The Intellectual Within in Everyday Ramblings

If you look carefully at this tree shot you can see a squirrel jumping from one branch to the other. I personally just like the light. We had abundant unexpected dreamy light yesterday but it was cold. It is unusual for us to get that deep to the bone wind chill here but we certainly had it yesterday. Still, I was out in it as much as I could be as the moisture laden air was right on its tail and is here this morning.

I am listening to three different philosophy books. There is the History of Philosophy lectures; in those I am on #36, the second one on Immanuel Kant. Then I am just about ¾ of the way through the book, Mirror Mirror by Simon Blackburn and he is also talking about the categorical imperative in terms of morality and virtue and social cohesion. There is no doubt that these lectures are the history of Western Philosophy even though they don’t say as much.

It seems like I have always understood the basic concept behind the categorical imperative without knowing it was Kant’s most basic concept, so pervasive it is in our discourse as a culture. Truly, because of the big gaps in my education I missed Kant altogether. He sounds like he was a bit of a priss.

The other book I am listening to is one on the history of the text of the Yoga Sutras, (threads or songs). This text of aphorisms is promulgated in modern yoga as being unquestionably the founding text of the yoga we practice today. Kind of like a bible for yoga. The scholarly work goes deep into the differences in perspective in the various commentaries.

I have spent months over the last five years studying these four books or feet (padas) that make up this text, learning them in Sanskrit, chanting them, commenting on them in class. But what I am coming to understand that this is just one text that a particular guy, Swami Vivekananda, decided was the foundational text of yoga when he brought it to the west and he was born a half a century later than Kant.

What is old becomes new.

So the question, and this is a big one for me, is what the heck is yoga anyway?

Really.

I mean, it is totally weird to think that this thing I teach and benefit from so much is a mash-up between ancient wisdom texts from thousands of years ago and Western Physical Culture taught by missionaries to young Indian men in YWCAs in Calcutta in a colonial invasion…

I made an absolute fool of myself trying to explain Unitarianism to my hair person a few weeks ago. She had never heard of it and couldn’t figure out how it could be like a regular church with services and music, an organ and a hymnbook and ministers and not be, umm, Christian. Or specifically Christian. You can be a Christian Unitarian, or a Buddhist or Jewish. I made it sound like we were all a bunch of hippies, which we most certainly are not. Well, most of us.

She was completely baffled about how I could be taking a class on Dante’s Inferno at church. I was thrilled that they added back in an extra class this week to make up for our snow day that was really an ice day cancellation. So we get to talk about the end.

It is interesting, I spend most of my life engaged in doing things, yoga, church, poetry that I can’t coherently explain.

I know that when Mr. Finch was sick, especially the last five months or so with the wasting, I had a visceral physical response to his skeletal form. Every ounce of me wanted to recoil. This is biology. We shun wasting because by doing so we increase our chances of staying alive because our bodies think a pathogen is in play.

I have the same response when I see Diego’s eye sewn shut. But you know that is the great thing about having this mysterious thing called mind, we are able to let the affection and overriding love we feel towards others kick in and drive our actions.

And that is why I am typing this on my workstation at home on my laptop surrounded by empty egg cartons. :)

Diego is a total love bunny and wants to be involved in whatever I happen to be doing. Today we are learning to stop walking on the laptop when I am typing. Last night we learned about the vacuum cleaner.

Because of all the love and adapting and distraction, emotionally this was the best November I have had in 30 years. Wow. Just wow.

Last updated December 02, 2017