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WHO IS YOGA? The Will to Ignorance Ranko Bon Motovun, Istria February 2016 To Yogani, who has undertaken a worldwide experiment to find out whether books can provide the means necessary to tread the path to enlightenment It is not enough that you understand in what ignorance man and beast live; you must also have and acquire the will to ignorance. You need to grasp that without this kind of ignorance life itself would be impossible, that it is a condition under which alone the living thing can preserve itself and prosper: a great, firm dome of ignorance must encompass you. From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 328. 2 PREFACE (February 8, 2016) Yoga is everywhere nowadays. Lately, it has become a staple. Who is yoga, though? It sounds like a silly question, but this selection from my Residua shows that it is no less than a crucial one, for it goes back to the origins of the spiritual quest of the human species. In time, shamanism has spawned many a path through the realm of the spirit, including yoga. As of late, these paths are marked by myriad great gurus, but underneath the august crowd is the nameless guru of us all—the animal in us. It is as old as life on earth, and it has a lot to teach us to this day. But the only way to become one with the animal in us is to abandon all thought. This accomplished, time stops and the world becomes one at long last. Arranged chronologically, the pieces included in this selection, as well as the addenda extending many among them, trace my own spiritual quest over many a year. As the book shows, it takes an enormous will to shed all the alluring but ultimately debilitating trash that goes by the name of civilization. The will to ignorance, indeed. 3 ON THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST FOR SURVIVAL (November 27, 1980) The multitude of myths about giants perhaps testifies to an historical perception of the secular reduction of our powers and abilities. The living feel like dwarfs in comparison with the dead and the fortunate. Even the most superficial reading of Thucydides, for example, creates an impression that his contemporaries were somehow bigger in size. Upon some reflection one realizes that it is actually us who are less than full-grown, and that Athenians and Spartans must have felt very much like us today in relation to their ancestors. Perhaps this is why we sometimes experience envy toward the animals, the giants of many millennia ago? Perhaps this is why the mammals abhor the reptiles? Addendum I (April 29, 1995) There is a trace of genius in the premonition that regression goes beyond the threshold of humanity, let alone history. Extended to its logical conclusions, this premonition sheds some light on the very origin of life and the irrepressible yearning for death. Addendum II (April 4, 1998) Intrinsic religiosity—a state of mind incited by belief in forces perceived as supernatural that demand placation—is embedded far less in the finer emotions than in vague and instinctively grounded fears and anxieties. Primevally, that mental state appears to have originated as a means of expressing or relieving tensions through the subconscious generalization of their specific causes. Reactions to these were apt to be intensified at the social level, and to be projected onto inanimate and animate objects that commanded attention in one way or another, eventually as numina. In the course of hominid evolution the choice of a particular animal to symbolize deep emotion was bound to be whimsical yet subject to the vicissitudes of livelihood and the composition of the local fauna, with game animals and formidable species of reptiles, raptorial birds and fierce carnivores holding an edge in the competition. From Balaji Mundkur’s “Human Animality, the Mental Imagery of Fear, and Religiosity” in Tim Ingold, ed., 4 What is an Animal? London and New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 177. Addendum III (December 11, 2000) Which is why, of course, Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for the bird to symbolize the new nation never had a chance. In retrospect, his argument was almost comical. The turkey is indeed useful, but it falls short of symbolizing any emotions, let alone the deep ones. These are inseparable from danger and fear and wishful thinking. Oh, the eagle. If it does not survive out there, in the polluted heights, it certainly will in our hearts, just above our stomachs stuffed to the brim with the silly old turkey. METHOD AND MADNESS (March 14, 1981) Random thought is threatening because it is nothing but a technical device designed to secure a modicum of indifference toward all structures that protect us from the truth. It is blind. It paradoxically finds by not seeking. It is engaged when it ironically insists that it is oblivious. Random thought is clever to the extent that it remains stupid: the sublimation of cunning. It stumbles about aimlessly and it leaves a web of infinite complexity as a byproduct. Nothing can escape it by hiding, for there is no place it either craves or abhors. It describes a Pascalian sphere, the center and the circumference of which coincide everywhere. Random thought leaves no residua, for it can offer nothing but residua. Addendum I (December 21, 1988) This is the most succinct programmatic statement concerning my writing I have written thus far. So many years later, even if I could, I would neither add to it nor subtract from it, for by doing so I would only spoil it. And that is all I feel I should say at this time. Addendum II (August 20, 2000) A quarter of a century ago, in what appeared to be my youth, random devices of all kinds struck me as new and bold and exceedingly clever. They offered an elegant way out. My ruminations about such devices struck me as no less new and bold and clever. Looking back, these perceptions only date me, only place the bulk of my intellectual development in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century. Alas, the more innocent one is of one’s own time, the better witness of it one tends to be. 5 Addendum III (December 19, 2014) Splendid, this. Whenever I come across this piece, I am amazed at the method in my madness and the madness in my method. As programmatic statements go, this one is indeed superb. And yet, random thought cannot but light upon some jewels along the way. By the same token, one of them cannot but become an anchor of sorts. A fixed point, at least. This is how I discovered and stayed close to yoga. Ever since, it has provided that fixed point around which my thought can wander hither and thither as long as I wish without fear of losing my bearings ever again. Method and madness ever so tightly intertwined. Nay, joined. A VULGAR HYPOTHESIS CONCERNING OUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGE (June 28, 1982) It is conceivable that the only salvageable moment of the religious life of the species, which will not be simply discarded and forgotten, is precisely the sum of its practical traditions—its material substratum, as it were—congealed and preserved in a constellation of techniques, devices, procedures, expressions, physical arrangements, and rules of thumb appropriate to specific conditions and situations. It is indeed conceivable that the stupidest routines and the most dreadful details of religious performance (and religious labor?) contain the essence of our spiritual experience. An enormous amount of testing, sifting, and refinement of quotidian worship and spiritual survival has already been accomplished through millennia and across the planet. Consider, for example, the very forms of sacrifice and prayer, the temples and altars, the communal singing, the prayer and worry beads, the institutions of monastic seclusion and mass pilgrimage, etc. Also consider the rocking and swaying, the rhythm, the repetition, the dancing, the language of curses and blessings, the masks and symbols... (Could reading and writing be added to this list?) This is not to say that ideological—as well as utopian, for that matter— “superstructure” is irrelevant, but merely secondary, or even derived, and undoubtedly comparatively unstable. This is furthermore not to say that we now need another scientific or professional discipline—a praxeology of religious life, or an architectural vocabulary of prototypical vehicles of faith—which would secularize and thus annihilate these apparently ignoble physical remnants of accumulated wisdom of the species. And finally, this is not to say that here lies buried another panacea. Far from it. My intention is primarily to shift the emphasis, and to point at heaven and hell as material facts of our childhood. (Could reading and writing possibly be construed as unreal or immaterial, that is, unproductive?) And our collective childhood is something we cannot choose ad libitum. Although we could accept, for the sake of the argument, the possibility of alternative histories, ours has been determined and it consequently surfaces as predetermined. The fact nevertheless remains that we have learned 6 something or other, that we have established a correspondence with the unknown, or, at least, that we have stumbled upon the needs and ways of satisfying them that will not surrender to reason. For the “causes” are both too far and too many. The most precious lessons are perhaps already built into our very bodies—into our physical performances, including those associated with language—where they linger unattended. Again, my intention is primarily to shift the emphasis, and to point at these internal ruins inhabited by ghosts of our misunderstanding.

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