Ancient Ayurvedic Secrets: Charika Samhita Part 6

In this blog we will explore the role of art and science in our lives … by looking at  the symbiotic relationship between Yoga as the art of consciousness and Ayurveda as the science of life.

SEGMENTS

1. The Art Journey
2. Cool Effort And Being In Flow
3. The Need For Science

Transcript

Dear Friends 

In this blog we will explore the role of art and science in our lives by looking at  the symbiotic relationship between Yoga as the art of consciousness and Ayurveda as the science of life.

THE ARTIST’S ACT

There are so many definitions of art but what does the artist really do? Explore, play, taking life itself as material the artist comes out with different expressions.

THE TOOLS OF AN ARTIST

The tools of an artist might look different for different artists, for a violinist it's the violin, for a painter it's many things from brush to pencil to spatula and more, for a ballet dancer it's just her body, as it is for the actor, for a singer its the voice but every artist basically works through his senses organs, through his body, mental capacities, emotions and that feeling.

THE SUBJECT

The subject can be anything but we can say the real subject for an artist is the artist’s own life. How does he approach life as a subject, that’s how it’s a little different from how everyone else lives. An artist lives the same life but wants to do it consciously. A professional dwells intensely on his work but he has a specialization, a narrow field which uses only a part of him and a professional works for a purpose. An artist’s field is limitless and he puts his whole self into his art and deep down. He has no purpose other than to just to express.

THE METHOD

Question is, can my life be my subject and can I live every moment consciously through everything, boredom, rejection, failure, grief, tiredness, even sleep. Can it all be part of my artistic process, my subject, my expression, where my canvas, my stage, my clay. My performance space is creation itself and if at all there is a method to your art of life then it is to feel your way, that feel is about enjoyment. You want to feel the joy in the process and you follow that feeling. In a way, we can say that the enjoyment is the creator, the artist.

Question is, can we the lay people live our lives like my life is my work of art and I am the resident artist of my life to be able to answer that, we need to first answer the question, who is the artist?

THE WHO

It can be said the artist is one who likes to reveal the real behind the illusion. His expression can be seen as his subjective experience of truth. An artist’s process is all about being conscious to shed light on the unconscious and his compass is his feeling of joy.

This resonates with what the ancients called ‘satchitanand’. ‘Sat’ means ‘being’ ‘existence’, ‘real’, ‘actual’, ‘essence’, ‘chitta’ or ‘chaitanya’ means consciousness. Spirit and ‘ananda’ means joy, bliss, ‘chaitanya’ or consciousness can be seen as the essence, the real whose nature is ananda, bliss, ‘satchitananda’ is also considered the attributes of the creator  ‘Purusha’ in the Veda. Purusha in rsi Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is the unchanging causal principle of the Universe including the individual and rsi Bharadwaja in the Caraka Samhita refers to Purusha as the “indweller”, consciousness that resides in each atom, in each cell, in each mind and body, giving us our sense of being. The body and mind being an inert part of me and the abstract “indweller” as the conscious one.

According to our definition, the artist’s quest can be seen as to ‘real-ise’ this indweller.

THE ART JOURNEY

When you start your art journey, three things are important; preparation of the medium, good material and enough practice.

For a painter it is mainly preparation of the surface such as cleaning and priming it. It will help the paint adhere better and give you a smoother finish. A musician takes enough time to tune his instrument, a singer warms up and exercises his throat every day before his session. The second important thing on the art journey is using quality materials, investing in good quality paint, brushes though it will cost more. The end result will be worth it. A good looking violin can actually produce bad sound if for example the wood is not good quality or of some other material which many beginners buy and practice makes perfect, to not get discouraged if your first few expressions don't turn out the way you hoped, to keep practicing and experimenting with different techniques and you will see improvement over time and finally, it’s important to have fun and enjoy the process of creating.

Similarly with life itself as your art, it is important to keep the mind, body and sense organs. Our medium and material are in a good condition, warmed up, strong, supple, sensitive, responsive and youthful. It is also important to keep our material in good condition, that is the organs and our sensory and mental faculties. We do it by exercising the brain, the muscles and every sense organ by using every faculty consciously from smell, touch, vision, hearing, taste, using our analytical faculties and above all to have fun with them. Pick up creative projects, live in the creative space daily, enjoy that space.

Doing this, you will start to notice things you never did before that your body is never still, your mind keeps wandering, you miss so much that goes on around you. Your body isn’t energetic enough to last out a long session of anything including just sitting on the balcony and looking at the horizon, soar back, tight shoulders and neck, knee pain, back hunches and when you are enjoying an eagle’s flight or the sunset or the movement of a caterpillar. Your mind is not alert enough to hold on to that movement continuously or to a beautiful idea that you just had. It’s not subtle enough to grasp the fine thoughts that are passing from this state the subjective part of the art journey begins. Here the medium which is one’s daily life and the material. Our senses and mind are not constant, they are in a flux. Our practice is in all the tasks. Any task we do in the due course of the day, at work, at home, socially, everywhere, through all the tasks including sleep.

It’s a state of doing doing doing. The key is 24 hours, so that there is continuity. You start to get more conscious as habits begin to crumble, even skills change, lot emerges from the unconscious, memories, emotions, desires, energetic, distracting, disturbing. You get derailed, do silly things and you get back. There are moments when you need to be more sensitive and you are not. You feel the need to build on resilience, strength, immunity and you realise that dealing with all this is not about simply finding fixes. It’s now intrinsic to the artistic process because your entire content of the day and of the mind are the material of your art and as you gain ease with them, as you become more conscious, finer, deeper challenges keep unfolding. There comes a turning point when you feel the space to express. This is a sign that you are able to see life in your own unique way; subjectively, where there is no forced discipline, no voice in the head, no conscience that is watching you, judging you, here you experience the possibility of authentic being of expression from a free space where you don’t take that fractional moment of a pause before reacting. You just respond without thinking, without watching out, without inhibition, without caring for “what will it look like”. You experience ‘flow’. This opens up dimensions of what you perceive. There is no more the world like it always is. It’s in flux right in front of your eyes. There is always more you can hear, now the challenge is “how do I express all that I perceive”.

Being more and more conscious is one track of the artist’s train, the other track is the health of your instrument, the body and mind, good health. It is here that we need to dive into what Purusha, the indweller means because we are after all doing all this for its joy. That is you think about mind, body and soul.

At this point in the art journey, there is no curriculum or technique. It’s just about enjoyment. More you enjoy, the more you are yourself, the more you are conscious without trying or knowing it is an artistic process. because  if you are able to look at the image  in front of you with both your eyes, if you are able to pay attention to all that you hear, including your own thoughts, if you know how you feel, if you are kinaesthetically aware and the mind is one pointed, after a point you get into the deep states of absorption. There you are seeing a very straight line but when you draw it, it is not so straight because the skill is not there yet, but it has a quality, a touch because you are so absorbed, so conscious, so full of delight, whatever your level of skill, the expression has ‘life’, you might not be gifted as a genius but in expressing freely in being yourself, in being you are at home and that’s how you exist as the artist, that’s how you are “the indweller”.

In due course, you develop a certain unique skill because that is the way the mind and body are made. Anything you do enough they get skilled with practice but every moment of doing it. If you have been alert and aware, then it has the skill, it has its own dynamism, freshness every time, unpredictability, it goes elsewhere and being conscious. There is no interfering censor, no spectator, no judge and in this way you don’t get into a rut, even as you keep failing at some technique. This failure itself has its own expression because this process is itself your art. What strategies does each person adopt to not make it mechanical in themselves will be unique techniques and that comes instinctively to the person who considers himself as consciousness, who is attentive to the process.

COOL EFFORT AND BEING ABSORBED IN THE FLOW

When we do asana, as an artist, you are just moving your hands, feet, trunk aware of the entire body. You find your way, where it’s not comfortable, when to exhale and relax the tight area, like that you can just conjure an asana in a flow without a voice telling you what to do. You can learn Suryanamaskar Sun Salutations from a teacher but one day you will have to come to it by yourself as an expression of your soul and that’s when you will begin to test the lessons you learnt. You will know the truth of the definition of the technique is an asana  “prayatna shaithilya”, cool effort first hand where your mind is not aiming at any particular goal. You learnt of ‘poorna sthiti’, the end position of a particular posture but here the concept of poorna sthiti might be about ‘poorna’ ‘completion’ and ‘sthiti’ ‘being’ where you have lost the doer completely. There is only the indweller where the fingers are moving on their own on the keyboard and one is not the player of the piano anymore but the listener. The ‘rasik’, the enjoyer of the flow of essence, rasa, a mix of emotions. So these are explorations of your own and these we can call as the art of it. That’s why on the canvas, we always wonder “is it done or is there more to be done”. You get an answer not by looking at it as a composition, you get the answer when to stop only by a feeling.

There is an effortlessness in the effort because you are not trying to keep up with any notion of how the asana should be done. A coolness  “shithilata” comes like a soul wind from the sense of being. But the moment you have a purpose, a place to go to, effort is there. There is heat. It is now a workout. The technique of asana also says “ananta samapatti” , fixing the mind on the beyond. It's about flow, it is possible only because you don’t have a thought or idea of exactly what the next action is, exactly what the stroke is but it is not really random. It’s just that it has not emerged from your thought process or analysis. Flow is, you are being led but you don’t know to where. You are so absorbed there is no room for two, for a discussion, ‘dvandva’ between the doer and the thinker. The discussion has to go, the doer has to go, just the expression remains, only the action and the art, process and object. The state of absorption marked by the disappearance of the doer, thinker, ‘samapatti’. So we have “prayatna shaithilyaam ananta samapattibhyaam” the technique is “with cool effort getting absorbed in the flow”. This is meant to take you to “sthirah sukham”, a state of stability and a sense of well being, a state of ease.

THE NEED FOR A SCIENCE 

If we look at the core objectives of Ayurveda, to live a long disease free life, that is, can we always be at ease, the goals are the same. 

The state of stability and wellbeing 

Marked by the doer’s absence

The indwelling Purusha shines 

As the ageless, timeless essence 

Caraka says “the individual is the aggregate of the five elements of space, air, fire, water and earth and consciousness but the Real in us is consciousness, Purusha alone”.

In Ayurveda the body and mind are always seen as that which houses its creator, its spirit, its consciousness, Purusha.

The ancients say, it is the indweller which has  created the body and the mind and in doing so takes on an identity because of that goes through pleasure and pain, health and ill health and Yoga is the art of separating the indweller from its creation. That is identity. There is a deeper need to become disease free, not to get back into pleasure-pain but to have a good long life to realise the Purusha.

To be disease free, one needs to do a few things. For the senses we do yama, niyama for the body and mind we do asana pranayama. How to approach food and lifestyle, here we need to find solutions according to our body type. The times we live in and the conditions of geography, deal with harsh weather, unpredictable climate attacks from microorganisms, stress of lifestyle, aging so that I can take care of the physical side, be in a non-disease state which allows me to live my life artfully without any interruptions.

So when you come down to the how of it, food related knowledge, knowing about food, herbs, minerals, the science of it. Here it’s about specifics; what is your constitution, what are the qualities of the different food stuff, what’s best for you, how to go about your diet and lifestyle with respect to the time of the day, lunar cycle and the seasons of the year, how to deal with hunger, thirst, indigestion, sickness, how to improve immunity, what’s the science of fasting. The vision is, this science is there to serve its source, Purusha. So Ayurveda can be seen as this science of life that has emerged from the needs of the artist who practices the art of consciousness called yoga.

Each person is unique. So one picks up a bunch of sciences, specialisations depending upon your way of life, constitution, goals, career and so on but there is one science that everyone needs to pick up first and that is the science of life. Because attention to food and lifestyle is essential for everybody and Ayurveda is not about just food and herbs. It’s principles are meant to provide us with all the knowledge we as a layperson need to be at ease in life. The idea is to have the sweet problem of “what am I going to do with my free time” because it’s this space which gives birth to the artist, who practices the art of consciousness.

Bharat Thakur