There is still room in the book group I’ll be starting up next Tuesday. The Zoom group runs for 4 weeks from February 10th to March 4th (10-11:30 am Pacific time). We’ll be using as guides for our explorations, material from my last book, In Every Wave, the Entirety of the Sea, and some material from a new book I’m finishing up work on (Everything is the Doorway). If interested in taking part, please message me at: john@johnastin.com.
Other Events
• March 15th (3-5 pm) - Talk sponsored by the Open Circle Center (Berkeley, CA). Click here for further details or to register for the event.
• March 28/29 - Weekend retreat (w/ Dena Evans) in Austin, TX (for details - john@johnastin.com)
• May 17th (4-6pm) - Concert in North San Juan, CA (tickets available here)
• June 13/14 - Weekend retreat in London (for details, john@johnastin.com)
ALREADY DISSOLVED
The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, which means to yoke or join together, to reunite the individual with the absolute reality. But here’s a question: has there actually ever been separation? Let’s look at that assumption and see if we can actually find any support for it.
Typically, we imagine that we are somehow circumscribed, that we are here, and then there’s a whole world over there, a world that’s on the other side of us. But feel the presence of experiencing right now, the presence of being or aliveness, and ask yourself, “do you find anything other than this feeling of aliveness?”
If you venture out to whatever you imagine exists outside of the circumscribed you, what do you find? Don’t you find more aliveness? As you travel through the space of the world you think of as existing outside of you, don’t you always find this sense of being, of aliveness?
For a moment, just feel how the being of you is already completely, 100% dissolved in the sea of life itself. Feel the way in which there is only life here, the miracle of existence. Notice how, whether you’re feeling what you think of as yourself, or you’re feeling what you think of as not yourself, you’re always feeling life, the one taste of everything, the taste of aliveness.
Yes, the aliveness shows up as all the apparent parts and pieces interacting with other parts and pieces. That’s all there, all included as part of the dance of this one thing. But right now, we’re just tuning into the perspective of there being only one thing here, one life. Notice that as far as consciousness can go, it just keeps finding life, the life that’s looking through our eyes and the life these eyes are beholding. What’s looking and what’s being looked at, one thing, a single aliveness.
It turns out that the final stage of yoga, the discovery of the one thing, or samadhi, is exactly what we’re experiencing right now. From this perspective, every moment is the end of the road of yoga, the reality that there is one field of aliveness, dancing as everything, one vast, edgeless, fathomless ocean of existence that you and I are already fully dissolved in and inseparable from, just as the waves are dissolved in and inseparable from their basis, the sea.
