116 yogasūtra 3.0 yogasūtra 3.0 117 Yoga, intended as a path towards awareness as already discussed on these pages, unites within itself disciplines which are different in form, but nevertheless aim at the same objective just like the radii of a circle. These can stem from different points [truth be told, these are infinite] of a circumference, but inevitably aim at the same centre. This way, keeping in mind their common destination, we can briefly state that Hatha-Yoga is inspired by the education of the body - due to this, as can be easily understood, it represents the most common practice, where the sun sets. On the other hand, Ashtanga or Raja Yoga is inspired by the education of consciousness. A destination, needless to say, which constitutes the foundation and the ultimate goal of every epoch and, for us Westerners, has been engraved since time immemorial on the pediment of the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, Greece. Nonetheless, on a closer look, the matter concerning the so called awareness - the problem of establishing what it is and how to attain it - remains to this day as something which is anything but radiant, even after all these centuries foregone. And since tradition [maybe the one that’s closer to the source] refers to the Sūtra of Patañjali and articulates the Path of Yoga along eight steps [from here the name Ashtanga, which literally means eight], let’s attempt to lift some of the fog, keeping in mind, despite all methodological precaution, the peak of these stages, known as samādhi. Normally - and faintly - described as a fusion with the Absolute, samādhi, ‘to put together’ in Sanskrit, has the same meaning as the Greek word symbol. Derived, in turn, from sumbállō [I put together], the súmbolon [originally meaning hospitable land divided in two] regulated the mutual bond that was the sacred norm established between the natives and foreigners [ksénos]. For this purpose, the parties involved had to break an object into two - normally a piece of a mosaic or a terracotta brick, a súmbolon to be exact - each one retaining half, so as to ensure the mutual bond of friendship. ts authenticity could be demonstrated if one of the two pieces combined perfectly with one another, reconstructing the whole from which both came from. However, even more importantly, each fragment when observed on its own [and thus as opposite from the other as possible], reflects a bond, the presence of a third subject. Although momentarily invisible, it in turn inevitably reminded of that now-lost unity, without which, after all, neither of the two could have existed. It was thus a ritual meant to bridge the ancestral separation which everyone, without exception, feels since that time when we distinguish between ‘me’ and ‘you’ for the first time, so as to overcome our inherent inability to grasp with the mind a unit that simultaneously encompasses the two opposite concepts in itself. In truth, from our own normal perception, the world juggles between many polar opposites, incompatible at first sight: Light-Darkness, Good-Evil, Black-White, Life-Death, Male-Female, Subject-Object, Health-Disease, WaveParticle and so forth. Nonetheless, on a closer look, these distinctions cannot be entirely “real”: they stem out - just like the splinters of the súmbolon - a unity that in principle had to summarise all of them without any friction. In fact, if we look at elementary mathematics, we can think of 1 as that number that, even if implicitly, contains all other numbers inside it - that is, just like that Unity that, even if unexpressed, includes in itself the whole multiplicity. Therefore, the existence of 2 informs us of the necessary pre-existence of a state in which this had to be 1. In addition, dwelling a little deeper, although we enjoy judging the extremes of these divisions as existing per se [for the same reason we enjoy paying lip service when we say «this is good» and «that is bad»], substantially it is impossible to think along these terms. In fact, if we observe the world less superficially, we realise that the poles of each couple basically depend on one another, and, in a certain sense, continually crave the lost union when both were still in harmony: a union that, as we have established, must have existed, otherwise the world itself would not exist. Just like a súmbolon fragment matches only with a fragment which was previously united, in the same way a pole of every complementary couple mysteriously does not match with whatever is not like itself, but rather with what is relentlessly antithetical. The positive and negative poles of a magnet are a perfect example of polarity: down to the atomic level, they are viscerally and indissolubly opposite each other; however, well perceivable between them is something like a burning desire for unity, despite the fact that one embodies everything that the other is not. Indeed, once left free, what are they doing in the end - if not trying to reunite frantically? Now, if we think again on how we experience the world, we know well enough that all relationships change, without a pause, and that through this lens, which is subject to time, everything now is this way and after will be that way. But is this direction, on the basis of which the cause is always in the past and the effect always in the future, truly so unambiguous, or can causes exist beyond, which act already upon the present? If this statement should, comprehensively, appear odd, think about all those motives still “hidden” in the future that influence your today - such as, for example, going grocery shopping because tomorrow you will have guests for dinner. We realise, without understanding it, that our life fluctuates incessantly between these two types of causalities, and that every event can be read as their encounter. Truth be told, both ways of thinking appear valid if we think of that common conception according to which time, experienced as a first followed by an after, substantially does not exist per se, and is the guise through we partially perceive a space that we cannot fully grasp. Nevertheless, and even though this appears seemingly to be a form of speculation on insignificant topics, the adherence to one belief or the other splits the world into two battling parts: those that conceive it as a temporal development of a mechanical principle and those that see it as a fulfilment of an eternal model. In other words: is the world to which we belong the result of a cause, born of an unknown point in the “past”, or is it the result of a cause from the “future” that is dragging it to reveal itself in a form that has always been waiting to manifest itself? The way out of the labyrinth is still a source of heated debate, but what if it were the very act of this separation which makes it particularly difficult to grasp the right direction? If we ascertained that the contrasts of the polar world need, for their very existence, a previous symbiotic state, should we not therefore conclude that this splitting is not an intrinsic characteristic of the world, but rather the result of the way in which we alter it? At this point, the solution appears to be to reunite the two discordant visions - if only it didn’t mean that, taking this path, unavoidably we are going to crash against the indomitable monster within our logic, that we call paradox: that is, the impossibility of acknowledging that the same thing can be simultaneously A and non-A. As already mentioned, we are unable to grasp the entirety within which, for example, black and white coexist at the individual level, despite the fact that they are fundamentally devoid of this uniqueness: black and white - the 2 - are the only form through which we enjoy the experience of something that we cannot speak and even think about - the 1. If, however, we accept the simultaneous presence of both sides of the dispute, in some way these must continue to keep the features of the unity from which they derive - meaning that they must, like the two fragments of the súmbolon, continue to be connected some way between themselves, despite that, for us, this type of relationship is everything but self-evident. Given this, what needs to exist really, meaning in its entirety, will be something for which the unidirectional process of cause/effect will lack a meaning, something contradictory and irreproachable to our commonplace logic - indeed, something like A = non-A. #yogasutra 3.0 curated by Marcello Cicognani
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