Mark Whitwell | Mark Whitwell on How to Stop the Seeking Mind
Mark Whitwell | Heart of Yoga
You are not the one seeking for Reality. You are Reality itself. The same power that lives the trees and the birds, that moves the oceans, the sun and the moon, that same power lives you. It is the power that beats your heart and moves your breath and Sex.
As Reality itself, it is obvious that you have a completely robust and given connection to everything in the cosmos.
You are at one with air and light, with water and the green realm, with the animal kingdom, and the female/male collaboration. The yin-yang nurturing power of life, whether in same sex or opposite sex intimacy, is your condition.
We are in safe hands in this universe. Everyone is here. Everyone belongs. There is nothing we need to do attain to belong. It is given. Just like we do not seek for the sun, we do not need to seek for our life.
Yet, for thousands of years, civilization has ignored its own reality in the name of higher goals and celestial territories. The real material world and its inhabitants have been degraded in the assumption that it is lesser.
My teacher U.G. Krishnamurti would say,
“Man’s idea of heaven has created a hell out of this abundant paradise.”
And so, us modern people, whether we are consciously religious or not, have inherited an assumption that we are somehow not ‘there’ yet; that we are not Reality itself; and that we need to toil away in some effort to try and get there, one day in the future.
We feel a subtle yet painful wound in our lives, a feeling of existential restlessness that keeps us moving, struggling, and unable to fully relax into our lives. As if infected with a virus, our mind’s have been convinced there is somewhere to get to. All day our minds are working hard trying to get us there.
We get seriously busy trying to realize something, or to realize ourselves in some way. We take up the religious methods of meditation and renunciation. Or we try and find a sense of connection through career, self-improvement, artistic pursuits and other people.
Not to deny any our cultural interests, but if they are driven by a delusion that we need to get somewhere, then our efforts only make things worse. By trying so hard to get to God/Reality, we only reinforce the idea that we are separate. We become rigid and unhappy. It is much better to drop the struggle. Know that there is nowhere to get to and let your activities be an expression of your connectedness and your joy in that connection.
Our Response-Ability
In the great tradition of Yoga it is recommended that we approach this situation from two directions:
1. Just realize that you are reality and robust connections in life will flow. Or,
2. Choose a direction of intimate connection (body, breath and relationship “in that order,” of any human or non human relationship) and in that embrace reality itself, consciousness or God will be revealed to the mind as mind’s source and purpose.
Then there is 3. Combination of 1 and 2!
In the traditions of Yogic realization, it is STRONGLY recommended that method 2 is adopted most primarily as the practical means to abide in and as Reality, as what you are. There is a necessity to deprogram the social patterning and denials that have been put in us by hundreds of years of patriarchal patterning. Your Yoga practice will do this.
Some very rare people can go straight to 1. But it cannot be practiced. 1. can only grasped as a fact — once is enough.
Following which, your daily Yoga is the practical response to you factually knowing that you are Reality itself. In practice, Reality becomes continually realized as your condition and is enjoyed forever.
If our cultural inheritance is one of dissociation and transcendence, then our Yoga practice moves us in the literal opposite direction. We begin by being intimate with our body and breath, our senses, our emotions, our mind, and our Sex. Every day, non-obsessively, we move and breath in a unitary movement. The mind feels its connectedness to the body and the body feels its connectedness to all of life. The sublime intelligence, peace, power, and harmony of life becomes obvious to the mind.
As we practice we very naturally and spontaneously tend to detach from the harmful desires that have been implanted in us by the culture and education system. We release those desires that are inimical to what is truly good for us and we receive what is.
Gradually and suddenly, the ground clears for us to be more and more viscerally connected to our real desires: we begin to know what we want and want what we know. We start to refine our desires, to coordinate our movements, to get connected to people whom we truly like and love and to find out who we actually want to have Sex with.
As U.G. would say, “Always yield to temptation.”
If You Can Breathe, You Can Do Yoga
So, if your feeling restricted and pained by the dissociative culture that we have all inherited, then,
1) Know that you are reality itself, the power of the cosmos, consciousness itself, God, already, and that you are and can never be separate from life. Life is not a desperate, fearful struggle, but a nurturing power that brings us into being and presently sustains us.
2) Be intimate with your body and breath on a daily basis with a Yoga practice that is tailored to your unique life and destiny, and then
3) Let this practice of intimate, robust, tangible connection to life, become the principle of your life, in all areas, all interactions. The sensitivity to yourself that develop from your Yoga practice will naturally extend towards others, including and especially, a special partner.
4) Know that you are here to enjoy your life of intimate connection to Reality. In that embrace, all that we need is revealed as already given.
Read More:
