Momentum Yoga: The Blog

2.5 antiya ashuchi duhkha anatmasu nitya shuchi sukha atman khyatih avidya
Ignorance (avidya) is of four types: 1) regarding that which is transient as eternal, 2) mistaking the impure for pure, 3) thinking that which brings misery to bring happiness, and 4) taking that which is not-self to be self.

Ok, we avoid things.  Why?  The yoga sutras categorize it into four main reasons – we’re messed up temporaly, we can’t see the trees for the forest, we love misery, and we don’t know who we are.  Ok, that’s the harsher version, and a bit over the top, but I do it for literary effect.

Here one day, Gone the next

What is eternal? Ask a physicist, and he or she might say energy.  But that all decays into unordered chaos anyway.  The rut you’re in seem pretty eternal?  Are you eternal?  No, no.  That one’s obvious – we all die.  What about your family history and heritage?  No, no.  There are families we’ll never know about.  Maybe for a few thousand years, if you’re really good.  Well, then what about the earth we’re on?  No.  The sun will eventually explode and the planet will be gone.  Our galaxy?  Well, black holes and all.  So… Nothing really eternal.

And yet we’re so worried about how our homes will look when company comes over.  In the grand scheme of things, it’s rather transient, to say the least.

Purity

Mistaking the impure for the pure?  Well, that sounds kinda fru-fru, no?  But if you think of impure as having impurities in your water, or dirt on your clean floor, you can start to get the idea of how they affect the nature of what is pure.  Separating that out is hard, of course, but once the impurities are removed, there is more clarity – and less ignorance.

The sutras argue that not knowing what is pure and impure is a form of ignorance, a form of avoidance.  It colors our thoughts to think of something as other than what it is.  And really, that’s just a basic tautology – we label things as pure and impure, and draw conclusions and inferences from there, and mislabeling them will have us draw incorrect conclusions.  It may not be a life-changing difference, in many cases, but maybe, when it’s all added up, those little difference do change our lives in subtle, but significant ways.

Happiness and Misery

Thinking that we’re getting happiness out of things that actually bring us misery?  That never happens, no?  (Feel free to laugh heartily here.)  I suppose the holidays are the best example of this.  We have fabulous intensions of wonderful family gatherings that should be warm and loving, but are really tense and uncomfortable.  Or perhaps the workout that we chose, not because it’s the one we like, but it’s because it’s the one we’re told will make us lose weight the fastest, though we are miserable and eat an extra piece of candy on the way home from the gym to soothe our mind.

Figuring out what is real happiness is hard, and figuring out what is real misery as opposed to just mental resistance to a challenge is even harder.  But there’s resistance to a challenge, and there’s misery.  Neither of those are happiness.  The former may help us improve as a person, when we overcome it, but the later?  It just makes us miserable.

The Self

And the last form of avoidance – mistaking the not-self for the self.  No, no, I don’t mean all of high-school, though there’s a lot of that too.  Nor do I mean trying to make the boss like you at work.  I mean really trying to convince yourself, making yourself believe that you are something you’re not.  Maybe you’re artistic, but you want to earn the money (and, you think, respect) of an engineer.  So you try to convince yourself that you are an engineer, and not painter.  Or perhaps you simply are not a parenting type, but your family, your culture, insists that you’re wrong, and you try to convince yourself otherwise.

It may not be easy to figure out what the true self is.  I find, in the American culture of externalities, of conformation, of craziness, it’s a lifetime journey.  At least I hope it is, because then I might be able to get somewhere in this lifetime.  But at least the search is interesting, and trying to figure out what is not the self is just as important as figuring out what is the self.