Riffin' On the Universal Path

“When the yogi, by practice of yoga, disciplines his mental activities and becomes situated in transcendence- devoid of all material desires, he is said to be well established in yoga.” 6.18 Bhagavad Gita Dhyana-yoga

It sounds simple on paper…but it’s hard to integrate fully into one’s ground of being… to live fully, lucid and persistently, from the perspective that everything is a vehicle of the Singularity/Source. When one does, they’ve become “situated in transcendence” in the sense that the transcendent is their singular desire/aim… all they seek is simply…love..or perhaps God, maybe a different value such as truth or justice…

Notice, these values are transcendent values…it’s not just any ol’ take on love or justice…it’s a take on love/justice which sees “love” or “justice” being treated as if it’s the all-powerful, Monotheistic God… we go into this as if the thing/value is Omnipotent…

It’s a romantic and noble notion, but often times it plays out hopelessly naïve, to think that you can live simply, blissfully, merely by setting a single intent to pursue something uniformly positive…by having a positive life vision. Honestly, it is enough, it needs to be said, even if one is challenged staunchly in the pursuit of getting it right (and they are challenged all the same, whether they frame it as a pursuit of God or a pursuit of a secular value such as love or justice, or perhaps the obtaining of “balance”…all modes of seeking eventually get it right). Nonetheless, if one were wanting to be cunning, to cut through the expected hindrances and expedite the path towards effectively living steeped in love…to expedite the path towards the moment in which their very life truly has been aligned effectively with positive values in such a thorough fashion that their very future/quality of life is secured… the transcendental frameworks do work well/perfectly. They can help one pivot from an intent to singularly pursue positivity/love with all that they do, to masterfully manifesting love in the situations in their lives across days.

It’s a transcendental path in that all paths become it. No matter what you thought you were after in life, eventually you will end up here working this beat.

When one realizes that that which nurtures is not the forms but the very thing that first shaped the forms of the world, and then also breathed the transcendental spirit into them in such a way that moral imperatives become an aspect of reality (as in, there becomes things we ought to do and these steer us towards manifestations of the spirit which are hidden within forms in the very environments which we inhabit in our lives)…they are said to be “devoid of all material desires”.

This is because they know that what they are after is merely the Infinitude which gave rise to the world itself. What they desire are specific things yes, but they desire these things because they are expressions of some deeper curriculum spiritual folks call “wisdom”…and this wisdom is but a form of communion with the Spirit, ultimately, and we are super duper addicted to it because it’s “life” incarnate…it is healthy…it is the stuff that bodies were intelligibly designed to chase like carrots upon the stick so that our stupid, near monkey selves would be resilient/not die off as a people.

Now, let’s rewrite this (today’s passage) for a Universal culture…a non-Yogic culture. It could be expressed as… “When the lifer (as in the person living a life until said life is over), by practice of living, disciplines his mental activities and becomes situated in transcendence- devoid of all material desires, he is said to be well-established in life.” 6.18 Bhagavadcitta Doug-yoga

This is what life does. It’s not just doing it to the priests or the Yogis. So ultimately, we have only so many monastics…I would wager we have maybe as high as 7.9 Billion people to still account for… so the sorts of solutions or implementations of the Dharma that really excite me are those which are squarely concerned with those folks and how to best serve their needs/life goals/etc…

Tangents aside, to be construed from this today is that life is a type of yoga. Yoga is often defined academically as a discipline meant to stop the spontaneous flow of the mind-state. From infinitude and unwitting spontaneity we create a mind system which achieves perfect harmony with the gift that is the body…and once time’s passing gets factored in, we essentially have an expanding matrix, superimposed over the pre-existing reality, of utter Divinity…of perfect and vibrant communion with the Source, often times from which flows life-force/well-being itself. As in, to live is to learn…and to learn is to somehow grow richer/more beautiful, which increases one’s capacity to radiate beauty outwards, as if a contagion, as well as often times sees them put into social roles which capitalize upon their increased knowledge/capacity to teach.

My long-winded doublings aside, life is a type of yoga which takes a potentially infinite blob, and fashions it comprehensively into something which resonates with the “heart of life”…the personality of God… the “Christ”… it makes us into good people. We know this to be true.

And this, in and of itself, is meaningful to experience, so so evidently meaningful to experience. They refer to this process of going through it as a number of things…maturity…self-actualization… doing the dance is what grounds us as individuals, and gives us a foundation upon which we can manifest bliss day in and day out in our lives. We’re already all somehow on this path, or have known it in our past…

It is the transcendent. All acts of seeking eventually lead to it… all paths, noble or wicked, eventually lead to it…

The reason I write so often with virtually no audience is because this stuff is inexplicable in its capacity for positive social agency… it’s causations are beyond linear time, and it can seem to awaken entire realities spontaneously…rewire certain mental modules nearly instantly… essentially hijack the processes of being for virtually any types of creatures and have a positive, visceral impact upon their very physicality in near live-time…it’s the force…errr as much as it exists in real life.

Think of a powerful orator. They can change lives with a few sentences strung together in the right sequence at times…shape huge parts of the human stories which play out in our midst by merely speaking… such, I’d wager, is the capacity of the force in real life…the arts have been pimping it out for centuries…

But I’m being dubious. An orator needs an audience. Truly, it was a false trail. Sincerely, I’ve always imagined that most of the perceived efficacy regarding meaningful social impact I’ve been having with my little read pieces lies in the territory of pure ‘collective soul’ sorcery… I’m obviously appeasing the great spirit which is in all things, shaping the future affairs of man with its various B.F. Skinner conditioning circuits…and using some sort of sexy backdoor tactics I’m definitely scoring some sort of vague jackpot in the name of Mankind in general…

I’ve seen the synchronicity mannnn. This is evident.