The INS and OUTS of Context

Dear Friend,

How are you? I hope you're well in the midst of current worldly events, the ongoing changing of seasons, the internal ebbs and flows, and everything else that seems to leave traces of impact in our body and mind. Isn't life's palate so rich with colors and flavors? Even when things tend to lean towards the more bleak side or get stagnant in some way, they are still part of this magnificent dance of life.

Long time ago, in a previous stage of my life, I was a film and video editor. Those of us who ever worked in that field, or even played around with creating audio-visual media, know that the real magic happens when we put everything together. It is quite an unglamorous profession despite a consensus in the film & TV industry that editing is the most important part of the process, where the movie is actually made.

I remember that as a student in film school, when I started playing around around with editing, I felt like a kid in a toy store. It was fascinating to discover how taking a few pieces of footage and putting them together could present such a wide range of options that have vastly different effect on the outcome as a whole. The order in which you sequence them, how and where you cut them, the rhythm in which they follow one another, and obviously the soundtrack you put in the background, they are all important factors that impact the finished product significantly more than the pieces themselves. Sometimes a little change in the sequential order of the segments ended up as a completely different film.

In a way I feel the same kind of playful joy these days when planning a yoga class, putting yoga postures and movements together into a sequence to create a specific effect. A yoga posture by itself doesn't have the power to create the effect that comes from connecting it together with other postures in a certain order, and when you add the breath (which is the soundtrack), and mindfulness, you have the potential of creating a specific and yet complete yoga experience.

Editing can be used in creative ways to make art such as film or music, or plan a yoga class, or anything similar that has positive value, but it can also be used to inflict harm, particularly when things are taken out of context using manipulative editing techniques with the purpose of promoting certain agendas or pushing some propaganda, selling products or ideas, or even for shaming or degrading purposes, sometimes with an intention to destroy reputation and livelihood. But in my opinion, the most harmful way that these methods are used is to drive people towards rage and violence. In the era of smartphones and social media, when anyone can create audio-visual content in the palm of their hands, our psyche, both individually and collectively, is constantly being hijacked.

One way of protecting our minds from manipulation is recognizing that the true meaning of things lays primarily in the context and not so much in fragments of content. I'm not a neuro-scientist but it seems quite obvious that our brain doesn't feel comfortable processing multi-source, complex, high resolution information with a broad view, we tend to lean towards focusing on bits of information rather on how they integrate and come together. Using a puzzle analogy, we seem to be much more interested in the pieces of the puzzle rather than taking our time and making the effort of putting the puzzle together, and we often tend to take one or two pieces and make all sorts of assumptions or speculations about how the full puzzle may look once assembled, usually coming up with biased theories that say a lot about our own preferences and beliefs and very little about the actual puzzle image once put together.

One of the key features of the teachings of yoga is the process of resolving this common tendency of ours which usually puts us in a bind and prevents us from being in touch with the fullness and essence of reality. We may feel strongly that we see things accurately when we see things in bits and pieces, and most of us do see these pieces truthfully, however to understand reality which is a complex interplay of many factors interacting with one another, we need to shift our focus to how things come together rather on how they exist individually. The simplified example is of a car which cannot run with its parts working well on their own, it needs all the parts to be assembled together and cooperate well in order to function, the human body works in the same way but is much more complex, and that principle applies to everything, from the most simple organism to the most complex biosphere, to all systems and phenomena whether animate or inanimate. When it comes to yoga, this becomes relevant when we look within ourselves.

Most forms of yoga practice encourage us to inquire internally and feel directly this experience of interconnectedness. We can observe how body, breath, and mind are in a way, one. As we refine our ability to pay attention, we notice the intricacy of the body through subjective yet very real experience of it, we can feel many bodily sensations manifesting in a wide range of textures and patterns, we can then begin to notice the symbiotics of it all and eventually see this clearly also at the subtle level of the mind.

For a decade or so I was a dedicated Vipassana meditation practitioner. To explain this method in a simplified way, it is about mindfully scanning the body and developing an intimate unmediated comprehension of felt body experience, moving from a gross to subtle level, to the point of feeling only a cloud of sensations in a state of flux, coming and going continuously. There is obviously a lot more into it which one discovers when diving deep into the different techniques and teachings behind them. This form of mediation served me very well for years but also started becoming restrictive at some point, it didn't seem to take me much beyond some short-lived pleasant moments of inner peace stemming from direct recognition of impermanence, and even this profound insight into the transitory nature of subjective experience didn't seem to change my habitual reactivity to all sorts of things at the root level. The more deeply rooted patterns of thought and emotion were still very much dominant even though on the surface level I experienced many transformational benefits. I then discovered  what is often called "non-dualistic" spiritual teachings, particularly traditions like the Tibetan Dzogchen and Indian Advaita Vedanta, and I realized that they were the missing link when it comes to seeking ultimate truth that has the power to shift things at the core.

When we practice meditation (or any form of yoga) with a non-dualistic approach, it is primarily about context. We shift our attention to the fact that everything we experience is simply appearances or subjective-experiential phenomena within this context that is often called "awareness" or "consciousness". We start to recognize that this context is always there, there is nothing we can do to turn it on or off, it is simply that space in which everything appears. Thoughts, emotions, states of mind, and also sounds, sights, smells, and of course our bodily sensations and breath, they are all like waves in the ocean while the context is the ocean itself, and the waves are nothing but different water shapes, forms or movement patterns arising and passing away on the surface of the ocean. Another image is the sky which is the vast open space, the context in which clouds and storms, rainbows and stars, and everything else that er can see when we look up skywards.

Now, when I practice meditation, instead of being focused on the breath or body (which I still do from time to time, it can be very useful), I try to rest my attention on this context, allow the waves of consciousness to come and go without getting caught up in them, simply rest as awareness itself, as the context in which everything happens internally. That is the highest state that yoga wants to lead us to, and it can easily get confusing or elusive. At times we may be in tune with this liberating insight, and at other times the mind easily gets caught up in its contents. Once we get a glimpse into this non-dual wisdom and fundamentally realize that context is the essential most profound thing to be recognized, that it is what ultimately frees us from all forms of misconception, we then find ourselves more easily dropping back to it whenever we need to.

You can try some short meditations guided by Stephan Bodian if you're interested in exploring this path, check them out HERE.

If you find yourself curious about these kinds of topics - join a workshop, a retreat, or any other event on offer.

Looking forward to sharing yoga with you in March.

Wishing everyone peace and happiness,

Oren

♡

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