My yoga journey and the things I learn on the way, keep reminding me the same principle..that ‘All things change and flow’..hence there is a constant flux of things, thoughts, emotions.! Hence kinisis = movement in greek.
Very early in humanity, people started wondering questions and tried to explain all this movement and notion in nature; some gave explanations with what they could perceive more with the senses or created myths around it, stories and Gods involved in that flux, whereas others should equate all this with what reason told them ~ the Rationalists as they were..unshakable faith in human reason. Τhe Greek philosophers posed questions in transformations they could observe in physical world. They were looking for the underlying laws of nature and they wanted to understand what’s happening around them. The first in history who said that ~~ life is like a river ~~ was Heraclitus (530-470 BC) ‘We can not step twice into the same river. When I step into the river for the second time, neither I or the river are the same’. He pointed out that the world is characterised by opposites and we should have to appreciate the difference and change…’if there were no winter, we would never see the spring…if we were never ill, we would take no pleasure of being well…if there were never any war, we would not appreciate peace..’ For Heraclitus, God or Deity was something that embraced the whole world. Instead of God, he used the word ‘logos’ (reason) but he believed that there must a universal reason guiding everything that happens in nature. He is not to be found in myths but can be seen most clearly in the constant transformations and contrasts of nature. Since nothing survived from Heraclitus’s original work, he is considered a valuable philosopher from his commentators because history has changed so many times since his time…it seems like it is repeated but always taking different forms and particularly times like today…where change in dysfunctional political, economic, social systems is mandatory.
From Greece travelling towards the east and eastern philosophies where people in ancient times tried to explain the constant changes that arose as a vibration on a canvas of pure consciousness. This approach is the complete opposite of the Rationalists… where fantasy, visualisations, subtle pulsations are born in one’s mind, they are developed and appear as bubbles appear on water.
Completing one year of Indian philosophy with an excellent academic teacher who studied in Benares University and elsewhere , I can’t wait to carry on studying the Siva sutras and the Kashmir Shaivism again this coming year. This was one of the earliest expressions of Shiva worship in Nothern India of Kashmir where Shiva is the ultimate principle of existence, the male pole, the pole that provides support to all things – it is everlasting, supreme and pure….Shakti is the female pole and the potential evolution of the universe, the one that generates vibratory motions and changes that occur and manifest in the universe and Nara the conditional personality seeking liberation (well…us as humans I suppose). Now, a further development on this tradition is Spanda-Karika and spanda means vibration or movement, not in a way we encounter movement in space-time, but the instant vibration in the transcendental reality itself, the source of all manifest movement. Obviously, these ideas are far from realistic and human reason but in my point of view (or at least the way I perceive things now, at this moment..) the opposite realms identified in philosophical issues in a way complete one another. Ancient eastern philosophies provide the practices, the techniques to allow us to transcend into our unconscious level and see, feel, engage, invent, develop, encounter higher realisations and serious ecstatic throbbing of the Shiva consciousness. Different already from Classical yoga where the Self is a distant observer of body-mind events. I can see them both directions completing one another in a sense that we are not made merely from matter (body) which is irrelevant to mind, senses and vibrations. Human reason in different eras have a huge importance of the way we perceive the world, but there is definitely something deeper and higher into our consciousness ~ we might as well call it Shiva consciousness and we might as well feel the vibrations and movements measurable, overt or not. Movement as a motor -cognitive response or undetectable by our measures of senses?
Let us all embrace movement, change and transformation in actions, thoughts and events even if it’s not very pleasant to the mind or ego. We are destined to roll with it. And we better enjoy the ride!. ❤
