Yoga,
longevity and quality of life
by Octavian Sarbatoare
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- Length and quality
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- The issues of longevity and quality of
life as related to Yoga, seem to be important reasons why
people start Yoga practices in the first instance. In day
to day life, the desire to live a longer life is the reason
behind many of our activities as we pay attention to health
and good life in many forms, all having more or less a hidden agenda
that of living longer. However, longevity and
quality of life are much related to one another as two
aspects of the same desire, the quality of life (as
intensity of life experience) being a qualitative
progression of longevity.
In normal circumstances, people pay more attention to longevity, not
being much aware on the issue of
quality. It is not so in Yoga, for here the main issue is the
quality of life experience that attracts also the longevity as a component
of quality of life. Yoga sees longevity as a component,
or more exactly a result of Yoga practices. The fact that
the yogic discipline allows the body to function
better and the mind to be under one's own control (that is a balanced
way of life without any doubt), has to lead to a longer span of life of a
practitioner. But, Yoga is primarily about the quality of life, an issue
that is outlined by the Yoga philosophy in its very authoritative book
known as Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.
Quality of
life
From the yogic perspective, the issue of quality of life has to be seen from both
material and spiritual angles. Yet, the material angle of quality of
life can be simplified by considering it as an expression of
the spiritual perspective. Indeed, the spiritual side of
quality of life takes credit for the material side that becomes just a
matter of a right attitude towards material things. In own
turn, the spiritual side of quality of life has to be
seen from body and mind perspectives. The body issue is
essential, as the harmonization of the body is a solid foundation for addressing the
issues of the mind that becomes a the tool of extension,
the organ and function through which we experience the
world.
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- In practical terms Yoga
recommends the body has to be cleansed of
impurities, i.e. toxins, etc., for this reason a multitude of Yoga techniques being used. The motivation behind it is the fact that the toxins
within
the body do corrupt the perception to certain degrees. It is primarily the quality of perception that gives in fact the quality
of life, is so Yoga pays a great attention towards the body as a vehicle of
sense experience and host of mind experiences. Yet, here, the issue of the
mind
is far more complex because it requires a certain degree of
abstraction to understand the mind experiences. However, we cannot miss
the point to mention that body experiences, as sense experience, do end up ultimately as
mental experience. From the point of view of Yoga, what is essential is
that the experience of awareness known as Samadhi, is the focus and end
point of the entire practice. It can be said in simple terms that in Yoga
philosophy and practice, the quality of life is determined by the level of
awareness that leads to yogic liberation known as Kaivalya.
Awareness
The end achievement of Yoga practice is in some form or another
described by people who have experienced it, as the
experience of awareness or the experience of being alert.
A person possessing such an awareness is known in Yoga as
Drashta ("witness"), as is mentioned in Yoga Sutras. Here. the question we might ask is: "Who is a witness and what the witness
witnesses?" The relevant yogic literature does mention that
awareness is a gradual process, as Yoga practices become more
refined and the practitioner becomes more alert towards the
environment and towards one's own person.
There is a wide spread idea in the Yoga literature about awareness being a
transcendent experience in the sense that somehow the one who does
experience it gets out of this material world, but this is not true. Yoga
awareness has to be seen as an immanent experience for the fact that
conscious
states are mental states therefore brain states. It will
be more appropriate to see consciousness, as qualia of mental activities, that step ahead from
animal to human species. As such, Yoga does assume that the present Homo Sapiens has the
capacity to graduate into the Yoga consciousness as qualia, but this ability is not a common feature of
all of us. It appears, as the yogic literature points out that only
after practicing advanced forms of Yoga, somebody is capable to acquire such
an awareness as a day to day
feature of human activities.
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, talk about Drashta ("seer
or witness") from the beginning (Ch.I-3). The issue seems
to be of an utmost importance, as the practitioner (as
Drashta) has to be now on the same site with the the one who is the witness of all,
i.e. the God (more often named in Yoga tradition as
Ishvara). According to Yoga, the object a witness witnesses is the
material nature, as
manifestation of Shakti principle. Yet most important is the fact that
the witness does witness himself/ herself, as every witness is part of the
material nature. Yet, this process of witnessing is not the ordinary way
of seeing actions and things within the world of nature (Prakriti).
According to Yoga, this kind of witnessing has a high quality of
perception.
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- Yoga claims that this the enhanced quality of perception
does not lead to a simple passive contemplation of things or to a one-pointed directional concentration, but a
multilevel degree of perception. Naturally we might ask the question of
what is a multilevel degree of perception? Yoga explains in simple words
as being the capacity to be aware of more
than one thing at a time. Yet, this capacity appears to be beyond
the human
capacity, but Yoga has proved that some people can do it. Such an
experience might be
called a three-dimensional awareness, for the fact that attention is
directed now in the entire surrounding space. Such a remarkable ability
has to be seen to be indeed a high degree of expressing the qualia of human life.
How to
increase awareness
The Yoga practices normally do increase awareness to a certain extent depending
on the kind of practice.
The preliminary stages of Yoga that are related to body optimisation, start with
a gradual elimination of body toxins and renunciation to
various addictions. At this stage, gradually the perception of the
senses increase in quality. By other
practices like the use of Pranayama ("control of
the breath") Yoga says that there is a sensation of awareness of the lightness
of the body (called Laghima), i.e. the heavy burden that hanged on the
body appears to be removed. Yet, as far as
the Tantric practices are concerned, awareness can
be obtained
by elimination of sexual ejaculation during sexual intercourse.
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Therefore, according to Tantra Yoga, the
real sexual pleasure can be experienced, in so such a practice known as Maithuna Tantra becomes a training towards obtaining awareness. Overall, it
can be said that it is only by
a personal experience that somebody can discover an inclination towards
specific practices leading to the increase of awareness by a proper
training. However, the tradition stipulates that a more refined
awareness comes from advanced practices, and at this spiritual stage an
aspirant has to consider having a Guru (spiritual preceptor) as a guide to help overcoming the
obstacles towards a refined experience of Yoga.
Siddhis as
powers of awareness and expression of quality
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali talks in Chapter III about
various Siddhis ("powers resulting from Yoga' or 'supernormal
abilities'). It
is an exposition of what a Drashta can do with his/ her
abilities. Many people take the descriptions of Siddhis ad literam, but the fact is that all the Siddhis are
products of the mind. It is the mind which assumes the
form of that particular action or thing by being empowered to do so.
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- Here is where
most of aspirants get confused to believe that the Siddhis are
powers of creation or destruction that can be acquired by
somebody and the role of God can be obtained by confronting the laws of
nature. It has to be clearly understood that all Siddhis
are powers of awareness, the one possessing them has to be seen an out of
ordinary person that is able to extend one's own mind beyond
unimaginable realms surpassing the ordinary imagination. Yoga believed
that one necessary quality
for such a person has to be what is known as Amritapurna ("filled
with nectar"), that is an advanced state of purity of mind as a result of body and mind purification. A
Drashta, according to Yoga has to be considered having the Amritapurna
quality.
The ability to experience awareness has to be seen as a remarkable quality of
expressing the human life. Such a powerful is the experience that by an encounter with a Drashta
most people will feel that there is something special
about such a person, but are unable to know what could be. It will be
easy to observe the quality of experience of life in
such a person, but will be heard to know details like how intense his/ her experiences
of perception of life are.
It is at this point where we have to draw attention to the issue of
longevity.
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- The
real longevity is not given by the span of life, but by the quality of mental
experiences. The awareness of life, as is normally experienced, is like
a photographic shot, i.e. a slice at a time. Every
now and then, normally we have a slice of conscious experience, that is a brief
experience. It is not so for a Drashta, according to Yoga, for the fact
that the slices of time
are united in a continuous flow of awareness. Yet, some people having this
extraordinary ability that could hold on awareness for hours or even during sleep.
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- Considering all of the above, it can be certainly said that
longevity in Yoga is a matter of quality of experience. By deduction, it can be
also said that a Drashta has lived the
equivalent of hundreds of years due to the ability of having a higher level of awareness.
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- Copyright © 1999 and
subsequent years by Octavian Sarbatoare
(Australia)
- This article is copyright-protected. The
author grants the right
to copy and distribute this file, provided it remains
unmodified and original authorship and copyright is
retained.
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