A talk by Richard at the Yoga Workshop in the Spring of 2005

The Game of Games

The mind sets us up to be happy or sad. The mind sets up an image of what it expects, and then when what is doesn’t match up exactly with what it expects, there is this gap called duhkha, or suffering. This is the story of my life, perhaps the story of your lives. The process of yoga is to suspend that very gaming of the mind in which we irresistibly label what’s arising in the mind. The raw experience itself is ignored and we become concerned with all these silly little things, like what other people think about us. At the time of death hopefully that won’t be the last thing to loom up in the mind.

Yoga is a game of games in which we turn the mind back on itself, so that we can suspend the game in order to taste complete freedom from the suffering inherent in the game. Because the game is always incomplete, there’s always a gap, even when you get good at the game.

In the “Yoga Sutras” we find the description of samadhi, in which we suspend the activity of nama, (naming) and jnana, (knowledge). Those two functions are suspended through the practice of yoga. Then artha, (the raw or immediate experience) shines forth on its own as if sacred. It’s as if it were emptied of a separate self. When we see it as if empty then we know the name is ultimately part of the game. The thing in itself is truly sacred, because it is enmeshed with everything, either material or spiritual, either intimate or impersonal.

Yoga is actually finding out the basic patterns of the way we play the game, not rejecting them at all and not being distressed by their presence, but simply observing them, almost as if you were observing some fantastic wild creature. We’re not playing with the root psychological triggers of the thought process and the counter process in order to stun the mind. We’re creating this situation in the body just as if we were sitting.

Through observation, we come to the point of seeing the interdependence of all the different extremes. At the point of feeling the opposites we have the effect of stunning the mind, which we call nirodah. Translating nirodah as squishing the mind, suppressing the mind, are bad translations. A better translation is to treat nirodah simply as the dropping or leveling of the mind. It’s as if you were walking along some trail and the trees opened and you actually caught a glimpse of the back range, unexpectedly, and for a moment your breath stops and you actually experience the whole pattern of presentation of the world. The world presents itself: no name or commentary necessary at all.

The mind loves to give commentary. Commentary is important and analysis is essential. Yet it is nice to take a break every now and then. Everyone has a little glimmer of this....even people who haven’t done yoga have at least a free breath or have been happy for a moment or two. But what I’ve done and it appears that everyone does, is that when we have an experience like that, the mind very quickly tries to take over and exploit it, maybe sell it, make a buck off of it, by reducing it to what the content of the mind was at the time of the experience. We think the experience is a result of the smoke or the wine or the chocolate. Instead, letting go of the content creates the mystical experience.

We create an addictive religious process based on the misinterpretation of our inspiration. The yoga process is designed to gradually feed our misunderstanding into the practice of the yoga and to reveal the mistakes that the silly mind likes to make.

The game the mind creates is to reduce experience to a name and relational knowledge. It creates a gap between what is and what ought to be or what was.

In asana there is so much comparison. One has all these pictures, that’s Iyengar doing it, that’s so and so doing it, that’s me doing it. Because there are techniques involved, it is absolutely inevitable that the mind runs in and impales itself on itself. Then we find ourselves all hung up on our own yoga practice, which is this silly game in the first place.

It’s almost as if we were skewered and draped on the trident of our own mind, completely lost in the yoga gossip and yoga technique. It’s miserable.

Hatha yoga is where we use the impulses of the mind, and we go with them in order to dovetail them back so we can observe them. In a sense, hatha yoga is like sitting practice with a lot of squirming. Whereas in sitting practice you just let it be. The urge to squirm arises, but it doesn’t translate out. You sit on the urge rather than squirming. In yoga we actually do both practices. The mind tends to go back and forth through these modalities, between the active and passive modes.

You need the ability to take a stand and see what the results of taking a stand are, and then you need to see that even that was just a stand and that there are other stands. The passive or lunar mode makes a context, but the active or solar mode allows a single viewpoint.

The theory of Hatha yoga is that this is reflected in the body, the breath and how the muscles are patterned. The idea is that eventually these two different modes connect. And that’s the game.

Just seeing that it’s a game intellectually is a pathetic state; it’s eternal pathos. That’s what the existentialists see; Sisyphus rolling a rock up a hill. Having the game insight and then reducing it to a nihilistic theory is just another game.

The nice thing about realizing that it’s all a game via yoga is that you can let it go, which is freedom. The mind creates, constructs and dissolves religious practices, but the joy is the fact that it’s free, open. There’s nobody in there; no player who’s suffering.

The insight into the game is seeing the nature of awareness as it is. That’s the ecstatic joy. There’s no cognitive process involved at all. Yoga is the endless pouring out of infinite radiance from this mysterious core, deep in the body.