Looking for a term.

What if you considered the present situation from a longer lens;  what if you took into consideration all the myriad doings of all the tribes and the cultures on the face of planet throughout all the ages;  if you added the European Old World sensibility and awareness and eye for things to consider the way things are here;  if you added into the perspective the primitive, the cave painter (a sophisticated artist, tool maker, social being as any.)  What if you then allowed your vision to encompass the vastness of space and time and universes the Buddhists are aware of, the vast kalpas they speak of?

What if you took a job, your job, my job, any job, say that of bartender, that of a particular kind, one of food and wine at a decent bistrot, what place in society, what respect, what renumeration?  What is the meeting room, the tavern, the inn, the pub, that is a responsible healthy barroom, what is it's function, what happens in it.  What is the meaning of the job, what tasks does it serve, the random therapy, the communal show of garden variety human stuff...

And what about you personally?  Who are you, if you take in that broader perspective out into the Universe?  What is your own reality toward relationships, toward a profession?  Exclusive of labels, the name tags placed by society via an understanding of the professions and the way things work...

Is there the celestial person, a fulfiller of deeper roles, roles seen perhaps in a more archaic light, like that of 'wisdom teacher', or 'man' in some term of relationship as in 'man and wife,' or 'heroic seeker.'  A celestial person who has celestial relationships, a reality that extends beyond the immediate, say the relationship of a son with a departed father.

And what if the traits of this celestial person actually proved to be just as accurate a description of  reality, if not more, than the terms conventionally imposed upon the being, limiting the individual to narrow confines, of time and space, but also of societal roles.  What if we acknowledged the deeper appropriateness that we have few terms for, terms like 'poetic justice,' or appropriateness.

Like when you learn something from a teacher that turns you on.  Like when you meet an old soul and she gets you and you get her.  Like when you find the beauty of yoga's kind of science working and breathing within your own self.

But how do such things transfer into the real world, where the striving keep on striving...




Therapy is about connecting the dots.  Yoga is about connecting the dots.  Where did the low self-esteem come from....   Then you find, balance, and then it ceases to matter what knocked you out off kilter, and your health returns.  You're fine the way things are, you understand why things happened as they did.


But to tend bar really is an important education, a very good one, priceless really.  And what one finds doing it is the contrasts of being centered and being not centered.  And the non-centered people can knock you off balance, such that the next day you really do need to get back to yoga and the flow through the chakras, prana.

Then when you are balanced, again, perhaps we all fall out of whack, you know what to do with yourself again.  You realize how the self could get buffered about in the winds of needy people.  You know, like the kind of guy who interjects his politics into the forum of the public house, unsettled as he is by his pursuit of material things outside himself, spewing forth hate.  Go do some yoga, buddy.  Get centered.


The Gospel stories of the Rejection at Nazareth (in Luke 4, Matthew 13 and Mark 6) come to mind, with the focus shifting to the people in the synagogue.  What provokes their reaction, taking offense, driving him out, wanting to throw him off the cliff at the edge of town, but a kind of un-centered quality that Jesus stands in marked contrast to.  We don't see how uncentered and out of touch people are until we have the model of calm centeredness which Jesus brings.  It's harder to bring more back from the realm of wisdom than that lesson.  And it's a lesson seen throughout, the reassuring of the Disciples.  The meaning of what faith is, of having faith, is demonstrated in new light, much as if he had them all doing the yoga that he does.

Was it that he felt obliged to teach people because he found them so distracted and distracting, so unnerving in much of their daily habits that it was almost crushing for him to bear, thus his obvious irritation that pokes out here and there which is itself a thing in need of explanation because if you were the Son of God, divine, there wouldn't be any problems.  The language with which he asks and shows people to be calmed by seems vague, as if he worked largely through brain waves, yoga-like exercises off-stage.   Maybe he too wondered if he was crazy or not.


Where does doing yoga lead?   You feel a lightness, a calm beyond calm.  A core of energy within that goes beyond your own boundaries.