I have always been someone with a short attention span. And at the same time deeply interested in all limbs of Yoga. And this was quite a paradox. Ashtang-yoga as the name suggests has eight limbs. Of which five – Asana, Pranayama, Pratyahar, Dharana, Dhyan in that order, require an increasing amount of attention lock-in from the Sadhak. However, I wasn’t wired for that.
Key learning points from the book
By Alan Watts
My conventionally edited version of my past is made to seem almost more the real ‘me’ than what I am at this moment. For what I am seems to be so fleeting and intangible but what I was is fixed and final. It is the firm basis for predictions about what I will be in the future. So it comes about that I am more closely identified with what no longer exists than with what actually is.
By ALAN WATTS
Spiritual shouldn’t be separated from material nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need, above all, to disentangle ourselves from the habit of speech and thought which set this two apart making it impossible for us to see that THIS – the immediate, everyday and present experience – is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.
Synopsis of
by Alan Watts
Zen has always believed that the mundane and the sacred are one and the same.
The transformation of consciousness is not a question of how much time you put into it as if it were all added up on some sort of quantitative scale and you got rewarded according to the amount of effort you put into it. Nor is it that simply by avoiding the effort and wanting it instantly would you get it. The only thing that your effort or ‘no effort’ can teach you is that this approach doesn’t work. You can only get it when you discover that you do not need it. You can only get it when you don’t want it. That is the secret.