KNOMO CHOICIUS

Off to Chennai- No Wait- Salem

I flew on a ticket purchased through Orbitz on Hahn Air, and then eventually found out, after 3 months and 2 long phone calls later, Hahn Air has no airplanes. I was really traveling on Spice Jet. They don’t actually give you a confirmation electronically til you show up at the airport, if you don’t buy the ticket through an Indian company. But all went well on the non-stop flight from Guwahati to Chennai. I have found my uncertainty about loose ends less anxiety producing on this trip for some reason.

I actually prefer how Indian airlines board their planes. If there are two doors, they board from front and back based on where you are sitting. People don’t usually have too much carry on baggage on domestic flights, and it’s much more democratic. Like in the OLD days in the US when they boarded the BACK seats first, so people did not have to crawl on top of each other. The person sitting next to me was not talkative. So be it.

The coronavirus situation is causing problems worldwide. The reason for this trip to India at this time was a Heat Treating and Surface Engineering Conference and Expo that was sponsored by the Chennai ASM International Chapter. But five of the planned international speakers cancelled. At least one was taking the opportunity to present at two conferences.

So at the last minute I got invited to present my Keynote for the Heat Treating conference at a small university in Salem, Tamil Nadu, the day before the Chennai event started. This second conference, on smart materials, was sponsored by the British Royal Society of Chemistry.

It is pretty amazing to me to show up at a place half way around the world, and knowing a few people who I have kept in contact with since my last trip to Chennai in 2017, be immediately accepted as an honored guest. That’s the benefit of belonging to an international society.

I opened by telling the audience that before I became an engineer, I thought I wanted to be a chemist, having had Marie Curie as my childhood heroine. So, a few decades late, I will say that being the keynote speaker at a Royal Society of Chemistry conference is close enough to being called an “honorary chemist” for a day. Drs. Gopi and Gopi, a married couple, who organized the conference, she a physicist specializing in magnetism, he an actual chemist, sent me the below photo of me sitting up there (being stared at) as the center “dignitary” of the event! This was an article from the local paper, that is (presumably written in Tamil) and I do not understand at all!

Periyar University Holding British Royal Society of Chemistry Conference on Smart Materials. This gave me a second chance to give the talk on the Yoga of Failure Analysis. Here I am, the only woman on the stage, but 60% of the Periyar University student body is female!

Dr. Bela S was traveling from Chennai to Salem, so the Periyar U organizing committee bought me a plane ticket to accompany him to Salem. They put me up in a fancy Radisson Hotel. Drs. Gopi and Gopi are at left.

Periyar University is named after a famous atheist social reformer. India has many social reformers. But Thanthai Periyar (see link at left), who emphasized the dignity of every individual, was controversial in this very religious and spiritual country.

Statue of the atheist social reformer, Periyar.

The conference got off to a late start, and the Indians do not, apparently, “believe in” letting people read their slides themselves. And every one of the organizing committee members insisted on personally naming and thanking every one of the speakers. And every one of the speakers gets a full introduction. The organizers always think it is important for the attendees to know how smart, important, and etc. etc. etc. the wonderful people who have come to enlighten them ARE! So it was a good thing the main original keynote was not there, or we would have been off to a later start than we were. I was told to prepare a 20 minute and a 45 minute talk. As the introductions wore on, I eventually was given 2-3, maximum 5 minutes instead of 20, although I did use the whole 45 minute slot after lunch.

I was pleasantly surprised to see so many women students in the auditorium. I was told that the student body is actually 60% women. Yeah!

Two of the other speakers, Dr. John Philip and Dr. Zoltan Kolozsvary, are in front, as the attendees filter in. John Philip gave a very interesting talk about smart materials. He is at left. We discussed how he gave his son an Indian sounding name as he was tired of people asking him why he had a British name. Dr. K, at right, said that his MOTHER’s name was Zoltan. The only other Zoltan I have ever met was a man. Dr. K is Hungarian, but Romania ended up with that part of Hungary, so he is a Romanian citizen. He was a very early contributor to the design of nitriding heat treatment furnaces.

Lunch, that was another story. We had been told we were going to be taken to the Salem Cafe for lunch, which was where they served us giant Thali platters on palm leaves the day before. I asked “Why don’t we stay here on the campus and eat with the STUDENTS???” That idea was not even entertained. It would have put us back on schedule, but no, they insisted we could get to the Salem Cafe, eat and get back to talk in 20 minutes. I refused to have anything but a coke, my second one this trip. Because once you start eating, they keep feeding you and I knew I would get indigestion from eating too fast. Of course, lunch took an hour.

I wanted us to get back on time because I knew we had a 5 hour drive to get back to Chennai for the original conference. Well the 5 hour drive was really a 6 hour drive. We finally left after all the triple goodbyes, at 4:45 pm. With a short tea stop, we arrived at 11 pm. The student who accompanied us and the driver did not get back on the road until after midnight, because they wanted to make sure that the other foreign dignitary had gotten checked in to the Taramani Guest House at the Indian Institute for Technology- Madras. I had already checked in for one day before I traveled to Salem. Anyway, Indian professional drivers always amaze me how they can stay alert for so long.

Assam Gibbon Sanctuary and Tribal Life

We had a long adventure to get to the Gibbon Sanctuary after a short stop back at the Orchid Co-op to buy souvenirs. This was not the first time I would have been happy to spend more money to get a higher quality of craftsmanship, but it just wasn’t available. I bought one of the many roughly carved wooden rhinos, some Assam tea, and some locally grown Stevia leaves.

The Gibbon Rest House was our destination, but Google Maps (and the entire internet) does not know that this business exists. We did have the street address and finally made our way to the goal, which had a giant yellow sign marked Spot On Gibbon Homestay. But the owner, Diganta, insisted that the sign had nothing to do with his business and he would (FIVE YEARS after opening HIS business, FIVE YEARS of confusing his customers later…) ask Spot On to remove the sign. OK. Ok. Ok.

No. Despite the sign, we are NOT at Spot on Homestay.

There is very limited information on visiting the Gibbon Sanctuary available on-line, and when planning my trip, I had found a traveler’s blog, and they said they stayed in the “Forest Guest House.” The “Gibbon Rest House” was not IN the sanctuary. It was 15 km away in Jorhat. I complained to the travel agent AGAIN. He said there was no accommodation in the sanctuary. Finally, the guides provided by the government explained that there is a Forest Guest House, but it is only for use by the park employees. So I do not know how those westerners got invited, but I didn’t get the nice forest birdsong I had anticipated as my lullaby. I got normal Indian city noises, loudspeaker blasted Islamic calls to prayer five times a day, and reasonably quiet nights, interrupted by the occasional dog barking, and terminated by some loud roosters.

Compared to the views of the elephants and rhinos, the gibbons were less photogenic. They are entirely arboreal, and they stay high up in the trees, like probably a minimum of 60 feet or 20 meters, and they are not that big. So without special photo equipment the sharability result is limited. But they were a lot of fun to watch swinging through the trees. Thinking about it, I guess that means that if there were gibbons at the Brookfield Zoo (near Chicago) they were probably living too close to the ground for their ultimate happiness. In any case, here is a flavor of what we saw. Overall, in three half days, we saw an apparently unprecedented 6 groups of 1-6 gibbons. The guide provided by the national park, the armed guard (in case we surprised some elephants), our hotel owner host and guide all started telling me at the 10 am breakfast break the first day that I had brought them luck. I told them NO. It was a gift from Maa (Durga, great goddess of India). By the end, we all agreed that 1) I brought them luck 2) Maa blessed my visit and 3) the guides were skilled. I was told that there are people who make the trip and NEVER see a single gibbon. In fact, as we were getting ready to leave Kaziranga, a British woman said they had made a brief stop at the Gibbon Sanctuary and had seen no gibbons. So, there you have it. Diganta bought a wonderful cell phone with a fancy stabilizer, so his video was the best. Here is part of what he shot. The male is black, and female brown. She’s a bit harder to see. They are obviously enjoying life.

Since I am still at the IIT Madras Taramani Guest House with reasonably fast internet, I will now upload a few videos from the dancing at the Orchid Co-op. After the professional dancers finished their 20 minute presentation, the host invited the audience. The Home Science students I had met earlier in the day pushed one of their classmates to sing. She has an angelic voice. Then they all started dancing. They looked really happy. I will have to see what I can do later to add the video. The file is too big, and was captured sideways.

Happy Home Ec College Students Dancing at the Orchid Park

Everyone is always taking photos and selfies and videos of everything in Asia. The happy young women continued their dance, and toward the end of this clip, two Western women are joyfully welcomed into the circle.

While we are back in the orchid park, and on the subject dancing ladies, I will post the picture of the beautiful Dancing Lady orchid.

The last afternoon in eastern Assam, sated with my blessed and lucky gibbon viewings, we made a small jaunt to a village where the tribal people of Assam still try to maintain a hint of their old life-ways. First thing I see?????? A Baptist church!

Baptist Church in Small Village in Assam, near Nagaland border.

There was even a (dry) Baptismal Fount off to the side. Well, I have always been conflicted about Christianity in India. But it provides a counterbalance to the devastation created for the lower caste and out-cast people. All sisters and brothers in Christ is more appealing to the Western democrat than the hierarchical system of the bronze age, as much as modern India has struggled to reduce its damage.

We were invited into the home of one of the families. Everywhere in India, people have wanted to take selfies with me. Here are three family members, including two cute young girls.

Assamese Tribal Family. Many of the people of this region look somewhat Chinese. They are considered to be genetically linked to the Chinese, and we are not far from the Chinese border.

Baptist family roasting beef in Assam, India. They are Christians, so they eat beef. There has been violence against Muslim beef providers in India.

I also spent an hour or so talking with my taxi driver, Sarwal, and some members of a tribal “Self Help Group” that had built a small amusement park, complete with boating in a small lake. Like many places in India, it’s not for the weak kneed. I got to practice my Hindi a bit, even though the native language, Assamese, is preferred. These people did not refuse to speak Hindi with the same force as my friends in Tamil Nadu, who mostly claim they do not know any Hindi.

My taxi driver, Sarwal, explained to me that he only looks at Facebook when he is “boring” because he has to wait for his customers to see what they came to see. I tried to have Dharmendra explain the difference between BORING and BORED, but am not sure I had much success.

Sarwal looking down at the lake, from near the entrance of the small, still under construction, amusement park.

Well, I am going to post this already very long post, but will briefly jump ahead to my second to last day in India, when I went to the Arignar Anna Zoological Park. It’s the largest zoo in India. They do a lot of work to rehabilitate populations of endangered species. Dressed like an Indian, I was less popular as a selfie subject, but these young ladies asked for one.

I started getting tired of people asking for selfies. So I told them I wanted one too. One of the four of them took this photo for me. I had been walking more or less near them in the “walk through aviary” at the Arignar Anna Zoo, but was not sure if Muslim women wearing hijabs wanted to be seen with an American. It was exceedingly hot, which was the reason I had my shawl covering my dark hair.

The Horned Spoonbills, and other things…

We really got lucky with the wildlife we saw. In addition to some pretty close views of elephant groups and rhinos, we saw several pairs of Horned Spoonbills, large birds, and it’s their mating season.

Spoonbills Mating Video by Dharmendra

We had three total jeep safaris to see the wild life, and had planned one day to visit a tea plantation. There was ANOTHER communication problem and the tour company left us a morning to figure out on our own how to visit the tea plantations. There wasn’t much going on this time of year, and so there are apparently no ongoing tours. We did stop to look at one tea estate that had tall trees with black pepper vines growing up the trees. The still green pepper corns were plenty spicy.

Black Pepper Vines Climbing the Shade Trees on the Tea Planation

The tiny unfurled leaves are what are harvested to make the tea that is sold to prepare the beverage.

We then continued wandering around and found a rubber plantation, also without anyone to give a formal tour. But we ran into a field trip of a “Home Science” college class. The young lady and I bonded over our pink clothing and my limited Hindi.

My new “pink sister” and her Home Ec Professor. No I did not go down the very steep hill to wade in the water.

And finally, we ended up at a co-operative venture with an orchidarium, and an ethnic museum, which does dance displays from about twenty of the local tribes, some of whom are trying to maintain a traditional lifestyle of sorts.

Another beautiful orchid. Much easier to get to co-operate for photos than the gibbons turned out to be!

This photo was taken with the microscope mode on my Olympus TG5 digital Camera.

Ok. I have arrived at the Taramani Guest House on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology- Madras. They have blessedly fast wi-fi and so I have gone a little nuts uploading these photos and videos much less painlessly than the last post entailed.

Tomorrow, I am going to Periyar University in Salem, Tamil Nadu, to a Smart Materials Conference. It was a last minute invitation. I’ll be traveling with another person who is attending the main conference I came to India to participate in. So I will have two chances to present my Keynote Talk on The Yoga of Failure Analysis. We’ll be taking a short flight in the morning, staying overnight, giving our talks, then driving back to Chennai to participate in the Heat Treating and Surface Engineering Conference. So I guess it is time to practice my presentation a few more times!

Report from Kaziranga

Map of Assam, India. See small map of India, upper left, with circle showing where Assam is. The dark blue line is the Brahmaputra River, which dumps into the sea at Calcutta (Kolkota according to new spelling). The museum guide’s pinky is where were are.

Monday we saw many rhinos, some up pretty close, and some elephants. We also saw a family of elephants cross in front of us on Tuesday afternoon. Here are the movies.

See the three elephants cross the road in front of us. Very cool.

A quick look at the bulky vegetarian.

Enjoying lunch!

A hog deer looks us over. Their bodies really do have a hog shape!

A larger elephant group. This was in a different part of the park. We had an armed guard. At one point I really wondered where we were going. But we arrived

Rhinos in Assam

Back in India, I am doing something different. I’m in Assam. That’s part of the little bit of India that sticks out to the east, running along the north of Bangladesh. I flew from Grand Rapids to Guwahati on a single ticket. It was a long ride. The week before I left, an Indian friend told me he had just come back from Guwahati. (Pronounciation: The u isn’t exactly silent, but it’s exceedingly short. It’s a long u sound, so you have to round your lips like you are going to make a long u as in food, but don’t say it. Just go on to the “wahati” part!) And that his sister in law lives there. And that she would invite us to visit. Which we did.

After visiting the handicrafts museum, which sells a camera pass for 100 Rupees, but then won’t let you take photos inside the museum, and won’t sell you postcards of the artifacts either, many of which were pretty cool, but too bad, I guess they don’t want free advertising in all the places their visitors come from, so you only get these two outside photos.

Shona in front of a giant Assam style hat — Traditional style of hat, made for an exhibit of Assamese traditional arts from a few years back. The museum apparently doesn’t care for visitors as they won’t allow any photos to be taken inside!

This looks like a bird goddess, a representation of perhaps the original concept of the mother of the cosmos, used in religions that appear to possibly go back at least 30,000 years. The baby is very cute.

Assam is off the beaten past for tourists in India, even though it is a beautiful area and the people who go generally loved the visit. I was really surprised to find such a mess of horrible traffic ALMOST similar to Delhi, in Guwahati. But there are, I am told, 12 million people in the area of the city. BUT CORRECTION- Wikipedia says around 1 million. So maybe the bottom line is that this city was never designed for so many cars! We left at 6:30 in the evening to visit my friend’s sister-in-law, as it was only 4.6 km away. It took us an HOUR to get there! But she, like me, grows a lot of her own vegetables, and she is a retired physician, and unlike the rest of the country, uses very little salt. It may well have been the best meal I have ever had in India. And the company was very charming!

The next morning, we set off on our adventure to Kaziranga National Park. The tour agency sent us a different driver from the one they had said was coming, but he arrived early and we were ready, so we set off in high spirits. 15 minutes away from the hotel we stayed at the night before, we had a flat tire. Luckily, we had a flat tire fairly close to a tire fixing store. That’s a fixing store. They don’t have new tires. Twenty minutes later we were on our way. But we didn’t find a tire sale shop, so we kept going on the bad tire, which was also almost completely bald, which was also the condition of two of the other tires. In the mean time, two older Indian women pulled up behind us for some reason, being conveyed in the exact same type of tourist taxi with the exact same type of bald tires. So it was nothing personal to give the gringo bald tires. No. And I should have remembered all the bald tires my sister took pictures of on our family trip in 2008.

Half an hour later, our fixed tire blew out, and, the driver decided to put the spare on. We made it the rest of the way….. Hoping against hope that two flat tire events and a wild goose chase for the River Boat Cruise meant that we had used up all of our bad luck for the rest of the trip!

Yes, we did make it the rest of the way, including a two hour detour to Tezpur, where we were supposed to have a cruise on the Brahmaputra River, but only found a sad looking beach…after making our way past the mental hospital, and the city jail, which happened to be right next door to a Montessori school. Huh! That would not go over well in the good old USA.

Sad looking beach with nothing resembling a cruise boat.

The tour operator finally returned our calls, but we had given up, having found out it was our driver’s first day of work for this tour company, although he had worked for other local tour companies, and we have since decided he knows what he’s about. He even got us a NEW USED tire to replace the spare that had a busted sidewall.

And finally, here at the Kaziranga National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I found myself in paradise. Sitting on my balcony in a nice hotel room with all functioning items (there could be a few more electrical outlets, and the bed is, as all beds in Asia, exceedingly hard), listening to the night sounds in February, that I hear at home only in August, watching Jupiter, and a beautiful golden sunset….

Birds chirping, as heard from the balcony of my room at the Infinity Resort near Kaziranga National Park in Assam, India.

The birds got pretty excited sounding later, or maybe these sounds were made by some other animal.

Monday am we (I and my tourguide friend Dharmendra, who I asked to come as regular Indian tourguides are reliably mediocre….and he basically considers me family…) got up to have breakfast at 7, so we could be off in the jeep to see the Unicorn White Rhinoceri!!!!!! The moment I had been planning for since March of last year had finally arrived!

Our Jeep Driver said these trees are called “Himalo.” They are gorgeous. Orange flowers before any leaves, and they are everywhere we’ve been in Assam. They are really stately and majestically tall as well.

The bottom of the flower is a fairly large hard shell. The entire thing looks like a badminton shuttlecock. I watched one fall from the tree and it dropped straight down, spinning like a helicopter rotor. Later, I saw some more fall, which were not as fresh, and they didn’t spin. It was a gift to see the one fall that way.

Well, it’s late. Tomorrow we’re going to the tea garden, so I am going to wrap this up with a photo.

Two Unicorn White Rhinos, along with much other wildlife.

Choose Confidence over Humility

We act humble when those motivated by lower chakra energy impose their will on us. Usually, the imposers work categorically NOT for our own true good. Our own true good comes when we experience the consequences of our own decisions, and can thereby learn from them. In order to do this, we must work to overcome the “humility programming” we are given. How else may we remove the obstacles to confidence? I can find no other way to take the bushel out of the way of my shining light.

Embracing confidence over humility allows us to store up our treasures in heaven. Treasures of a spiritual nature (social capital) are no easier to earn (and maybe harder to earn) than financial treasures. But the interest accumulates automatically. We don’t have to waste our time seeking out the best 401k.

This little piece was written in E Prime. It avoids use of forms of the verb “to be.” Humility does not serve as the opposite of arrogance. Rather confidence does so. Confidence is deserved when earned through study, practice, or experience!

Don’t try too hard to understand. Just listen and enjoy the artwork. The audio is a different version that is not E-prime. I had missed 5 ises.

Pandora contemplating the now empty box. — Pandora’s Box Courtesy National Gallery of Art (USA)

Thanksgiving

Molars at the bottom of a jar — Have all my teeth fallen out????

Being somewhat of a grouch, even though recently I had several dreams about my teeth falling out, which I finally decided were not a warning to go to the dentist, but rather a message from my subconscious that I was losing my bite, and maybe some of my perceived bark, gratitude is something that I have to cultivate. I am truly filled with gratitude for being able to live a very comfortable life compared to most of the people in the world. We middle class Americans, as much as we disappear, still have it pretty good. I am really grateful that I have managed to work for my own company for 25 years. I really am grateful for not having to be in at 8 or even 7 am, as most working people do. It’s not that I am a shirker. I rarely leave before 7 pm when the work-load is normal. But I like the flexibility to pamper my night-personhood.

But grateful as I am for the privilege of living in the good old USA, it is truly depressing to watch so many people apparently veering off into a mindset so divorced from reality. What do Americans still agree on?

Well, traveling years ago in Europe, getting to know pit toilets for the first time at a fairly tender age, and then getting to study in Switzerland for a year in college, I had the opportunity to know what Europeans thought of Americans…

Americans are the people who have nice plumbing.

A Western Style toilet — Wasteful and comfortable. I am grateful for my toilet.

So here we go. Whether Democrat, Libertarian, Republican, or Alt Right of some type, we all (well almost all) wake up in the morning, pee in a nice porcelain toilet, on which we can sit comfortably if desired. We can then take a nice hot shower, brush our teeth with water that is mostly not contaminated with deadly bacteria (even if it is increasingly contaminated with harmful industrial and agricultural chemicals, and heavy metals), dry ourselves off with a nice fluffy towel, and get dressed.

So, to all of my fellow Americans, let’s remember to be grateful for the plumbing we have. We live in a country where almost everyone has a toilet in their living space. India has recently almost completed a national campaign to reach that goal, and apparently Nigeria is just starting to do something about the 4.7 million people without toilets.

Let’s be grateful, this Thanksgiving, for the basic things. Not just the food we all commonly say we are thankful for, but a place to put it when we’re done digesting it. And the fact that we don’t have to watch anyone else getting rid of theirs. And that it rarely ends back up in our drinking water.

Tarot Koans

THE MAJOR ARCANA

You may see the classical images for the Rider Waite deck at Wikipedia. Scroll down to Major Arcana. Arcana means secrets. The major arcana are meant to represent the entire human experience in an abbreviated, symbolic way.

Story Number 1: The Magician
After the thought, manifestation.

Story Number 2: The High Priestess
Before the thought, knowledge.

Story Number 3: The Empress
She glowed.
The fields flowered wherever she walked.
Bringing fruit out of season.

Story Number 4: The Emperor
His authority radiated from every pore.
He no longer required the uniform.

Story Number 5: The Heirophant
The attention rejuvenated his soul.
His sister had claimed it was his ego, but he knew better.
The eyes had followed his every move.
But now, he was tired of it all.
Performing the same rituals day after day.
Only the thoughtless cared.

Story Number 6: The Lovers
Loving lovers loved lengthily.
Do you remember?
Always remember.
Remember.

Story Number 7: The Chariot
Your chariot awaits.
The work you have done has its own reward.
Enjoy the ride.

Story Number 8: Strength
The Goddess radiated light.
The lion lay down in submission.
Truth and goodness flood the thought field.
Justice has become mercy.

Story Number 9: The Hermit
The old woman closed the door of her house behind her, and latched it.
Her cloak fastened at the neck, she headed up the mountain, holding nothing but a lantern.
She would go up as far as she could. She knew how to put one foot in front of the other. She knew how to struggle toward the heavens. She had done it all of her life.
There, she would breathe her last. Her knees would never let her return to lower earth, and that was just fine with her.

Story Number 10: The Wheel of Fortune
The monkey raced around the mulberry bush.
So did the weasel.
Which was chasing which?

Story Number 11: Justice
Jane bowed her head. Justice was slow in coming. Very slow.
A thousand times now, the sun had risen and set.
Jane lifted her head. Now she understood.

Story Number 12: The Hanged Man
Everything is upside down now.
The hummingbird has consumed the eagle. Ganesh rides a mouse.
Mist obscures the ground,
above the hard black bowl of the sky.

Story Number 13: Death
Ring around the rosie,
pocket full of posie.
Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Story Number 14: Temperance
Silver wings fluttering in the breeze,
the angel plodded on,
toward the approaching dawn.

Story Number 15: The Devil
The image stared back at him
from the depths of the blackness.
The sin looked out at the sinner.

Story Number 16: The Tower
Ground shaking, tower leaning.
Maybe this was not such a good idea.
We’d better jump now.

Story Number 17: The Star
She dipped her big right toe in
the river of time, while chewing
a blade of grass.

Story Number 18: The Moon
Over and over and over again, they had endured the
reign of terror.
Once, the wings of mercy had shielded them.
What goes around comes around.
The moon waxes and wanes.

Story Number 19: The Sun
Bright shining as the sun, the child’s smile.
Crickets start to chirp in the heat.

Story Number 20: Judgement
Dem bones gonna rise again, Ezekiel eventually proclaimed.
But is that really what you want?
The streets of heaven are paved with gold.
The alchemists’ stuff, not the end result of
two neutron stars colliding in
far away galaxies.

Story Number 21: The World
No longer at my fingertips.
Where are my fingertips?
Who am I?
What is I?
Boundaries dissolve.
The world is.
Is.
Isness.
Isness is.

A Story: The Master
I watch the lord comb the lady’s hair.
The rest is untold.

Story Number Zero: The Fool
Innocence and isness
make no claims.

I hope you liked these little poetic reflections. If you have an artistic bent, and would like to collaborate on illustrations, please let me know by the comment feature.

Osho and Patanjali

I have read Osho’s book about Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras probably around four times now. It’s called The Science of the Soul. A lot of real and metaphorical ink has been spilled over the Yoga Sutras. Osho says that Patanjali was the Einstein of the spiritual path. Yet today, scholars dispute the time of his life by plus of minus 500 years! (400 BCE to 600 CE). Patanjali, as I see him, lies squarely in the river of the thought of the sages of the Indian culture.

They were so logical. They did not have all of the different developed modern scientific tools of epistemological analysis, so they were limited in what they could achieve, and sometimes mistaken about what was natural law versus cultural habit, but many of the areas where they turned their gaze were revealed in a way that increased accessibility for whole new groups of people.

For example, our alphabet, based on the one supposedly developed by the Phoenicians, has a random order. The Devanagiri script, descendent of that used for Sanscrit, is completely logically ordered. The first letter is the one whose sound is furthest back in the throat, and it moves forward from there.

Patanjali, like the modern scientists of the mind, used introspection as his main tool to create his science of liberation. Despite the work of Freud, Jung, Adler and their colleagues and professional descendants, Western culture has no communally shared answers to the big questions and problems of personal loss. Patanjali however, in the spirit of the Rishis of the earliest Vedic culture (1500 – 500 BCE) gave simple instruction on how to attain liberation from the feelings of loss and failure that accompany most thoughtful people who are subject to the human condition.

The instructions, Patanjali noted in his first sentence, are not for everyone. Osho says that Patanjali acknowledged that if you were not completely fed up with your mental state, completely devoid of hope that things would ever improve, you would not likely be interested in his method of liberation. I reached this state, or at least close enough to think that I know what it means, about a year ago. That’s why I keep rereading Osho’s book, and have also sought out other commentators on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

So, once you come to terms with the fact that you don’t have and never will have hope for peace of mind by any method based on logic, science, psychology, love, or money, open the Yoga Sutras. There you will read: Now, the discipline of yoga.

Grr. Discipline. I have never had any. People think I do, but I don’t. Or at least I never did. The arthritis attack forced me to get a little. I actually make my bed now, almost every day. Why not? I’m going to have to straighten the blankets before I lie down to sleep. Why not just do it in the morning? That’s discipline for it’s own sake. I live alone, so it’s very rare that anyone will see my messy bed. This, believe it or not, is a huge step forward in my personal practice of discipline.

Now, the discipline of yoga. Osho says that you have to have basic discipline in your life, eating and sleeping at regular times, or you will never get anywhere with your yoga practice. OK. Again, the arthritis forced me to change some of my ways.

I’m certainly not disciplined in any complete sense. If I were, my Failure Analysis book would be much further along than it is. Oh well. Maybe as I study and meditate more and more times on the second sutra, I will want more discipline so that I can proceed along the path to liberation from my own permanently troubled mind. The second sutra? Yoga is the cessation of mind.

This has always been problematic. The mind is kindof necessary, like the ego, to get through life. So what does this really mean? My current understanding is that it means that the mind, and ego for that matter, get demoted to servant, so that the true self can be the master.

The rest of Patanjali’s masterpiece is about how to make that happen. The bottom line is that we move our sense of who we are from our feelings, thoughts, and sensory input to the witness, the seer, the personal soul whose real existence is embedded in and inseparable from the consciousness of the eternal divine essence.