Click here to go to the next issue
Highlights Home Page | Receive the Nonduality Highlights each day
How to submit material to the Highlights
#3781 -
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Vicki Woodyard:
No Shit
Vicki Woodyard is called to talk about the dark side of her life,
the deaths of her young daughter and her husband’s
succumbing to multiple myeloma. She says,
“The dark night of the soul is slap-up against the treasure
and my life has been about that. I am called to write and speak
about the darkness and the light and they always go together and
there’s always a punchline to the darkest hour.”
Listen about a broken
heart, a broken life, a broken mind, and its sharing:
http://www.bobwoodyard.com/No%20Shit.mp3
Vicki’s home page: http://bobwoodyard.com/
A short film about
seeking, the absence of seeking, and amazement at life, as it is.
With words/narration by Jeff Foster -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUmENB19MhA
Do you like Yoga? The
Yoga Sutras? Etymology? Metalinguistic transformation? Who
doesn't? Here's Brett Brunner on those topics...
Brett Brunner
http://wordempire.blogspot.com/
I have recently perused
Patanjali's great work concerning yoga, the Yoga-Sutra,
translated by Chip Hartranft. I have found the aphoristic style
of the Yoga-Sutra to be not only engaging, but also deeply
profound; in it, Patanjali discusses the considerable spiritual,
mental, and physical rewards that one can derive from the
practice of yoga, which is much, much more than the usually held
western conception of yoga as just the asanas, or physical
postures/poses.
During the next two years
or so, I will devote myself to writing about each of Patanjali's
aphorisms, sequentially, contained in his remarkable 2nd-century
BCE text, with a focus on analyzing the text in terms of its
classical Greek and Latin roots of the fine English translation,
and then providing an individual's exegesis of the text itself,
based upon my own wonderful experience with yoga beyond the
asanas. It has been said that memorizing the Sanskrit text of the
Yoga-Sutra in and of itself can re-pattern the mind; I am
most curious to see if this phenomenon is also metalinguistic,
that is, can English and its root words effect the same
transformation?
Chapter 1:
Integration
Aphorism 1: Now, the teachings of yoga.
The name of this chapter (itself derived from the Latin root
caput, capitis: "head") comes from the Latin root
integer: "whole, entire, untouched." Thus, this first
chapter, the first of but four in the Yoga-Sutra, from an
etymological point of view, will focus upon "the act of
becoming whole, entire, or untouched." Note that the
mathematical term "integer," also comes via the Latin
integer (an "integer" is any "whole" number
that is not a fraction or "broken," hence an
"untouched" number, including the positives from 1, 2,
3 onwards, the negatives, or -1, -2, -3 onwards, and 0). Other
SAT-level words that derive from the Latin root word integer
include: integral, integrity, integrate, disintegrate,
disintegration, and entirety. Hence, Patanjali suggests very
early on that the practioner new to yoga is in some sense
"disintegrated," or has lost his or her spiritual
"integrity," and must regain being "whole" or
"entire."
Let's talk for a moment about the word "yoga."
"Yoga" simply means a "yoking" back to one's
origins by once again gaining "union" with our ultimate
origin. The Sanskrit yogah, "union," from which English
created "yoga," is that discipline by which the
"yogini" tries to rejoin her spiritual origins via
achieving a state of inner serenity by quieting the pestiferous
sem, or "flea mind" (so called because our minds tend
to jump around desultorily like ‘fleas,’ flittering
about to the tune of about 60,000 random thoughts per day). Let
us consider related Latin and Greek cognates of "yoga,"
and a few of the SAT and GRE vocabulary words that derive from
them:
Greek zygon, "yoke,
pair:" zeugma, zygote, zygotic.
Latin iungo, iungere, iunxi, iunctum: "to join:"
adjunct, adjoin, juxtapose, joint, juncture, conjunction,
maladjusted, conjoint, jostle, disjointed, subjunctive,
subjunctive, joust, junto, junta, rejoinder, conjoin,
conjunctive, disjunct, enjoin, etc.
From the roots above and
a discussion of the word "yoga," we can see that
"yoga" has a deep relationship to "joining"
its practitioners again with something profound, but with what?
And how does one go about practicing this union? Stay tune for
next week's entry which will discuss Aphorism 2: Yoga is to still
the patterning of consciousness. In this entry, I will
etymologically analyze the Latin root words of
"pattern" (related to our word "father") and
"consciousness," the latter an absolutely integral
concept that is at the heart of what the yogini or yogi does.
~ ~ ~
Read more Aphorism 2 and
more: