My Integral Yoga to Develop the Senses
My personal sadhana includes time taken to uplift and purify the vital being. For this, I have been following Mother’s guidelines in educating the vital being. Specifically, she says,
“This vital education has two principal aspects, very different in their aims and methods, but both equally important. The first concerns the development and use of the sense organs. The second the progressing awareness and control of the character, culminating in its transformation.”1
In this write-up I will share what I do for the first part of vital education, i.e. training the senses.
To develop the senses, what I have been doing for the last few years is musical studies. I have been studying music with teachers in singing and in guitar. Presently, I have a teacher in Pune, India who teaches Khayal tradition of Hindustani Sangeet (Indian classical music). And I have a teacher in Seville, Spain who teaches the Flamenco guitar. The vocal training has been very good for the vital being since the voice is so connected to vital expression. And Mother has mentioned how the Indian music of ‘raga’ leads one straight to the psychic. The guitar also is very sublime with its multi-layered sound harmonies and sublime melodic structures. As a music, I find that Flamenco also has a very touching soul quality to it. And although Flamenco is very vital and energetic, it is a refined and elegant expression of the vital.
Training with these teachers who are professional performers and educators in their field exposes my vital being to a very high quality of aesthetic, artistic expression. The aesthetic quality is something Mother insisted a lot on. She says,
“To this general education of the senses and their functioning there will be added, as early as possible, the cultivation of discrimination and of the aesthetic sense, the capacity to choose and adopt what is beautiful and harmonious, simple, healthy and pure.”2
Thus, for me this musical training in the beauty of sound, rhythm and harmony has helped to bring in more refinement, uplift and elegance to my vital being. And because of this, it is easier to have uplifting emotions and feelings in my day-to-day interactions. Whether it is with people or it is about various situations, I find it very easy to be much more balanced. Emotions that are negative, behavior that is reactive or crude are happening less and less. And as Mother says,
“As the capacity of understanding grows in the child, he should be taught, in the course of his education, to add artistic taste and refinement to power and precision. He should be shown, led to appreciate, taught to love beautiful, lofty, healthy and noble things, whether in Nature or in human creation. This should be a true aesthetic culture, which will protect him from degrading influences.”
To sum up, this vital uplift and refinement is what I am experiencing in my own life. And for sure, the musical training that I’m doing isn’t the only cause to this good state of the vital being, but it plays a very important role in my vital being’s enrichment and development. In the next blog post I’ll write about how I practice her guidance on character development.
- Paul Sawh, Canada
Keywords: Vital Education, Sensorial training, Music, Education, Aesthetic sense
1 The Mother, Collected Works of The Mother vol.12, ‘Vital Education’ - https://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/vital-education
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
Hi Paul - as a lifelong musician (accordion, organ, piano and composer) I fully resonate with what you have so beautifully written. In your next post you should send a link to your singing and guitar playing!
ReplyDeleteOne of my main focuses as a clinical psychologist was helping people deal with chronic physical pain. I wonder if you might share how you might be finding this increased sensory awareness affects your experience of negative sensory input - what appear to be "unpleasant" sounds, odors, tastes, sights, sensations.
There's a wonderful passage in the Life Divine (which I know, may sound far away but I've found it enormously helpful even in working with illiterate patients who know nothing of anything related to yoga) in The Problem of Delight where Sri Aurobindo notes that the way we're normally constituted, our sensory reactions are basically pleasant, unpleasant and neutral.
We tend to think (or more correctly, mindlessly feel) that these are laws of nature, set in stone - one must feel pain in response to a blow, aversion in response to a bitter fruit, etc. But he says we can train ourselves, even simply using a clarified mind, without going too far inward or upward, to first, respond neutrally and after that, even learn to touch the ananda underlying all sensations.
I was able to do this in my own experience of rather severe dental pain. But I first learned it in response to music as a teen, when my composition teacher introduced me to modern music - the atonal, dissonant kind of people like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. At first sounding like painful noise, I began slowly, under the guidance of my teacher, to hear the beauty in their music.
I"m always fascinated to hear other people's exploration of this. You must know this to some extent in your physical training, where what appeared to be painful and unbearable at first changes its nature afterward.
Hey Don, in this context of the senses that's a nice reference to the Life Divine. The discovery of the Ananda behind all the three fold types of sensation is the key as you note. I like how you found in your music training this beauty even behind the dissonance of Webern. This is similar to what is said in the Upanishads about 'who could breathe if that Ananda were not there?' And for sure, the physical training and intense exercise brings out the release of the happy endorphin hormones in the body. Its as if the body's mechanism to connect with the Ananda that is there always. In Indian music, they speak of the 'rasa' of the raaga as its feeling and expressive mood. And yet this 'rasa' is that also which the upanishads regard as the essential truth of existence 'raso vai sah' which is also the ananda. And perhaps then the raga brings out this ananda in its multiple forms of emotion and feeling.
ReplyDeleteWell, for anybody would like to challenge themselves to find the Ananda in all, here's Webern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwX7jPdFsD4
DeleteAnd I love that term, "rasa" - the rasa of the oat milk ice cream I'm going to try (a form of ice cream that also takes many some effort to appreciate).
And though I'm dreading going to learn yet ANOTHER new software - Indian aestheticians speak of the "rasa" of the horrible and the terrible. "really" looking forward to it:>))
And the 'rasa' of terror, the “terrible sentiment”, (the Bhayānaka-rasa - भयानकरस) is common in Indian dance performance. So have fun 'dancing' with it!
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