Repetition
by Sam Glannon
I. Broken Record
I am in the habit of repeating myself, and therefore you will have to forgive me if you have heard me say these things before. Those who have been attending the class for some time will have heard me say all this at least one thousand times.
For those of you who are young enough to have never listened to music from a vinyl record, allow me to explain something that can go wrong in this context. There is a defect a record can develop if treated poorly whereby the track, which is normally contiguous from beginning to end, develops a break in its continuity in that it will feed back into itself.
The result is that a section of the recording plays back again and again until you interfere, take the needle out of the groove and either move it on past the end of the loop, or put on a different record. People call this a broken record...People call this a broken record...People call this a broken record...you see?
We human beings are susceptible to this same form of error. We can develop habit patterns which are similar loops of negative thinking patterns coupled with behaviors, often which become self destructive or detrimental to our well-being.
A certain negative thought or emotion occurs, a habitual response follows, and the results of the behavior accrue. Rinse. Repeat. The effects compound themselves over time. Many addictions and compulsive behaviors large and small fall into this category. By being repeated, these habits gain strength and have ever increasing effects on our lives and personalities.
On the other hand, we can develop positive feedback loops in our behavior as well, wherein a productive habit builds on itself, and comes to transform other areas of our lives.
If done successfully, spiritual practice should be of this sort. It should give you a point of leverage from which to transform your mind, emotions, habits, ways of thinking, and so on. It is worth noting that there is something repetitious about a lot of forms of spiritual practices. In Hinduism and Buddhism, we have the word Sadhana, to which I will return later, but this quality of repeating and then repeating again is common to what we refer to as spiritual practices across cultures. Monastic lifestyles have this character. Witness also chanting, a category which transcends any individual faith tradition but which is by its nature repetitious, and even many festivals and holidays, which by being repeated year after year, century after century, take us out of normal human experiences of subjective time into a timeless eternal state which is sometimes referred to as ritual time.
In other words, these are examples where repetition becomes a tool through which we achieve some form of transcendence.
II. Samskara
As I said previously, I am in the habit of repeating myself a bit, and you will have to forgive me for that.
Samskara is a Sanskrit term, which in one way of thinking can describe these same patterns of thinking and behavior. The analogy which is sometimes made is to a rut worn in a dirt road. Imagine that over time, various carts and other vehicles of many kinds pass over the same course on an unpaved path. You have doubtless seen the effect of this. A groove is worn into the land.
If you are passing the same way, it will be very challenging for you to force the wheels of your vehicle to follow a different path, although it is not impossible. You might also think of the cognitive effect of repeating an action or behavior in neuropsychological terms.
There is a neural pathway which is being used again and again, and in so doing, that pathway is getting strengthened and reinforced, leading to a physical change in the brain.
One of the effects of Sadhana–spiritual practice which is carried out repeatedly in the same way over a long period of time without attachment to the karmic results of the action being repeated–is that it has the power to reroute the course of Samskaras.
The Sadhana has the power to overcome the force of habit as it has previously been established. Whether you believe in karma or not in the more vague, abstract sense in which it is sometimes discussed, you could think here about karma as the mere force of habit. We do something again and again, and there is some effect. The compounding of that effect over time is a Samskara, and that habit pattern has a gravity to it which in turn influences future action.
In Patanjali, there is the statement that the unripened karmic seeds can be burnt without their fruits having to be first experienced. To translate this idea into terms which are hopefully more approachable, we could say that the negative impacts of past and continuing negative actions or habitual patterns can be turned to a different course, like diverting the course of the flow of a river, without your having to suffer the negative consequences of those past patterns of behavior.
In the highest spiritual sense, the pattern we are talking about is identification with the ego self, and this is the sense in which sadhana can change our consciousness from mundane ego consciousness into samadhi. In a more everyday sense, sadhana can also move us out of negative habitual modes of action and reaction towards something more productive and healthy.
III. The Theater in Berlin, or, Heraclitus
Constantin Constantius (who is really the pseudonymous Kierkegaard) gives us an account in his piece 'Repetition' in which he travels to a foreign city twice. In this case we are talking about Berlin, and it is some time in the middle 1800s. He recounts before embarking on his second trip the virtues of the first–the comedic talents of the actors in the theater, the elegance of the rooms in which he stayed, and so on–only to be disappointed by the lack of these qualities the second time around.
The actors in the theater can no longer make him laugh. His rooms, though they are the same rooms, have been subtly changed by the owner and have lost their charm for him. He concludes that there is in fact no repetition at all, having set off to prove the opposite. Our practice has this quality.
We do a set series of poses without varying the order or even the breathing from day to day. One might think, if they had never done such a thing, that this would become uneventful. But this is not the case.
Variability arises as a result of various factors, for instance weather, diet, changes in our lives, changes in our bodies, stress, mood, and a myriad other things. Even aside from these factors, as we repeat the sequence again and again, our bodies themselves change. There is, in other words, a dialectical relationship between the practice and the rest of our lives.
It is perhaps helpful to reconceptualize the practice and our bodies themselves as a flow instead of as a static entity. In fact, nothing in the world is static in the sense that I am referring to, everything is in constant flux, but it is easy to lose track of the tangible reality of this, although we might know it conceptually.
In Buddhism, we meditate on this as the truth of impermanence, and there are many methods for this. In our asana practice, we can witness this in our own felt sense of the body. We do not perceive ourselves to have the same physical self from day to day, and although we might do the same set of movements, the sensation we experience can be radically different.
In connection with this, we can recall the often quoted words of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, who in his most well known fragment comments that (in one rendering):
“You cannot step into the same river twice.”
The body is, in other words, not a static reality, but a set of dynamic relationships which are in flux over time, and our practice is meant as a way of regulating these dynamic relationships precisely by interjecting this element of repetition. To say this same thing slightly differently, the body is a set of dynamic internal relationships which we are reorganizing by introducing this repeated set of actions, which are set against other habit patterns.
IV. Repetition, Again
Kierkegaard's piece is actually not meant as a rejection of repetition as a category. There is a distinction here between the kinds of variations we experience in a pattern from day to day, and the level of abstraction one step above that, wherein all of these individual changes are united into a larger rule (in logical terms, we are speaking here about generalization).
This is, in other words, the difference between the universal and the particular. A similar set of contrasts is drawn out in Adorno's book 'Minima Moralia', where the observation in question is related to a set of conclusions derived from reflections on Hegel, which in this context I will spare you.
One of Adorno's interesting conclusions is that there can be a contradiction between the levels of the particular and the universal, but that this does not in fact invalidate the truth of either. In other words, a general conclusion can be true, and a particular instance can arise which seems to contradict it (or at the very least be in strong contrast to it), but in this way it actually proves the rule, so to speak. Kierkegaard in his notes on 'Repetition,' seems to have arrived at the same conclusion.
In our practices, we all have days where everything feels wrong or impossible. There are times when we are too tired, we are not focused, when we can't bind or keep our Dristi. Don't become too attached to that when it happens. It can be hard to let that go. It can be easy to take it to heart, to become discouraged, or to question ourselves or the method.
But these are, to repeat the often used phrase, the exceptions that prove the rule. If you doubt what I am saying, look around the room and reflect on the people you are seeing there who come in all the time. Over the course of time, their practices improve, they are able to do more, they get stronger, more flexible and more focused, and hopefully they calm down and become more able to handle themselves under duress. This happens not just to one or two lucky people but it happens, as one might say, as a rule.
The individual substance of what happens in each person's process through the material is different. This variability is the flow of particular events which possesses genuine variability, and does not repeat itself from person to person. But the larger general rule is that it basically works.
On a practical level, if you come in and do the practice again and again, something moves.
So in one sense, I am seeking here to contradict another common saying, namely that to do the same thing again and again but to expect different results is insanity. I am telling you unequivocally that you should do the same thing again and again and expect a change.
To emphasize this, allow me to repeat something which Kierkegaard has written:
“When the queen had finished telling a story at a court function and all the court officials, including a deaf minister, laughed at it, the latter stood up, asked to be granted the favor of also being allowed to tell a story, and then told the same story. Question: What was his view of the meaning of repetition? When a schoolmaster says: “For the second time I repeat that Jespersen is to sit quietly–and the same Jespersen gets a mark for repeated disturbance, the meaning of repetition is the very opposite.”
I do not take this to be a joke at the expense of the minister in question. In other words, the meaning here is not that the minister didn't hear and made a mistake, it is that he understood perfectly well and wanted to emphasize, to reaffirm, what had been said.
The schoolmaster is in the opposite position because he seeks to bring about a change in reality by repeating something which is not the case. We are in both positions in our practice–we are trying to reaffirm what is good and true, and contradict what we wish to change, in both cases by repetition.
In telling you what I have told you, I have repeated a lot of common language turns of phrase, boring adages, malapropisms, quaint truisms, and cliches–for that you'll have to forgive me.
V. Sadhana and Reality
In terms of what we have been talking about so far, we could say that reality is that which happens again and again. What has never happened twice is a mere exception, a modification or inversion of the normal reality which we usually experience.
There is also a reflexive sense, therefore, in which we make something real by repeating it. This does not have infinite potency: repeating what is untrue does not make it become true.
This is a real philosophical question in our world today in a way in which it has never been before. Collective truth is to some extent socially defined, and we have seen in recent years the extent to which collective delusion can be created simply by the repetition of that which is untrue with great frequency to the point that it becomes pervasive.
This does not make it concretely true–the reality in the world does not change–but it can reshape the social reality so that a consensus truth arises out of that collective delusion which obscures the reality of the situation. This is related to what Kierkegaard had to say about the schoolmaster, who seeks to reform the behavior of the disruptive child through repeated correction.
But this is only repetition in a linguistic sense, which while it may become convincing to people for a time, does not change the fact of that matter in the world to which it refers, and while it may have power to confuse and delude people, it does not attain some magical power to invoke circumstances other than those which really exist. Sooner or later, this will become clear.
Finally, it is worth noting that there is an interpersonal and societal dimension to the sorts of repetitions we are talking about. To explain what I am getting at, consider the extrinsic effects of your own yoga practice.
Hopefully by doing our practice, your health is better, your mind is more calm, and as a result you participate in society in a more conscious way because of the work that we are doing together.
If you agree with me that this is so, you can perhaps infer that you are doing your practice so that these effects can be compounded for yourself and for others, and so that transformation in the society can likewise occur.
Many of the difficulties we have in the modern world are not of a technical nature, but of a political, societal nature. These are in a sense the accrual of our collective karmas–the repeated behaviors, biases, prohibitions, and so on, that have been enacted and reenacted in our culture over long periods of time.
The results of these repetitions are written into the structure of our society and even into the physical world which we inhabit in a complex and interrelated set of ways.
Changing our own selves through spiritual practice is also a transpersonal action in that we change everything else in to world to which we are connected by doing so.
Interconnectedness is a basic fact of the world, and as such, by working on our own karmas we are also working on society, in a variety of more and less direct ways.
Anyway, I am sure that in what I have told you, I have said the same thing again and again to some extent, and for that, you will have to forgive me.
