by Sam Glannon
One thing about practicing ashtanga yoga is that what we do is consistent day to day, and doesn’t change. It might be reasonable to expect that doing the same practice each day would produce a similar result each time. But I think any person who has actually done our practice over the course of many years will agree that this is decidedly not the case. Of course there is normal variability in our practice, such as is explainable based on the variable conditions of human life over time. This normal variation in our experiences aside, there are some times when we might have experiences practicing which are very unusual or hard to categorize. What are we to make of the experiences which we have during practice which are incompatible with our usual patterns of experience, physical or mental, or which seem to defy categorization? And so, at this time of the year during which we observe Halloween and All Saint’s Day, we inevitably come, sooner or later, to these related categories of the unexpected and the uncanny.
1. Regular Variability
It should first be established that there are regular variations in our experiences during the practice which fall into neither of these two categories. By virtue of the fact that we practice each day, some change in the circumstances of our lives must be expected. We do not eat the same things each day, or sleep at the same time, or live through exactly the same routine on each day. After all, what degree of monastic living would be required to reduce all normal variation in human circumstance to the point of exact repeatability? Nor would such a condition be desirable, both because it would be very boring and also because it likely would not meet all of our needs, physical and psychological. The farcical exactitude of the person who, arising each day at exactly the same minute, eating and drinking exactly the same things in the same quantities, undertaking the same activities, and so on, would be both ridiculous and remarkable. But it would also be futile, given that the external world in which we live is not regular or repeatable over time, but exhibits a great degree of variability. There is seasonal change which, in this part of the world, produces great differences in our felt sense of our physical body during different times of the year. In Ayurveda, this gives rise to the idea of rtucharya, meaning ritual and habitual practices which change based on the season of the year. This is likewise the moment, which arrives again each year perennially, in the manner of Elaide’s eternal return, in which I will remind you to take extra care with yourself during these periods of time during which the weather is changing between hot and cold, as your physical experience of your own body during the practice may be very different now compared to what it was a few months ago when it was hot.
2. The Unexpected
But it should be noted that, some days, when one has every logical reason to anticipate that practicing will be difficult, you try, and it isn’t. Or the opposite happens - you expect it will be wonderful, but it’s awful. This happens to me sometimes when I haven’t slept enough. I often predict that on such a day, I won’t have any energy (and frequently, that is the case - I wouldn’t recommend doing this). But once in a while, I can’t sleep, I go in to practice, and for some reason I feel very light and energetic. This is the first of my two categories - the unexpected. These are times when, despite every sensible reason one can conceive, things do not turn out as you might predict. In part, I am introducing this category to observe that, contrary to what we often like to think, we don’t have perfect knowledge of the state of our own body. We tend to think and act as though our own abilities of introspection and interoception provide us with a direct line of information about the state of our body. I am proposing that that is simply not the case. I would provide you with two different analogies through which to think about the difference I am describing: is your perception of your body like the situation of a pilot in the cockpit of an airplane, where many various instruments provide real time, objective information about the status of the vehicle in which he is traveling? Or, is your knowledge of the body more akin to the situation, more akin to a person who is riding on an elephant, and although one can get real time feedback from the disposition of the elephant and the way that s/he reacts to you, one does not know exactly what is going on? I propose you are in the second situation. Of course, through being better acquainted with the elephant, becoming friendly with it, and eventually, one hopes, by taming it, you get better and better at negotiating the relationship you have with the elephant. But as good as you might get, you never achieve that first state of affairs, wherein you have real time, direct knowledge of your body. You are always getting a picture which is an indirect representation, or to put it more poetically, you are getting told a story which involves an aspect of interpretation rather than simply a list of facts.
The first conclusion I must put forward is, therefore, that one’s experience of the body is a story about the body and not direct information from the body. In the same way, Hinduism and Buddhism have repeatedly advised us that our senses do not give us direct knowledge of the external world more generally, but rather paint a picture of it, and one which is liable to falsity and error. As instances of that, we could cite experiences like hallucination, where our sense organs, although they are functioning, produce a perception of something that isn’t really there. Another common analogy that comes from the Indian philosophical tradition is something that’s referred to as the rope/snake analogy. This analogy invites us to imagine the situation of a person who, around the time of twilight, mistakes a coiled rope for a snake, becomes afraid, but then on further investigation realizes the mistake and is pacified. This is not an instance of hallucination, but merely of misperception, and it reveals to us a basic truth of human perception which is salient for our yoga practice. In our normal lived experience, we are having sensory perceptions of the external world (in this analogy we are seeing what is actually a rope, but in half-light). On top of that layer of perception, which we do experience, we are also getting an interpretive overlay of what the brain and mind make of that information (in the analogy, this is the perception that the rope is a snake). At least as far as visual perception goes, this is certainly true, because there can be all sorts of other sensory tricks and odd visual phenomena which arise out of the nervous system itself and not out of the sense organs.
All that is required to make this experience of misperception into an experience of the uncanny is that one’s perception of the world involves something which is by nature disconcerting or pushes against what one believes one knows about the world. I will advance to you, therefore, the comic example of Yajirobe and Kitahachi in Jippensha Ikku’s early-1800’s novel ‘Hizakurige’. The novel follows the two travelers as they walk the Tokaido road between Edo and Kyoto. In the particular episode I have in mind, these two bumblers are staying at an inn, where they are told that the innkeeper’s wife has died in tragic circumstances and is haunting the place (this begins on p. 121 in the Satchell translation). They become apprehensive and progressively grow more and more terrified as the evening progresses. Eventually they need to go out into the back garden to urinate, where they encounter the ghost. They fall over each other and make a lot of noise in their attempt to flee, at which point the innkeeper comes out and explains to them that what they have seen is only a kimono hanging up to dry (you can see Hiroshige’s rendition of the scene below).
In this particular experience of the uncanny, all that is required for that which is uncanny to be rendered mundane is an insight into the nature of the phenomena at hand. And likewise in our practice, sometimes the advent of a new sensation or other experience in the practice is really an invitation to increased awareness of some element of our experience to which we have heretofore been blind. We might have a sensation which we have not yet experienced, even a painful one, and that might lead us to understand the mechanics of a posture more completely, or to deepen our knowledge of the body. For instance, maybe your knee hurts in the backbending, and you fear the worst, until someone points out to you that you need to internally rotate your legs, at which point the pain no longer arises and your backbending actually improves. The pain which we had felt was threatening then becomes like the kimono in the wind, as it moves from being incomprehensible to understandable.
3. The Uncanny
The foregoing is meant to establish the existence, indeed the commonness, of regular variability in our experiences of the practice of ashtanga yoga. We can expect to encounter variability, and that unexpected experiences will also arise. We can also expect that as we learn more about what we are doing, certain aspects will move from being unknown and unfamiliar, to commonplace. But neither of these two brings us yet to the threshold of the uncanny, which is another category still more rarified. In the field of our experience generally, other experiences which might be categorized as experiences of the uncanny are ones such as those people describe of alien encounters, experiences of the supernatural, having tea with bigfoot, and so on. There are those people who insist that Elvis didn’t die and that they’ve seen him. The list goes on. I express no judgement in any of these cases about the veracity of such claims. Within the scope of the uncanny we can include those experiences which are novel, but also cannot be explained according to our existing understanding of the phenomena under observation, and which therefore may be unsettling or disruptive to our understanding of the practice, or to our understanding of the body, or to our experience or worldview. When speaking of experiences in the world which are not related to yoga, we might think of experiences in the world which we have to which we cannot ascribe a cause, or which do not follow our normal understanding of the rules of the universe, as we understand them. Consider for a moment the phenomena of ball lightning. This is certainly not an occult phenomena, but rather an electrical one, or so we believe; science does not have a single consensus answer as to how ball lightning is produced and why it behaves as it does. Nevertheless, it is well attested over the course of human history, and has even been measured and imaged by scientific teams studying other forms of lightning. It is not mythological, and yet it defies explanation. It is also (and I think this is also a part of the uncanny) weird. It behaves in a way which is unpredictable, almost spooky.
To say that we often have experiences of the uncanny during our ashtanga practice is by definition untrue. It is also a salient feature of these experiences that they are uncommon and break from the normal patterns of experience. Nevertheless, once in a while, given the right confluence of factors, strange things do happen. Allow me to give a personal example to make more concrete the sort of thing I’m talking about. The first time I ever went to India, I was doing Sirsasana (headstand) on the roof of the hotel in which I was staying. It should be said that I had flown for around nineteen hours from Boston, on to Dubai, and then to Kolkata, where this took place. I had slept very little in that time, and had eaten very little. The roof on which I was practicing didn’t have a wall at its perimeter, and was around eight stories tall, higher than the one or two story houses surrounding it, which meant it afforded a good view in all directions. In other words, if, while upside down, one looked out across the flat plane of the surface of the roof, one was looking a long way off into space horizontally. The perception which I had at that time was that I was about to fall up into the sky - I mean to say that as my feet were pointing upwards away from the earth, I had the fear that, unrestrained by gravity, I would begin to fall upwards away from the roof. This was not a passing impression. We hold Sirsasana for fifteen breaths. I recall holding the posture and breathing for as long as I could given that I was having this disruptive sensation. I doubt I made it to fifteen breaths, but I think I probably made it to ten, which means that I was in this posture and having this experience for several long minutes. It showed no sign of dissipating as I held the pose, but eventually I felt so disconcerted that I did come down. The experience lasted long enough for me to recognize that it was happening, and take note of how unusual it was, and to continue observing it for some time even after that. This is not an experience I have very often, although once in a very long time, given the right circumstances, I have had it again. I don’t know if that means there was something going on in my sensory apparatus which has been repeated at other times or if, having felt that first time this very unusual sensation, I have when the moment was right, felt it again as almost an echo of that first experience. When I describe this as a sensation I was having, I mean to distinguish from what it might be potentially like to have the idea that one was going to fall upwards. It wasn't that. It was that I felt I would fall upwards away from the earth, in the same way that one might feel the normal pull of gravity downwards. In other words, it was a sensory experience, and not a mental one.
This is one of the many things which might be classified under the heading of the uncanny. It was a bizarre experience, and one which I still cannot explain.
This example is, however, only an example of a physical experience, a sensory one in this case, which defies easy understanding. By far the more compelling and unusual category of experience which is possible during yoga practice are the mental states which it is possible to encounter in this context. I should reiterate, before delving into this territory, that most days, one practices, and although you might enter into a meditative state almost every time you practice (I want to state clearly that I hope you are - if you aren’t, focus on the breathing) these more unusual experiences do not happen often. Furthermore, when I say that these experiences are mental, I don’t mean to imply that they are ideas, or are linguistic/discursive in nature, or imagistic in the way that dreams might be. I simply mean to distinguish them from experiences felt or sensed in the physical body of the type I have just mentioned. This dichotomy, so entrenched in our culture and way of speaking, between the body and the mind is itself an illusory distinction in many ways. In fact the territory of experience I am pointing towards is so broad that I do not want to give too narrow a definition of this. It is precisely the amorphous, protean, chthonic character of these experiences which make them fascinating and hard to describe. I will allude only to a few general trends in things I have felt over time to give a sense of the kind of thing I am talking about. 1) experiences of transcendent depersonalization. By this I mean that one is witnessing oneself but feels a sense of being beyond and behind one’s own actions and experience, not in the sense that you are witnessing the actions of another person, but instead that there is some larger consciousness or perspective which is suddenly felt in addition to one’s limited, small self consciousness. 2) experiences of heightened emotional sensitivity. This could mean that one experiences an emotion one might feel normally, but with an increased intensity. It could also mean that one experiences a transformed emotional relationship with something which one normally regards in quite another way. These first two categories of experience can be uncanny in the sense that they involve a new set of feelings and relationships in place of deeply entrenched emotional and mental patterns, either emotional patterns or patterns of consciousness. 3) distortions of perceptions of time, meaning it seems that time passes slowly or quickly, or of space, meaning that one feels oneself to be large or small relative to one’s normal perceptions of such things. This is more often experienced in meditation than in the moving asana practice, but it is possible in both contexts. I could multiply this list tenfold and more. In mentioning these experiences I am not attempting, however, to create a typology or an exhaustive description of such states, but merely to offer a few useful examples to see what sorts of things I mean. These experiences are uncanny in the sense that they push our field of immediate experience beyond the bounds of what is normal, and because they are unsettling to our usual experiences of reality. This sense of the immediacy of these experiences, and the weirdness of some such experiences, is what I wish to highlight.
It is questionable whether yoga has remained a mystical practice as it has been imported into the west, or whether, as it seems possible to ask, it has become merely a form of physical exercise or a health practice. I do not mean to dismiss goals related to physical health as unimportant, or to imply that practicing yoga for these purposes is not the right thing to do. Our society is also badly in need of yoga to meet needs of this nature, and the enthusiasm with which yoga and mindfulness practices have been adopted demonstrates the unmet psychological and physical needs which are therein addressed. However, yoga and mindfulness might become only a form of charlatanism or a modern snake oil if they become divested from the larger messages they contain about the relationship between the individual and the world and about the nature of reality. The fact that these aspects of the practice exist and are vital to it are also partially responsible for the overall therapeutic effects it has in these other domains. When we talk about mysticism as a way of knowing the world, we are also talking about the difference between intellectual knowledge, such as that derived from logic and scientific inquiry, and the information we derive from direct experience. Our experiences of the uncanny can be an experience of the intrusion of reality as it presents itself to our experience into the field of our ideas about the world. In this sense, the hope is that our practice rises to the level of being a mystical practice, and that it therefore becomes a way that we have of knowing about the world in a non-rational, non-intellectual way. To do this is a higher bar to meet than some other standards which we might set for ourselves, but is more fulfilling and deeply meaningful once realized, and renders the practice something of an altogether more sophisticated nature.
(Also Happy Halloween Everyone!)
