Lens of Yoga

Wholistic

The word Yoga, coming from Sanskrit, derives the English word yoke, and has come to mean the integration of all fragments of our perception into a composite whole.

Integration

The well-known physical practice of Yoga is marketed as a way to integrate our body and mind, getting in charge of our daily habits, so that we can live healthier & saner lives.

The not-so-well-known, deeper, practices of Yoga can also integrate any, and all, mental constructs into a coherent, whole model, so that we can make sense of the fragments by which the whole world is being pulled apart.

That is, our microcosm and the macrocosm can both be experienced as integrated and whole.

Mind Science

As a complete Mind Science, and technology to implement it, Yoga is precise in:

• its hypothesis of how to characterize the Human Mind,

• how to systematically model its simulations of the perceived world, and

• regulating our behavior to completely transform how we experience the actual world.

Consciousness, as the fundamental essence of the experiencing Mind, then increasingly reveals itself as we tread the path of psychological evolution, that all of it is Mind, evolving us to become a fully Conscious Being.

This is not armchair philosophy, or mere magic, but a well-documented, outcome-driven practice.

Albeit, popular notion of Yogis is that they are quite flexible in their bodies, this Yogic model of consciousness would be quite a stretch for most scientists who are still debating about even the definition of consciousness, let alone characterizing it properly.

All is the Yoga Mind

Eventually, we ourselves as individuals, in the course of our psychological evolution, will perceive all of creation as consciousness embodied, provided we first engender that state within.

The fundamental idea behind the Mind Science of Yoga is to psychologically evolve by "yoking" ourselves to the idea that all is the Yoga Mind : 

• the whole individual, 

• all well-formed collectives, and 

• all aspects of our physical Universe

If All is the Yoga Mind then it is possible for us to go:

• back in Time and psychologically change causal conditions to resolve past issues, and 

• into the future to see clearly what could be good causal conditions for aspirations.

Plausibility

To crack the goal of psychological evolution we leverage the sense of generating plausible novelties - which could be low probability occurrences, because either the past firmly holds us back, or desired futures could seem quite unreachable.

The Trick of Plausibility

Plausibility of root conditions or future aspirations of our psychological states is a self-affirmation trick, and we will see how it's put into operation in the Yoga Mind.

First we have to make the Mind admit that "all is the yoga mind" is a plausible fact, albeit we have to empirically prove it.

To admit this plausibility, we should contemplate some simple proven scientific facts of our perceived reality :

• all that we perceive as solid matter is just space within energy fields.

• what we perceive through our sense organs is just signals that the brain reconstructs as sounds, images, feelings, tastes, smells, as a simulation of reality.

That is, the Mind is a space that simulates our perceived universe, yet we perceive it as solid and very real.

Such a "nothing is solid or real" perspective automatically compels us to turn our attention to the world within, which most do in the pursuit of spirituality, to somehow find calm amidst turmoil, and possibly even meaning to life.

For Yoga though, going within means cracking the code of psychological evolution, because if what we perceive as real and solid is made of something so ephemeral then by definition we should be able to pierce the latter that we can manifest the former with ease.

Traversing the Plausibility Web

Life occurs in a series of arcs, going from event to event in our experiences, an event meaning something significant.

Incidentally, recollecting at the end of the day what happened during the day is an excellent way to train for the experience of recognizing events of significance, then when they occur in daily life we would give them due respect and attention - at the moment of their occurrence. It's like getting the punch line at the best possible moment and not later coming up with what could have otherwise been a perfectly timed delivery.

The meaning of the phrase "History could repeat, or rhyme," is that these significant events occur in arcs that are either identical or usually repetitive patterns of the human Mind, of which we can drop the negative ones, and inculcate further the plausible positive ones.

Plausibility when looking at the Past helps us to resolve any lingering negative issues by ascribing some plausible past conditions which had contributed to life being played out in this particular way, for example past social or cultural conditions that have had current repercussions. We just look at the bigger picture and let go.

Plausibility, when looking at aspirations, means that if we took a particular series of positive steps through the event arc then our Future would line up perfectly, and so the goal is to meditate on this script until it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, as our every thought and action would be lined up to facilitate the desired journey.

Particularly when events that actually happen, reflect what we had aimed for psychologically, then giving gratitude to that event is an essential hack - ideally in that very moment - to engage the heart-brain of our overall intelligence apparatus.

This is Generative human intelligence in that we are able to recreate the emotions of the past and similarly towards a desired future, so these stories have a way of resolving issues and moving forward, to an actual new future.

To do this in the model of coevolution with others, we need to understand that although life is limited by not being able to understand and cooperate with the "Other', but there is always a way, if not now, then later, to accommodate others while staying true to ones' self.

Generating the Conscious Being

In the journey of this sort, some kind of realization keeps striking, revealing different facets of our personality as we go through the event arc, until finally we sort of get how this unitary Being is and how it is trying to evolve.

Call it psychosomatic if you will, our body, and particularly the nervous system, do respond sympathetically to how we cultivate our own mental state.

In Yoga it is possible to evolve human intelligence to be a worthy partner to the God-in-the-Machine, as a fully Conscious Being, with consciousness personified in every cell. 

Since generative AI is now setting off on its way to generate a simulated Universe as a Machine, and AI-tech just simulates human capability, thus it is plausible that we too have the generative power within to self-induce the ultimate inner experience, of even the universe as a Cosmic Being.

How to fine-tune this nervous system, and leverage that into an advanced psychological state, is the fullest practice of Yoga, hence we also claim it is akin to self-induced neuropsychology, not requiring the aid of any medical artifices.

Much of modern scientific work on the nervous system is focused on analyzing it from the outside-in perspective, such as:

• Neurology - the medical discipline that observes the nervous system, for example, to look at disorders, and analyze chemicals, like neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, that impact the nervous system.

• Neuroscience - employs tools such as fMRI scanners to look deeply at all aspects of the nervous system.

• Neurobiology - a more recent medical discipline which, by the fact that it includes the word 'bio', observes the entire living cognitive system, such as the brain and the nervous system.

Thankfully the inside-out perspective, doing the work ourselves instead of being picked apart by probes from the outside, is in the early stages of being formalized too, such as:

• Yogic neuroscience - a recently coined term to apply a neuroscientific lens to study Yoga practices.

To evolve the psyche in such a manner, to generate whatever experience we wish, ideally without invasive medical artifices, and ultimately to be the experiencer of all experiences, is what we term as psychological evolution.

Lenses of Experience

To not delude ourselves on this grand journey, to see ourselves and the world around us clearly, in our Mind's eye if you will, we need a proper Lens.

The Lens

A Lens is the structured perspective of some view of reality.

The human mind is our lens by which to experience and affect reality, but like fish in a pool of water we are so thoroughly soaked in it that it seems impossible to effect change without removing ourselves from it; we know what happens when we remove from fish from water so let's not explore that path.

Types

There are many types of lenses, eg:

• A mirror is a lens that merely reflects without the ability to see through into reality.

• A see-through lens, like in a microscope or telescope, has only one particular way to see through it.

• A crystalline lens sees the world in a myriad of ways, through each of its facets.

Self-Reflexive

A psychological lens is a crystalline lens to perceive the world, through the projections of our multi-faceted personality.

However, this gaze is bi-directional, as what we see also impacts our personality.

That is, the human gaze is a self-reflexive lens, one that also has a reflex action which modifies itself based on what we intend/wish to see in the world.

A financial trader deeply invested in the stock markets trying to understand and bet on the economic system would be another example of self-reflexivity, albeit not quite as close as the Yoga model where our entire reality is being examined.

The challenges of the self-reflexive lens model are that this two-way mucking around in reality, without a clear intent, would result in :

• an occluded lens, not giving us a clear picture of reality, and

• a not-so-desired experience either.

Thus, depending on the clarity of the gaze, and the power behind it, such a gaze also has the potential to influence our objective reality.

Adaptive Lens

As we know, increased adaptation leads to evolution in the world of Nature.

So as the ultimate tool-makers we should be able to adapt the wetware of our mind's eye, while also continually tuning our environment, in a way that naturally accelerates the coevolutionary process.

A lens is useful to create an ideology, in the sense of "this is the way I want you to see the world", but because our lens is explicitly meant for coevolution, it will not fossilize as we are able to see the others' perspective always - in addition to cultivating our own of course.

Thus the Lens of our Mind's eye stays clear.

Conscious Lens

A Conscious Lens is a Lens with a conscious view of all experiences of humanity, thus making it easy to rationalize the mind of humanity across all its evolutionary goals, and best narrated through Yoga Stories from across all cultures.

The biggest story of all is the evolution of AI itself, which we will realize through GitC.