S4E3 Summary
Yoga is a discipline that has a complex and accurate understanding of all the things we need to do in order to determine what is real so we can determine what we care about, the nature of our relations and therefore help us determine what we should do.
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Episode Transcript
The transcript is automatically generated, so please be kind.
Well, welcome everybody.
I wanted to to put out a summary
of everything that we did, because the we did a lot in the podcast, if you all had listened to it, but there are several central ideas that are very important and were really compelling to me, as I did all of this study. And those I'd like to recap, because they'll give us an idea about where the podcast will go in the future. So first of all, we started with the Veda and and there's a lot to say about the Veda, but, but I want to say three really simple primary things. It's very important to understand that yoga came from what we would call an ancient cosmology, and that means a vision of the universe, of the cosmos, of the organized, sort of living universe that's very different than ours. So we have a cosmology dominated by natural science and physics and quantum physics and so on and so forth. The Vedic cosmology is a little bit different. There's a lot to say about that, but let me say this. Remember that the microcosm is always a miniature of the macrocosm, and so that would go for the human body. That would go the human body is a miniature of the universe, in some sense, following the same laws. That kind of universe is the is the universe where the the early beginnings of yoga come from. And in that universe, remember, this is a sacrificial universe, and
in the sacrificial context, anything that's dissolved in this world is immediately coagulated or reborn or fed or made real in the heavenly world at exactly the same time. So I think the example I gave in the podcast was a pot that's broken and the sacrificial context is immediately reconstituted in the heavenly world. It's really important to remember that, because when we get to Tantra, the relationship between the gross body and the subtle body, or what you might call the place where the chakras are, or the gross body in the soul, it's exactly the same.
The next thing that came from the Veda is, is the Vedic triad, the three primary substances that go are involved in the sacrifice. One is Soma, and one is Agni and one is Vayu. And that means we have a fluid, fire and wind. Sacrificial triad, the fluid, or the soma, is what the fire eats, and the soma also produces Rapture. The fire, obviously, is the transforming, mediating element, and the wind is from from heaven. And those three metaphors go with us throughout the whole entire podcast, as much as I could manage to spot them everywhere that I ended up. And it's very important for us to think that we are this fire, fluid and wind, this dynamic that happens in the Veda. That's how they see us, and that becomes a key to the yogic process going forward. The last thing I would say is that since this this sacrificial process is a process of imbibing Soma, or of eating or drinking. Then eating becomes a central metaphor in the in the practice. That's how that's a lot of how we are to understand what yoga is about as we move forward. But we also understand yoga to be about cooking, and so you can envision this process that is called yoga as a process in a way of eating and cooking that is kind of in a sacrificial place.
So we came forward to the Upanishads, and the Upanishads did something really astounding. They took that Vedic Bucha.
Sacrifice, and they internalized it. And so that's a psychological term that means that they put it inside them. And I hope that now you can see that internalization as an act of eating, in a certain way, a symbolic act of eating, because I'm definitely going to talk about it. You know, that way more and more
also what the Upanishads did is to put soul, or Atman, at the center of the of the yogic Opus for us. So it's the first time that soul is given a really profound place in this game of liberation that we're playing. And that becomes a central metaphor as we go forward. The last thing I think, that I would say, is in this internalization of the sacrifice, the human body became considered the juice or the liquid, the fluid, in the Vedic triad. And so they began to conceive of the body as Soma. And they called it something called rasa. And rasa is a really enigmatic word in Ayurveda and many other places, but as we go forward, it means things like taste, like the taste that happens when you put something in your mouth. It also is used in tantra as as repro synonym for reproductive tissue. It's also mercury in Tantra, and so the body takes on this amazing status as the seed of the sacrifice, and that leads to a whole bunch of cool things.
We did a little bit of the Bhagavad Gita. And there's so much to say. I always feel like I'm glossing it unjustly in some way. But the Gita, the important thing about the Gita is, is that it synthesizes the Vedic way of sacrifice, which is called The Way of action, and the way in the Upanishad, which is called The Way of renunciation. And so as we come forward in history, yoga begins to mean something like renunciation in action, and we find the Vedic triad again in the Gita. The Gita also offers us devotion, or bhakti yoga, as its answer to what action or renunciation in action is is going to produce. It's going to produce wisdom, but it's always it's also going to produce an awakening in the heart
in a particular way.
So
after the Gita
came the Buddha
and Buddhism is so important to understand in the history of spiritual practice in India. Because I think the thing I wanted you to take away from that is that is that the Buddha was the teacher of no self, or the teacher of no soul. And I think rather than denying this profound concept of soul that is so central to the Upanishads in most everything in that we would call yoga. I think the critique that the Buddha brought is necessary for us to take seriously. And I actually believe that the majority of people that came after him were deeply affected by this one idea, if there is something like a soul, and I'm going to speak of this cooking, that yoga is, in a way, is soul making or cooking the soul or feeding the soul? Then, because of the Buddha, we can't think of that soul as a thing, as a as a substance, in a way, like other things in the world, because he showed how much change and impermanence play out in the nature of things. So I think that we have to allow the soul to be imagined, not only as fluid and fire and wind, for instance, or something that results from cooking, but also something that's like a process more than it is like a particular thing. And so the Buddha is extremely important for what will be, how we'll be thinking as we go forward. We gave Sankhya as a as an example of an ancient cosmology. I won't go too much into that. It's important for yoga teachers, probably beginning yoga teachers in particular, to know Sankhya as the most influential philosophical system, probably in the history of India. Not everybody agrees with it, but, but most people are playing off of it and critiquing it, or saying yes or adding to it in some way. So, so that's an example of an ancient cosmology.
We then came to Tantra.
And Tantra is another example of an ancient cosmology that that is similar to that of the Veda. But there are several things that have emerged in in this ancient this version of of where we live in the universe. The main thing I called that was.
That Tantra is the erotica mystical context of Siddha practice. And remember Siddha, I tried to make the case that Tantra and Hatha and alchemy and Ayurveda can all be called this thing called Siddha practice that's really interesting and deeply still tied to using a fire to transform substances and to produce something amazing. And so for the Tantrics, the universe is is erotic. It's deeply tied to the notion of sexual creation and the rhythms of sex, but it's also mystical. It's about the kind of absorption, right that can happen in that context. And so we see the absolute here as a rhythm, and we see also that the absolute produces an essence, and we can still call that rasa, in the same way that the Upanishad called the body rasa. And so because the universe is an essence producer, so is the human. So let's see in Tantra, this, in this erotica, mystical universe, we still see the Vedic triad. We see it as rasa and Agni and prana and rasa. Here is essence. It means reproductive tissue. Again, it means also mercury, right? That is cooked and taken out of cinnabar. The this focus on rasa
means that that the human and the divine, those are microcosm, macrocosm relationships also, and because humans produce reproductive tissue, or they produce an essence of some kind, something very precious. Then the human body
now is starting to be seen as the vessel in which the cooking process takes place. And so the Tantrics and the Hatha yogis call our yoga, the yoga of the pot, or the yoga of the Kumbha. And this is the place where you really start to see these ideas of cooking something inside a vessel and dissolving it, and because it's dissolved in the ritual context, it's immediately integrated in the heavenly realms. And that, again, I'd like to suggest, is the relationship between the gross body and the subtle body. And so as the as the gross body is is sacrificed in various ways or purified in various ways. The subtle body is fed in the next world to the to the Tantrics. This is an idea about how liberation proceeds for them.
We talked a lot about preparing things and purifying things in the context of citta alchemy, and that stuff will probably all come up again as we as we continue to go, purification and preparation are crucial pieces of the of this process of soul making. So let's see.
I think that the podcast also gave us images for our imagination so that we can imagine ourselves into the process of of transformation. And the images that we get, first of all, are of that triad, fluid, fire and wind. By the time we get to Tantra, that would be juice and fire and breath, right? Something like that that's very similar. And so this gives us an image of the soul as a fluid dynamic that means something that flows,
a heat dynamic, that means something that generates its own radiance and light, and also a breath dynamic, something that not only flows, but is powered from above in a certain way.
Humans are, are very divine, in a sense that we make essence. But if you'll think about it, we don't really make Breath. Breath is the thing that has to come to us from the outside and come to us from above. And so these flows are part of what the alchemist or the tantric or the Ayurvedic practitioner is is interested in ingesting or arresting, sorry, we stop the flow of juice. We stop the flow of breath, and we regulate the fire very, very carefully. And so the last thing I'd say about tantra and Hatha and alchemy is that they remember that they called what they do the yoga of breath, mind and seed and and they made some statements about breath and mind and seed, which, as you're probably suggest suspecting, is the Vedic sacrifice. The teaching suggests that breath and mind and seed are very, very volatile, that breath could evaporate or be set on fire very quickly, or that mind is also something that could evaporate.
And or, or quickly Ignite and be burned up or, and that goes for the other third of the triad also. And so what is, what's desired here is that
somehow we catch this essence of of us, breath, mind and seed, and we keep it from evaporating, and we coagulate it in a certain way so that it becomes something substantial that won't evaporate quickly, something that can't be set on fire so quickly. So we have material to work with, to feed the subtle body, to do things like, remember, install the chakras through a process of visioning and imagination. And so we're we're now
1000 years past the Vedic sacrifice, and we're still dealing with a triad that's the essence of of yoga, breath, mind and seed and and we're dissolving something in this world to feed something in the next world. We're calling that the subtle body now.
So those are the highlights, really, of the of the podcast that I wanted to put forward. I wanted to make it possible to talk about alchemy, to talk about the lip process of liberation as a process of cooking and feeding, or eating or being fed. I wanted to provide images, you know, so you could imagine yourself in this work in a certain way. And where we ended up was talking about the Kundalini. I think that's the last piece of Tantra. I'm not going to say much about the purely historical episodes that are about Krishna Bucha and about Vivekananda. Those are very important to understand where we are now, but as we go forward in in the podcast, what we're really going to be talking about is this process of cooking and feeding between the higher and the lower, or the gross and the subtle, as this process of soul making And the Kundalini is a unique image that shows what it's like to be involved, or what the material you're working with, what the forces are that you're working with when you're in a universe where things create themselves, and so these this process of soul making can be called autopoiesis also, and it's a it's a process of of a creature or a system that is able to take energy in from the outside, repair itself, get rid of what it doesn't need in order to not only sustain itself, but to grow right in several ways. And of course, I think yoga is specifically about that kind of process, because I think awakening is, is a kind of auto poetic process, a process of self making or self creation, and the Kundalini is shows all kinds of paradoxical
images around her, because I think she's one of the chief images of this, of this process of making yourself so she gives life and she takes life right when she's asleep, we're asleep, but we think we're awake. When she's awake, we from the outside, we swoon, and we go into, you know, absorption.
She is the the thing that blocks the doors to the central channel. She is also the thing that relieves the door of the central channel and rises up the central channel. And so this looks like the process where the snake is eating its own tail, or where something is is making itself. It's being birthed out of itself, and it's consuming itself and it's also growing. So I wanted to go forward using these imaginative means to talk about the process of awakening.
