Reality Check

I suspect that the Arupa approach to yogasana isn't destined to become widely popular. It goes too much against the grain of the way people are accustomed to thinking, requiring a fundamental shift in self and world views. And, why would anybody want that? People go to yoga to benefit themselves, not to lose themselves.

Arupa yoga (Formless being) pushes yoga as union of body, mind and spirit - a phrase commonly used, but rarely taught in any meaningful way. There can be no union as long as it's seen as something for "me" to achieve. That very notion maintains the separation. Arupa encourages fluidity, even in stillness, and seeking variation that's right, not empirically, but in that moment. Most every other style/teacher instructs how the postures are supposed to be - fixed and regimented, ergo familiar and comfortable to a mindset built around the illusion of stability and permanence. Our minds are geared to label and organize in an attempt to create a solid and stable world view. This is, of course, quite practical on one level, yet delusional and debilitating on another.

The world is not as it seems to be, and we are not as we think we are.

As an example: Science proved, well before quarks, quantum mechanics and string theory were conceived of, that our world is far from solid. When seen on the subatomic level of protons and electrons, all of the physical world is quite unsubstantial.

To try to put it in semi-graspable terms: If a proton was the size of a basketball and its electrons "things" more the size of golfballs, the electrons orbits would be similar to that of the moon's around the earth. Basketball, golfball, well beyond 20,000 miles in between. This is proportionally what our atoms are made of. Mostly nothing. When we sit on a chair, we aren't actually touching it. Our electrons are repelled by the chair's, causing us to hover over it like a magnet repelled and suspended by another.

Facts like this may pass from one ear through the other without sticking at all. Some may consider it fascinating, ponder it for a while and then carry on as usual. Rarely, will anyone chew on this for any substantial length of time. Which is fine, really, because unless one is a physicist, it doesn't much matter insofar as we know. However, it should be noted that the presumption of solidity remains "factual" in mind, despite the minds own knowledge to the contrary.

It is similarly hard to digest that we are as insubstantial in mind as we are in body. Most will discount the notion as ridiculous, without giving it a first glance. Some will consider it an intriguing idea to contemplate for a spell, and then go back to life as usual. Very few will actually assimilate this knowledge and use it to reprogram their way of seeing and thinking.

The problem here is that there are real life consequences to ignoring this reality, for everyone and everything. Wars, poverty, environmental degradation, dismissal of the elderly, disproportionate earnings, inadequate education - all this, and much more, is a result of mankind's disconnection from the world, due to living in the isolation of a conceived world, within the individual mind.

As long as posture practice follows a prescribed path toward a predetermined configuration, it's a practice guided and preformed by the ego. The Arupa approach to yogasana is designed to promote inner quiet and inspiration, a dissolving of the self that allows movements and postures to take on lives of their own. It's intended as a practice of surrender, not accomplishment - of giving, not receiving - one dedicated to the whole, not the individual.