Insurgent Heart: A Vipassana Manual for the Guerrilla Yogi — {2}
Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana
Table of Contents
~ Preface
2. Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana
3. Contact: Aim /Attack / Harass
4. Mobility: Bases / Fluidity / Agility
5. Distrust: Suspicion / Investigation
6. Medicine: Metta / Divine Abodes
7. Retreat: Encirclement / Escape
8. Diversion: Distraction / Misdirection
9. General Strike: Invisibility / Cessation
10. The Guerrilla Band: Camaraderie / Community
11. Independence: Responsibility/ Self-Retreat
12. Intelligence: Education / Reporting
13. The Revolutionary Spirit: Discipline / Determination / Faith
14. Protracted War: Land Reform / Regular Army / International Support
15. {Afterword} Mindfulness: A Balm or a Bomb for Babylon?
~ CHAPTER 2 ~
Indigenous Knowledge: Bhavana
Your sense of touch must also be used in finding your way at night, as well as your sense of hearing and of smell. Pig-styes, cowsheds, breweries, tanneries, all have their distinguished fragrance — if I may use the term — and their scent will help you locate yourself. The ripple of a brook or the croaking of frogs in a certain pool — all these things, carefully memorized on your nightly excursions, may in the future help you to find your way at night when finding your way is a matter of life or death, life for you and death for the enemy.
~ Bert “Yank” Levy, Guerrilla Warfare
As often as not, the territories guerrillas are trying to defend or reconquer are the neighborhoods, villages, and communities they grew up in; places that are a part of them and of which they are a part. It is this intimate knowledge of the place — the roads and buildings, hills and hollows, as well as the people and culture — that must be leveraged to its fullest extent to give the irregular armies their advantage. Intimate relationships with the people and the land on which a guerrilla movement is surviving and fighting are essential to maximize their advantage.
In the Democratic Autonomous region of Rojava in Northern Syria, the feminist liberation movement has organized itself into councils of various sizes as a way or ensuring direct-democratic authority in the revolution. The councils exist at four levels: the commune of 30–200 households; the neighborhood of 30 communes organized by a coordinating board; the city-sized district comprised of delegates from the neighborhoods and coordinated by an internal group called the TEV-DEM; and finally, the People’s Council of West Kurdistan (MGRK) made up of the TEV-DEM from district councils. This design is built upon the faith that it is the people closest to the issues — at a the block level — who have the direct experience and social bonds necessary to best address most issues affecting their communities. They can do so more effectively than elected bureaucrats who live at a distance from the barrio and who manage based on ideas and priorities that become increasingly at odds with those of the people. As individuals move to higher levels of council, they do so as delegates not as representatives with decision-making power. This design has been as much a process of the re-organization of political power as a strategy of social re-education.
One of the greatest intellectual influences on this movement for “democratic confederalism,” Abdullah Öcalan, put it this way,
In contrast to centralized administrative and bureaucratic exercise of power, confederalism proposed political self-administration, in which all groups of the society and all cultural identities express themselves in local meetings, general conventions, and councils. Such a democracy opens political space for all social strata and allows diverse political groups to express themselves. In this way it advances the political integration of society as a whole. Politics becomes a part of everyday life.
~ Abdullah Öcalan, Democratic Confederalism
This premise is no less true for the guerrilla yogi. Liberating insight is a direct result of this same kind of intimacy with the landscapes of the body, the mind, of the textures and tones of all our sense experiences — the culture of our being — which is diminished by greater conceptual distance: what we believe about the body, what we perceive about a sound, what we imagine about an image, what we think about a thought. The revolutionary partisan may think they know the place they live and grew up in, but upon closer examination it becomes evident that their mind has tended to ignore the familiar — to take it for granted — and has not actually paid very close attention to the details of one’s own home and community. The guerrilla yogi likewise thinks they know who they are, but when they sit down to examine ourselves the details of that knowledge are very fuzzy and the closer we look the more unfamiliar the inner terrain appears.
Unacknowledged and unexamined unfamiliarity with ourselves is the great danger that keeps us confined in the occupied territory of delusion, encouraging us to engage tactics for happiness that re-immerse us in our confinement, that strengthen the grip of our bondage. The primary thrust of our effort in vipassana then is to see and understand with more and more clarity and detail the depths of what is happening in our inner world. The enemy tends to operate just below the surface and so the more light we shed on our inner landscape the fewer the shadows delusion has in which to operate. This is Buddhist process of mind-cultivation or meditation: bhavana. It is our primary weapon against the forces of delusion.
When we close our eyes and come to sit and try to gather our attention around the sensations of the body, for example, we generally find it very difficult to connect with the direct physical experience for any significant amount of time. Instead we fall back on the conceptual overlay we have of the body. Notions, opinions, interpretations, ideas or visual impressions of “belly” or “hand” or “body” tend to dominate the experience — or else the mind just wanders off. At first we don’t even know that we are doing this because we cannot tell the difference between the word “hand” and the direct experience of pressure, tingling, or warmth in that part of the body. To experience the direct physical sensations of pressure, or tingling, or warmth in the area of the hand is so simple but it is considered to be a profound accomplishment in the development of our meditation practice precisely because we are conditioned to live mostly in our minds, in our thoughts about life, and not in the direct physical, sensory, or mental/emotional experiences. Reality is all around us but we don’t live there. We’ve barely even been there for a visit.
We live like this because mental fabrications feel safer than reality. Our minds are not trained to abide in the wildness of reality in a way that feels safe and stable. Mental fabrications feel safe because they seem like they can be controlled. In reality they are conjured and re-conjured so rapidly as to appear stable. Like sand castles that crumble with each wave of time, we can spend our whole lives anxiously rebuilding these constructions, rehashing our worries and reshaping our opinions: rarely taking a moment to investigate and explore the nature of the sand, sun, wind, and water directly. Living like this — at a measured distance from reality — is exhausting. It takes relentless shoring up of constantly dissipating notions. Yet it also feels safer than reality because it is more familiar. Even if it is painful or scary at least it is a familiar agony that we so often prefer to letting go into the unknown of the world.
With the body, similarly, we are only interested in it to the degree it feels good and can be controlled, which on a very subtle level we all try to do neurotically. Reality is always changing, undependable, core-less and so it takes powerful mental forces to be able to observe these actualities in a way that is wisening and not frightening.
As a way to manage the overwhelm of the project, the Buddha described four fields of engagement with all conceivable phenomena, four theaters of war, well known as the Four Foundations of Mindfulness (satipatthana): body (kaya), feeling-tone (vedana), mind (citta), and their manifold interactions (dhamma).
Our de-facto strategy of the Empire of Self is through the constant enforcement of ideas and views about ourselves (and the world) onto our experience. The four-foundations model does not deny the value of the thinking mind but it puts it into egalitarian relationship with the totality of our human experience. Thought is treated in exactly the same as the body. The Four Foundations are not intended to be hierarchical nor necessarily sequential. The practice of one is not better than the practice of another. They are all always arising and passing, dependent upon conditions, out of our control. If seen clearly, they all lead in the same direction. They are all viable doorways into insight. There is no sensory experience outside of them. All of them lead the way to all of the others. Ultimately, none can be avoided. Our approach to them is simply a matter of wise strategy and skillful means.
When the invader pierces deep into the heart of the weaker country and occupies her territory in a cruel and oppressive manner, there is no doubt that conditions of terrain, climate, and society in general offer obstacles to his progress and may be used to advantage by those who oppose him. In guerrilla warfare we turn these advantages to the purpose of resisting and defeating the enemy.
~ Mao Zedong, Guerrilla Warfare
We can think of the four-foundations frame as an assurance against the bureaucratic domination of the revolution by the thinking mind. As with the Rojava project, the four foundations can be understood as a means of diminishing representative power as concepts about ourselves are sublimated to training in awareness in the direct experience at the level. In this way there is a profound democratization process that we train in and build as we allow all experiences to express themselves outside of the mind’s interpretation and preference.
KAYA
Physical sensations of kaya are the most tangible of all of these and so is our most accessible point of entry into revolutionary engagement with our experience. Practicing primarily in this terrain is called kayanupassana. Because it is such a vast and varied field, physical sensations can be further broken down into four general categories corresponding to the “four great elements” of earth, air, fire, and water. It is not to say that the body is literally made up of these elements but that we can describe our experience of physicality in a way that corresponds to them. The spectrum of experience from hardness or softness in the body can be labeled as “earth.” Air element is understood as the range of pressure and movement we can feel in the body; experiences including tingling, electrical pulses, abdominal gas and so on that we can mentally note as “air, air.” Fire element is experienced in the range of warmth and coolness, noted as “fire, fire.” Moisture or dryness, cohesion or distention, we can note as “water.” Often these forms of labeling can be more helpful than more precise descriptions because they allow for a basic conceptual acknowledgement but still allow and invite the attention into a more direct relationship with the experiences.
VEDANA
Once the mind has the ability to directly experience these elemental dynamics of the body, the yogi moves on to investigate the pleasant, unpleasant or neutral feeling tone, or vedana, that arises in response to all sensation. Vedana is a mental feeling tone that arises simultaneously with all sensory experience and is experienced itself as either pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. It is this aspect of experience that tends to entangle us so profoundly. The mind is deeply conditioned to respond to pleasant experience by grasping, unpleasant by rejecting, and neutral by ignoring, and thus the unnoticed experience of vedana sets off a chain of events that reintegrates us into the cycles of suffering. Sensitizing to this aspect of our moment to moment existence is called vedananupassana.
Our practice is not designed to change vedana — to make the unpleasant pleasant — but rather to see that the mind is subject to a constant bombardment of changing feeling tone in regards to the body, the other senses, and the mind itself — and that this bombardment is largely out of our control. It is the hardship of this uncontrollability, despite our most sincere and determined efforts, that is the key to inspiring our movement toward freedom. As we accept the flux and see the Self as no more fixed than anything else we stop identifying with the need for pleasure to stay, for the unpleasant to depart, for things to be how we want them to be and engage each moment with genuine interest and care.
CITTA
Seeing all this wanting and not-wanting we naturally become more openly aware of the mind/heart (citta): of knowing, of emotion, of the mind flavored by various states — including anger and doubt, rapture, joy. Thoughts themselves are cittas. Notions and perceptions are cittas. If we consider the fields of “mind” and “heart” we begin to recognize the spheres of what is included in this theater of experience and the difficulty of trying to establish mindfulness there. The qualities of citta are even more varied than those of body and so are also broken down in numerous more discrete phenomena, but most basically: wholesome, kusala, or unwholesome, akusala. Getting to know the vast subtlety of variation of mental experience is important but we should never neglect the power of simply recognizing mind as mind. Observation of the mind and of knowing itself is called cittanupassana.
DHAMMA
Dhamma is a term that is even more oblique and has a wide range of uses and meanings. In the case of the establishment of mindfulness, it is sometimes used as a catch-all to describe that which does not fall into the other three categories (such as seeing, hearing, tasting, and smelling — though these are considered aspects of kaya in some frameworks) but is also used as a place where more complex notions of interrelationship are explored and understood. The Seven Factors of Enlightenment (bojjhanga), the Four Noble Truths (ariyasaccani), the hindrances (nivarana), the five aggregates (khanda), and the framework of dependent origination (paticasamupaddha) are all considered aspects of dhamma because they point to the way that the phenomena of being and becoming are dependent upon one another. When this occurs, that occurs. When this stops, that stops. With the arising of this comes the arising of that. With the cessation of this comes the cessation of that. Examining their causal relationship between mind and body, between various forces of mind, dhammanupassana.
Progression along of four foundations of mindfulness follows a path toward the more and more subtle aspects of reality.These are the fields of war against the armies of Mara and they encompass all that can be directly known. And while we may experience our lives as a much less distinct jungle quagmire of these realms, it is important to become aware of their distinctions as a way to make the battlefield more approachable, more discernible, more winnable.
Not only should you learn the outlines of buildings, and other marks, from all sides. You should know what they look like from a lower sight-level — when you are lying down. For the day may come when you cannot stand up to look for these landmarks: you will be crawling low through cover. You will be surprised to find the difference there sometimes is in the view of a thing from the standing and in a prone position.
You can practice this by day and night, on your way to work or on your evening or Sunday walks. Keep your eyes skinned and your memory keen. You cannot know every foot of your territory, but you can make that your ideal and aim for it. Mark every road, path, copse, shrubbery, bit of bracken, hill, hedge, valley, railway line, tunnel, culvert, power station, church steeple, isolated cottage or house, river or stream, pond, lake; and note, by compass, how they lie. And every indentation, dip and hollow, and the winding course of streams…
~ Bert “Yank” Levy, Guerrilla Warfare
Understanding the various ways we can structure our rebellion helps us become more deeply familiar with our vast mental and physical terrain. During the Algerian Revolution, the vast territory of the country was similarly divided into six Waliyas, or autonomous zones, within which the efforts for liberation were distinct but cohesive. Our experience of being can also be thought of as the aggregation of six zones of relentless turbulent experience: the six sense-doors of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touch, and the mind. Just as we use the four foundations of mindfulness as our primary map of the battlefields, we can use the schema of the six sense doors — our own six sense waliyas — when they make more intuitive sense.
The Buddha also spoke of the five aggregates or heaps (khandhas) “of clinging” which the human being tends to confuse for a solid self: form (rupa), feeling (vedana), perception (sañña), mental formations (sankhara), and consciousness (vinyana). This is another way of breaking down and understanding the terrain of human experience into the realms by which through insight we can manageably engage in order to come into greater freedom.
Traditional military philosophy states that the fundamental approach of war is to seek out the enemy’s core centers of power, its army, and destroy it in battle. But since the irregular army cannot attempt such a maneuver the strategy of the guerrilla is to be free to move about the vast terrain that is outside of the enemy’s fortified positions. In those places it can be a destructive nuisance: isolating bases, disrupting communications, and building strength. The whole country is the front and there is no rear — no defensive position,
Our largest resources, the Beduin on whom our war must be built, were unused to formal operations, but had assets of mobility, toughness, self-assurance, knowledge of the country, intelligent courage. With them dispersal was strength. Consequently we must extend our front to its maximum, to impose on the Turks the longest possible passive defense, since that was, materially, their most costly form of war.
~ T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
For the guerrilla yogi, we don’t try to contend immediately with the most entrenched entanglements of the heart and we don’t try to wake the sleeping dragon because we are feeling brave. We focus our attention on the vast territory of the mind and body that is easily accessible to us — in which we are not likely going to encounter serious resistance — and build up our training and fortitude there.
We must not take Medina. The Turk was harmless there. We wanted him to stay at Medina, and every other distant place, in the largest numbers… His stupidity would be our ally, for he would like to hold, or to think the held, as much of his old provinces as possible. This pride in his imperial heritage would keep him in his present absurd position — all flanks and no front.
~ T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Guerrilla yogi training is designed to unfold initially in the most neutral aspects of our experience, as the breath is for many people, because if we tried to train with the most intense emanations of the Armies of Mara we would find ourselves quickly overwhelmed. The method intentionally creates a platform for us to attend to the aspects of our experience where we are most able to maintain connection of concentration and interest, of lovingkindness and equanimity, in order to strengthen these powerful capacities of the heart. This is not to say that it is easy maintaining a healthy relationship with more neutral experiences. It is not. But at least we have a chance to develop the skills in places that are less volatile and where our loss will be of less consequence.
And while we may intend to choose the most neutral terrain for our training, we cannot always control the arising of more intense experience. Over time we will surely be confronted with the more volatile aspects of our being — the most challenging corners of our minds and bodies. We must never feel that these experiences represent failure. Rather they are proof of our heart’s increasing capacity to bear witness to the reality of our conditioning, to understand it more and more fully.
The ancients said, “Tai Shan is a great mountain because it does not scorn the merest handful of dirt; the rivers and seas are deep because they absorb the waters of small streams…” This is something that patriots will not neglect.
~ Mao Zedong, Guerrilla Warfare
Our obstacles are very often our most important vehicles for insight. Traditionally, our primary obstacles in the practice are known as the five hindrances (nivarana) of: 1. sense-desire (kāmacchanda); 2. ill-will (byāpāda); 3. sloth and torpor (thīna-middha); 4. restlessness and worry (uddhacca-kukkucca); and 5. doubt (vicikicchā). This list encompasses the spectrum of some of the most difficult mental experience we can encounter during our meditation practice. When we try to apply our attention to a mental or physical object these five forces assert themselves very powerfully because they are some of our most deeply-trained defenses against the uncontrollability of reality.
We may notice them most clearly while on intensive meditation retreats. Sometimes we can be so powerfully overwhelmed by one of them that it feels as if it will derail our practice entirely. But we must remember that these experiences are also part of our native habitat, the terrain of our inner world that we seek to know and seek to build a relationship of interest and kindness with. We may think, “I didn’t come to meditation to get more averse, I came to become more kind. This isn’t working. I’m no good at this.” But this is not so. It is just sleepiness. Just wanting. Just aversion. And they are all worthy of our attention. It is necessary to bring our attention to them and try to understand them and know them fully, inside and out, if we are ever to overcome their grip on us.
As we come to map out our inner terrain we must try our best to treat each experience with the same respect and sense of worthiness of being known, careful to not believe our prejudices about the value of some experiences over others. Sometimes we think we have come to meditation to wrestle powerful demons but we find ourselves just falling sleep on our cushion. We get frustrated and bored because this hardly feels like an engagement worthy of a noble warrior. But the fact is we don’t really know sleepiness. We don’t have a relationship with it. We don’t understand it because we don’t value it as worthy of our attention. We think of it as an annoyance: something in the way of what we really came for. But if all of our terrain must be known — from the abandoned buildings to the bogs to the hidden caves — and from multiple positions, we must take the time to explore it become familiar with its many layers and nuances. Sleepiness, or restlessness for that matter, are fundamentally important places to understand the nature of consciousness. What is the texture of the sleepy mind? What kind of physical sensations do we notice? Where is the Self when we are asleep? If we think sleep is a problem and we cannot be genuinely interested in it, how do we expect to relate to our own death?
What are thoughts? What is fear? What is boredom? What are they made of? What are the conditions that lead to their arising? Their abandonment? Why do we not value them as worthy of our attention? There should be nothing outside of the field of our potential interest or engagement. Everything must be known. We are not getting rid of anything but through insight knowledge we find security in reality and make ourselves impervious to the counter-effectual weapons of fabrication.
We cannot afford to ignore, belittle, or dismiss these small streams of experience as irrelevant or as obstacles. In reality they are our entry point into the deeper river of existence. Full and profound knowledge of the vast landscapes of the mind and body; the hills and valleys, the rivers and gullies, the caves and crevices, the seasons, the weather patterns, the qualities of these places at different times of day — is essential for our purpose, for overcoming the occupying armies of Mara. As the Buddha says in the Itivuttaka,
Bhikkhus, one who has not directly known and fully understood conceit, who has not detached his mind from it and abandoned it, is incapable of destroying suffering. But one who has directly known and fully understood conceit, and who has detached his mind from it and abandoned it, is capable of destroying suffering.
Humankind is possessed by conceit,
Bound by conceit and delighted with being;
Not fully understanding conceit,
They come again to renewal of being.But those who have abandoned conceit,
And who by destroying conceit are freed,
Have conquered the bondage of conceit
and overcome suffering.[7]
~ The Buddha, Itivuttaka
The series of suttas in this section repeat this phrasing word for word with the exception that the word “conceit” is replaced in each by greed, hate, delusion, anger, contempt, and finally the All, so the message is clear: it is through fully understanding these phenomena that they are abandoned, and when they are abandoned they are destroyed.
There are vast stretches of our experience that are not even known in a cursory way. These are places that we may be afraid of, gullies of the heart that we deny, places that are almost completely under the influence of greed, hatred, and ignorance. But they can just as easily be places that we don’t value — that we think are boring or mundane — or places that we take our familiarity with for granted. In this case, we are wise to be careful and must provide ourselves the proper training to be able to familiarize ourselves with those places in order to begin the process of reclaiming them for the liberated state.
We can become bored when long periods of calm persist and that boredom can detract us from investigation. Some day when weeks of unrelenting fear express themselves or an existential restlessness beyond belief takes us by the throat, we will long for that quiet sea of calm and wonder why we didn’t appreciate it at the time.
We aim for joy but do we really know it? What does it feel like internally, detached from the object of our joy? Have we really explored the textures and tones of the mind and heart when we are fervently happy? We want love, we are enamored with love, but do we really know what love is? Can we distinguish metta, true lovingkindness, from love that is melded with craving, that is conditional, dependent upon people’s behavior?
If you take the Seven Factors of Awakening (bojjhanga) of mindfulness (sati), investigation (dhamma vicaya), energy (viriya), rapture (piti), calm (passadhi), concentration (samadhi), and equanimity (upekkha), which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, you will see that an increase or decrease of any of these will contribute to a wildly different experience of what is being observed. All of them are real, valid, and worth knowing. Different degrees of concentration alone can have tremendous impact on the character of our awareness. Depending on where we are in along the progress of insight, reality can be experienced with intense diversity — with more or less clarity, faster or slower, with peace or fearfully — and not in ways whose comparative significance can be easily assumed.
My own teacher likes to point out that we live in a multidimensional universe. We are explorers of the mind and must practice whole-heartedly to come to know the varied dimensions of reality through and through, up and down, inside and out, so that we are intimately, natively, familiar with the terrain of existence — and not attached to any of it. The most powerful insight of the Buddha, and the crux of vipassana bhavana, is not to get stuck in any of these ways of seeing as more “true” or “deep” or “real” than any other. They are all real and they are all impermanent, anicca, they are all undependable, dukkha, they are all non-self, anatta.
The more familiar we are with it all — the plethora of physical and psychological conditions and phenomena that can arise — the more we recognize the inconstant, unsatisfactory, and disintegrating nature of it all. Through intimacy we develop insight. Through insight we become disenchanted. Through disenchantment we become liberated because no experience holds any chains around or within our hearts.
It is important to remember that everything we consider Self is just as inconstant as all other phenomena, and so to fixate the mind on any particular experience of Self — even non-self — leads to destruction. With our attention we are not trying to fix, affix, fixate in relationship to the object. There are millions of experiences in between the poles of extremely identified and the utter disappearance of self and it is important not to get too hung up on which of these is a “higher” form of observation — just notice the difference.
The mind will want to land on one experience as THE experience, or the place to get back to, or the place to attain. But the tendency to develop new beliefs, new fixations, new identities, new attachments that override our old ones is not progress: it is part of the same patterning that got us oppressed in the first place. The guerrilla army learns as much as it can from a victory but does not try to then relive it over and over in each battle. It takes its growing wisdom and faith to show up dynamically for each new engagement. And just as the guerrilla army cannot afford to get bogged down in defensive positions in concentrated areas, the guerrilla yogi must learn that their greatest strength is in intimate relationship with the broadest possible terrain of the heart and mind.
It is through understanding that we break through the fortress of delusion. The job of the guerrilla yogi is to see and understand phenomena as they actually appear, not search for what we expect or try to make them how we think they should be. This familiarity requires a starting place of not-knowing, of letting go of preconceptions, views, and assumptions in order to see each moment freshly.
It is very difficult to maintain an unmanipulated investigative relationship with the body and the mind. The ability to sit still and bear the changing reality of our unfolding kamma is a training unique to vipassana. We may be compelled to augment or diminish the intensity of physical experience or to move energy around to try to perfect the experience, as in asana-based yoga or thai chi. But in our sitting practice, profoundly sensitive to the risk of the threat of enchantment with experience, we don’t try to transform what is happening, we try to understand it. It is through that understanding the mind’s relationship to all phenomena is liberated as it stops seeking to defend a homeland in that which is entirely undependable.
In this war we are confronted with the seemingly inexhaustible impulse of the mind to control, something that is ultimately even harder to bear than discomfort in the body. The mind is afraid of the undependability of life and it is caught in belief that controlling is winning. But we will never win that war. The body will never fully be under our command. Nor even, really, the mind. Body and mind will always arise and pass due to natural law: conditioned based on past experience. Understanding is winning. And while other approaches such as yoga or thai chi or breathwork — or any range of other spiritual practices — may be supportive and healthy in different ways for us, unconsidered faith in them will risk threatening the integrity of our receptive non-attached vipassana relationship with the body and mind to the point that they are only familiar and acceptable to the degree they are under our control.
But it is of this unfamiliarity and fixation on control that we should truly be afraid because it keeps the entire battlefield under the control of the enemy and we lose our native advantage. The process of regaining a relationship with the body and the mind, one beyond manipulation and based on genuine interest is the beginning of the training of vipassana: the source of our indigenous wisdom and the cornerstone of our advantage.
Starting in easy terrain gives us confidence as we maneuver through more difficult areas. It is the key to our success and guerrilla yogiʻs flexibility. But when they arise, how do we come to know such powerful and dangerous forces without succumbing to them? The essence of the answer will always be the same: come into relationship with the All carefully, humbly, and sensitive to when we have the capacity to meet the phenomena fruitfully and when we will be met in ruin. The guerrilla yogi must learn how to engage and how to run.
Back to Chapter 1 ~ Sabotage: Dana /Sila
Click here for Chapter 3 ~ Contact: Engage/Attack/Harass
