Serpents and Senses: Yoga in the Garden of Eden

Predicament: An Excerpt

“Predicament” is the second chapter in my digital Book - Feeling Stuck? From Stuck? to Move! In 10 words. (The book is free if you sign up for our mailing list.) Below is an excerpt.

One Damn Thing After Another

A high school friend once said, “Life is one damn thing after another.” Neuroscience and contemporary psychology reveal it’s worse than my friend imagined: it’s all damn things all the time. More accurately, experience is the soul of mental life, and predicaments give rise to each moment of experience. “Damn things” is just a colorful term for the run-on stream of predicaments which characterizes our daily life.

When we think of the word “predicament,” we imagine those occasional events which don’t necessarily end well, at least in part because of our actions. If we end up thinking about it frequently, we focus as much on what we did as we do on the distressing nature of the outcome. In fact, we have an easier time accepting the outcome than our role in causing it. Predicaments undoubtedly are “damn things.” It’s just a matter of size.

Most predicaments and their associated experiences happen so quickly, we have no time for conscious awareness. When we are aware, most predicaments are trivial and require little attention after the fact. It’s the bigger ones with awkward outcomes which we remember and think about, so naturally, when we use the word “predicament,” we use it to indicate the predicament which we think about.

Moving Towards Wisdom:
From The Sense Arose The Sense

When we look at how our more casual idea of predicament arises from the more general one, we see some fascinating aspects of human nature. Consider some of the standard dictionary definitions of predicament:

1. an unpleasantly difficult, perplexing, or dangerous situation.
2. a class or category of logical or philosophical predication.
3. Archaic. a particular state, condition or situation.
4. Archaic Philosophy. (in Aristotelian logic) each of ten “categories,” often listed as: substance or being, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, having or possession, action, and passion.

To paraphrase/interpret predicament’s derivation (from Latin): From the sense arose the sense. From the “categories” arose the “state of being.” From the circumstance, we become. In other words, predicaments evoke behavior. The “archaic” third definition is the one closest to my use, and describe a predicament’s central role in human experience.

The first definition is more valuable because it evokes many of the sentiments associated with feeling Stuck? (For more details, see my post on Stuck?)

A predicament isn’t just “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous," it’s unpleasantly “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous.” Why “unpleasantly?” Isn’t it enough for a predicament to simply be “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous?” What does “unpleasantly” signify?

From the sense arose the sense. From “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous” arose something unpleasant. A dictionary defines unpleasant as: “causing discomfort, unhappiness, or revulsion.” Discomfort is a physical sensation. Revulsion is the mental analog to disgust, a physical sensation. Unhappiness strongly suggests sadness, another physical sensation. Unpleasant is a general categorization of some of the physical sensations caused by the “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous” qualities of a predicament.

For example, hold your breathe while you read this paragraph. You chest constricts. Your heart pounds. You get dizzy. Your vision blurs. The growing lack of oxygen is a predicament. Your body takes the lack of oxygen as “difficult, perplexing, or dangerous.” It evokes increasingly obvious physical responses. It causes unpleasantness. Soon, you will breathe. Or you will pass out, then breathe. From the sense [of diminishing oxygen] arose the constricting chest, pounding heart, dizziness, blurry vision, gasping for air, passing out.

From the sense arose the sense. From the circumstances arose embodied sensibilities.

Basic predicaments give rise to basic, sensible behaviors. What arises from our sense of our most troublesome predicaments? What happens if we manage to encounter and resolve them? What happens if we shift from Stuck? to Move! From the sense arose the sense sounds like movement towards wisdom. And as we all know, gaining wisdom is unpleasant and often dangerous, arising as it does, from life’s most “unpleasantly difficult, perplexing, or dangerous” predicaments.

The Serpent and the Archetypal Predicament

If you show a snake to an infant who has never seen a snake before, he will recoil in fear. Humans instinctively fear snakes (and spiders, too). How do some people get to the point where they have large, scaly pythons as pets, or care for many strange, potentially deadly snakes at the zoo? How do people learn to hunt rattlesnakes and then dare to serve them for dinner? (Rattlesnake, in my opinion, is tasty.)

These people spend time with snakes. They spend time reading about and thinking about snakes. They gain a sense of snakes and from this sense arises a very different sense of what to do with them.

Because of our innate fear of snakes, snakes are a significant symbol in mythology. Consider the garden of Eden. Eve has quite a predicament, perhaps the most significant predicament of all time. The serpent is not Eve’s predicament. The apple is.

If someone handed you the apple from the tree of good and evil, an apple God forbade you from eating, you’d have quite a predicament. The apple is the archetypal predicament. The serpent promises you the apple is the gateway to wisdom, and by eating it, you would become like God. What would you do?

Eve ate. God cursed. God’s first act, after creation, was damnation! Talk about one damn thing after another. The serpent in Eden articulates the possibility of wisdom perhaps at the cost of damnation. In fact, here it seems damnation is the first necessary step to gain wisdom’s redemption.

Encourage. Encounter. Shift.

In the Hindu tradition, Kundalini is the embodiment of coiled energy and is seen as either a goddess or as a sleeping serpent. Sometimes, Kundalini is called “serpent power.” It lives at the root of our spine, and mingled with earth, gives rise to the human form.

Kundalini is constrained in human form by three knots which roughly align with our three archetypal wounds - failure (I am not able), condemnation (I am not worthy), and confusion (I don’t understand) - wounds caused by our predicaments.

Kundalini, as a serpent uncoiling up our spine, confronts each knot in turn, as it seeks to unbind itself from the human form. This concept is psychologically significant. It describes the rudimentary process of Stuck? - Encourage − Encounter - Move!

Each encounter with the knot, however unsought or unprepared for, is an encounter with the wounds that are the soul of every unresolved predicament and the heart of personal suffering. If unprepared for, Kundalini can be a destructive force and can transform the knots into significant trauma. If understood, prepared for and anticipated, Kundalini unbinds these knots, allowing us to unearth our divine wisdom (sometimes labeled self-knowledge).

Yoga, in one sense, is the preparation for these encounters. Encourage aptly describes the process of preparing for an Encounter. Encourage has many forms.

Witness. Damnation. Transformation.

From the sense arose the sense almost sounds like a snake rising from its coils to seek insight from the mundane. Kundalini rising is the promise of more enlightened ways of sensing. Kundalini, the serpent in Eden, and mythical snakes in general seem to gain full stature as they witness someone encountering a life-altering, potentially horrifying predicament. They gain fresh insight, in the form of from the sense arose the sense, when they witness archetypal moments of human nature and transformation. They learn so they may serve better.

The serpents of myth arise as witnesses, as a warnings of human imperfection. They guard temples and other places of transformation, granting permission and access only to those who are properly prepared. A serpent king once guarded Buddha, after all.

As guardians, they threaten the damnation of failed transformation. If a snake stares you in the eye, you are paralyzed by vexation. If a snake poisons you, you despise your polluted body. We must risk being paralyzed and poisoned to discover wisdom. Doesn’t paralyzed and poisoned sound like an extreme version of Stuck? And isn’t new perspective and wisdom part of shifting to Move!?