Yoga achieves perfection of the body through the asanas and pranayamas (Hathayoga). Asanas are a series of stretches and postures, which, it is claimed, give you the same cardiovascular efficiency as vigorous aerobic exercise and vast improvements in fitness.  Each posture stretches a certain set of muscles and is followed by a posture that stretches the opposing set.  They need not be difficult and the postures do not have to be maintained for long.  Proceed at your own pace.  It will leave you feeling remarkable relaxed and refreshed.  Pranayamas are a set of breathing exercises that invigorate and balance the system.

Yoga achieves perfection of the mind through meditation (Radayoga).   The meditation is designed to clarify the surface layers of the mind as lack of movement clarifies a muddy pool so you can see down to the depths. It involves sitting or lying comfortably in a quiet place in a relaxed posture and by breathing and inward chanting to attain a deep state of consciousness akin to trance.  Preoccupations, worries, regrets are banished from the mind while you concentrate on the here and now.  In trance, there is a clearer focus on the sounds and feelings around you while everything else drifts away.  Meditation is focus and can be achieved through creative work; painting, sculpture, gardening, poetry, music, cooking, even  running and walking or even sitting quietly by the side of a river fishing.  Find the time and the space in your life to do this. 

Asanas, pranayamas and meditation exist for one purpose, that is to acheive that peaceful state of body and mine that allows a contemplation on the meaning of life, what yogis say is union with the divine, or an innermost state of peace and contemplation.

Yoga is not another religion.  Yogis do not believe in a single God or even a company of Gods, but they do believe in the notion of a divinity, a state of being that creates and pervades all existence and they revere sages like Sri Aurobindo as instruments to help us attain a state of perfection. 

I cannot believe in such a divine presence, although I acknowledge the power of the human mind to create it. There is much about our existence that we cannot explain, but I like to place my faith in evolution, cosmology and the amazing power of the human mind to create meaning out of our existence.  But I do believe that Yoga is a wonderful system of  healing the mind, the body and the spirit or meaning and I incorporate asanas and meditation as an essential components of my everyday life. 

Our lives are so fragmented; we express so many different aspects of ourselves at different times.  We are, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, disorderly ordered.   We seem to have a fatal attraction to pain and suffering.  Yoga is a means of liberating ourselves.  Yoga is not only a method by which man can attain that state of peace and relaxation that facilitates health, fulfilment and happiness.  It  also creates a state of being that allows reflection on the deeper meanings of our existence,  alongside but separate from our daily preoccupations with work, family and the material aspects of contemporary living.   

Some yogis may renounce all material connections, retire to an ashram and live a life of self perfection, but most of us cannot do that.  Each person must follow their own path. But we may find time during the day to carry out asanas and pranayamas and we may also be able to build into a more balanced way of life time to meditate and reflect on the deeper meanings.  This can only help us to cope with stress, to think about what we are eating, how we are living and deal better with the strains of life that cause illness.    

In June, I lived for three weeks in the Sri Aurobindo ashram high above the town of Nainatal in the foothills of the Himalayas.     

Related posts:

1. Yoga in the Park We had completed the first set of asanas and were...
2. A Question of Faith There is so much we do not know.  There is...
3. It’s a Dog’s Life! ‘A dog is a man’s best friend’, so they say. ...

Cosmology and evolution seem so far- fetched; a series of lucky accidents.  Left to itself, matter tends to disintegrate by processes of inertia and decay. So why doesn’t it?  For most of the world’s population, the answer is simple. God created the world and everything in it.  And he created man in his own image. 

Yoga, while believing in a super-intelligent design, is not against evolution or science or psychology.  All are  part of the divine plan. Everything that we perceive to exist contains the essence of the divine, the vibration in stones, the way a plant bends towards the light, the way a beautiful lotus flower will blossom in the mire. Divinity, it asserts, pervades the whole universe from the stars to the smallest cell in our body.  God creates life out of Himself, like a divine spider weaving a world wide web.  Scientists may claim to have created life,  but they had to rely on the forces and raw materials that God provided in order to do it.     

Just as a tiny seed has the potential of a tree inside it, just as a grain of sand can be made into a silicon chip, so the potential for humanity was there from the beginning in the DNA of the smallest organism.  Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.  The human embryo starts as a simple unicellular organism and from there develops through fish stages with gill arches, amphibians, mammals and man.  The philosophy of yoga acknowledges evolution as one aspect of a divine plan that conceived humanity from the start. ‘Karma’ embraces past and future lives and the ultimate purpose of our multiple lives is to merge with this divine being.   Thus yogis believe that man’s destiny is to evolve into a state of superbeings  at one with the divine.   

But hang on a minute, belief is one thing, but when faiths apply science to support their convictions, it doesn’t quite work.  Take the inertia argument. Things only disintegrate when you don’t apply energy to them.  If you apply the enormous energies generated by the birth of stars and locked up within the universe, then synthesis is not only possible but obligatory and there are an infinite number of chemical combinations to choose from, many of which may ‘work’.  But, we might ask, where does all that energy come from?   What caused the big bang?  Or is that just another act of faith?     

And is evolution evidence of divine plan or a wonderful genetic system through which life adapts to environmental change?   Did God really look at a chimpanzee, scratch his beard and say,  ‘Hmmm, there are capabilities there’.  Would an intelligent designer have built in so much junk DNA?  And why should a race of superbeings develop?  We might equally argue that we are in danger of generating a race of sickly degenerate beings only able to exist in our artificial environment. 

Karl Popper’s dictat that we can only accept hypotheses that are capable of being disproved  indicates that the creationist’s position is, by the rules we adopt to establish our universe, antiscientific.

The other argument for the divine is collectivism. All cultures on earth; Indian Yogis, Christians, Moslems, Buddhists, the ancient Greeks as well as primitive peoples such as the aborigines, American Indians and African bushmen, have at one stage or another believed in an all powerful divine presence, who created the world, watches over it and requires appeasement.  Certain truths seem to exist in all religions;  so many people seem to have independently experienced a similar concept of divinity.  In his book, The Perennial Philosophy,  Aldous Huxley describes how leaders of religions throughout the world  claim remarkably similar expressions of the divine.  But that does not constitute evidence of the divine existence, just a collective culture of meaning.   Millions of people believed the earth was flat.  That didn’t mean it was!  We are all of us driven to find meaning in our existence and God is the simplest and mast lazy answer.  We have a template.  Weren’t our parents originally our Gods?   So is it surprising that our Gods exist in their idealised image.  Life can be so lonely without anybody powerful to look up to.         

Many would see intimations of the divine in thought transference, synchronicity, dreams, premonitions, faith healing, fate, love, but can we always be sure that there is not a more grounded explanation?   Very sensitive people can ‘read’ subliminal signals in much the same way as aboriginal trackers can read the landscape.  They are very suggestible.  People, who know each other well tune into those signals and each other and think the same thought, do the same thing.   Hope and faith alter the function of the immune system and are the essence of healing.  Dreams, as Freud commented are often wish fulfilment or the enactment of dread and we can all have an unerring tendency to bring about what we most want or fear or to re-enact the conditions of trauma.  This is not fate; it’s more about the way experience wires our nervous system.  .    

Some people even claim to have had encounters with the divine being, but there is a rational explanation for this too.   Just as traumatic events can make us ill, they can also make us cleave to the idea of redemption by divine grace, the perfect love by an all caring deity.  This desire can be so powerful, it can create delusions, even generate hallucinations.  And because there is a collective impression of God,  then these hallucinations will appear similar.

We cannot know everything, but  is that justification to invent a divinity?      

And then there’s fate.  A person’s life can tend to run according to a script.  People do tend to make the same choices, make the same mistakes.  It’s what is called character or personality.  But that  isn’t evidence for the divine, merely that our personality is forged by the influences on us early in life and given the same set of circumstances, we will make the same decisions.  Change often requires a crisis.   Yogis also do not believe that fate is ineluctable.  Man does have choice.  He can change fate, but the pull to the divine is inexorable and the path is rarely direct and may take many lifetimes. 

If there really is a God, why did he create such an imperfect world?   Yogis would say that the divine plan does not exist to give comfort to human beings.  Sometimes it is necessary to create tragedies, disasters because these manifestations of the divine will are opportunities for spiritual growth.  How many people have come to terms with the reversals in their lives by being more reflective, more spiritual?   Don’t we all need grief to appreciate joy?  Don’t we need darkness to appreciate the light.  This argument has always seemed to me somewhat contrived.

And what about emotions?  Are not love, fear, shame, remorse and guilt, manifestations of the divine?  Or can they be simply explained by neurochemistry?  I define emotion as ‘feeling put into context’.  Many feelings have a chemical signature.  Hormones, a class of chemicals named after the Greek word ‘eremonos’, literally, messengers from the Gods, are quite heavily implicated;  adrenalin – fear and anger, cortisol – depression,  thyroxine – agitation, oxytocin – love.   They help to define the subjective self and underline such phenomena as awareness, experience, memory, meaning, metaphor and attitudes.

The other area in which people perceive the existence of the divine is morals and ethics.  It is the influence of the divine grace, the religious argue, that encourages us to live a good and honourable life.  I cannot agree.  It’s not God that encourages us to be good but the mores of the community.  God, I believe, is a human projection; the embodiment of an inner authority.  If God didn’t exist, then we would have to invent him. Instead of God creating man in his own image, it seems more likely that we created God in our image? The social argument of a man made God seems very powerful to me.  Gods are necessary to provide a moral and ethical framework for communities, to provide structure and security and belief, hope and meaning.  Without the belief in God, the world could descent into chaos. To my mind, whether God exists does not exist in reality does not matter.  It’s the fact that most people believe in a divinity and that that divinity represents a moral code that is important.   

To my mind, concepts such as soul and spirit represent the meaning we ascribe to life’s deeper issues .  And  thoughts and  meanings the generated by the activation of neural networks, established by experience.   Believers state that faith is the starting point of knowledge.  No.  Imagination is.  Imagination is a predictive construct based on previous experiential associations.  Discovery favours the prepared mind.  As King Christian X of Denmark said many years ago, we console ourselves with our imaginings and delusions.  A meaningful life can be so beautiful; it doesn’t have to be divine. 

Proponents of any a belief system, whether this be a religion, a cult, psychoanalysis or aspects of neurochemistry and cosmology,  insist that we suspend and ultimately surrender disbelief for the security of faith.  It is true that for a full life, we must liberate our slavish dependence on evidence and let our imagination free in much the same way as the artist, the poet, and the composer, but that shouldn’t mean adhering  to a particular faith because we have been told to.  We are all seekers, but our quest should be generated by our own observations and meanings and not by obligations to science or God.

Related posts:

1. All life is yoga ‘All life is Yoga.’  So wrote Sri Aurobindo,  sage and...
2. In praise of uncertainty. The Archbishop of York, John Hapgood, once famously declared that...
3. There, but for the grace of God; a perspective on psychosis. You’re driving me mad, I’m going crazy, I’m losing my...

The opening sequences set the mood, time passing in the ticks and strikes of the clocks, the unrelenting passion of the crimson carpets, walls and drapes.  We see a woman or is it a man; the angular face and lank hair obviate sexuality.  She is lying in bed.  Another woman, plump and beautiful with ringlets of honey blonde hair lies asleep in a chair.  The invalid gets up stiffly and walks painfully across to her bureau and writes in her diary, ‘It is Monday and I am in pain.’ 

Agnes is dying of cancer.  Her sisters, Karin and Maria, have returned to look after her, but it is the peasant Anna with her plump expressionless face and simple faith who loves and cares for her.  ‘In elliptical flashbacks, intended to give us emotional information, not tell a story, we learn that the three sisters have made little of their lives.’ Karin is icily detached, married to an older husband, a calculating, sneering diplomat, whom she loathes. She cannot bear to be touched and in one awful scene lacerates her cunt with a broken glass and smears the blood over her lips to avoid her husband’s attentions.  Maria is beautiful, but corrupt and heartless.  She is married to a weak man, whom she despises and so she consoles herself with other liaisons.  When her husband stabs himself and pleads for help, she turns away.  Maria and Karin were close as children, but are now too damaged to allow any real intimacy.  Agnes always felt isolated, especially from their tragic though beautiful mother.      

Theirs is not a happy house, it’s a place of guilt and repression, cries and whispers.  Nobody can get close enough to draw comfort from anybody else.  Agnes is in agony, her back arched as she struggles to breathe, desperate for human warmth, but her sisters turn away.  Only Anna can console her, pillowing her head in the living flesh of her breasts to ease her terrible transition.   

Cries and Whispers is a disturbing film, a film about life and death.  It’s not only Agnes who is dying.  Karin and Maria are too, and in a way, we all are.  Their lives have no hope, no meaning.  Karin works while Maria plays, but these are evasions.  Theirs is a simalcrum.   Without human warmth, without love, there can be no life.   Paradoxically, it is Agnes,  who finds life  in simple pleasures, the garden, a drink of water and the comfort of  being held.   So Bergman presents us with a contrast, a counterpoint between the hopelessness, defensiveness and meaninglessness of  Karin and Maria’s lives with their compromises, pretences and terror of real contact and the dreadful void of death that confronts Agnes.  

Bergman does not spare us the shock and horror.  Harriet Andersson is not beautiful in death; sweat glistens on her angular face, her hair is lank, her skin pale and grey, her eyes terrified;  she arches her back, she drags air into her damaged lungs with long, tortured stridor, she retches, she beats her fists on her barren, wasted chest. 

The cinematography is superb.  As the critic, Roger Ebert, wrote, ‘The camera is as uneasy as we are. It stays at rest mostly, but when it moves it doesn’t always follow smooth, symmetrical progressions. It darts, it falls back, is stunned. It lingers on close-ups of faces with the impassivity of God. It continues to look when we want to turn away; it is not moved.  Agnes lies thrown on her death bed, her body shuddered by horrible, deep, gasping breaths, as she fights for air. The sisters turn away, and we want to, too.’  We know things are this bad, but we don’t want to have to feel it.  The scene of  Anna embracing the decomposing Agnes has all the soul searching depth of a Rembrandt,  the horror of embracing death but at the same time a moving and familiar reminder of the pieta.   So the death of Agnes  represents the corruption of humanity.  And here again we have the dialectic;  life in death and death in life.   This film gets as close as any film can get to the crimson membrane of passion and sexual disquiet that for Bergman is the soul.  

Cries and Whispers has little narrative.  We don’t know how the major characters arrived there; we are left to fill in the gaps from the darkness of our own experience.  This is the power of Bergman.  He does not attempt to explain; he just shows us what its like.  He communicates on a level of human feeling so deep that defies description – but how well he communicates.

Related posts:

1. Through a Glass Darkly The family are on holiday in their house on an...
2. Haunted! ‘Trauma’ and McGrath’s ghosts. Charlie is a psychiatrist, an expert on trauma. His marriage...
3. King George, the stammerer. Bertie was never expected to become King.  David, his elder...

We live in an uncertain world.  We can never be sure of anything, truth, fact, reality, faith; they are all illusion. Nothing is absolute; there are contexts, conditions, caveats and excuses.   Alter the perspective and the conclusion changes. We can never know the right course of action; all we can do is weigh things up and make a decision, that seems best at the time. 

From the dawn of civilization, people have needed to invent myths to explain the things they didn’t understand; day and night, the weather, the changing seasons, the migration of animals, the growth of crops, family relationships, love, anger, grief, madness. These ‘certainties’ were ascribed to the deities, who alone understood the ways of the world and  required appeasement.      

But man is restless and curious.  There have always been the neurotic ones, those who would challenge the elders and question the collective wisdom; the ones who noticed the missing stair in the double helix.

Man’s neurosis has made him successful. Curiosity has generated the knowledge that has turned men into Gods; Gods who knew how to grow their own food, create their own shelter, and migrate to every corner of the globe. The first revolution in human society, agriculture and the settled community, was followed some thousands of years later by the industrial revolution and the growth of massive cities, but now we have been taken over by the third wave; the electronic revolution, further disconnecting us from the tangible traditions of home and tribe. This new artificial world is based on belief and expectation.  Money, property, occupation, marriage, family can no longer be relied on. There is no absolute security.  What we regard as our wealth, our security, is more a matter of collective trust than any real commodity.  What sustains us as family and home is the faith that it is so. We are consoled by our illusions, up to a point.  

But there is a paradox; the more illusory and insecure our existence, the more we demand absolute certainties.  Our need for security permeates all aspects of our existence.  Daily administrative concerns domesticate an existential insecurity by providing the illusion of control. This is not so much a lust as a fundamental human need for shelter; what psychotherapists would term containment.  We need to know that our savings will be secure, that we will get effective treatment, that our children will get the best education, that we will be promoted, that our wife will love us forever.  These are our certainties. But all too often we worry about whether it will rain tomorrow, whether the rubbish will be collected, the mail delivered, the roads gritted.   We are panicked by a glitch on our computer,  enraged  by transport delays,  devastated by the loss of our mobile and tyrannized by regulation.   

To provide the reassurance to calm our fears, we demand more information.  We need to know what we can never know.  So we build glass and concrete temples dedicated to science, create multinational corporations to look after our money and service our existence and construct whole cities dedicated to treating the incurable, unexplained malaise of a society, that is sick with worry about being worried.  These are all illusions.  The reality, as we have seen all too clearly, is that our money can never be safe, the basic services, energy supplies, water, food, are finite, our shelter can be destroyed and life is an incurable illness.  But how desperately we need those illusions,         

In our uncertain, artificial world, try as we will to distinguish reality from fiction, truth from lies, right from wrong, the good from the bad, we fail. And this failure leads to regulation, because regulation provides the structural illusion of certainty. So we regulate every aspect of our existence – banks, hospitals, schools, transport and food.  So just as our ancestors never questioned their deities, so we put our trust in the God of  Science, the mysterious divination of evidence, the Rule of Law, the Oracle of Psychology, the Security of the Bank and The Power of Government.  Not to do so invites chaos or so we fear.  And our collective psyche abhors tension and chaos.    

We need to know where we stand, what will happen. So we look to our leaders to guide us.  Our politicians have to appear certain, lawyers trustworthy, businessmen reliable, doctors omniscient and efficient.  They all trade in absolute truths. We make Gods of them.  We have to believe that when our politicians tell us they will cut taxes, improve medical services, increase the state pension for old people and get us out of recession, that this will happen. But politicians are false gods. Certainty for a politician is at best what seems to be the optimal solution at the time and at worst sheer deceit and manipulation.  To be certain is to appear to have control and control is power.  And we need to know our leaders have the power to look after us. The media, the watchdog of an insecure public, demands certainty and will destroy those whose predictions fail to happen, whose promises are unfounded.      

It’s a game of pretence, a case of keeping one step ahead of disaster. Politicians are theatrical exponents of deception. Lawyers conjure truth out of doubt.  Businessman are skilled manipulators. Doctors trade in reassurance.   But they are only giving us what we want; the semblance of certainty in an uncertain world! 

Far be it from me, a lusty sinner, to take issue with the good archbishop, but I think that lust for certainty is less a sin and more a sign of insecurity.  Lust implies the need to own, to have power and control and that makes us feel secure.  It is what this desperate need leads on to, what it justifies, that are the sins; the deception, division and conflict, war, even murder. Doesn’t religion, in preaching a doctrine of certainty generate sin as much as any other conviction.  God save us from those who have conviction!         

Certainty forecloses discussion, precludes compromise, stifles creativity and promotes division. It inhabits a world that is split; right or wrong, black or white, good or bad.  The illusion of certainty  requires deception, suppression and secrecy.  It denies the real world and leads to conflict. There must be winners and losers.   

Uncertainty is freedom and life. We need to accept uncertainty if we are to understand the nature of things and change them.  Knowledge is not written in stone, but on shifting sand and the tide keeps coming in.  We should marvel at what we don’t know, engage with the fascinating complexity and the stimulus for understanding. Curiosity is one of the greatest joys of life. 

If we are to live together in harmony, we need to acknowledge there are no absolute rights or wrongs; only what we decide is so. Everything has its contexts and conditions.  Laws are there to be broken if conditions dictate that is the greater good.     

But society has to deal in absolutes, otherwise there is no society.  And the bigger society is and the more complex, the more the individual needs to be regulated.  No man is an island … Society determines that we make decisions, obey conventions, laws, that our word is our bond.  Doubt and inconsistency could lead to chaos and disintegration.   But society is too large to trust or to understand. It is an artifice that must be accepted advisedly not absolutely.  .   

But there is a third way; that is to acknowledge the necessary regulations of society while at the same time realizing and understanding the complexities and uncertainties of human existence.  (Give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s ……….).  Decisions should not be imposed by obligation but arrived at by creative compromise.  Accept society’s necessary regulations, but retain the personal uncertainty, because it is out of uncertainty that we derive identity and meaning.   Too much regulation will breed fear and stifle life; too little threatens distintegration.  Decisiveness can lead to sin, but indecision may slide into chaos.  As ever, we need to find the golden mean

Day will follow night

and life will last forever,

but the watchman spins his coin

and the way it lands is never.     

Related posts:

1. A Question of Faith There is so much we do not know.  There is...
2. Death, desire and despair at the Odioun; the pholly of Phedre She has desired Hippolytus since the day she married his...
3. All life is yoga ‘All life is Yoga.’  So wrote Sri Aurobindo,  sage and...