Abiding as reality in the world of patterned suffering.

Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga

Mark Whitwell
3 min readNov 7, 2020
The Healing Power of Intimate Connections | Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga | Yoga Guru
The Healing Power of Intimate Connections | Mark Whitwell

The “world” is merely mind presumed mass patterns of roles. Of limits interacting and reacting to each other in a tangled mess of dissociation from reality.

What is reality? It is the brightness of the sun, the flowers blooming and the mother-father embrace of their newborn. You are the power, intelligence, beauty, and intrinsic harmony of the body in the known and unknown cosmos. Your body-mind is a duplication of the grand cosmic domain arising in limitless spherical unfolding eternity blooming. It is that which brought you here and presently nurtures you and all life. That is a fact.

This “world” is presumed to be real, but it is not. This presumption distracts you from actual reality. It’s not valid but sure creates endless complications in the patterned roles, endless repetition, and duplication of limit. This is not reality although it’s dissociating effects are real enough. It causes competition only, difference only, division, destruction, self defeat, patriarchal cruelty as the normative social patterning put in everyone, fear, control, war, pandemics and. failure of Mother Earth’s ecologies for the human and other species. And if necessary the Earth will reject the human species for the continuity/regeneration of life, the power and sap of existence eternally springing forth.

So! The way forth is not to dissociate from the patterning of the usual life with the usual patriarchal advice to go to an “inner state” to deal with and dissociate from the “outer state”. This caused the problem in the first place. No! The way forth is to associate positively to the mere patterning. Be free in its dark midst. Embrace it like the sun shines on Earth. Outshine it with your intrinsic love, the recognition of the unitary nature, and context in which all things are happening. Embrace it like mother father embrace their baby. In this way, we will create a heartfelt sustainable community in the darkness while not being naive to the dreadful state of humanity. And take action to get us all home. All to gather. now.

And “do your yoga”… your daily participation in the Given Reality. That is capital R Reality’s embrace of small r reality mess of humanity. Let’s get the job done together.

Start with Reality and go to the “world”. Don’t start with the world and try to get to reality with the methods of patriarchal seeking, which is just more “world” patterning of mind. That doesn’t work. The world of patterns seems to hide or sublimate reality, even obliterate it. Reality is prior and so obvious and so simple, this exiting news that it is overlooked. Just as the characters in a dream don’t know it’s a dream and don’t know they can wake up. They don’t even know they are formed of sleep. So it is with the people of the “world”. We need to tell them of reality so they can wake up from the patterned egos’ dead roles being played out. It is deadening, literally to life. The world is dying, already dead. To perceive reality is easy. To embrace reality in the anciently given Yogas of participation is easy. Then the world is not a problem. It is reality itself. It is inconsequential and we can participate in its patterns freely even as we grieve its malfunction.

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Mark Whitwell
Mark Whitwell

Written by Mark Whitwell

Mark Whitwell has worked as a Yoga teacher around the world for the last 45 years and is the author of 4 books on Yoga. He lives in Fiji with his wife Rosalind.