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Philosophy of the Grammarians

Three-quarters of language remain hidden in a cave, while the fourth part fashions creation.

Thinking is seen as internal speaking to which not enough prana or breath has been added to make it overt. Writing, the focus of attention for the modern West, is seen by vyakarana as a coded recording of the oral, which can never perfectly represent all the nuances of the spoken word and is therefore always secondary.

Stumbled across this site in pre-practice reading. Can’t resist posting, as it is astonishly poetic.

The word “pratyahara” means “removing indriyas from material objects.” Pratyahara is the stage at which an adept learns how to control the “tentacles” of consciousness that are called “indriyas” in Sanskrit. This allows him to achieve the ability to see in subtle and the subtlest layers of multidimensional space, as well as to exit of his material body into them and to settle in them, accustoming himself to their subtlety, tenderness and purity.

Concept of indriyas exists only in the Indian spiritual culture. Europeans with their simplified, complicated and degraded religious ideas usually are not capable of grasping this kind of knowledge. Even in translations from Indian languages they substitute the word “indriyas” with the word “senses” that has lost its original meaning; by doing this they completely reject the immense methodological significance of pratyahara concept and of principles of work at this stage.

Europeans translate the term “pratyahara” as “control over the senses.” But senses are not everything that is denoted by the term indriyas, since indriyas include mind as well. It is also essential that the image of “tentacles” evoked by the word “indriyas” provides profound understanding of the principles of functioning of the mind and consciousness, as well as of methods of controlling them.

Krishna presented a fundamental knowledge about working with the indriyas in Bhagavad Gita. He was talking about indriyas of sight, hearing, smell, touch, proprioreception and also about those of mind. And indeed: concentration on an object through any sense organ or with mind is very similar to extending a tentacle to it from one’s body. When we switch concentration to another object we detach and move our indriyas to it. In the same manner the mind creates its own indriyas, when we think about something or someone. People with developed sensitivity can perceive other people’s indriyas touching them. In some cases they can even see those indriyas and therefore they can influence them.

Krishna was saying that one of the things that a man should learn is the ability to draw all his indriyas from the material world inwards, just like a tortoise retracts its paws and head into its shell. Then one should extend one’s indriyas into Divine eons in order to embrace God with them, to draw himself to Him and to merge with Him.

From Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies: The Philosophy of the Grammarians:

Abhinavagupta recognized the similarity between aesthetic experience and the mystical experience, but points out the boundary line that separates the two. The mystical experience of the ultimate reality is total and complete, and the yogin is far beyond any form of discursive thought. Aesthetic experience gives bliss only temporarily and cannot be considered supreme bliss, though it is superior to the worldly joys.

Later Jagannatha Panditaraja, aithor of the Rasagangadhara, states that rasa (aesthetic pleasure) is identical with consciousness or Brahman, and aesthetic experience, in its truest sense, is the realization of that consciousness by the removal of the veils covering it.

Sure, I get sick of reading business cases and reports. Sure, I’m OVER PowerPoint presentations.

Yes, I look forward to getting in a few minutes of Infinite Jest before I keel over into unconsciousness each night. A little bit more literature in my day; is that too much to ask?

Apparently not. Click this link and then click on “NZ Book Council Guest.” Then doubleclick the folder of your choice on the left side of the screen…

All of my problems have been solved.

***

If you Google “spatial direction” you get some trippy quantum physics stuff and also an excerpt from Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies: The Philosophy of the Grammarians (don’t ask me why I know this).

(without bends), and this action is one of going upward.

Does anyone else love fragments the way I do?

Oh word-based ready-made, I love you.

***

Direction differentiates material things (murta) in terms of nearness and remoteness, while time distinguishes them in terms of sequence of actions. Direction is the basis of the talk of contact and disjunction through the perception of occupied and unoccupied regions of the sky.

There is no fixed arrangement of spatial direction. The various compass directions, which seem to divide systematically, are mere names when they are divested of reference to things (for example, the sun at a particular time) with which they are associated.

Based on distinctions such as “this,” “that,” “eastern,” “western,” and the like, which are introduced by spatial direction, are the divisions seen in things from mountains to atoms. These divisions are characterized in terms of the accompanying entity (for example, presence or absence of light) or configuration, but the concept or capacity called “spatial direction” is their ultimate foundation. Things per se are beyond division, sequence, and fixation by region. Division with which the adjuncts invest them has no end and cannot be something inherent to them. Yet division cannot be avoided. Spatial direction is operational everywhere. Along with time, it is part of the very nature of living beings.

Okay, I’m back. Just ordered the book. How could I resist? Anything that instantly pops me into right-brain first thing in the morning wins my undying love.

This whole thing started because I was going to tell how The Cop’s parents sent us a GPS system for the car. They bought a new one and sent along their old one. I got home from work, and The Cop was looking at it with a bit of disdain. Easy for him to do, since he is not spatially challenged. My first thought? “Woohoo! I can program it with addresses I need to find when I’m in Minnesota!”

Yup, July 11-17 is Matthew Sweeney in Minnesota week. Turns out the hotel near the shala is bad, so I booked a room downtown. Which meant renting a car to get back and forth to the shala. Which also means driving from the airport to the hotel. All of these things are a huge challenge to me: as I mentioned, I have no sense of direction. And I don’t mean I have a poor sense of direction; I mean, I can get lost in my own neighborhood.

I do feel better now, though, knowing that “things per se are beyond division, sequence, and fixation by region.”

So there you go. An object lesson in what happens when I surf the web and try to tell a story at the same time.

Yes, a new template. Wanted more flexibility with the categories. This blog was originally started to keep up with my yoga practice notes. Along with a little personal stuff. And then I added some separate pages for poetry projects.

Lately, though, I’ve had some work/technology/learning topics I’ve been thinking about, and I’ve been debating whether to start a whole new blog, or try to have one, more flexible site.

So, if you want yoga (which is 99.999% of the current posts), you can use the Ashtanga yoga category to select those posts. Technology and Poetry have their own categories, so you can sort that way, too.

This is nice. Everything is all fresh and shiny. Unlike my house, which I’ve neglected in favor of playing on my computer all morning.

excavating a space within or beyond,
a space into which to pass

and, even closer, the dead figure,
the pure simultaneity of

the immediacy and directness with which surface is given to vision

there is a slippage in this imperative
through which the visual and the bodily
form a single continuum

gathers up all the strands of separate parts
retreats away in successive waves
back into the distance

the loss of a single viewpoint

the very image of what could be called the moment
lifted up within, cancelled,
at the same time deposits its mark on the surface,
like the x that cancels, in a great hiss of negation

pleasure of leaving a mark

the mastery of resemblance is progressive

the fabulously detailed and nuanced animals
bifurcated from within,
point in opposite directions simultaneously,
both downward
and upward,
the internal contradiction of the world
a perfect fit

projected out

this is the trace, the instigator,
the pure movement

preceded by multiplicity
which underlies the ground of possibility

indivisibility of presence

allows the outside
to invade its inside

the field to which he or she is present
only as a displaced term

separation of self
from itself

connects

then

1

1. name / a) Becoming light. b) Suspension and habit describe the contours of the human body.
2. third eye / a) One who measures fate a half inch in diameter and over three miles long. b) One who makes predictions I can’t understand.
3. throat / One who shapes a kind of postscript.
4. crescent moon / Master of all things, nearly swamping in the end. The Lord of all things broken up and of all things gathered in folds.
5. hair / The creator of vaguely topographic configurations.
6. ashes / One who is difficult to distinguish from the central core. One introduced as a narrow band along the edge of creation.
7. skin / One who is a pier extending into the sea.
8. serpent / The soul of all beings — animals and insects spread out across the maps, sometimes clustering, sometimes appearing to head out into the unknown.
9. spray / One who is a simple text.

2

10. the pure self / One who is landscape with rain. What we see remains.
11. the supreme guide / One who reverses the rhythms of this earthly life.
12. multiplicity / One who is beyond the map’s edges, suggesting released or liberated souls.
13. humor / a) One who evokes the human body. b) Indestructible.
14. snake / a) One who bestows erect stances and animated gestures. b) One whose explicit bodily references are lost to more abstract arrangements. c) One who is an imaginary grid of raking light and long-handled nets. d) One who could, theoretically, go on and on.
15. ink / One who directly witnesses the recollections of ordinary people.
16. animal / One who transgresses every boundary.
17. body / One of self-portraits, cast-off clothes, endless pictures and continuous projections.

3

18. One who alone is the definition of rotting apricots and apples.
19. One who leads to ruin in unpredictable, disintegrating flux.
20. One who intercepts the view of the outside world.
21. One who possesses a body fragmented and eventually eclipsed.
22. One with the great freedom of the burning ground.
23. One resting in uncertainty.
24. The Bird with One Wing amongst the illimitable field.

4

25. One who when observed without any intention will unfold.
26. Anything that could be used to draw or write about human or animal forms.
27. One who fuses spirit and matter. And bestows momentary contact between.
28. One who is chains, tires, satellite dishes, radio towers, batteries and, at the outer edges, birds of this and that.
29. a) One who eagerly seeks after the mysterious incommensurability of the apparent. b) The source of love, but it’s not what you think. c) The source of all doors.
30. The inexhaustible trying to keep up.
31. One who can fly with one wing. It is desire that binds.
32. One who generates a heat-producing and luminous body.
33. Breath.
34. One who offers resistance to, and is resisted by, other bodies.
35. One who is one-sensed.
36. One who pursues spiral feet and delicate hair. b) One who has the ability to assemble whoever is there, with whatever is available.

5

37. He who manifests a bright line of pointed flames.
38. One who causes happiness to everyone by the beauty of a hand, a sleeve, a toppled candle, a breakfast dish.
39. a) A slightly opened window, a way to enter discreetly. b) A burst of light, along with a ringing tone. c) A boat’s hull level with the horizon.
40. The Question, responded to with vagueness or parried with counter-questions.
41. A draft strewn with changes, corrections and interruptions.
42. One who is expanding and quickening and necessarily inadequate.
43. The Creator of generalized contours and blurry edges.
44. The Producer of thin, almost transparent washes and wiry graphism.
45. a) One who posits the picture as a whole. b) The nest of tactile.

6

46. One who cannot be rooted in the sense of touch, emotionality, or mood.
47. a) The preeminent criterion of reality. b) One who is visually clear yet always mysterious.
48. One from whose navel the wish not to know emanates.
49. The Lord of Failures — hideous and inescapable.
50. a) One who is the agent of all actions. None remember what they are, but all remember the outline, the image. b) The Creator of a pattern of thick black lines suggesting the outlines of many small adjoining stones.
51. The Great Thinker: blurred and delayed.
52. One who created no literal answer to the question of location.
53. One who is exceedingly huge in size.
54. One who introduces fragments of sky or landscape into otherwise coherent terrain.
55. One who, in grasping the significance of form, is the link between far-flung elements.

7

56. One who is beyond the pencil-on-paper storyboard.
57. One who plunges into the vagaries of slight variation.
58. a) One who is always in a state of bliss. b) One who has a complexion that appears to move into the distance too slowly, as if space has been compressed.
59. One whose eyes situate physical beings amid the events of one direction that diminishes too quickly.
60. Creator of trying to catch up with the endless flow of contingencies.
61. One who is going from no place to no place amid the swarm of irreducible particulars to which no system is adequate.
62. There are three words in this name: Man of Sorrow.
63. Purity suggesting a void at the root of things.
64. The embodiment of moment to moment through all the twists and turns of provocative detail.

8

65. ambiguous / Beyond the maps’ edges.
66. bird / Halo of grease.
67. sweat / Life.
68. woman bathing / Sheer, unadorned matter.
69. ashes in water / Something unfolding over time.
70. moon / Lord of the cows and pigs.
71. eyes / He who gulps water and stares straight ahead.
72. destruction / Remnant of collapsed systems.
73. tree / a) The consort of navigation. b) The Lord of carried upward to heaven. c) One who is suspended in a steplike, rising formation. d) One for whom microorganisms predominate to mesmerizing effect. e) A touch of the master’s hand.
74. tears / Layered, embossed and consumed by those who name or describe him.

A boat,
a floor inscription:

formlessness itself

Blue water sliver moon
constitutes one of many self-tests

Whispery dream, a canoe on the banks of a placid waterway,
perhaps sadder than intended

A considered statement, perhaps not.

Poppy field, rice field

an awful lot of hush

something was there

without time – without body –
without place

lines overlap the open interiors of the loops

As they curve broadly toward the edges,
they visibly waver and shift
– a sensitivity
and continuous flow

– put a name on it, please –

ragged assemblage,
tattered battle flag,
scavenged cape.

Perhaps more to the point, it looks like
(working with the invisible)
a disembodied material, opening
to a range of new chromatic
and atmospheric possibilities,
a traditional corporeality – a tendency,

the wow and flutter of an intentional choice
or limitations in unfamiliar territory
create woozy effects of countless
blurry-looking lines that have been woven together
in what seems like numerous threadlike strands of differentiated color
but is in fact
a monochrome field

The result is dense with a perfectly smooth
factureless trompe l’oeil
always present in the mind

(perforation marks)

These punctures afford glimpses
of light shows, tree branches,
and the wall behind – composition
even in a moment of self-obliteration
manipulated by two people
(tenderhook) (self-portrait)

The affinities, the sense of
parallel purpose discovered by comparison
is one rather abrupt turn,
is exactly what the title says,
several rows one might almost take
as quirky abstraction, but once acknowledged
won’t go away.

More explicit is the night chant way,
a diagram oblique and freighted as its title,
painted onto a large black square in vivid reds,
yellows and purples – appearing as tally marks, Xs,
and various scratchings here and there
until historical flowers and coded “storms”
fall apart completely,
the margins of everyday life
nearly invisible,
uprooted
in the versions
of our statements