Forget the World and Choose Reality | Mark Whitwell

The “world” is merely a presumed mass patterning of roles. Of limits interacting and reacting to each other in a tangled mess of dissociation from reality.

What is reality? It is the brightness of the sun, the flowers blooming and the mother father embrace of their new born. You are the power, intelligence, beauty and intrinsic harmony of the body in the known and unknown cosmos.

Your body mind is a duplication the grand cosmic domain arising in limitless spherical unfolding, blooming eternity. It is that which brought you here and presently nurtures you and all life.

The “world” is presumed to be real, but it is not. This presumption distracts you from actual reality and creates endless complication in the patterned roles, endless repetition and duplication of limit.

This is not reality although it’s dissociating effects are real enough: creating competition only, difference only, patriarchal cruelty as the normative social patterning in everyone, fear, control, war, pandemics and failure of Mother Earth’s ecologies for the human and other species.

If necessary the Earth will reject the human species for the continuity / regeneration of life, the power and sap of existence eternally springing forth.

There is only Reality, one Light, pure intelligence, unspeakable beauty in the intrinsic harmonies of Totality. Start there. Life is springing forth as that. There is the One. No difference. Not two. Only One.

You are that. You do not have to get to that because you are that. You don’t have to realize that because you are that. There is also a delightful dance of unique individuation & inherent relationship with all in the One.

So! The way forth is not to dissociate from the patterning of the usual life with the usual patriarchal advice to go to an “inner state” to deal with the “outer state”.

This caused the problem in the first place. No! The way forth is to associate positively to the mere patterning. Be free in its dark midst.

Embrace it like the sun shines on Earth. Outshine it with your intrinsic love, the unitary nature and context in which all things are happening. Embrace it like mother father embrace their baby.

In this way we will create a heart felt sustainable community in the darkness while not being naive to the dreadful state of humanity.

Have a friendly and intimate relationship with everything: even pain or someone else’s anger. Acknowledge the fact of the situation and be present to it.

We are nurtured and sustained and we can and do have a nurturing connectedness to all our experience. Forget the usual spiritual teaching to be aware only and become detached from your experience, which tends to leave an empty feeling.

I say get connected and be intimate. Value others completely as the one life: the one body of life. Some times it may be possible or necessary to change our circumstances and recognize that it is other people’s karma and not our own and to move out of inconvenience of danger.

But often it is dear friends or family and so we must be Present in a positive way. If we find ourselves struggling then we do some Yoga and return to link to the person again.

“Do your yoga.” Do your daily participation in the Given Reality. That is capital R Reality’s embrace of small “r” reality mess of humanity. And take action to get us all home. All to gather now.

Om Sahana Vavatu. Let’s get the job done together.

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Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.