5. I am not a Number! Unless I Stay Silent
The Bliss of Working in Ignorance with Transitions, Our Reintroduction to Buddhism, and a Kundalini Experience
Continued from 4. Which Came First: Personae or the Mask? Into Joyful Quarantine
Into timelessness.
Gone was the quarantine joy.
Now Yukon yoga.
—Haiku, 2022 Duperreault
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
—Shakespeare Macbeth, Act VThe aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. —H.L. Mencken
When there is an increase in the modes of ignorance,
madness, illusion, inertia and darkness are manifested.
—Bhagavad-GitaIgnorance, the product of darkness,
stupefies the senses in all embodied beings,
binding them by the chains of folly,
indolence and lethargy.
—Bhagavad-Gita from Chapter 14And so it came to pass that we left the joy of a yogic quarantine and began to explore Yukon. Yukon is big. Yukon is very beautiful.
And, of course, I began my work as a telecom engineer in an office that was mostly filled with empty desks. (Note, this has an odd irony when that ‘emptiness’ is enlightened with the Buddhist idea that ‘emptiness’ is a characteristic of form and cannot exist separate from form, in the same way that heat is an inseparable characteristic of fire while not being the fire.) The corporate recommendation to stay at home had been followed by most of the engineers of which I had joined and all of the support logistics personnel.
This had the consequence of making my learning of the finer interdependent points of getting materials identified and ordered extremely difficult. The face-to-face communication that would normally have been a key part to learning the job well was missing. This learning void was seriously exacerbated with the telecoms in Canada having long since succumbed to the world domination of accountancy MBA-itis control-freakism. (MBA equals More Bad Advice.) My new employer, like many others, used a giant German accountancy behemoth to fracture pennies and then count them at a multiple of the cost of the ‘savings.’
The rise of the MBA book-fiddling idolatry and idols was, I recognise now with hindsight, as business woke.
In the 1990s an astute Indian I met observed that the then current accountancy practices were in fact communism. We had a great conversation because with him I discovered that it wasn’t just me that was able to see that. It is the adoption of an ideology comprised of ungrounded profit maximising business models largely based on removing employees and pretending to value customers. The MBA dream is for customers who will pay without actually being provided a service.
In the late 1980s my prescient friend, whom I nicknamed Dr. Bob after the Muppets’ character, described it well with the following observation: give accountants the opportunity to run an airline and they will judiciously look to cut costs. And subsequently they will fire the pilots and stop buying fuel. Most of us remaining worker grunts, at the bottom of the hierarchy in the unprofitable design and build part of the business, strove hard to work around the siloing and fracturing practices in order to provide a genuine product/service people would be willing to buy.
And yoga continued. I took the yoga off the mat and into my work by practicing the principle of ‘no complain and no blame’ amidst the inconsistent and changing corporate standards, increasingly incomprehensible purchasing restrictions and requirements, and the imposed poorly designed and inappropriate computer programmes and systems. My job as an engineer was about 10% engineering, 50% figuring out the records required to engineer, and 40% figuring out what and how to order the materials my design optimally required. And in each step the time to completion was being extended by imposed ‘new and improved’ systems that had been designed by external vendors hired at discount prices by MBAs, both of whom had superficial or perhaps utopian ideas of what we actually did.
And yoga continued. At home and out in the wilderness.
Our practice deepened our experience and joy of life and even of being alive. Often we did meditation in the middle of nowhere, beside one of the many large lakes surrounded by expansive forests and snow covered mountains. And on a couple of occasions, we had a bear foraging several hundred metres from where we had set down our butts.
We were in bliss, most of the time. I say ‘most of the time’ because aperigraha continued to intrude with its demands of expansive simplicity.
Despite its apparent meaning, moving into simplicity from a life of surfeit stimulation and merchandise is sometimes very uncomfortable. OMG! We humans sure don’t like to let go of our unused stuff, let alone our lifetime habits that we begin to recognise as no longer positively serving our lives.
Our experience of synchronicities continued, with books and encounters. Notable synchronistic books included The Yoga of Eating: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self by Charles Eisenstein. OMG! As I wrote this, out popped another odd synchronicity: only a few weeks ago I subscribed to the Charles Eisenstein Substack. He is looking at the spiritual challenges of living in the time of covid. I had totally forgotten that he was the author of The Yoga of Eating, which is an amazing and unexpected book.
Other books were Bella Figura: How to Live, Love, and Eat the Italian Way by Kamin Mohammadi, which we found inspirational and vivifying. It described, to a surprising degree of yoga, what we were doing, eating and living in the ‘Guy and Yoshiko way’ in Yukon. Also Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I was surprised by how our own yoga practice brought an unexpected depth of appreciation for this book that, because of its popularity and being an Oprah read, I was inclined to dismiss. Natalie Goldberg’s Long Quiet Highway: A Memoir on Zen in America and the Writing Life that triggered a resurgence in our long discarded interest in Buddhism via her experiences with Zen Buddhist monk Katagiri Roshi.
It is a lovely book that prompted many discussions on what life is and what is our lives. Then Yoshiko’s totally transformative and ‘accidental’ discovery of Michael Stone and his astonishingly powerful book Awake in the World: Teachings from Yoga and Buddhism for Living an Engaged Life. With him our life took another of those quantum leaps into joy that comes with expanded awareness.
We continued to restrict our awareness to our sadhana practice while staying asleep to the expansive insanity overtaking the day-to-day world all around us.
One final book synchronicity came, as two of the above came, via the tiny book exchange boxes that exist at various places in the small city of Whitehorse: Kundalini Rising: Exploring the Energy of Awakening by contributors Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa and Dorothy Walters. This book was significant because it explores various experiences people have had with the awakening of the kundalini energy that Gilbert described well in Eat, Pray Love. It seems that, while there are some common themes to the experience, each person experiences it differently, sometimes significantly.
We got this book just around the time we began a focused yoga practice on the chakras from one of Tommy Rosen’s intensive multi-day courses that combined yoga, philosophy and the somatic healing psychology of Heather Monroe. I had read a couple of chapters while we were doing each chakra exercise for four days.
On our fourth day of the fourth chakra, anahata, the heart, I stood up to transition and the next thing I knew Yoshiko was shaking me awake. I had fainted, collapsed forward onto the computer and knocking it over onto the floor. Since we sit it on the floor in front of us the computer didn’t fall far. Once I had come to and reorientated myself into the room, Yoshiko described a powerful feeling of her own that was like having lost her energy in a bizarre way and powerful way. We sort of finished the practice and then I went to work.
That night when I got home, Yoshiko began what was to become a week long inner journey towards a kind of death. That was followed in the subsequent weeks by a rebirth into a newborn’s body, to paraphrase her words. She found herself without the strength to move, and her appetite had disappeared. Fortunately the experiences we read about in Kundalini Arising had enough correspondence to her experience for us to see that this was likely what she was experiencing. Our practice over the years allowed us to remain calm, even as the hours became days. I was a little pushy and strongly urged her to drink at least some of the highly nutritious miso soup I made.
At one point I asked “Yoshiko, do you want to die, now?” (She doesn’t remember me asking her that.) “No,” she answered with a calmness and assurance that deepened the trust I already had in her experience. A few days later she began to drink more of the soup and even eat a little bit.
“I felt like I was a bird that had been near fatally injured or shot, like I was falling towards the ground of my death. Or like an air balloon falling to the earth, heading towards my death. And I thought, sincerely thought from my heart, that I had lived a very good life and now it is an okay time to die. I felt at peace. I felt peace. Then I began to recover and I didn’t hit the earth. I began to rise up again.”
And she did recover. One day I heard her counting, as she moved slowly across the living room: “Ichi, ni. Ichi, ni,” Japanese for “One, two.” I asked “What are you doing, Yoshiko?” “I’m learning to walk again,” she answered. A few weeks later she happily announced that she had managed to walk part way up the small hill behind us. A few days later she was excited to share that she had started to relearn how to run.
She describes the whole experience as a true rebirth after going towards or even into a kind of near death experience. After which she relearned all the functions of being a physical creature of the human form living in this four dimensional existence. And that relearning included the use of language, she said.
Yoga is for the strong of heart and mind! Yoga is only minimally about postures. Postures are a tool, described in just three of the one hundred and ninety-six sutras (lines) by Patañjali in the third of his eight limbs.
II.46: Sthira sukham asanam – The posture is firm and soft. Another translation: Posture is that which is firm and pleasant.
II.47: Prayatna saithilya ananta samapattibhyam – The posture is attained by pacification through correct effort and contemplating the infinite. Another translation: By slight effort and meditating on the unlimited the (posture becomes firm and pleasant).
II.48: Tato dvandvanabhighatah - Sitting still being conquered, the dualities do not obstruct.
And another translation:
Of the 196 Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, only three speak directly to asana. The most well-known is Sutra 2.46: sthira sukham asanam: asana should be a balance between steady, stable, alert effort (sthira) and comfortable, easy, relaxed effort (sukham). Sutras 2.47 and 2.48 go on to describe that asana can only be mastered once the Yogi learns to let go of the natural tendency for restlessness and begins to meditate on the infinite. Once this mastery is achieved, it is believed that one is no longer disturbed by the dualities of life. —Yoga Sanctuary
See also “Yoga Basics” by Timothy Burgin.
During this time of our journey, the clouds of darkness were expanding all about us while we were blinded by our own increasing lightness to see them. We were in a kind of bubble, a yoga pink bubble gum bubble–or maybe it was the dogged white bubble ball (‘Rover’) that chased down and captured escapees from ‘The Prisoner’–as we explored Yukon’s landscapes and our own inner scapes.
We weren’t totally oblivious to the masks and barricades, of course, or to the expansion of anti-social sentiment as a new kind of supposedly temporary ‘normal’ was being increasingly enforced by paid and unpaid covid police. Simplistically I thought that common sense would bring about the re-enactment of reason and social interaction.
I didn’t think that fear would (could?) become the new normal and raison d’être. I had unthinkingly turned my back on the lessons of history and by my silence consented to the expansion of tyranny as the travel bans and job suspension/terminations began to be enforced in late 2020 and into 2021. I was lazy in my dedicated practice of ‘selfish’ yoga because I had allowed my fellow and sister citizens to become just a number and soon my number would be called up too.
“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered!” “I am not a number!” “Who is number 1?”
To Be Continued