After reading a recent blog entry [http://kquvien.blogspot.com/2011/08/now-what.html] by one of my yoga teachers, Kquvien, who just returned from India, I was struck with one word to describe her entry: Beautiful. But why would I associate beauty with descriptions of starving animals, feces, and pollution? I asked myself the same question for several days. I attended her yoga classes and a Sutra Workshop, where we discussed the idea of himsa, violence and the Yama (Moral precept) Ahimsa or nonviolence.
It made me think about how I felt when I first read Thich Nhat Hanh's Poem "Please Call Me by My True Names". It's a poem in which he identifies with an entire scene he witnessed: from the birds and frogs to a 12-year-old girl and her rapist. At the time it was so hard to wrap my head around that kind of reverence and compassion for the nefarious workings of the universe. It still is for the most part. But when I considered how I felt about Kquvien's blog, it dawned on me that perhaps I was able to get a glimpse of and gain an appreciation for the wholeness of experience -- the good, the beautiful, the bad, and the ugly. I don't know. I do know that at this stage of our evolution, unless we have that duality to compare in name and form before us - we can never appreciate the good parts.
I feel it's all here so we do (hopefully) evolve. It's what I'll call our "Gross Reality" and yes, I love the double entendre. In yoga, we learn to move from the gross to the subtle - from our outer limbs, etc to our inner organs, and then our life force, or energetic Prana. As I always say, I am by no means an authority, I'm still just getting a fingernail hold on things, but for the purposes of my blog I'm coming up with two terms: "Gross Reality" and "Subtle Reality". "Gross Reality" is what we think we experience (Note: Descartes', "I think therefore I am"). It's what we think we see, feel, taste, and hear. "Subtle Reality" is what our consciousness cannot know with its limited faculties. Yet, it is what our energetic force senses (for lack of a better term)--let's consider that force in the idea: I am, therefore I think I am. In this "Subtle Reality" that force "senses" on a level of oneness with a much bigger energetic universe.
In Dennis Waite's article in the Fall 2011 Yoga International "Science and Consciousness" he talks about how scientists are writing more and more about the non-dualist nature of reality.[See http://www.himalayaninstitute.org/yoga-international-magazine/philosophy-articles/scienceandconsciousness/] He says, "Scientists have made a significant contribution to persuading people to consider that the world may not be as it initially appears to our limited organs of perception.[...] "Reality" is far more subtle than everyday experience would have us believe." That's no news to yogis.
Again in a philosophical spiral, I go back to my initial sense --possibly a semi-subtle notion, albeit a top layer on infinite layers, of appreciation for the beauty of an imperfect whole. What caused that? Could that happen again? Could I get to subtler levels of experiencing this top layer of the bigger picture? I think it was in the movie Total Recall when Arnold Schwarzenegger went to some scientist, inventor-type, who made these robotic masks of faces. The guy kept telling Arnold that the imperfections are what make it real. I guess I'll sum this up by having you consider the face of a handsome man or a pretty woman - if we put a microscope to that face we would see billions of imperfections and maybe even something really gross - you know like two amoebas violently attacking a skin cell; but pull out and look at the sum of its parts and it's amazingly beautiful.
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