When Yoga is Learning to Learn
The Truth of the In Between Repositions Our Choices
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Aho’Rajanaka,
I hope this finds you well. Here first to say that the Sessions resume this weekend.
Saturday, March 22nd, Hanuman and the Greatness of the Shadow
Sunday, March 23rd, The Mahabharata, Unfolding the Central Narrative
5PM Eastern, Zoom Links and Archive under the line. All welcome.
It strikes me as more than a little ironic that I’ve been rereading this past week the Bardo Thodol, usually called the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I don’t recall the first time I read it and neither does anyone else who isn’t a Buddha. That’s something of the point: all readings are re-readings. (Editor’s Note: well, maybe.)
I would love to go through this text with all of you, thoroughly, carefully, so that we might understand so much more about Buddhism, Tibetan traditions, and ourselves. If there is approbation expressed, I will happily take it up with you in the future.
I do recall my first reading in this current birth in the original Tibetan like it was yesterday. This would be like remembering some (mostly catastrophic) event in history and you were there. So, this wasn’t exactly happy, but it was unforgettable. I only put it that way because reading the original was even more mysterious (re: euphemism for impenetrably difficult) than the best translations and explanations.
Shall I wax-on (wax-off) about the wonders of Tibetan when you learn it first from a grammar book written by a brilliant Czech and taught by an equally impressive Japanese professor who knew every language of Buddhism equally well? Later we had help from a beautiful Nyingma Lama who himself was a reincarnation (tulku) and had the creds to prove it.
I’m far less confident of my previous births being quite so edifying, much less certified. Our Lama had certifications. But this is not why I mention this here. (Digression is the art of birth and rebirth, is it not? Progress seems so… 14th century Tibet nowadays. )
Rather, I find myself in the In-Between more and more every day. That’s the meaning of bar do, this more properly being the Tibetan Book of the In-Between (bardo) through Hearing (thos) to Liberation (grol). I digress, my in-between is not (yet) about any personal passage through (this) death, unless we are referring to the death of democracy and decency, which have never lived on eternal ground either. You see, this week the attack on “elites” in universities came home to us here in Rochester.
I will spare you the details but to say that the trolls of the Right have a taste for cruelty, absurdity, and inciting violence that we should not take lightly. It’s real and while I have personally been spared targeting, my friends and colleagues have not. They are calm, morally elevated souls but I know they are hurting, and no one could blame them for being frightened, that being a priority agenda of those inflicting injustice.
Some folks like cruelty and that should not be as hard to fathom for our wish that it wasn’t true. We want to think better of our fellow humans and these facts put in question the very notion of a shared humanity. But what I saw this week wasn’t only the usual grift or pursuit of adulation and narcissism, it was a more concerted effort to inflict harm on innocent people.
The In-Between here is personal to me, and maybe it is to you.
How shall we respond to a world, a country, a society and its putative norms that are daily under assault?
Do we ask Krsna to place the chariot between the two armies to see those we must battle?
Do we retreat to the cave, the mountaintop, the riverside, or anywhere we can find refuge in nature and the company of the likeminded?
Yoga has always been on both sides of this argument with a very (very) strong lean into the latter forms of by-pass. The exterior is transient appearance and therefore not as real as the peace within---and while this may be also true, it’s undoubtedly cowardice and morally inexcusable. You may want to give up but if you have a shard of humanity then you know that if you can, you mustn’t. The ethical is a privilege to pay forward, not merely claim as one’s own inner state.
I suppose that makes it clear enough about where I stand with this problem though I am no less in-between than the next guy who doesn’t want a fight, who wishes we could have civil and serious disputation and resolution, who wants a future with peace and, dare I say, a modicum of justice for all. I am by disposition eager to compromise and let everyone have their share. None of that seems immanent and the path is fraught with even more in-betweens. I am also disposed to be irenic because violence never ends well. But we are in a dilemma of conscience that warrants reflection.
I watched a prominent public commentator this week proclaim that he was no longer going to appear preaching to the choir on friendly “liberal” TV channels. Rather he would attempt to bridge the gap between “us” and “them” in other more “conservative” venues of conversation. Good luck with that, I said to myself. I think this may make us feel good about the effort but there is no reason to believe he can change any minds or make any serious impact. Even his use of the word “conservative” belies the facts. This is all merely entertainment because there is no serious argument made in good faith by the other side. Good conversations require honesty, not equity.
How does one carry on a serious conversation with folks will not admit to the facts unless they conform to their cult leaders’ declarations? Assertign the subjective to be objective truth will have its consequences when the matter is gravity jumping out of a window or just the stock market. Reality will catch up to people. But then what is the alternative if we can’t really converse? How do we resist those intent on little more than destruction of all that we hold valuable and make it worth the peril of engagement?
My Rajanaka heart tells me that while I don’t have any simple answers here, I do think we learn as much from posing (and reposing) the questions. Also, that being in the in-between where we are called to engage and would prefer to retreat into happier things isn’t itself deplorable---and I think we do get to describe certain ideas and behaviors as deplorable. How we feel is not the same thing as what we choose to do.
If we are unwilling to make judgments albeit with prudence and seriousness standing their ground then we abdicate being human itself. Humans judge, assess, inspect, evaluate, interpret, even honor. To abdicate these powers is to submit to others by retreating into yourself.
It is giving up on those capacities and skills that is yoga retreat into soporific indifference. It is an inspid resignation into karma as fatalism, as if passivity will eventually make the world better if we just call that passivity “yoga.” We may not have answers to our dilemmas (the very meaning of in-between) any more than we yet have strategies to address our real adversaries (because they are no longer good faith conversant). So what do we have?
We have the need, maybe even the responsibility to hone our skills in thinking, in critical adjudication, in marshaling our emotions and our powers of reason to engage. We must take seriously our feelings and put them to the tasks of action, understanding, and commitment.
Learning to think is yoga. Learning to address our somatic and emotional states for the purposes of acting deliberately and meaningfully is yoga. Learning how to learn is the most important yoga you will ever learn.
And this doesn’t mean feeling less, much less repressing feelings. It means working with our feeling and the powers of the mind to develop abilities in comprehension, discernment, and decision-making.
These skills are not natural, they don’t fall out of the sky nor come as mere matters of talent or karma, they are learned. Learning is something we can do together even as we ponder the next moves we will need to make. Crisis has come to criticality; this is why feeling so in-between is so real. Who wants an argument when we can avoid one?
But make no mistake, this crisis will not wait: we also cannot use the arduous tasks of learning to learn, learning about our empowerments as excuse not to act. We will need to decide what courses of action are meaningful even if they are not as effective as we would hope them to be. (So good luck to that commentator for his sincere Promethianism.)
We may feel the in-between but there is no “in the meantime” left. The in-between is not an in the meantime excuse, it is the call to learn. Let us study yoga together because we dare to stay in the difficult questions that make us human. And may yoga be learning how to learn for the purposes of that better engagement. Retreat into a beatific self-felicity is gonna have to be for other people. Talk soon then.
With affection, saprema, Douglas
**Below the line starts here:
Hanuman Saturday Zoom:
https://rochester.zoom.us/j/95057662268
Hanuman Recorded Archive: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fl8lkz3lv53lzmny28o55/AM5yQB5YSYn9WO2j7x3R4cU?rlkey=x604wds1ljxwyuhzvmhkjyozj&st=u0y07ce5&dl=0
Mahabharata Sunday Zoom:
https://rochester.zoom.us/j/314987250
Mahabharata Archive:
Rajanaka Summer Camp starts Thursday July 10th at 2pm and ends on Monday July 14th at lunch. Venue is Bristol Valley Vineyards, 7235 Lane Road, Bloomfield, NY. Details to follow. You get the sessions, plenty of refreshments, and lunch, even Curry Night, but all the rest is up to you.
LA Sessions soon. Apri 4-6. The link for tix: https://tickets.brightstarevents.com/event/workshop-with-professor-douglas-brooks
I was working in the park last Saturday when an unknown man came up to tell me my work was beautiful and ask me if I am a Christian.
When I answered, ‘no, I’m a practicing Hindu’. The man looked solemn and replied ‘but I wanted to share heaven with you’.
Unfortunately, I told him that is not an option the world is offering me so he will have to just enjoy me now in punctiliar time.
He walked away shaking his head because he didn’t like that response.
My heart still breaks in the significant sublime bias hidden inside his question that keeps us worlds apart.
Alas, I fear my “activism” (outwardly passive and compassionate though it may seem) turns to fire in my writings. Or perhaps it shows in small, deliberate choices — reading things beyond my grasp, not buying from major corporations on purpose, listening with intention to the sorrows of others and helping them reframe, take action, or climb over the rubble of their pain.
I do learn to learn each day. And it’s because of great men like you, dear Douglas, that such endeavors carry even more meaning.
Rage on, my friend.