Divinity Fantasy Waning; Yoga Trainging Weekend; Follow up on DIY Spirituality

Still thinking about how to follow a path or philosophy or religion without having to adhere to it on the absolute face of its doctrine. Clearly there are shades of gray in every interpretation of a path. I mean, every one of the gajillions of sects, tributaries, and off-shoots of Xtianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and whatever, each represent its own independent shade of gray of its parent religion.

And yoga is the same way. Right now I am using two of Iyengar's books, Light on Yoga, and Light on Life, as foundation-providing texts. They are in the required materials of my course and he's a main guy of stuff and if I get something from him he is basically recognized as an authority and I can defend my position very well behind his textual shield. And then this other required book by Desikachar has a very different take on things that makes me reevaluate Iyengar's books. And even Iyengar, apparently, has changed his approach to things over the years - the source text for yoga asana, Light on Yoga, was written quite a while ago, and things just change. Perspective on yoga and how to do it changes. It is, to borrow from either Iyengar or Desikachar (I can't remember who said it), to live in a state of "sustained transformation." Evolution revolution, man.

So different branches of faiths have their own interpretations of a path, and then even further, each person filters a particular doctrine through his or her own experiences and understanding. Our language itself doesn't even permit any real confidence that what someone means to say is what the hearer understands. Even two people who agree about something in any given moment could have different concepts of what is happening. We just can't know. It's all shades of gray.

Living with shades of gray is actually a more complete way to experience life. This language vagueness I just mentioned reminds me of a grammar tussle I got into once. I was taking a class to become a tutor for adult literacy, and some retired school teacher corrected me when I said "different than" - she said "no no, different FROM." Lady, f*** you it's "different from." First of all, there can be, for the deliberate speaker, shades of difference between the two. Troy is a different city FROM Albany, but my time living in Troy was different THAN my time living in Albany. But besides this, even if I wasn't speaking deliberately, did she know what I meant? Yes she did. The function of grammar isn't to create a set of rules that people have to adhere to - and then provide a means by which small minded retirees can feel superior to others. Correct grammar is an important social anchor for personal and professional credibility, but that's where strict adherence should remain - somewhere with rules of etiquette - it's really only there to rely on when you don't already know your audience or situation. Communicating effectively requires flexibility - your language choice must accommodate your audience, adjust in order to express the tone you wish to impart; you must call upon all the innumerable shades of subtle gray available to you in order to be clear and precise. And in fact, it is the flexibility of language that I find so wonderful about it; I think that beauty is lost when people insist that English has to exist according to rigid rules. These are people who are, as Ms. Gertrude Block put it (in the June 2010 edition of the NYSBA Journal), "America['s] . . . huge middle class of 'rules-followers'" who use strict grammatical adherence as a way to "distinguish[] the educated from the uneducated." It's absurd. It's like using "they" as a gender neutral pronoun instead of having to say "he or she." Let it go, people, it might be in the dictionary eventually, and if it happens, that will be okay, stop freaking out about it. Use it if you want to, don't if you don't. Language IS ALL ABOUT flexibility - "meaning is use." (This is attributed to the linguist Ludwig Wittgenstein, and I only know the quote and his generic history - reading more about this is on my self-improvement list under "language arts education.") So let's add to the pile that strict rule-adherence is actually a pretty small-minded way to live. Stay gray or stay home.

Okay so let's accept shades of gray as a given - even as a requirement for broad-mindedness. What is the limit of personal interpretation within which you can still claim to be an adherent of a particular faith? Short of absolute contradiction or incoherence, you're in the game. That's it. These are parameters I can work with. I think I can feel comfortable calling myself a devotee of anything (even grammar) as long as I don't completely contradict its holdings, or twist it into something incoherently unrecognizable to its source.

So I guess I'm really going to have to be comfortable with uncertainty, with ambiguity, with interpretation and personalization. And how does this affect a yoga teacher's credibility? How do students feel when they hear conflicting messages from their teachers? I guess you just have to present information in guideline form. It's scarier in that it requires a student to ask more of him- or herself, and the student must be more sensitive to his or her own experience, and be critical of information as it is presented, and combine one's intuition and experience with ancient teachings and foundation texts. In this way living without absolutes requires a greater depth of understanding; and this, in turn, is actually more precise than something that is supposedly black and white.

Phew. On a side note, the divinity school fantasy is waning, as I knew it would, and gets to be back burned along with all the other things I get carried away with. One thing at a time.