The Inner Tradition of Yoga by Michael Stone

Author:Michael Stone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2018-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

Context and Release

The saṁskāras are predispositions or contexts that the mind and body supply in each new moment of experience. When we have an experience, say of a sunset, we try to allow the sunset to reach us, to make an impression on us. But we tend to do that only by supplying a context within which we can receive the experience. We label the phenomenon as “sunset,” compare it to other sunsets we’ve experienced, and frame it in language. These contexts are base-structures of understanding. They are preconceptions or prejudices. We select contexts by choice—they are not given, nor are they intrinsic to the experience itself. A direct experience of a sunset or the energetic flow of a posture is inherently empty of conceptualizing, empty of meaning. The scholar of myth Joseph Campbell once said that we are not trying to find the meaning in life but rather a deep experience of it. The comical thing is that when we let go of the constant drive to find meaning, things become more meaningful.

The process of experience, then, goes something like this. To begin with, a new experience enters us. It is without context. But because we know something about what the experience might be, based on preceding moments or past experience, we believe we have a small collection of contexts that might be appropriate for whatever is arising. When the new data meets us, we take it in only partially, as it comes through the filters of the sense media and the mind. The sense organs and the mind quickly decide on the context that fits it best. The experience then seems completed by the context we give to it, but this is actually only a partial experience, because it is already an interpreted moment. Patañjali calls this cycle saṁyoga, or the misapprehension of an experience in context with a fresh experience that has no context, because context is never built in to experience.

Having an experience—whether of a sunset, a yoga posture, or even another person—without creating a context seems at first impossible. How are we to vacate prior experiences in order to have a fresh one? This is the psychological conundrum that Patañjali points out in his description of āsana. The problem is that we base our sense of self on these past experiences and alter all new information through that previously determined sense of self. We feel wedded to context because it reinforces our sense of self. So, how can one experience something if the precondition for the experience is to already understand what it is about? This is a paradox. We insist on being prepared, yet come always to face the fact that nothing is more invisible than the next moment. In that case, all we have is this moment, which is without context. Context is always our addition.

Contending with this paradox means moving through it and recognizing that we are always shaping our experience, mostly unconsciously, with the grooves of the mind and body,

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