nadaism: January 2007

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Nadaist yoga sutras

The yoga sutras were written by Patanjali some 2500 years ago, they are a very precise piece of knowledge about yoga. But they were written in sanskrit, which is a difficult and dead language, and they were very short, their meaning a bit obscure, as it happens with many other old scriptures. The fact that according to the myth Patanjali was an incarnation of the snake god does not help bringing light to the subject, I'd guess.

Neither do help much the big number of books that have been written on the subject since the beginning of the 20th century. So many pages of commentaries on a bit less than 200 short aphorisms cannot serve to clarify it but just to mess it up more and more.

Some of these modern thinkers claim that in those ancient times the sutras were written, they were actually understood by the readers, because the spiritual knowledge was on average much much higher compared to the present moment, in which modernity and technology have spoilt everything (?). I would not dare to contradict anybody on anything, but it sounds like the typical statement about any past period of time being better. Why should the contemporaries of the snake god understand anything he was talking about, what do we know about those centuries, were there more yoga practitioners compared to the present?. For sure there were not people from every corner of the world travelling to India to learn yoga.

Anyway, it's not that my translation is going to contribute to clarify anything, of course not. Not that many people are going to read it anyway. Not that it has any value either, I'm not translating it from sanskrit, but just playing from another english translation. But the point I'm going to try to make is that I will translate them not using any spiritual word, that using the right words it could be a very clear explanation with no ambiguity. Depending on who you ask, my translation could be a blasphemy or an exercise of stupidity. I just hope it will be more or less funny.

Friday, January 12, 2007

Let's face it

I have no idea what to do.

I do know what I'm going to do next, I have the return flight to London, which I booked so long ago I can't remember, (when january 2007 was far away and meaningless), and I have to leave India because of the visa. I'll spend a few days in the crazy expensive city, I'll visit my family to say hello, and then I will go somewhere to stay with a friend for some time, he/she still does not know, since I don't know either. Little by little I'll get used to Europe again, and I'll see how my money flies 3 or 4 times faster compared to India, even though I'm staying with a friend. (If it takes me some time to realise it, it might be a different friend from the 1st one).

In the meantime I'll finish the novel - I'm nearly there already. I'll make everything possible to get it published, feeling very sad since if I had success it would be the end of the nadaism and this time there would be no way around, (it was still ok when I starting the regular yoga practice for the sake of it, also when I was focusing on writing just for the sake of it). But the nadaist cause needs money, and if nobody contributes, it is over. Anyway no problem for a while because it is probably a hopeless try I will make.

Then, money running out fast, novel not published, the consequence is obvious and sounds very very scary: I'll be forced to look for a job. Let's face it. It is going to happen. It will be the end.

I hope by that time I am not much worried than I am now, (i.e. right now I am not worried at all). I'm quite sure, actually.

Also I'd like to think that by that time I have an idea or a hint of what to do. But let's face it, I won't. How could you make sense of such a step.

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

New year's eve

Short post to explain you how did it go with my new year's eve, because it was awesome.

The yoga & vipassana guys were going out for dinner, but somehow I did not feel like it. They are very nice and warm people, I've spent some good times with them, no complains about it, (except maybe that their conversation sometimes tends to go too much to the yoga & vipassana subjects). And they are not "party people", not particularly, which is kind of nice as well.

=> A side note maybe, quite an important one though: make no mistake, yoga people are quite neurotic. I don't know why I thought in a yoga course in India you would find very nice and balanced and peaceful group, but no no no they're nuts, (starting by myself of course).

Anyway that night I did not feel like going out with them. And I did not have any other alternatives since I don't know so many people around - besides the yoga classes, my social life is limited here, there's the girls I try to talk to now and then with little success. Then I didn't.

On my way to the restaurant I was feeling kind of weird. Was I going to spend my new year's eve having dinner on my own and going to bed early?. Would I not regret it and feel sad about it?. The answer was obviously negative. But I don't know, I had my doubts untill it was over; it seems that you cannot be sure unless you give it a try. May I encourage you to do the same one of these years?. It was a wonderful finding. No hassle with new year's eve anymore.

the second language

The second language refers to a quite interesting proposal by Peter Sloterdijk: to try to translate more acuratelly some important words, e.g. enligtenment, in a way everybody (religious or not) could agree with.

There are new needs in the west, where everything has become so rationalistic, but there is an obvious source of misunderstanding when two people think about the same word in different ways. I'll try to find a writter or a phylosopher or a thinker that could have made a clarifying interpretation of 4 concepts: enlightenment, redemption, liberation and devotion.

differences

Is there any essential difference between a man and a woman?

Ok, there's obvious and visible differences. But let's look at it from another point of view.

If you try to live with somebody, and share most of your time, and be completely intimate, and shop furniture together, and even raise children...

do you expect it to be easy to understand and accept the human being you are sharing everything with?

are you not using the fact that your partner is a man or a women as an excuse because you don't understand anything about him/her?

These below are the differences I will accept. For the rest, I'd like to try to prove that men and women think the same way.

Body shapes. Some internal organs. Hormones. "Those days of the month". And only women get pregnant. There are some phisological differences everybody could agree with.

There's cultural differences: men and women are not educated the same way, i.e. they are repressed in different ways. For instance, men should not cry, women should always look beautiful.

There's the common vague understanding that men are somewhat more rational, (in their behaviour and decisions), while women are somehow more connected to their emotions, (i.e. women manage their emotions in a better way, and use them).

And there's the mysterious way in which women know exactly how much more they feel like eating or drinking, and in consecuense at the end of the meal they just sip your glass or cut a portion of a precise weight from your plate - it's exactly the piece they're missing.

The nadaist contract

Do you want to know if a person who passes all the time doing nothing would be able to live a normal and happy life?

The principles

- We humans continually pursue our minor objectives; when achieved, we only realise that they were not satisfactory, and then we look for a new target. A nadaist breaks the circle by not having any objective at all.

- The mind needs to be occupied, the process of thought is endless: either it may be killed (e.g. tv, music, a novel, alcohol, drugs), or given a focus (sometimes the same tv, music, a novel, also studying, investigating, playing an instrument, or other activities that require discipline). Both mechanisms are the same in essence. A perfect nadaist despises any objective, and would rather stop thinking. However thought is difficult to stop and also is sometimes useful (only sometimes; most of the time our thoughts wander aimlessly). A human nadaist is simply aware of how pointless it is either to kill or to focus thought, but uses all methods at hand when thought cannot be stopped.

- A perfect nadaist would kill thought and spend all the time alone and doing nothing. A human nadaist would amaze him/herself choicelessly with many things, would cultivate friendship, and even have a family, why not. Any nadaist knows that thought cannot kill itself by thinking, just tries to listen to his/her thinking, with no resistance.

- Nadaism requires discipline, so that there is no discipline. A nadaist is very careful with randomness, since a perfect chaos would become a pattern, which is the thing to fight against.

- A careless reader may associate nadaism with total uncertainty. But if uncertanty was to be total, then it would become a certainty. There's always room in a nadaist for a few safe places to shelter when thought is pressing up.

- The nadaist is not looking for unhappiness or misery. A nadaist just wants to live in the present, with no concerns about the past or the future, and with no patterns.

Exercises

These are practices that may help to budding nadaists, but they cannot be taken literally since they would become patterns.

- Go to bed and wake up as irregularly as possible. Go for naps at unexpected moments.

- Join courses in different subjects that you may or may not be interested in, and never finish them.

- Hire somebody to go to your home and rearrange your stuff, so that you don't know anymore where anything is.

All hobbies are allowed (reading, sports, games, whatever), but only as a pastime, carefully handled, so that there is no sense of achievement. e.g. a nadaist may go to the cinema, but will remember the least technical details, just the ones to select other movies that are not too boring, and pursuing no targets like following up a full career or a cinema current. A nadaist may also go travelling, just for the amusement. He/she will need to plan the trip to some extent, to try to get to the places that are not pointless, to avoid those in which there is not really much to do. Anyway the nadaist will for sure feel pretty much at ease wherever, will be an independent traveller, flexible, and will move around according to moods.

The contract

I'm committing to follow the nadaist principles. I will not work, I will not engage into any activity at all in the long term, not even in the medium term. I will amaze myself with methods that only try to kill or focus thought in the moment, in a short sight. In order to become a nadaist, I need YOUR MONEY for MY LIVING. If not, I would not be able to follow the principles.

- I will use the money strictly for living and for selfish purposes.

- I will carefully track all the money of each of the contributors.

- If I ever refute nadaism, I will pay 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will give the money back to the contributors proportionally, adding a 100% interest plus inflation. When the total amount has been repayed, I, the failed nadaist, will go back to live a normal life.

- In case of death, my belongings will go 100% to the nadaist fund.

- I will log my daily activity, and if anything is considered to be against the principles, any contributor may issue a complaint. I'll have the right to defend myself, to prove that I was pursuing no objectives. At the end there will be a weighted votation for all the contributors. If I'm declared a failed nadaist, I will give 50% of any future income to the nadaist fund, which will return the money to the contributors, adding 10% interest plus inflation.

- The contributors decide when and what amounts, when to stop paying, but they cannot disengage. They can only expect their money back, with interest, in the cases above.

nadaism

Nadaism is not dead