Technical Terms: Īśvarapraṇidhāna

We see beauty all around us: a bird in flight, a bee on a flower, the sunlight on the water, the moon in the night sky. And then the mind tries to capture it, savour it, and repeat it.

Have you ever noticed that when the mind tries to capture beauty the sense of beauty goes?

The mind can never capture beauty nor any experience. It is too slow.

The point is you are the beauty. You are the same beauty as the sun, the flower, the water and the bird. When we stop trying to experience beauty, we are free to relax into what is already true. We feel the beauty, love and harmony of the One binding absolute Reality that is appearing as you and I and everything.

In the same way, in trying to capture the experiences and ideals of spiritual traditions we can never enjoy them; because we already are what these words express. There is no getting to spiritual ideals. There is no “becoming” a Buddha. There is no getting “enlightened.”

What there is is direct participation in Reality Itself; the Nurturing force that brought you here in the first place through the mystic harmony of male-female. The force that is blooming now as the whole body and presently sustaining you. We do not need to realise Reality. Reality has realised us.

Actual Yoga then arises naturally as the movement of Life in body, breath and relationship, rather than the manipulation of Life and the qualifying of the living organism with concepts and effort in mind and body.

It is simply clear that the wonder of Life and its source is our natural condition already utterly established in us as us. This is perfect faith in and surrender to Life, whatever Life is altogether in its extreme intelligence and vast interrelatedness.

Attempting to surrender or develop faith in a proposed social concept such as God as ‘other’ only keeps the mind busy and stressed.

My beloved friend U.G. was fond of saying:

“You cannot surrender to anything because every time you surrender you want something. There is no path at all. There isn’t anything you can do. All effort has come to an end. All movement in the direction of getting something has come to an end.”

The only samadhi that is valued in Yoga is sahaj samadhi: the union that occurred when you were born; the unity condition of every thing and every person in the cosmos with the cosmos. In the Buddhist tradition the experiences of bliss that come and go were described as “higher defilements.” They were distractions that risked creating an on/off switch in the mind vis-a-vis our sense of connection to Reality.

Everything has been given. There is a Heart Prana (Hridayashakti) flowing through you that is the cause and context of everything. Nothing could arise without the Heart, not even apparent limitations of body and mind.

The Heart is the first cell of life that arose when you appeared through the absolute union of male-female polarity. Synchronistically the nurturing force of Life began to flow through you like a lotus in full bloom, as mother love.

The mind is not the enemy, but part of the wonder and beauty and supreme intelligence that is Life. The Mind is an extraordinary elaboration of the sublime human nervous system. It is there as the navigation and communication mechanism of Life.

The Mind does not need to be conquered in a heroic spiritual enterprise. The only thing needed is a practical means to link the mind to its source: the Heart. The Heart’s flow clarifies the mind and removes the illusion that the mind has any existence that is independent of the Heart.

Yoga is the technology of participation in the Heart — the very source of the body and the mind. Visceral connection to one’s own form and the form of your friends and lover cuts through the pain and anger of the world leaving you standing free as you always were.

U.G. declared for all time that: “Unhappiness is trying to be something that you are not.”

How much of modern spirituality is such an attempt?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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.