Yogibear, I agree with everything you said I think. The individual has perhaps a yogic ladder to climb. But they get up on their own ladder, not on the ladder. They don't become higher than other people by virtue of yogic attainment.
That training by Bruce Lee does seem to be based on bio-individuality. It may be true that in some places and times, bio-individuality was taken into account much more in Yoga, I don't know, though I have my doubts. In everything I've ever seen, a definite set of practices were released in a definite order along with a scale of assumed 'progression'.
On the subject of mantras, sometimes the practice of adapting mantras to people's bio-individuality was a pretense which was entered into for promotional reasons. To a certain extent, such a prestense may have even helped the recipients for psychological reasons: if you believe that a mantra is specifically tailored for you, that may give it more power in your experience. But that's something of an aside.
AYP takes care of bio-individuality by allowing the individual to use their intelligence and experience in using and prioritizing the tools.
Christi said:
If you re-read, I think you'll find that all I said was that I believed the point at which Samadhi would be useful as a stand alone practice for both Nirodha and I, was somewhere further down the line.
Christi, I regret giving you offense and you have some reason to complain because of the way I wrote my response. I don't intend to say you say you're better than someone else, but you've certainly placed him, inadvertently, somewhere on a ladder/scale of diligence and persistence somehow; suggesting if he had more of it, he'd probably be seeing things your way on a certain issue. You've also placed him on a ladder/scale of development behind someone or something else, and even if you place yourself likewise, it's part of the same problem I'm getting at: he's right that you don't know where he's at, or (I'd say myself) what ladder/scale he's even on. If such a scale is real, what if he's way ahead of people you presume he's behind? If such a scale is not real (and I say it's largely not real -- or more strictly only real in a much more limited sense than people know), why place anyone on the scale?
There's probably a much simpler way of saying what I'm saying. (Anybody?) I have a knack for making things more complex than they need to be. But this is the way it's coming to me right now: when we make progress in yoga, we have to be as careful as hell not to assume that it has evolved us further than other people on some general scale of being. If we do, we're likely to be heading into 'inflated' states, which I would say are the plague of Yogis. Every occupation has its hazards. Coal-miners get miner's lung. Yogis get inflated.
Humility is substantially the answer to this problem, but the 'ego' almost always finds a place to hide. Human beings being what they are, human institutions and traditions, purporting to free people of delusion, actually build places for human delusion to rest at ease, undetected: an example I am fond of is when monks who had taken vows of poverty got into the business of greed by acquiring riches for their abbeys. (These were among the excesses of the pre-reformation Catholic church.) Many of those monks had no idea that they were greedy businessmen -- after all, they owned nothing and were only acquiring stuff for their holy abbey, right? The institution around them had provided a cognitive hiding-place for their error. They were in fact being trapped by the errors of many monks who had gone before them, and built this hiding-place.
How can an individual monk in such a situation have the virtue of non-greed when his culture has hidden greed so that he cannot find it?
There is a parallel with the yoga tradition, particularly the siddha tradition of yoga. Here, the question is, how can an individual yogi have the virtue of humility (non-inflation) when his culture has hidden inflation so that he cannot find it? His culture contains a cognitive trap in which delusion can hide: if one thinks enlightenment means becoming superman, and one starts experiencing the process, how can one not think one is becoming superman? And how can one interpret oneself as becoming superman, and not be inflated?
So there are reasons why I try to promote a better understanding of enlightenment, one in which the limits of the 'enlightened' person are well understood. This can be like taking the monks abbey away for a moment, so that if he's up to acquiring riches, it is quite clear to him that he's doing it for himself -- the delusion, and the ambition, can no longer be hidden. It can be a painful thing to do, but in the long run, that's a gift to the monk.
