Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Wonderful documentary
If you want to understand dimensions a little better (the 4th one in particular!) watch this! It's fascinating.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
On the intricacies of Qigong
A fascinating book made its way into my hands today while roaming between the shelves of the National Library: Qigong Fever by David A. Palmer. The book is actually a revised edition of its French version called La fièvre du qigong, published by EHESS. The purpose of the study is - to make it short - the elucidation of the "meanings, the goals and the social relations created around qigong practices", which "are not quite the same as those that have emerged around similar or even identical body techniques" (p 7).
I found some very interesting passages which I am going to transcribe here not only because they allow one to have a better idea of what lies behind the qigong phenomenon or to understand what we are being served nowdays under the "traditional" label, but also because I feel that there are lots of parallels to be drawn between qigong and its development and modern yoga.
I will start though - in order to arrouse your interest:) - with the author's experience in relation to this practice.
"The effects of qigong practice were powerful. I entered mental states I had never previously imagined. The limits of my body and of my world seemed to dissolve. I felt imbued with a powerful energy that could make anything possible. I no longer thought in words, but in forms and symbols which seemed to leap out of my head, my hands and my abdomen. I could see my thoughts like visible and living objects, as real and palpable as the material things in the outside world. The boundary between the real and the imaginary was vanishing. (p. 2)
...
A few years before the founding of the People's Republic of China" in 1949 a group of Communist cadres in the mountains of the South Hebei Liberated Zone discovered an ancient technique that, at almost no cost, could bring healts and vigour to the sickly and impoverished masses. It was a simple set of exercices that anyone could learn: every day stand still for half an hour, control your breath, concentrate on the yongquan acupoints at the centre of the soles of your feet, recite the mantra "My organs move, my mind is still". The cadres called this and other sitiing, lying and strtching exercices qigong - a name that literally means "breath training".(p.3)
...
In the 1950s and early 1960s traditional body technologies were reformulated and institutionalised as part of the Communist state's project of developing the health of the masses and of extracting and transforming all useful elements of traditional culture in the service of building a New China. The choice of the term qigong by Party cadres in 1949 reflected an ideological project: to extract Chinese body cultivation techniques from their "feudal" and religious setting, to standardise them, and to put them to the service of the construction of a secular, modern state. As such, qigong is an invented tradition. The object of its construction was to present qigong from a purely technical angle, to reconstitute the history of these techniques in isolation from their religious, political and social context, and to classify them according to a rational schema. (p. 5)
...
Many of the gymnastic, breathing and meditation techniques defined as qigong were widely practised in Chinese society before 1949, but were not known under that name, nor grouped under a single category. They were practiced in a diversity of contexts, and embedded in a variety of systems of representations and social organisations: monastic institutions, sectarian groups, martial arts networks, literati circles and medical lineages. It was only in 1949 that qigong became a global category which aimed to include all Chinese breathing, meditation and gymnastic techniques. As noted by Jian Xu, 'In a certain sense, the various forms of qi exercises designated by the modern term qigong always resided at the centre of Chinese culture, even though they were never regarded as self-sufficient cultural practices, but instead as ancillary to other cultural practices. ... Masters and students who transmitted knowledge of qi techniques usually did so in the name of a religion, or of a school of medecine or martial arts. It was unthinkable to study qi for the sake of its form and techniques and not in the service of other goals.'(p.8)
...
The status of body technologies began to change in the first half of the twentieth century with the introduction of Western values and the construction of a modern state. The new institutions privileged mechanical, disembodied ordering of the world: traditional body technologies were irrelevant to the ends of the modern bureaucracies, armies schools that mediated knowledge and power in the emerging society. [however, these body technologies manage tomake their way thanks to] widely circulated books that sought to eliminate the obscure esoteric language in which techniques had traditionally been couched, and to present them in the idioms of psychology, physiology and physics. (p.12-13)
...
But it was under the Communist regime that traditional body technologies became a distinct category. In its secular, technical, rational expression qigong has attempted a modern reformulation of the traditions through new combinations of techniques, new ideological constructions and enw models of transmission and collective practice. The technologies are traditional, but the qigong movement which diffused them in the second half of the twentieth century is a product of the Chinese socialist project of modernisation (p. 13)"
I found some very interesting passages which I am going to transcribe here not only because they allow one to have a better idea of what lies behind the qigong phenomenon or to understand what we are being served nowdays under the "traditional" label, but also because I feel that there are lots of parallels to be drawn between qigong and its development and modern yoga.
I will start though - in order to arrouse your interest:) - with the author's experience in relation to this practice.
"The effects of qigong practice were powerful. I entered mental states I had never previously imagined. The limits of my body and of my world seemed to dissolve. I felt imbued with a powerful energy that could make anything possible. I no longer thought in words, but in forms and symbols which seemed to leap out of my head, my hands and my abdomen. I could see my thoughts like visible and living objects, as real and palpable as the material things in the outside world. The boundary between the real and the imaginary was vanishing. (p. 2)
...
A few years before the founding of the People's Republic of China" in 1949 a group of Communist cadres in the mountains of the South Hebei Liberated Zone discovered an ancient technique that, at almost no cost, could bring healts and vigour to the sickly and impoverished masses. It was a simple set of exercices that anyone could learn: every day stand still for half an hour, control your breath, concentrate on the yongquan acupoints at the centre of the soles of your feet, recite the mantra "My organs move, my mind is still". The cadres called this and other sitiing, lying and strtching exercices qigong - a name that literally means "breath training".(p.3)
...
In the 1950s and early 1960s traditional body technologies were reformulated and institutionalised as part of the Communist state's project of developing the health of the masses and of extracting and transforming all useful elements of traditional culture in the service of building a New China. The choice of the term qigong by Party cadres in 1949 reflected an ideological project: to extract Chinese body cultivation techniques from their "feudal" and religious setting, to standardise them, and to put them to the service of the construction of a secular, modern state. As such, qigong is an invented tradition. The object of its construction was to present qigong from a purely technical angle, to reconstitute the history of these techniques in isolation from their religious, political and social context, and to classify them according to a rational schema. (p. 5)
...
Many of the gymnastic, breathing and meditation techniques defined as qigong were widely practised in Chinese society before 1949, but were not known under that name, nor grouped under a single category. They were practiced in a diversity of contexts, and embedded in a variety of systems of representations and social organisations: monastic institutions, sectarian groups, martial arts networks, literati circles and medical lineages. It was only in 1949 that qigong became a global category which aimed to include all Chinese breathing, meditation and gymnastic techniques. As noted by Jian Xu, 'In a certain sense, the various forms of qi exercises designated by the modern term qigong always resided at the centre of Chinese culture, even though they were never regarded as self-sufficient cultural practices, but instead as ancillary to other cultural practices. ... Masters and students who transmitted knowledge of qi techniques usually did so in the name of a religion, or of a school of medecine or martial arts. It was unthinkable to study qi for the sake of its form and techniques and not in the service of other goals.'(p.8)
...
The status of body technologies began to change in the first half of the twentieth century with the introduction of Western values and the construction of a modern state. The new institutions privileged mechanical, disembodied ordering of the world: traditional body technologies were irrelevant to the ends of the modern bureaucracies, armies schools that mediated knowledge and power in the emerging society. [however, these body technologies manage tomake their way thanks to] widely circulated books that sought to eliminate the obscure esoteric language in which techniques had traditionally been couched, and to present them in the idioms of psychology, physiology and physics. (p.12-13)
...
But it was under the Communist regime that traditional body technologies became a distinct category. In its secular, technical, rational expression qigong has attempted a modern reformulation of the traditions through new combinations of techniques, new ideological constructions and enw models of transmission and collective practice. The technologies are traditional, but the qigong movement which diffused them in the second half of the twentieth century is a product of the Chinese socialist project of modernisation (p. 13)"
Friday, March 19, 2010
Oh ye brothers and sisters in suffering...
This post is for all of you out there who are struggling with a language like Sanskrit, who deal with the difficult personalities of your teachers (indologist do have a reputation of being among the most... complicated people ever to walk the face of the earth), who despite the countless problems you face each day you continue to learn those paradigms, who -unpon realizing you forgot most of what you had learned during those hard-earned vacations- still have the power to open those dreadful grammar books and who, inevitably, at one point or another face THE question coming from a less than friendly interlocutor: "what's the use of it?".
Oh, and let's not forget the variations: "What are you planning to use Sanskrit for?"; "How is THAT going to change peoples' lives for the better?"; "Who needs that anymore?", "India hasn't got a civilization anyway, why bother learning that language?"... I could go on an on, and no, I'm not exaggerating. Usually at this point in the conversation you're glad you don't have a kalashnikov next to you, because you know you'd use it gladly despite you affinity for non-violence and pacifism.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having this hanging on a nail somwhere in the abyss of my subconscious, I was thrilled to read Niels Hammer's introduction to his Art of Sanskrit Poetry. He most obviously dealt with the same problems as you and I: "Though I have often been asked why I enjoy or study Sanskrit and what benefit such obscure language possibly might convey, I still cannot give an appropriate answer. Basically there's no real answer. Why do we live? What is the use of a Hareball? For each single act and each single thought should be complete in itself, without any arrière-pensée. Joy's soul lies in the doing; the present moment is all there is and that should suffice; [here he quotes the most fabulous of phrases:))] kṛpaṇāḥ phalahetavaḥ (only) the miserable (are) motivated (by) the result(s of their actions). But our civilisations pay the highest price possible for focusing so narrow-mindedly upon "utility"" (p. xv).
One precision is in order here: in India, when one speaks of action, one never means just the action itself, but its result as well. This is karma basically. And as you probably know, the actions (and so their results) is what engender a good or bad karma. Either way however, you are trapped in the infinite cycle of existence, doomed to be reborn until you will have consumed all the results of you actions. As a consequence,in a theistic approach, you are supposed to reach a state in which you realize you are not the one who does the action, but that the action is being done through you (by Reality, or God if you wish). In a Buddhist context, you would probably realize "I" doesn't really exist, and so there's no one to do the acts (and thus no one to collect their "fruits"). This is the way in which one can transcend this infernal cycle.
So the idea is that one needs to act as selfless as possible. This is the main idea behind the Sanskrit phrase cited above.
Hammer doesn't stop at this though, he reviews the imensity of Sanskrit literautre (be it scientific, religious, litterary etc), he draws the attention on the different approach one finds in the west as opposed to the East ("whereas Judaism, Christianity adn Islam primarily are faith-systems [...], Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism are primarily experience-systems. The difference is between faith in hearsay and subjective cognition. [...] for where the West emphasized moral perfection as the ultimate goal on life, the East preferred the freedom beyond the relative values of good and evil. reason may be a perfect servant but it is a devastating master. (p. XVII") and he finally states the importance of poetry: "generations outlive ideas, change theories, customs and clothes, whereas art remains, like human nature, basically the same - universal, as it suggests wonder, delight, beauty, compassion, sorrow or peace, through the subtles intuition of the fundamental unity of all living beings. [...] But awareness of the past creates humility and puts current issues into a relative perspective, and the purpose of much sanskrit poetic art was to suggest reality in all its absolute suchness thereby enhancing the quality of the present which is all we truly are. This approach tacitly presupposes that there exists a common neurophysiologically determined process causing deep inner (peack) experiences by transforming the view from within as a number of neural pathways in both cortical and subcortical structures are changed; and the art of poetry should be able to further such a process by suggesting the true nature of reality and/or consciousness - or life (p. xix)." Rien que ça!!
So there are those fields of study out of which practical and material stuff results (physics, maths, biology etc), and then there's what we call "human sciences". These are the ones who are fighting to keep us human, or fulfill those "human" needs in us. After a tyring day at the office, you're not gonna go study the intricacies of you car's engine are you? You're gonna go see a movie, a theater play, an opera, you'll read a novel or some poetry.. maybe even learn a language in order to be able to understand a certain culture better and thus raffine your thinking and the way you see the world. This is what Sanskrit does among other things.
Oh, and let's not forget the variations: "What are you planning to use Sanskrit for?"; "How is THAT going to change peoples' lives for the better?"; "Who needs that anymore?", "India hasn't got a civilization anyway, why bother learning that language?"... I could go on an on, and no, I'm not exaggerating. Usually at this point in the conversation you're glad you don't have a kalashnikov next to you, because you know you'd use it gladly despite you affinity for non-violence and pacifism.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Having this hanging on a nail somwhere in the abyss of my subconscious, I was thrilled to read Niels Hammer's introduction to his Art of Sanskrit Poetry. He most obviously dealt with the same problems as you and I: "Though I have often been asked why I enjoy or study Sanskrit and what benefit such obscure language possibly might convey, I still cannot give an appropriate answer. Basically there's no real answer. Why do we live? What is the use of a Hareball? For each single act and each single thought should be complete in itself, without any arrière-pensée. Joy's soul lies in the doing; the present moment is all there is and that should suffice; [here he quotes the most fabulous of phrases:))] kṛpaṇāḥ phalahetavaḥ (only) the miserable (are) motivated (by) the result(s of their actions). But our civilisations pay the highest price possible for focusing so narrow-mindedly upon "utility"" (p. xv).
One precision is in order here: in India, when one speaks of action, one never means just the action itself, but its result as well. This is karma basically. And as you probably know, the actions (and so their results) is what engender a good or bad karma. Either way however, you are trapped in the infinite cycle of existence, doomed to be reborn until you will have consumed all the results of you actions. As a consequence,in a theistic approach, you are supposed to reach a state in which you realize you are not the one who does the action, but that the action is being done through you (by Reality, or God if you wish). In a Buddhist context, you would probably realize "I" doesn't really exist, and so there's no one to do the acts (and thus no one to collect their "fruits"). This is the way in which one can transcend this infernal cycle.
So the idea is that one needs to act as selfless as possible. This is the main idea behind the Sanskrit phrase cited above.
Hammer doesn't stop at this though, he reviews the imensity of Sanskrit literautre (be it scientific, religious, litterary etc), he draws the attention on the different approach one finds in the west as opposed to the East ("whereas Judaism, Christianity adn Islam primarily are faith-systems [...], Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism are primarily experience-systems. The difference is between faith in hearsay and subjective cognition. [...] for where the West emphasized moral perfection as the ultimate goal on life, the East preferred the freedom beyond the relative values of good and evil. reason may be a perfect servant but it is a devastating master. (p. XVII") and he finally states the importance of poetry: "generations outlive ideas, change theories, customs and clothes, whereas art remains, like human nature, basically the same - universal, as it suggests wonder, delight, beauty, compassion, sorrow or peace, through the subtles intuition of the fundamental unity of all living beings. [...] But awareness of the past creates humility and puts current issues into a relative perspective, and the purpose of much sanskrit poetic art was to suggest reality in all its absolute suchness thereby enhancing the quality of the present which is all we truly are. This approach tacitly presupposes that there exists a common neurophysiologically determined process causing deep inner (peack) experiences by transforming the view from within as a number of neural pathways in both cortical and subcortical structures are changed; and the art of poetry should be able to further such a process by suggesting the true nature of reality and/or consciousness - or life (p. xix)." Rien que ça!!
So there are those fields of study out of which practical and material stuff results (physics, maths, biology etc), and then there's what we call "human sciences". These are the ones who are fighting to keep us human, or fulfill those "human" needs in us. After a tyring day at the office, you're not gonna go study the intricacies of you car's engine are you? You're gonna go see a movie, a theater play, an opera, you'll read a novel or some poetry.. maybe even learn a language in order to be able to understand a certain culture better and thus raffine your thinking and the way you see the world. This is what Sanskrit does among other things.
Monday, March 8, 2010
On different conceptions of poetry: East-West
The following passage is taken from The Transport of Love - The Meghadûta of Kâlidâsa translated and Leonard Nathan (1976, University of California). I think it describes quite accurately the Western vs. Eastern attitude towards art, in this case poetry.
"Where we look for close adherence to phychological and physical reality, the INdian poet rigorously excludes verisimilitude. Where we expect the poet to speak in his own voice - a voice that should be at once close to common speech and yet identifiably original - the Indian poet stays far behind his subject and stives at every turn for uncommon eloquence which yet deliberately echoes the voices of his tradition. Where we are prepared for, il not direct conflict, at least strong tension needing drastic resolution, the Indian poet gives us the slow unfolding of a foregone conclusion. Where we might hope to feel the pleasure of new insight, the Indian poet wants his audience to experience the delight of a foreknown universal sentiment. IN short, the poet was not expected to bring raw news of himself or the world, to lay out the complexities of social relations, or to flash light on the dark interior life of the particularized soul. He was asked instead to proffer the experience of the ideal, all the flaws of nature corrected, all the unfinished aims of men completed, everything in its proper place, performing its proper function in an orderly, therefore beautiful way. (...)
Behind INdian poetic expectation and the poems addressed to it were two major assumptions that we do not share. First, that reality was not to be sought through personal sensory apprehension of our changing empirical world, but beyond it to one that is permanent and ideal. One way the latter could be apprehended was through language that matches the ideal in its permanence and perfection. That language was Sanskrit in its poetic mode. Poems, then, were a way of experiencing the reality beyond appearance, and the pleasure one derived from reading or hearing them was, in the view of respected critics, analogous to the personal bliss arrived at by the religious experience of the divine truth. The second assumption concerned the hierarchical social system developed in India from Vedic times. This system was, according to the traditional view, based upon the rock of divine order. To understand it was, therefore, to approve it, realizing its faults to be the result merely of the shortcomings in those who failed to adhere to its rules, to dharma. The unspoken contract between Kâlidâsa and his audience assimilated these assumptions so thoroghly that they enter into every element of the Meghadûta and must be kept continually in mind if we are to understand what its proper audience experienced in the presence of the poem."
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
On "Yoga"
For years i have been trying to find hints through different texts and documents as well as different modern practices of what might be called "authentic Yoga", "THE Yoga". I realise now I had been entirely missing the point. There is no such thing as "true yoga", "authentic yoga" or whatever other derivate. Quite frankly, there is no one who can say exactly what yoga is!(anyone who pretends otherwise has just not read or pondered enough on this). There is not one yoga, but a multitude: as many practitionners, as many types of yoga. We are all forging our own yoga no matter what anyone thinks or says. There are no immutable principles. There are some who take a few ideas/affirmations and turn them into axioms. I'm not saying this is bad. On the contrary. Whether we like it or not, whether we're conscious of it or not, we are practicing while having adhered to a particular way of thinking. So one might better be conscious of it. I'm just saying that, while having been trained in a certain school (and obviously, they all think they have it right, even if they are denying it - why would one practice something if one thought there was something better out there?), we take on bord what is given to us and adhere to it and tend to see everything else as deviations from the true path. If one cannot see the validity of other approaches- or to look at it from a diffrent angle, the relativity of one's own approach - then one has most probably been brainwashed.
Here's an interesting passage taken from "Yoga in Modern India" (p. 19) by Alter, which might illustrate some of the points I've made earlier:
[the author mentions the orientalist who tend - and not only them mind you - to look at classical texts dealing with Yoga and consider thel "gold standard" in order to measure the authenticity of various kinds of practice]: "What else counts as an authoritative text, and on what basis are different texts ranked in terms of relative importance? How are they to be compared one with another if your point of reference is not the corpus itself but modern practice? The most obvious answer to these questions is to be somewhat restrictive and judiciously limit the scope to what are regarded as the primary texts [based on what? - my remark] - the Yoga Sûtra, the Yoga Upanisads, the Bhagavad Gîtâ, and the three mais Hatha Yoga texts of more recent, medieval antiquity, the Hathayogapradîpikâ, the Sivasamhitâ and the Gherandasamhitâ. But this presents problems, since in these texts Yoga blurs into Samkhya, Tantra, and the "cult of Krsna" among other forms of practice, systems of religious thought, and philosophical reasoning."
The differences in philosophies, in the forms of yoga, in the religious environment are far more drastic in reality than this passage suggests. This is why I'm saying that there's simply no point in looking for THE yoga (and judging others based on what one thinks Yoga is), but for what suits one best.
Here's an interesting passage taken from "Yoga in Modern India" (p. 19) by Alter, which might illustrate some of the points I've made earlier:
[the author mentions the orientalist who tend - and not only them mind you - to look at classical texts dealing with Yoga and consider thel "gold standard" in order to measure the authenticity of various kinds of practice]: "What else counts as an authoritative text, and on what basis are different texts ranked in terms of relative importance? How are they to be compared one with another if your point of reference is not the corpus itself but modern practice? The most obvious answer to these questions is to be somewhat restrictive and judiciously limit the scope to what are regarded as the primary texts [based on what? - my remark] - the Yoga Sûtra, the Yoga Upanisads, the Bhagavad Gîtâ, and the three mais Hatha Yoga texts of more recent, medieval antiquity, the Hathayogapradîpikâ, the Sivasamhitâ and the Gherandasamhitâ. But this presents problems, since in these texts Yoga blurs into Samkhya, Tantra, and the "cult of Krsna" among other forms of practice, systems of religious thought, and philosophical reasoning."
The differences in philosophies, in the forms of yoga, in the religious environment are far more drastic in reality than this passage suggests. This is why I'm saying that there's simply no point in looking for THE yoga (and judging others based on what one thinks Yoga is), but for what suits one best.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Matthieu Ricard conference
I have finally managed to attend a Matthieu Ricard conference last night in Paris. The last time I had tried to do this I had arrived one hour earlier and the place had been filled three hours earlier. This time I went there early enough and got a perfect seat (about one meter away from him:) ).
It was fantastic. The theme of the conference was altruism and the way it could change us all individually and - thanks to that - the society we live in. I must say it was the first time I actually understood the whole point of it. He said that altruism, kindness, compassion are all states of mind (not just some abstract concept of feeling) and that just as one works to cultivate a physical skill, in the same manner one should devote time to the betterment of one's mind. Through this, we can "contaminate" others with our lack of anger and disarm them. This is also the way in which we can oppose the exacerbated individualism of our society which will eventually lead us to our own self-destruction (ex. environnement, wars - since you no longer see others as human beins but only as targets - etc).
He also said some things about why saying that meditation is a way of shutting yourself from others and reality and of being egocentric is nonsense. One practices meditation in order to stop being egocentric and the transformation is visible in everyday life (a great deal of scientific studies have meen made on this topic). Some person said that withdrawing from her family in order to meditate made her feel as if she was excluding the latter, to which he responded that in order to do anything one need some privacy: whether it's practicing the piano, writing a thesis, or training for some competition. He said that if alowing 20 minutes a day or say 45 in order to become better and be a wonderful human being during the 23:15 hours left , then it is no doubt worth the investment.
He also dedicated a book to me (and many others :) ) saying: "à Alina, que l'amour altruiste règne en votre cœur, Matthieu", which I thought to be (and still do) really beautiful.
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