Two of a Hundred and Twelve

I picked up the Vigyan Bhairav Tantra around the same time I started listening to the Ashtavakra Gita. Two texts, side by side, and for the first few weeks what I was actually doing was comparison.

Where do they agree, where do they part, which one is saying the thing more directly. It felt like I was getting somewhere.

Nine months on, I have reached about the twelfth technique.

I asked a chatbot to lay the hundred and twelve out in an order I could move through, because I wanted a list I could walk down.

Of the twelve, I practise two. The first and the second. Both are more or less plain breathing — follow it in, follow it out, and then stay at the place where it turns.

I could not get past them. I would read the third and the fourth and the fifth, the words would go in, nothing in the body would answer, and I would come back.

For a while I treated that as being stuck, because nine months and two techniques is not a good number if you are the kind of person who counts. And I count.

Osho on the first ones I have listened to more than once, which is what happens when you are only doing two things and there is time to hear them said again in another way.

Then somewhere the Ashtavakra started doing something the Tantra wasn’t doing. Drishta. The one who is looking. There is nothing to carry out with it — no count, no in-breath.

What has happened since, is that the two of them have started changing places on their own through the day.

In a review, somebody halfway through explaining a number that doesn’t hold, and I find the attention has gone to the nostrils. Not because I sent it there. It is just at the breath, and there is a gap sitting where a reaction was about to be.

Other times there is no breath in it at all — only the sense of being slightly behind myself, watching him talk and watching me listen to him talk.

At home it is the same. Neither one of them holds for very long, and the moving between them is more of the day&.

The document runs from breath to sound to light to the gap between sleeping and waking to the question of what is left of you if the body is not you, and every one of them is two lines long.

So nine months, two techniques, and I still can’t tell whether I am practising badly or whether this is what practising looks like once it stops being reading.

The other hundred and ten are sitting in the same file. I open it now and then and mark one, and then I go back to the breath, or to whoever is watching the breath, whichever of the two is available at the time.