Excerpt from 'Beyond Power Yoga'
by Beryl Bender Birch
zone3
CONSTRUCT OF REALITY
One night, after I got back to California, I was on my way
home from a yoga class. I was sitting in the back seat of a
car thinking about going to India. At the moment, I was
actually visualizing climbing a mountainside covered with
wildflowers in the foothills of the Himalayas (which, not
coincidentally, I would eventually do). My friend turned to me
and said, "You want to go to India, don't you?" This was too
freaky! "Uh, yeah," I mumbled. "Well, you'll go," she said. A
year later I was on my way. How did this work? Was it just a
question of creating a thought form, and then holding that
until it began to manifest? I starting tracing back the string
of events of the past year or so. Every event had contributed
to every other event. Everything was interconnected. If it
hadn't been for this, then that wouldn't have happened. If it
hadn't been for that, then this wouldn't have happened. It
started to dawn on me how this all worked. I started to watch
a little more closely what I envisioned and asked for.
My father is dying; an Indian yogi materializes to answer
my questions about death and dying. I almost die in a blizzard
and a dog that as a puppy was adopted, and inexplicably
returned three times in a week before he ended up with me,
saves my life. I dream of going to India and haven't a dime
for the trip. Suddenly I have $1,500, which is exactly how
much I need to buy my plane ticket and go to India for four
months. As I look back at all of this, I can see that it never
occurred to me that I wouldn't get answers and action in
response to the questions I asked. As a child, I was in the
habit of asking God questions and expecting answers. It never
occurred to me that God wouldn't explain to me about my
father. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't make it to
Colorado. And it never occurred to me that I wouldn't go to
India.
If I had stopped to figure it out in a linear or logical
way, then I would have seen that since I was earning only $5
an hour, it was clearly going to take a very long time to get
this trip together. But I didn't think like that. I just
assumed that if God wanted me to go to India, God would come
up with the money, somehow. I didn't put a logical limit, in
terms of either time or effort, on how it was supposed to
come. I just figured it would be there when I needed it and I
went ahead with my plans. The next thing I knew it was time to
go, and I sold my Volkswagen van for $500, sold an article I
wrote on acupuncture for $500, and was given a $500
scholarship to go to India from a yoga school where I was
studying. Practically overnight, I had $1,500.
It started to dawn on me that there was nothing that wasn't
possible, and I started to live my life like that. Perhaps
that is why I was so naïve when I first went to India. It
never occurred to me that anything bad would happen, so that
construct of reality didn't exist for me. Luckily, God covered
my ass.
THE PAYBACK IN MANALI
Every twelve years in India there is a huge spiritual
festival called Kumbha Mela. Devout Hindus from all over India
travel to a designated city on the Ganges River. Then, at a
particularly auspicious moment, determined by a team of
astrologers and pundits, everyone tries to bathe in the river
at the same time. This wouldn't be so bad, but generally there
are well over two million people in attendance at these
festivals. The year 1974 was a Kumbha Mela year and Hardwar,
on the Ganges River, was the city where it was to be held, in
mid-April. I had offered to cover the event for East West
Journal, so after spending a month or so in and around Bombay,
I needed to think about beginning the journey north (along
with a few million other folks heading for the Ganges River)
in order to write about and take some photographs of this
unique festival.
In early April, I packed up and jumped on a train to New
Delhi. From there I could take a bus and arrive in the general
vicinity of Hardwar a few weeks before the masses arrived for
Kumbha Mela. I kept a journal while traveling in India. Here
is an entry from the train trip I took from Bombay to New
Delhi: "A few hours north of Bombay, it begins to get very
green, green fields, green trees and orchards. Every shade of
green from lime green to deep forest green. It is the first
green I have seen outside of Bombay's vegetable markets. It is
breathtaking. It is one in the afternoon and people sit in the
shade and watch the train go by. The sun is 180 degrees
overhead. It is hot. A pig urinates. Men and women squat and
watch and wait....Oxen stand in knee-deep swamp grass...clumps
of small boys watch the train....A bicycle lies on its side in
the dust....A woman beats clothes on a rock in a small river.
Saris are spread out on the grass, drying in the sun. Patches
of bushes covered with assorted scraps of cloth and lengths of
rags, all colors, all drying. We seem to make quite a large
number of unscheduled stops, in the middle of nowhere, miles
from the stations, only shacks, farms, tiny villages. A man
and young boy appear in the distance. They carry a shiny brass
urn and cross the fields towards the front of the train. They
walk to the side of the train and some exchange goes on. The
boy carries off two empty bottles. The simplicity is beyond
the imagination, beyond conception. It can only be
experienced."
The trip from Bombay was smooth and tranquil. The simple
rhythms of the passing landscape were like a meditation
mantra. When I arrived in New Delhi, it was hot as hell. My
backpack was too heavy, which made it feel even hotter.
Suddenly I was hot, sweaty, overburdened, and stressed. I felt
too complicated. After a few days of shopping for Tibetan
prayer beads and off loading some stuff at a friend's house, I
headed up toward Hardwar. I was down to the bare essentials. I
had a pair of rope-and-canvas shoes with recycled rubber tire
soles that I had found in Delhi for 6 rupees (72 cents back
then). I also had my Nikon camera and a good supply of film
and felt tip pens. I wore a plain kadi sari, but now no one
noticed because there were so many freaky-looking people
converging on Hardwar anyway, a good many of whom were
wandering around naked and covered with gray ash, that I just
blended in with the circus.
By the time I arrived, there were already about five
hundred thousand people in town. I spent several days
photographing hundreds of arriving sadhus (monks) and other
holy men and women, of all shapes and sizes and into all kinds
of trips and all come to purify themselves physically and
spiritually in Mother Ganges. It was still hot as hell, and it
wasn't long before I had had enough of Kumbha Mela. I was due
back in Bombay in a couple of weeks to walk for a month on
silent retreat with a number of Jain nuns before the rainy
season started in June. But first I had to see the mountains.
How I ended up in Manali I don't really know, but it was a
welcome change after the heat and madness of Hardwar.
I do remember someone telling me about a Tibetan refugee
camp, and about a number of Tibetan lamas who had walked
there, across the border from Tibet. So I honed in on this
tiny village in the north of Himachal Pradesh, in the
Himalayan foothills and on the border with Tibet. One thing
led to another, and I ended up on a bus going from New Delhi
to Chandigar in Punjab State on my way to Manali. There was an
energy crisis in Chandigar when I arrived, and there was no
electricity in the city. The bus schedule was shot to hell
because of the lack of electricity, so I ended up camping
overnight in the bus station. I struck up a conversation with
Chai Baba, an Indian who was also on his way to Manali, and
with a German hippie whose name I don't remember.
I slept peacefully, planted between my two adopted
bodyguards, Chai Baba and the German. The next morning I left
very early on the first bus out of town for Kulu Valley, just
south of Kashmir. The English had planted lots of apple and
fruit trees in Kulu Valley when they were a presence in India,
and Manali was one of the places in the high valley where the
upper-class British living in India spent their summers to
escape the heat of New Delhi. How they ever got there back in
the early part of the century, or even twenty years ago, is a
total mystery to me! Here is the entry from my journal for
April 18: "The longest, hottest, most nearly unbearable
thirteen hours that I can remember...bus to Manali -- packed
with people. Winding mountain roads all the way -- bumpy,
under construction. 'Under construction' means Tibetan men and
women digging into the mountainside and hauling chunks of
granite away in baskets on their heads. The women seemed to
work physically as hard as the men and all with babies
strapped to their backs and the family fortune in coral and
turquoise beads hanging from their necks and woven into their
jet black hair."
Every few hours the bus would stop at some roadside village
for "refreshments" for the passengers. Everyone would pile off
the bus and head for the fields to pee. Children, chickens,
goats, and bags would be unloaded and then reloaded when we
were ready to go. Belongings were hanging out of every window
and off the luggage racks on top and everything would get
shuffled around at every stop to make room for some new
passengers. Young boys selling clay cups of chai would gather
around the bus. You could take the cup of tea on the bus with
you, and then, when you finished your chai, you could just
throw the cup out the window and it would shatter and return
to dust, which I thought was perhaps the coolest thing about
my whole trip to India. About eight hours into the trip, I got
off the bus for a few minutes, and I left my bag, with my
Nikon camera stuffed in the bottom, on the bus under the seat.
A few hours later, when my first view of the Himalayan
Mountains came into sight, I scrambled to get out my camera. I
pulled out everything in the bag, and at the bottom of the bag
was an enormous stone, about the same size and weight as my
camera.
I stared at the stone. I emptied the bag. No camera? No
camera! A stone! A stone? This didn't compute. How did this
stone get into my bag? I just sat there with nothing
registering for a few minutes. I kept looking at the stone,
trying to figure out how my Nikon camera had turned to stone.
Finally the whole picture began to dawn on me. Of course, part
of me just wanted to go nuts, but my reluctance to embarrass
myself took precedence over my desire to freak out and tear up
the entire bus! I just sat there. My @#$%^)(* Nikon camera had
been stolen right from under my nose, and what was worse,
probably by someone who didn't have a clue how much the ggod
damnedthing was worth. This whole event, I slowly realized,
was premeditated to the point that someone actually had taken
my camera out of my bag and replaced it with a stone of about
the same size so that I would not know my camera was missing
until I actually looked in the bag. It must have been someone
who already had seen my camera when I had it out somewhere. I
couldn't believe it! Who? How? I felt a flood of panic. The
mountains! My first trip to the Himalayas. How would I record
the event?
The strangest thing happened. I just kind of looked around
and said, "Well, okay, I guess I'm not meant to take any
pictures in the mountains!" I was very calm. I remember
starting to feel pain, but I shoved it back down. I was bloody
stoic, in fact. But did I really "get" the teaching? Or did I
just bury my feelings as I had when my mother died? By rights,
I should have felt something. I mean it was okay to get really
pissed off. It was a brand-new Nikon. Ah well, one thing was
for sure: The camera was gone. Really, what was the point of
getting angry? Nothing could be done. Whom could I be angry
with? God? Life? Everybody on the bus? India? Whom could I
blame? I said to myself, "This is a lesson. This is a very
big, painful lesson. But what is the teaching, here?" For a
while, I carried the stone around in my bag. I wanted to chain
it to my ankle, like shackles, to remind me of my
unconsciousness. I carried it all the way to Manali. People
asked me, "What is that stone you are carrying?" Ah, well,
yes, you would have had to have been there!
THE BLACK CROW AND THE THREE MOUNTAIN
PEAKS
Kulu Valley was so extraordinarily exquisite, I cried. I
couldn't believe I didn't have my camera. It was simply one of
the most beautiful places I had ever seen. We sort of squeezed
into the south end of the valley through a narrow precipitous
gorge. But as we went farther north toward Manali, it opened
up into a lush green valley with apple orchards, rice paddies,
and wheat fields along the valley floor and lower slopes and
deodar forests higher up the slopes, with luminescent
snow-capped Himalayan peaks in the background. The apple trees
in April were covered with pink blossoms, and velvet petals
floated about like aimless travelers caught on the late
afternoon breeze. The Vyaas (also called Beas) River, which
flows down the middle of the valley, was high with spring
runoff, and the water, unlike spring runoff in Colorado which
is muddy, was perfectly clear and sparkling! The air was thin
and flawless.
Soon after we arrived in Manali, I heard that there was a
mud and stone hut available for rent up on the eastern slope
of the valley, above the Tibetan encampment. Chai was going to
stay with a friend, but I could stay in this hut, if no one
else had already moved in. We would have to hike up there and
see. It was over an hour's climb from town on the valley floor
to the hut. We passed goats and goatherds and followed the
goat trails up the mountain to the high pastures. I didn't
take the stone. The path we traveled took us through apple
orchards, wild fields of red clover, mint, thyme, hemp, and
chamomile, and one particularly incredible old-growth
Himalayan cedar forest. Then, about a five-minute walk from
the edge of the forest, a tiny hut, sitting unobtrusively next
to an animated stream cascading down to the Vyaas on the
valley floor, came into view. This little shelter was about
the size of a medium-to-large tent. The door was only about
four feet high, so I had to duck down to enter and I couldn't
stand up inside the hut either. The floor was made of hard
packed earth, and in the corner was a small clay-and-stone
oven where I could build a little fire for heat or to do some
simple cooking and baking. There was a basic sleeping
platform, a couple of pots and pans, a plate, a cup, a bucket
to haul water from the stream, and that was it. It appeared to
be available. Heaven! The rent was about $5 per week, payable
at the bakery in town. I moved in the same day. This would be
my home for the next few weeks.
The next morning was freezing cold. I built a fire and
jumped back into my sleeping bag, peering out the door and
waiting for the sun. Manali is at an altitude of about nine
thousand feet. I was another thousand feet up the side of the
mountain. The peaks surrounding the valley are all about
fifteen thousand feet. The valley isn't more than a few
kilometers across, so it's a pretty narrow angle from peak to
peak. In the mornings it takes a while for the sun to get up
high enough in the east over the mountain to hit the
west-facing slope. Finally, when the sun reached my vantage
point on the side of the mountain, it began to warm up. I
ventured outside to sit for my morning prayers and pranayama,
which is a yoga technique of controlling prana (energy), by
attending to the breath. That was when I noticed the
mountains, really. Off the front of the hut there was a little
wooden porch made from twigs and branches. If I sat right in
the middle I looked out across to the other side of the valley
and faced precisely west. There were three peaks more than
fifteen thousand feet high facing back at me in precise linear
progression. One was 45 degrees to the left, one 45 degrees
exactly to the right, and one directly in the center, I
happened to notice that morning that the three peaks came into
perfect focus right there on the porch, like the apex of a
crystal or a pyramid. They all seemed to aim their reflected
beams of sunlight directly at the point between my eyebrows,
or what is called in yoga the third eye center. I have no idea
how long I sat there -- five minutes, fifty minutes --
completely focused on these convergent sunbeams in my mind's
eye. The valley was so narrow that it felt as if I could reach
out and catch these energy beams as they rocketed in. It was
completely extraterrestrial.
As I sat there, tuning in to the prana charge from these
three majestic mountains, a crow landed about two feet from me
on the end of the little porch. He sat and looked at me. And
suddenly I had this incredible vision and knowing about the
yoga principle of asteya (nonstealing). For the past year, I
had spent a lot of time thinking about the idea of stealing.
Why, really, did I quit stealing things? Was it only because I
thought that in so doing I would prevent things from being
stolen from me? Or was there hope for a deeper ethical lesson?
But things were still being stolen from me. Was I still
stealing, only in less obvious ways, or just paying off my
debt?
Ever since the camera was taken I had been trying to make
the loss easier on myself by saying things like "Look; it's a
weight off my shoulders. I don't have to carry it around
anymore. It's a lesson in vairagya (detachment, letting go). I
should feel liberated." Well, all of a sudden, as that crow
touched down, it was like the fog lifted. You know how you
suddenly get something that up until that point has been
totally obscured from your field of understanding, and then
all of sudden, Duh! you get it? I realized that not only had a
weight been lifted off my back literally, but the weight of
the karma had been lifted as well. The debt was paid! I just
knew, in that moment, that I had repaid, with interest, the
price for every material thing I had ever taken that did not
belong to me. And I knew that if I paid fairly close
attention, I would never have anything stolen from me
again.
The absolute moment that that understanding dawned on me,
the crow hopped a few inches closer to me and squawked at me.
And then the second dawning came. Again, I got why my camera
had been taken. I wasn't supposed to have my camera now. I
realized that with every step I took, I had reached for my
camera, looking to record the event for the future. The
mountains, the river, the forest, the meadows -- I hadn't
really seen any of them, because I always wanted to get them
down on film. I was never present, really. I was always in the
future somewhere, not feeling a need to be present because I
could always look back at the photo and have the moment back
again, and then I could pay attention. As the trip to Manali
unfolded, I began to notice how often, whenever something
special or beautiful or noteworthy or painful or eventful
happened, I would reach for my camera in order to stop or
preserve it. I would then suddenly realize what I was doing
and remember that I didn't have my camera anymore. I started
to tell myself, "Look; this is it. There are no better
moments. There are only moments. Just appreciate it for now,
because you will never see it again as it is now!" It truly
was a lesson in vairagya. At that moment on that porch,
looking at that crow, I had just the tiniest glimpse of what
is meant by nonattachment. My experience in the Himalayan
Mountains was really one of my first teachings in
mindfulness.
CONSCIOUS EVOLUTION
Little by little I had these life experiences. I had
glimpses of understanding. And very slowly I started to
observe that what I generated, I would attract. I began to
watch a little more closely what I actually did. Consciousness
seemed to be dawning. But what is this process of becoming
conscious? This really is the fundamental question of this
whole book. How do we evolve? Do we just have random
experiences and learn from them, or is there a logical
sequence? Is there some plan? Do we evolve whether or not we
are conscious of our evolution or consciously trying to
evolve? Is evolution programmed into our DNA whether we want
to evolve or not? Or must we choose it? Must we follow some
plan or methodology? And when do we become awake?
I was conscious, at least enough to know that I wanted
evolution. I wanted to know the nature of my soul, to know
Truth or to know God or the highest, furthest-reaching
possible understanding I could attain of the nature of the
universe and of Self. I actually longed and ached for greater
understanding. And to become aware of this desire for
evolution is actually what I think "awake" means. And just
exactly what is it we want to evolve toward? I think the soul
knows that its only purpose is evolution, and that it is
longing to experience perfect love or, we might say,
God-consciousness. I think "awake" happens when we become
aware of this desire for liberation from anything that limits
our ability to experience this feeling of complete bliss, joy,
being, whatever you want to call it.
How did I know this? As a very small child, maybe three or
four, I can remember having awareness of evolution. And the
only way I remember this really, is because of a very clear
image I have in my mind. I used to think that if there was
something I could do, as a result of mental focusing or
effort, that would cause a child of mine to be born with some
sign of conscious evolution, then that would be demonstrative
proof that I had consciously evolved. And what I had in mind
as a sign was the pinkie toe. I figured that if I meditated on
mutating to a species with no pinkie toe, and then had a child
with no pinkie toe, then I would know evolution, or some
conscious forward movement, was possible. I would sit and
close my eyes and try to feel what it would take to evolve
consciously like this. I would often imagine a gigantic
machine with lots of gears and cables and whirlygigs and so
forth, and I would mentally generate energy to run this
machine. It was as if I were directing a beam of light toward
the mechanical power behind the movement. Then I would just
sit there and "watch" the machine. And it evolved me!
Now this is pretty strange for a four-year-old kid. Where
do these images come from? How could I possibly have a logical
understanding of the concept of evolution? Thinking way back
and trying to remember the feelings of what was going on in my
little mind helps to describe the pictures now. I did most of
my thinking in pictures, and I still do, so although it sounds
incredible now, I remember it as all very logical and familiar
at the time. The beam of concentrated energy that I sent to
this evolution machine was similar to the beam of
concentration that I used in my sleep to break the hold of
gravity and fly.
In yoga, the word samskara, which means "tendency," or a
"habitual conditioning of the mind," is used to describe these
inclinations of early childhood that have no obvious
explanation. Samskara is, quite literally, an imprint on the
energy body of the soul, which is carried over, according to
yoga philosophy, from one lifetime to the next. In Eastern
thought, my childhood craving for evolution and liberation
could be explained this way: I had to have had some prior
experience in directing and focusing the mind in some
capacity. Well, maybe I did a little floor-sweeping in
earlier lifetimes!
My experiences had shown me, through reading, study, and
life, that there was a way to do this conscious evolution
business. I had started to learn that I could direct my path
to some degree. There were trail maps to God. Deep in my
subconscious there was even a memory of a methodology that did
not require any particular faith or any religious belief. In
fact, this method said, "Believe nothing until you find it out
for yourself, from your own experience." I remembered it as a
very practical and scientifically worked-out way to reach this
truth. This appealed to me -- still not quite consciously. It
floated around just below the surface of my awareness, like a
bubble waiting to burst through. This method told me that I
could perceive for myself whether or not I had a soul, whether
life is of a day or of eternity, whether or not I had lived
before or would live again, and whether there is a God in the
universe or not. All this would be revealed. I seemed to
remember of this process that it required the same kind of
effort that it took in my dreams for me to fly. A turning
inward. A focused concentration that could then enable a
liftoff of sorts. But the memory of the technique eluded me,
in exactly the same way that the technique for flying was
completely obscured from my waking consciousness. I didn't
exactly know it yet, but all my experiences and trail markers
were pointing me toward astanga yoga.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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