At the start of my 40s, I went back to university to study a Master’s degree. A decade of teaching later, I wound up contributing to the same course – an M.A. in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation at SOAS (University of London).
As I prepare to host The Path of Knowledge – a year-long immersion in yogic ideas – I’ve been revisiting some of what I wrote as a post-graduate student. A sample from one of my essays is attached, discussing experience as a potential source of evidence. In the process, it examines how scholars and practitioners look at things differently.
My new course combines both of these perspectives, and aims to facilitate communal inquiry. Along the way, we’ll see how engagement with yogic traditions can help us to clarify what really matters – in terms of everyday life, as well as teaching and practice.
Although we’ll draw on academic research about yoga history, that’s just a framework for exploring evolution, and how we relate to it – the course concludes with a project that will help you to integrate what you’ve learned with your own priorities.
As the website explains, there’s no obligation to write a long essay, and if you chose to submit one it wouldn’t be graded (unless you’d find that helpful). Instead, the idea is to support the emergence of new ways of seeing – whether in the form of writing, visual art, plans for teaching a course, or whatever else appeals.
It’s basically a chance to reflect on your life through the prism of yoga. We discussed this last week in a live Q&A, which is available for replay below. Click the button to find out more and apply – and email me here if you have any questions!
*** 🐦 N.B. early bird rates end on June 15 – apply before then to save 15%… 🙌 ***
An essay from 2014
Are You Experienced? How Can I Tell?
By Daniel Simpson
Like many in the past half-century in the West, I first encountered meditation in a book. Its title seemed to sum up the process: Experience Beyond Thinking.1 As such, it said more about modern preoccupations. So intense is the yearning for “Headspace” that a self-help app of that name has more than a million stressed subscribers. Contemporary interest in altering consciousness has its pitfalls, potentially skewing our views of texts, as well as the contexts they arise in. Practitioners and scholars can see the world through different lenses, which are challenging to reconcile.
Experience can sometimes be verified, for example when it relates to occupation. If someone claims to have taught at SOAS, we can check. But the meanings concerning us here pertain to private inner states. We cannot observe what another perceives, just what they say about it, or the neural activity it entails. This is complicated further by the kinds of experience under the spotlight, which access insight by transcending cogitation. They amount to: “I do not think, therefore it is.” And yet precisely what it is, we cannot say.
Nonetheless, many people have tried, undeterred by what Robert Sharf calls the “logical impossibility” of a first-person account of deep absorption, in which mental processes seem to shut down.2 Discussing this sort of transcendence makes it end. Hence someone reporting a mystical incident speaks from memory, one step removed from a non-dual state that defies definition, because of its non-conceptual nature.3 This yields reflections like Aldous Huxley’s on taking mescaline, which reduced him to “being my Not-Self in the Not-Self which was the chair”.4
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