Monday, January 24, 2011

Feeling Conflicted (as usual) About Revelatory Insights

It seems like I am always hearing about people's next, next, and then next best and profound realization about life. I get tired of this. There is always a book I have never heard of, a swami I've never heard of, a retreat to the mountains I've never heard of, or some obscure little extra credit corner of spiritual and revelatory life that is providing someone with the new perspective they are finally ready to hear (tee-pees! Amazonian Shamanism! Kundalini energy!). Bleh. Even just the saying "when the student is ready the teacher appears" is kind of snobbish - "well look at me, I'm ready!" It could just as easily say "when the human is desperate, the free market will fill the hole for anywhere from 20 to 3,000 dollars." I mean, I'm pretty skeptical that new-insight people are enjoying entry into new aspects of self-inquiry as a result of their mastery of previously studied disciplines. And it's tough to take seriously the "next thing" seekers when everything else in their lives seems to have been taken so lightly that it can be abandoned for something "better." I mean I'm not trying to hate on personal evolution - our progress should be continual/cumulative in life and I certainly don't think we should ever consider ourselves to be "done" becoming who we are, but there's a line, no?

On the other hand: I like this stuff a little bit. I like to read books about things that are supposed to be useful to my perspective on myself and the world and everything like that. I even like to tell my friends about handy little ways of looking at the world that have been useful for me, and I'm sure I have been at least a touch sanctimonious about it a few times (I am thinking of one blog post in particular that I re-read and then cringed at myself about; there is no prize to readers who know which one I mean). And I love love love to hear what other people are thinking about with stuff like this. Also I am sensing a shift in myself away from the sect of Buddhism I have been looking into and more toward the India-centric yoga-related schools of meditation and stuff - at least in my inquiry stage (man I'm feeling jaded about Buddha - dharma is cool, but karma can suck it, and so can the priestly hierarchy and the glamorous temple and the unending, supplicating prayers). So am I a dabbling dilettante? A potential guru-hopping "new truth finder?" Probably. What to do about this?

Well, sticking with something is maybe a good start. I mean, sometimes I don't want to read anymore books about this stuff. I have enough books as it is, and I haven't exactly integrated them fully into my life in terms of insight and application. In a case of actual irony, I am thinking about this partly thanks to the insightful books I just read that my friend lent me. But really, to just keep reading on and on and on is the same thing as Sharpening Pencils. It's hard enough to hold on to new insights as they are arising. It's another thing to apply them to life and let them affect you enough to mean anything. In Buddha class this comes up sometimes - intellectual insights are nothing without putting it into practice, and the metaphor is that it's like having the prescription for the right medicine, and believing that since it is on your bathroom sink you're cured. You have to actually take the medicine. Knowing something is useless without acting upon it. In some way, being in a constant stake of seeking is yet another way to postpone meaningful life progress.

So anyway I feel like I have to boil down my plan for my relationship to yoga a little bit so that I don't end up in the ever-seeking stage dilettantish amateurism they way I have for everything in my whole life so far. For now, I have in front of me: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, which is the main yoga source text; my own physical and mental yoga practice; and muscular anatomy to learn. That's plenty. Can't go picking up book after workshop for the rest of time. Sigh, well, I have one new book right now on women and yoga which I'm going to read but I feel okay about that one because I feel like I can file it under anatomy. But seriously let's keep things manageable, here.

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