This “News Letter” No. 1, was written in August 27th 2012 to Athens – Greece
« Circular time »…
As a reminder, Indian thinking is based on a cosmogonic representation of life and contrary to the idea and to the feeling of most of the Westerners who present Hinduism as a polytheistic religion, for Indians the Divine is ONE in its essence.
To the elders in India, time is seen there in a cyclic or spiral way, like for Hésichios of Alexandrie, The grammarian (in ancient Greek Ἡσύχιος / Hêsýkhios) who wrote that life is «chronos tou einai” “the time of the being”. If we inverse this expression, as Raimon Panikkar the theologian proposes, it becomes: ” the time is also the life of the being “, and it becomes interesting because life is breath, the movement of inhale and exhale, this coordination of moving in space on a line, a circle or a spiral that never goes backwards, whereas time is rhythm.
Indian mythology makes reference to the quality of the rhythm which can be creation or destruction, as shows so well Siva (devanāgarī :शfव), the cosmic dancer or “Nataraja” (the God of the Yoguin) in the danse called Tāṇḍava or Tāṇḍava nṛtya, (ताण्डव, ताण्डव नृत्य) .
The rhythm quality which is either “creation” or “destruction”, it is as in Jaïna-Yoga described the Indian philosopher Jidhu Krishnamurti, the quality of the “silence”, which can be “positive” or “negative”.
“It is much more important to understand our power to create the illusion that to understand the reality. This power has to stop completely, but not to obtain the reality; we do not discuss with the fact. The reality is not reward, the forgery has to disappear because it is false and not with the aim of finding the truth.”
We live in the illusion most of the time. We have anticipated ideas, desires, different faiths, opinions and convictions. But all of this is the thought’s fruit, our reflexions, of what was brought back to us, from media… We see the world through the other people’s opinion. That is why it is necessary to us, to free us from the illusion, to begin by observing it, by understanding how we create the illusion, how we manage to pass from the immediate and true perception to what is for a perception full of value judgments and diverse feelings.
By this attention, we weaken gradually the power of the illusion and seize the truth. Indeed, the illusion is an erroneous perception of the reality, created by the thought.
Krishnamurti
«Oh yogi, don’t practice Yoga without vinyāsa…»
Vāmana Ṛṣi (devanāgarī : वामन ऋषि), Yoga Korunta
How to get away from māyā (devanāgarī : माया), the illusion, how to enter the rhythm, how to enter the circle ? yoga practice is one of the ways. Yoga is breath, it’s a movement, it’s a danse, the yogi, also called sādhaka (devanāgarī : साधक) will, thanks to the rhythm of his practice reach mokṣa (devanāgarī : मोf), liberation, freedom.
«To worship God by dancing achieves all inspiration and the way of freedom opens to the one who dances»
Ancient text abstract, quoted in «Les civilisations de l’Asie»,
Casterman edition, ISBN 2-203-15707-0
It is not by chance, if Sri K. Pattabhi Jois called its book “Yoga Mala“. Mala, is the rosary of prayer, like a pearl necklace that are the postures; the thread is the victorious breath of continuous Ujjãyi, , in rhythm never going backwards, but from pearl to pearl, without ever bypassing a pearl. In the rhythmic beat, the postures pass but are never repeated. Thanks to the mula-Bandha (: मðल बWध), and in the ujjãyi, the tension is constant in the thread of the necklace.
Om Shanti,
JC Garnier
