Connectedness
One participant in life feeds another and lives off another too; the movements of life is a conditioned coming together and coming apart of combinations and permutations, sometimes perfectly sensible and at others, totally mysterious. Yoga describes this flux and its practice is devotion to it.
The clouds, moment after moment unceasingly morph into new forms; and the birch trees in our yard, day after day, expand their canopies wider and with increasing density they will eventually let all those shimmering leaves fall away. What can live outside such conditions? The executive climbing the ladder, the banker banking on retirement security, the automobile company looking for more and more growth – the human mind always finds itself in the trap of illusion.
The greatest illusion is that we can find some kind of permanence outside our own heart. Meanwhile the crab and the honey-bee, the ocean currents and the forest fires, evolve and sustain such evolution without the need for narrative security or metaphysical answers.
Human beings exist within the flux of language and meaning, to deny such activity would overlook what it means to be human. But when we cling to things by creating stories about their permanence, we are lost in a virtual world. The long plains of central Canada and the crystal waters of the Central American Coast and the throngs of people on their way to work – we are all at risk unless we think about our interconnections and allow such thinking to change our minds and actions while moving us toward a more sustainable existence.
Spirituality is not a blind kind of faith but a complete re-orientation of one’s attitude. Such a reorientation is the essence of yoga not as a system or an ancient technology but a true awakening to the union of all things. That must be the starting point for any form of social, ecological, economic, legal or psychological change. We must do our best to listen to one another and the pulsing world that sustains us and work on behalf of biodiversity itself, not our infinite desires and habit energies. It’s not just reflection that the spiritual person must cultivate but also the response to the insights arrived at through reflection and the deep commitment to take our practice out into the world.
The world is calling out for people like you.
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