Wishing You the Lucky Part of The Lucky, or Here We Go Again
Last March 2017 it took me some 16+ hours to get to Scottsdale, because it's very much winter here and anything can happen. Today I'm headed back to Scottsdale, or so says American with their _fourth_ rerouting. Deja vu all over again, as the great Yogi says. We shall see. My host Bill Banks is so gracious and understanding ---and the good folks of Arizona. I will do everything I possibly can to make it.
What I may not have been given in talent I've always tried to admit openly so that I could make a better wager in effort. You gots what you got, you try like hell, and then the chips fall. We didn't need Macolm Gladwell to tell us this, but he did a fine job (mostly) making the case. What I've long acknowledged as limitation or boundary, I have challenged with sheer terrier-esque determination. You win some, lose some, and need some luck too.
Some of the best lessons of yoga are not all that complicated even though they don't make the world less complicated. We can know "the story" and still know too that _most_ of the story remains without actually knowing more about that either. The task is to fathom when you have a chance and when you don't, what your chances are, and what makes for always _more_ chance. There's a sobriety and seriousness in the great sources ---I have Mahabharata in mind, as usual--- that takes to heart our talents, abilities, in Sanskrit our adhikara. That word "adhikara" means quite literally "with respect to (adhi) doing or acting (-kara).
First, it means that you can't put in what karma left out. The way nature made you, the way the world has fashioned you from itself is the first marker. We don't transcend this feature of adhikara, we use it to recognize our gifts such as they are, as they present in us. The task is to cultivate an honest process of engagement with our "endowments."
Second, adhikara means that we apply ourselves to cultivation ---and that is principally a matter of tapas. Tapas means "burning", that is, raising the temperature to put in the work required to ignite the fire, make the offerings, and so engage the sacred (another topic indeed). It's going to cost you, it's going to demand more from you than you expected, it will come with unforeseen issues and consequences, you will need to know when to hold'em, fold'em, play the hand dealt ya'. No simple matter again.
Third, you need a bit of The Lucky, some shuffle of the deck that leaves you without any ability to control or dictate causes, effects, or circumstances. Here the vocabulary in Sanskrit gets more complicated, though we Rajanaka usually use the word "lila", play, for the catch-all. But the words in play range from the very positive notions of good fortune and affirmation, such as bhaga, svasti, and kalyana (there are more), to less happy, more complicated matters such as durvasa, literally, "difficult to dwell in," or viśama, "uneven, asymmetrical, rugged, irregular." In other words, the words for luck are as complex, sometimes obdurate and opaque as the idea itself. You just gotta have it.
Rajanaka doesn't assign good luck or bad to some deity's grace or even to karma as such. Luck is the wrinkle in The Matrix, it is the broken line of sight, it is the serpent's moment to strike, escape, slither and slough, it is the way things happen when accidents, errors, mistakes, missing, extra, and broken pieces _add_ something to the mix, or cause the world to trip. The idea is to land on your feet when you can, if it's your feet you mean to land on. Today, I mean to land in Phoenix on a plane. But first I gotta try really hard, rely on much that I don't control at all (may other people be competent) and get some of the lucky part of The Lucky.
Last March 2017 it took me some 16+ hours to get to Scottsdale, because it's very much winter here and anything can happen. Today I'm headed back to Scottsdale, or so says American with their _fourth_ rerouting. Deja vu all over again, as the great Yogi says. We shall see. My host Bill Banks is so gracious and understanding ---and the good folks of Arizona. I will do everything I possibly can to make it.
What I may not have been given in talent I've always tried to admit openly so that I could make a better wager in effort. You gots what you got, you try like hell, and then the chips fall. We didn't need Macolm Gladwell to tell us this, but he did a fine job (mostly) making the case. What I've long acknowledged as limitation or boundary, I have challenged with sheer terrier-esque determination. You win some, lose some, and need some luck too.
Some of the best lessons of yoga are not all that complicated even though they don't make the world less complicated. We can know "the story" and still know too that _most_ of the story remains without actually knowing more about that either. The task is to fathom when you have a chance and when you don't, what your chances are, and what makes for always _more_ chance. There's a sobriety and seriousness in the great sources ---I have Mahabharata in mind, as usual--- that takes to heart our talents, abilities, in Sanskrit our adhikara. That word "adhikara" means quite literally "with respect to (adhi) doing or acting (-kara).
First, it means that you can't put in what karma left out. The way nature made you, the way the world has fashioned you from itself is the first marker. We don't transcend this feature of adhikara, we use it to recognize our gifts such as they are, as they present in us. The task is to cultivate an honest process of engagement with our "endowments."
Second, adhikara means that we apply ourselves to cultivation ---and that is principally a matter of tapas. Tapas means "burning", that is, raising the temperature to put in the work required to ignite the fire, make the offerings, and so engage the sacred (another topic indeed). It's going to cost you, it's going to demand more from you than you expected, it will come with unforeseen issues and consequences, you will need to know when to hold'em, fold'em, play the hand dealt ya'. No simple matter again.
Third, you need a bit of The Lucky, some shuffle of the deck that leaves you without any ability to control or dictate causes, effects, or circumstances. Here the vocabulary in Sanskrit gets more complicated, though we Rajanaka usually use the word "lila", play, for the catch-all. But the words in play range from the very positive notions of good fortune and affirmation, such as bhaga, svasti, and kalyana (there are more), to less happy, more complicated matters such as durvasa, literally, "difficult to dwell in," or viśama, "uneven, asymmetrical, rugged, irregular." In other words, the words for luck are as complex, sometimes obdurate and opaque as the idea itself. You just gotta have it.
Rajanaka doesn't assign good luck or bad to some deity's grace or even to karma as such. Luck is the wrinkle in The Matrix, it is the broken line of sight, it is the serpent's moment to strike, escape, slither and slough, it is the way things happen when accidents, errors, mistakes, missing, extra, and broken pieces _add_ something to the mix, or cause the world to trip. The idea is to land on your feet when you can, if it's your feet you mean to land on. Today, I mean to land in Phoenix on a plane. But first I gotta try really hard, rely on much that I don't control at all (may other people be competent) and get some of the lucky part of The Lucky.
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