individual wave on the ocean with its own special curve and dip, spray flying of its top, seagulls wheeling overhead; I’m just the Ocean itself, or maybe, to put it another way, the idea of Ocean where the Ocean is Universal Mind conceiving of the Ocean, dreaming it and itself into existence and out again and in again endlessly.

Or something like that.

All this remains an open question for me, which means, as Dr. Narasimham put it in today’s yoga sutras and chanting class, that I’ll keep coming back to it again and again. It’s like when you have a piece of food in your teeth, he said, the tongue can’t stop poking at it. But when it’s gone, you forget about it completely—until the next trapped bit of rice or whatever, at which point the process starts all over again.

That seemed like an appropriate metaphor for my final day here; I’ve been saying that India has gotten under my skin (in a good way), but maybe the better way to put it is that it’s gotten stuck between my teeth. I’ve got a little piece of Mysore lodged in the distal marginal groove of my maxillary first biscupid (I'm pretty sure that technically, this description doesn't even make sense, but keep in mind that what I experience as my teeth aren't even teeth at all.)

The important this is that now, I just have to keep coming back until it works free.

Treasure Hunt

Reaping the benefits of Ashtanga yoga, (which our fearless leader, Sharath, in today’s conference touted as the only yoga that includes all the angas, and therefore represents the one sure way to purify the mind and body and ultimately attain jnana, that is, knowledge) “is not like making noodles.”

It takes time.

And patience—which apparently, many people don’t have; everyone wants to be a teacher without even being a student. The shala gets many calls, he said, from people asking how they can become teachers; the answer: do your practice.

Paradoxically, though, it’s not about the goal: “We don’t expecting anything, we should do our practice.”

But it’s also, said Sharath, in what was my favorite quote of the day, “a treasure hunt.” He likened the longtime experience of doing Ashtanga to a search for the enduring knowledge and benefits that follow from the practice.

And he pointed out that the person who has found them will, like the discoverer of hidden riches, refrain from shouting, “I’ve found it!” He will be calm and in fact, may not even be aware of his achievement.

The hunt, in any case, is predicated on asana; in spite of being but one of the eight limbs, asana is the foundation, said Sharath; it is how we purify our minds and nervous systems. “Asana, don’t think it is only physical; it is very big tool to purify mind and body.”

Thankfully, though, one only need do what what can, as long as it’s done with a thirst to know what is yoga: “It’s not necessary that everyone should jump back; the people who doesn’t have that can also do Ashtanga.”

Which isn’t to say there won’t be pain; "with each new asana, you get new pain," but “sometimes when you get pain that means it is working.” The good news, however, is that “If you have pain from asanas, asanas will help you get rid of it.”

Sharath said that he has seen the practice heal many people’s physical ailments, from the arthritis of his friend’s aged parents to the hunched back of older student who has subsequently passed away, an inevitability we all face: “Once we take birth, we have to die, otherwise, we shouldn’t take birth.”

New challenges keep emerging, though yoga's effectiveness in meeting them has not changed. “Before television,” said Sharath, which he remembers coming to Mysore when he was fourteen, “people were very happy.”

Timing

My timing was perfect: I showed up outside the Mysore Palace Gates just in time for the last of the 27 sun salutations led by children from the Odanadi Seva Trust.

In other circumstances, I might have played hooky from the yoga shala and attended the entire Yoga Stops Traffick event, but since today was my last opportunity (this trip!) to take part in one of Saraswathi’s led classes, I decided to do the 7:00 practice and then hightail it downtown in hopes of catching the last few surya namaskaras and taking a few photos.

And although I’d only just gotten my mat placed when the 27th downward dog was being counted out, I got to feel a little taste of the great love motivating the event; it was beautiful to see so many folks out on a Saturday morning in the already blazing sun in support of such a worthy cause.

One’s yoga practice here in Mysore is very inward-looking. It’s a remarkable privilege to be able to take time away from everyday life and do something so focused on one’s own personal, emotional, and/or spiritual development. So, it’s especially good to do something that supports a cause beyond the boundaries of oneself.

That the cause, in this case, is one that’s so important and meaningful makes it even better.

And that one can offer that support, (in a small way, anyway), with just a single sun salutation, well, that for me, totally puts a cherry on top.

Detached Attachment

“Nonsense can be spoken about in a sensible way,” said Dr. Narasimhan, and then he proceeded to do the converse of that, speaking about something that made plenty of sense in a manner that was somewhat nonsensical, or at least paradoxical.

I had wondered aloud about the concept of detachment or dispassion in the yoga sutras; Patanjali writes that the yogi should cultivate non-attachment; Sutra 1.15 is translated by Swami Prabhavananda as “Non-attachment is self-mastery; it is freedom from what is seen or heard.”

But I was puzzled because it seems to me that there are many things to which we ought to be passionately attached: the welfare of our families, for instance, or fighting against injustice, or even, for that matter, our own yoga practices.

But Dr. N. explained that Patanjali isn’t saying we ought to not care about things; “Detachment is not to be like a stone," is how the good professor put it.

We should be passionate, it’s just that “passion should be a detached passion so (we) can see the whole action in the field.”

The problem, apparently, is that a single-minded passion for an idea, a person, a cause, the next yoga pose in the series, you name it, “loses your ability to be aware of the nuances.” “Single-mindedness,” said Dr. N., “is not evolutionary.” It doesn’t allow the object of our passion to grow or change, or for our reactions to develop as well.

What we want, in other words, is a “detached attachment” so we can continue to evolve along with the situations in which we find ourselves. I can be as committed to my family, my life projects, social justice, or to dropping back and standing up on my own from urdhva dhanurasana as I want to be just so long as I don’t lose myself (or the object of my passion) in the process.

“Attachment with understanding is detachment,” concluded Dr. N.

With that in mind, then, I think I can safely say that now I’m a little more detached from the concept of attachment than I was before.

Non Non-Contradiction

“There are no false statements in Indian philosophy.”

With that quote in today’s yoga sutras and chanting class, Dr. Narasimhan cleared up something that’s been puzzling me: you’ve got all these various schools and perspectives in the Indian spiritual and philosophical tradition and commentators like Swami Prabhavananda seem to be cool with all of them, even though they stand on different sides of long-standing debates in philosophy, like between idealism and materialism, or dualism and monism, or even theism and atheism.

But, if they’re all true, then I guess there’s really no problem, after all.

Dr. N. explained from the Indian perspective, truth is relative, or at least contextual. The madman is only mad from the perspective of the sane person; as he goes on about space aliens abducting him or whatever, he’s speaking what he takes to be true; and while I would want to say that just because he thinks it’s true doesn’t mean it is, the Indian philosopher is comfortable with accepting multiple versions of the truth, depending on the context.

I suppose that this is in part because our everyday statements of what we take to be true, say, for instance, “I have two arms and two legs” are, metaphysically speaking, false. After all, if the world of our experience is essentially illusion and all that really exists is pure undifferentiated consciousness, then all of my utterances about things are actually mistaken. But if I’m okay with considering them true on pragmatic grounds, then why not allow other statements, even if they contradict with mine, to be true, as well?

But does this mean that anything, anything goes? Apparently not; there is still absolute truth, but, as Dr. N put it, “Absolute truth cannot be expressed absolutely in the relative world.”

Consequently, I guess, we’re stuck with making relative statements which means, apparently, that the so-called “law of non-contradiction” which we take for granted in Western philosophy can be broken at will.

Makes perfect sense. And none at all.

But now, I understand. And don’t.

Finding God

In the Philosophy of Religion class I teach a couple times a year, I usually assign, as a final project, for students to “Go Find God.” Their challenge is to articulate a clear conception of what they mean by a Supreme Being and then undertake some activity to connect with that Being, whatever it may be.

Of course, there’s no requirement that they are successful in their search; what I expect them to do is to take the assignment seriously, do some creative and analytical thinking and writing, and to be able to clearly articulate to their classmates and me what they did and what they learned from the effort.

In years past, students have engaged in any number of different activities, from taking nature walks in the woods, to visiting houses of worship different than their own, to ingesting ecstasy in Las Vegas (this before I included a caveat on the assignment rubric that they couldn’t do anything illegal), to attending a rave (without taking drugs, the student assured me, in keeping with my revised assignment guidelines.)

Each year, in hopes of modeling what I’m looking for, I try to do the assignment myself, and I’ve done a bunch of different things, too, including taking a long bike ride, to attending Sunday service at an evangelical church, to performing 108 sun salutations.

In spite of my own reasonably serious efforts, though, I’ve never succeeded in finding God. I’ve generally had a meaningful experience, but it’s never gone beyond the material world; I’ve never inferred something behind or beyond the Universe as we know it.

This year, as I prepared to come to India, I told my students that my trip here would be my this year’s “Go Find God” project. And although more than a few chuckled, I meant it sincerely.

So far, in spite of serious yoga practice, regular (albeit somewhat disjoined) study of Indian philosophy, and a general immersion in this world where God is everywhere, I haven’t really succeeded in locating the divine.

However.

In today’s Yoga Sutra Chanting and Philosophy of Yoga class at the Anatha Research Foundation, Professor Narasimhan made a point—in response to a student’s question about whether, essentially, one can be a serious student of yoga without buying the underlying Hindu religious dogma—that may be moving me in the direction of something akin to success.

First, he explained that yoga is better understood as psychology than religion. It’s a technology, if you will, that, if followed completely—all 8 limbs—enables anyone who does so to, in time, find God.

God, however, is not to be understood as an external objective, nor as an externally objective Being. Rather, (and here I may be misrepresenting what he actually said, but this is how I understood it), God is the state of being you achieve when you employ the yoga “technology” successfully. To achieve Samadhi, in other words, is to find God.

Nevertheless, God remains indefinable by definition, distinctly beyond distinctions, and unknowable by any of our standard knowledge-acquisition methodologies.

Less esoterically, “God,” said Dr. N., “is a state of equanimity or contentment”; “the innermost sustaining force in your life;” he also suggested that whenever you achieve true satisfaction in your life, you have touched God.

So what does this suggest for finding God?

Well, if I’m satisfied that I haven’t, then have I?