As promised, a response to this question, sooner than I expected...
Hi Grim,
would you mind dedicating a blog post to a topic called "books that deeply influenced my everyday yoga life" or something similar? I remember when you posted pics on your yoga bookshelf, also remember some posts when writing about Heidegger, etc.
I'd like to read about the books you think influenced your spiritual life (so I'm not talking about asa a practice books).
Thanks in advance,
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I think I indicated this is problematic for me, I tend to avoid the S word at all costs, too loaded.
A spiritual life, do I have a spiritual life?
If I go back to Plato's cave analogy, then the spiritual life and philosophical enquiry are one and the same, to understand things as they are rather than as they appear to be.
A spiritual life in this sense is one of enquiry...
'How things are rather than how they appear to be'.
For Heidegger, we're thrown into a world that's already going on and we take on that world such that it's almost impossible to experience existence in any other way, to exist in any other way.
almost impossible...
almost.
The world we take on is one where religions exist, spiritual traditions, where chalk and blackboards exist, where tools are picked up and used and without reflection and yet there is reflection but this is of the world we're thrown in to also, of the house of language we're trapped within, one where reflection goes on.
I'm thrown into a subject/object world. Through Heidegger I can question this construct intellectually but as soon as I take off my philosophers hat, there I am again in that subject/object world, it's one thing to think the world you experience is other than it appears, another to experience it as such.
Meditation and Yoga, which I tend to read as the same thing are, for me, just tools, techniques, approaches to seeing if I can experience outside of the subject/object dichotomy, to experience the world other than it appears to me, and if there's still a me and an experience once that subject and object are dissolved.
I've no idea what that would be like and don't have that much interest in reading how others say that it is ... for them, all that is of interest is finding an approach where I can experience that for myself or dissolve myself if that's how it works... or not.
You tend to find what your looking for, better not to look for anything inparticular so you don't stack the deck, in fact it seems better not to look that hard either, just sit, do the practice and then reflect but not too much.
So books that have influenced my spiritual life in this sense of enquiry tend to be philosophical. I studied Philosophy both the analytic and continental traditions but tend to keep coming back to Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and Heidegger but mostly Heidegger.
I've read the Bible, cover to cover in a cattle truck in the Negev desert I seem to remember, the Christian Mystics, Meister Eckhart, Looked into the Koran and read discourses of the Buddha, the Tao, quite a bit of Zen since I first came across it in my late teens.... I tend to read them as literature, as poetry, aesthetically, rather than as inspiration so I'm not sure I would say they've influenced my spiritual life.
Except perhaps for Buddhism, I don't call myself a Buddhist but that's probably where my leanings lie but more as an approach to daily living, to being a little kinder, more compassionate, forgiving... more tolerant and as a guide to practice.
If you consider those qualities to be indicative of a spiritual life then then you can add the Buddha's discourses to the list.
I tend to focus on Mindfulness as a practice but I've been listening to Gil Frondsal's podcasts on ZENCAST for the last could of years, which put the practice into it's Buddhist context, they've probably been quite influential, just started listening to quite a bit of Jack Kornfield too who for some reason I'd avoided for quite some time, lovely man.
And of course I've read a bunch of other writers on mindfulness, vipassana, good books, interesting writers, mostly different meditation techniques, approaches but nothing particularly comes to mind now, as with philosophy I found it better to just stick with Heidegger so I'm starting to think it's better to just stick with the Buddha and his own discourses.
As for books that have influenced my Yogic life (apart from asana)...
I don't know, I just practice. I learned Ashtanga and just practiced it everyday for a couple of years, rather than any book influencing me I think it's the practice itself. Rather than the text of Jois' Yoga Mala, the main influence was the gaze of the young Jois as he stares out at you, same goes for Krishnamacharya, rather than his words, it's his intensity that seems to say go practice.
Ramaswami of course has been the major influence on me outside of practice, finding in his book a translation of Yoga that emphasises the focus of the mind rather than union, which seemed to fit with why I was practicing asana and meditation in the first place. Through him I've read more around Yoga, put it more historical and cultural context mainly out of intellectual curiosity.
I'm particularly interested in Samkhya at the moment but mainly as a confirmation of how I already see my yoga practice,
...as focus of mind so to enquire.
There you go, best I can do..... of course, that's just what I think I think has or hasn't influenced me, who knows what's really going on in there.
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