What Yoga culture has to say to Western philosophy and Science

This has been brewing inside me for sometime, now I'll try to sketch its outline here, briefly.

Starting my own experience. The first thing I did when back from my friend who’s seriously depressed, together with other bad news from New Haven, was sit down and meditate. I sank into a deep slumber deeper than normal sleep. Since then I stick to it. I didn't insist, but it's rather an inner need. As I read more about Indian body culture I came to be convinced that the obvious effect it bears on my mind, pacifying and clarifying for the least, is through cleansing of my nerve system.
Deep meditation is one of the eight limbs of yoga, which means connection, connecting the individual being with the universal, the atman, the being of the self, with the Brahman, the foundation of all beings. This Indian spiritual practice/body culture/philosophy (it is hard, almost impossible to bind it down with one of the terms) has much to say to the old fight between free will and bio-chemical power, or between mind and body. If we are to separate mind and body, at least we've got to admit that they are two end of one same band, the stretching of one end will stretch the other end by moving the whole band.
That's where Hindu culture comes into conversation with Heidegger, Meleau-Ponty, and Wordsworth. In a Wordsworthan moment, or a special kind of lyrical moment, when Wordswroth focuses all his attention on daffodils, or standing before a tomb for an hour, the mind-body is one, which are “yogaed,” connected, banded with the oneness of the world, the beings. Heidegger states two major modes of Dasein's existence: being-in-the-world and being-along-with-the-other. Neither of them takes into account of at least another major, though rarer, mode of Dasein's existence, namely the Wordsworthian, lyrical connection with the beings, or rather, the Being. This third mode can be theorized, if we have to theorize, as one of the manifestations of the human being's natural tendency to merge into the oneness of beings. This major mode of being has its vital foundation, which can be explained by Yoga culture and enhanced by practice of it. Of course, Hindu culture, especially the yoga culture would have a fruitful conservation with Meleau-Ponty, whom developed what Heidegger didn't mention much, the body in Dasein's being.
Now it is Hindu culture with its subtle ideas of Minody (my coinage) which will hold strongly against any reductionism. The many humanists' good-willed insistence on free will is more or less vain, before the strong explanatory power of science, ever getting stronger after Frued and Darwin. It is heoric but not quite effective to resist it by giving up the majority of territory and insisting on one small patch of ground. "Yes, it's all decided by the bio-chemical, but that I'm here to argue for free will is not by that, but by my own free will itself." The framework in which this argument is made is false, out-dated, partial. Look at the number of people practising Yoga today, and the rate of its booming, even though most people are just doing the Asana part (bodily postures) of yoga for health benefits, but even only Asana's effect on the nerve system is more than obvious. It makes you feel good because it is cleansing your nervous system. I believe science will have to examine and try to understand it. And after, the society will absorb it into its fiber and it will eventually change the way we think about our Minody, our being, our way of living. And with meditation, the shallow reductionism either to body or mind, or superficial devision, will be shed away like old skin. They are not even something to fight against, being so far away from the deep being of human.
I guess I'm a bit preachy in writing all this. I've started a reading project to explore Hindu culture, and have finished Gitanjali and Siddhartha, moving on to the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, The Upanishads, Lotus Sutra. I am also planning a longish trip to India some time soon. I’ll say more when I have had more experience in both meditation, Asana and my trip of India.

My Daughter, Discourses and Human Nature

I am a father. I have been a father now for almost 16 months. The amount of joy and happiness my daughter Eliana has brought to my life is extremely hard to explain, because it is different than most other kind of joys I have felt before.
But my daughter has not only brought novel joy to my life - she has also become two eyes, from which I can look upon the world. I see the world anew in her. I see the world anew through her, because I am displaced by her. When she was born, a cry echoed throughout the room. A cry that I did not create, and an echo that I could not control. I was a bystander to the birth of my child. Not a creator, not a maker - a bystander. My daughter is of me, but not myself. This fact is still after all of these months incomprehensible for me. I and my wife made her, but I can take no credit for how she has developed. I have no idea how and why she grows, walks and lives.

The Serotonin Fall(s)

In Chinese literature, the sorrow of encountering the fall season is as banal as it is old. And as old and banal as it is, it still affects me, conditions my feeling of the fall; so, as the leaves fall, I accordingly suffered from what my roommate, a biologist, calls a seasonal depression. "Your serotonin level falls."

Hah, leaves and my serotonin levels are falling, as they kept falling in the history of Chinese literature. In the eye of a biologist, the repetitious literary laments of the fall season becomes literal: my laments of the season is caused by the fall of my serotonin; which, like the falling of leaves, is no more than a natural phenomenon.

Asobi Seksu

Last weekend I went to the city for the first time since starting grad school. An old high-school acting buddy was checking out an Asobi Seksu concert.

To my ignorant ear, it was NY art rock blown out into loud prog synthpop, with a Japanese-American lady making ecstatic convulsions behind a keyboard and warbling banal lyrics in English and Japanese at center stage. The tall, white bass player would often turn his back to us and run his hand up and down the long neck of his bass guitar. Multi-colored, spinning squiggles were projected on the wall.

Mushroom digressions--Too Busy to Seize the Day

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero – "Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future. --Horace

On the contrary, any Dasein has, as Dasein, already projected itself; and as long as it is, it is projecting. --Heidegger


Seize the Day, is a novella by Saul Bellow that is on my reading list. I read from Wikipedia that it is supposed to be great, “a small grey masterpiece.” I plan to read it in the future when I am less busy, not so hectic.

“Sorry that…but I’ve been extremely busy.” “It has been such a hectic week!” “Life is so busy!” To say that one is being busy is not really an excuse, because we are actually, factically busy. Everyone has so many things to do that the busy-ness is undeniable. But what makes us essentially busy is probably more what to worry about than things to do. There are ten things that we really want to achieve, five items that we really desire and three things we really afraid that it will happen. The future sucks us in onward, out of the present.

Two slide guitar albums

One is "Jin Jin" (firefly) by slide guitarist Bob Brozman from Howaii and Sanshin player Takashi Hirayasu, from the southern islands of Japan. (Sanshin is the Japanese adoption of the Chinese instrument Sanxian) Folk songs from the south of island. As refreshing as breeze from these island. The Lyrics can be funny. For example, one of the songs tells children that there are three ghosts wondering in the street at night. They will cut your (now you are the children!)ears off if you don't sleep by 8 at night. etc. See
http://www.bobbrozman.com/jinjin.html

These are nice quotes

http://home.uchicago.edu/~pmarkell/extracts.html

Phenomenology of Loneliness

A few months ago my wife and our little daughter took off for two weeks, leaving me alone to myself in New Haven, CT. I have felt lonely before - it was not the first time. But this time it was especially lonely to me. I found myself wondering:

What is this "loneliness" I feel? How is it to be described? How to be named? I must wrestle with it to understand it even if I might not be able to conquer it.

But now you might say: who are you to think you might know anything about loneliness, son? And you are right to think that. I married very young and basically went from living with my parents, to living with my wife. I have never spent time alone before. However, for those who have never been married before or have never lived with a person before, I may ask: how do you know how it feels to be alone as a married man? A dog can naturally survive without living in water, but the fish will notice the dry air instantaneously and die. To understand how air "feels," must one not rather turn to the fish instead of the dog? And if this does not suffice, then let the doubter and inquirer simply take this post to be thoughts from a beginner.

It

The ‘Bringer of Light’ (henceforth denoted as the 'it') will not take "No" as a satisfactory answer; not even the subjugation of a people, bowing down at their feet is sufficient - to truly fulfill it's lust for conquest, one must become them; for it is not the physical subjugation that it deems glorious rather the mental. The redemption of a mind only fuels its lust for more; the adrenaline urges them forward.

Freedom reconsidered

Recently there are two books that really inspired me. One of Heidegger’s being and time, especially the section when he talks about “the They,” about how our being is shaped, caged, covered up by the Others. (Sartre, a profound misreader of Heidegger famously said: “Hell is the other” (L'enfer, c'est les autres), The others as the totality of the common and the ordinary of people. The other is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, especially the part in which he is talking about the power of political correctness to control and to eliminate certain kinds of ideas and opinions from being thought, making freedom in thinking and ways of life more or less an illusion. Let me quote one passage from each. I think the connection between is obvious. And I hope it would be thought-provoking to you, too.