Philosophy Rant- Deleuze, Teaching, Movement and Yoga

     Hello everyone,  I haven't posted here in a long time but today again some thoughts brewing in my head have come to a boiling point and hence I believe that I must express them here. 

I am infinitely enchanted by metaphysical speculation when its interesting enough (which is why Advaita Vedanta appeals to me so much for example). I have realised that all these things are totally useless when I am concerned with finding the truth however. 

In finding the truth, even a statement starting with an 'if' no matter how pure the metaphysical speculation that comes after it becomes utterly useless, an Idea, an abstraction. However, thinking in these ways is still fun and sometimes a guilty pleasure for me. In a Deleuzian sense, it seems to me like the nomad who has just chanced upon a village. It is fun and safe to be there for some time, however you know that you must continue your journey onward. It is with these ideas that I started metaphysically speculating this time, even though I knew it was useless in the long run, just to see what would come out of it. 

I have been learning the martial art "Kalayripattu" which is an indigenous combative hybrid of a martial art and dance form from Kerala. I have been quite influenced by the philosophy of Bruce Lee and Ido Portal in regards to movement. Some beautiful points there are how movement is a faceless activity, and it is rather about the quality of the mind through which the movement is practiced. They are often talking about movement in terms of our material physical body, however through my reading of the Yoga Sutras (and also perhaps influenced by the beauty of fluid mechanics) what if this concept was extended to the 'chitta-vritti' as Patanjali mentions in the Yoga Sutras?

'Chitta-vritti-nirodha' is the essence of the Yoga Sutras, if you have a crystal clear mirror you can look down into the bottom with clarity to find the essence of Brahman is what the Yogic philosophy would try to say. It is a rather unitary, and unifying perspective, espousing perfect presence and contentment. Of course, I have immense respect for this philosophy and it informs my conduct in life to some degree, but I was thinking about how there is an implicit value judgement of the movement of the Vritti's as something negative. The so called vritti's in a sense are our desires. This is why there is often a naive puritanical reading of religious texts that denies desires. It is similar to how if desires are characterized as a lack in our sense of self, there is an implicit condemnation. 

Deleuze and Guattari turn this on its head, saying that desire is a force for self individuation "A negative so great that it is beyond the dialectic" (that quote is probably not fully correctly quoted). Again, the absolute Hegelian negativity is transformed instead into a positive Nietzschean affirmation. Pure difference is positive wills individuating and determining themselves. 

What if we now apply this to Yogic philosophy in a sense? Instead of making the mind absolutely quiet, we follow each desire extremely carefully to its absolute zenith, without necessarily acting on it. This is probably in some senses the movement Krishnamurti was talking about when he referred to desire. 

Anyway, here is the interesting part. Movement. Pure self individuating difference is a radical Dionysian Movement. So, we just take the philosophies of Ido Portal and Bruce Lee with regards to physical movement and extend it directly to our cognitive processes. This links up beautifully with the concept of "Sakshi" or witness consciousness as if your cognitive process is also a part of your body (This is true in the reciprocal sense that your conditioning, traumas, memories, beliefs also determine the state of your body) then what is left is just the non-cognitive phenomenal consciousness. It links up with the ideas of skills and metaskills being specific qualities of movement of your cognitive process. 

In fact, considering how I talked about the thought process being nimble or intense, there may be an almost bijective correspondence between the attributes of outer and inner movements ("The outer is the inner"). 

Where does this leave us with regards to teaching and learning? An interesting quote I heard from Portal went something like, we're Human beings first, movers second. and as movers, we're sometimes teachers, sometimes learners. The dynamic movement of sometimes being teachers, sometimes being learners is again very Deleuzian. A nomad from distant lands, teaching people about knowledge he has collected in his travels, taking what they have learnt to pass it on along. (Though even this metaphor is much ossified and can't really reflect the pure dynamism of the thought involved here). 

This process of learning is in my opinion mediated by desire. D & G have famously impenetrable definitions of words such as desire but I think recently it just clicked for me. Desire is a way of connecting different flows between different machines. Machines again, seems like a relic of the past where thought was perhaps more territorialized. We may omit machines altogether and think in terms of fields in some very high dimensional phase space. 

There is a differentiation in portal's work of mere "Reverse Engineering" where one is desiring the aesthetic body of a gym goer for example, instead of the process they got that through. That is perhaps the differentiation between a pure and an impure desire. Again here I don't mean pure and impure in the naive sense of adding a value judgement to these (However I do realise that me simply staging these in terms of a binary creates that opposition due to the nature of language leading you to prefer a pure desire instead of an impure one), but rather in the sense Kapil Gupta or maybe Krishnamurti would have used it. In a way where my awareness is directed towards the veracity of these statements instead of moral judgements. 

At this point I haven't really one hundred percent thought things through, so I am in some sense contemplating as I go. Relating to Rupert Sheldrake's theories of Morphic Resonance, if we really stretch the definitions to some degree and account for the right variables of fields, we could reconstruct a body in terms of a disjunctive synthesis of the flow of different dimensions of thought and material reality. (whether these are really different though is also an interesting question; a flow of money for example which is in thought can affect the flow of atoms in the physical universe as someone builds a statue for example). However, the multiplicity and high dimensionality of the field involved makes (for now) even simple localized interactions uncomputable.

 Machines in a Deleuzian sense then are flows or different localizations in some feature extracted subspace of this field. Coming back to the illusion of a "You" for a second, you can't even compute your interactions exactly with the field around you because you don't even know in what dimensions "your" existence extends. Categorizing the field along a certain dimension is itself a dimension and so there is extreme combinatorial explosion if you try to compute things.  "pure" desire then is something that "inspires", extends the lines of flight available to you. Anything else is merely resentment or envy or perhaps domination by another packaged into nicer euphemisms.  I would like to talk about this more however I got tired of writing all this in one go, so maybe I will continue this train of thought later. 

Thanks for reading!