Underneath the Lamp

One of Bikram's favorite riddles is "where is the darkest place in the world?" This is one of the many questions he loves to throw out when he lectures, we teachers and regular audience members at the Bikram circus keep our mouths shut as newcomers yell out guesses. "A cave?" - blah, Bikram is bored by this answer. "Yoga class?" - some giggles, now he's bored and irritated. "The night of my soul?" "No!" says Boss, "it's SO SIMPLE! The darkest place in the world is underneath the lamp - think of it!"

And so I have, in fact I know for certain I first thought about it far before I'd ever heard of Bikram, thanks to the enforced reading of Thoreau in 10th grade. I found an old sheet of study questions on the "Conclusion" chapter of "Walden" in a pile of old papers the other day. I must have kept it because I got an A+ on it, something that didn't always happen in English class! So the last question on the sheet was, "Identify one of the paradoxes in the last paragraph of the chapter and comment upon it." To which I answered:

"The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us." - light is not dark - this is the paradox: how can you call intense brightness darkness? Thoreau's reasoning is that true understanding of the world and "what is essential to life" comes in the form of intense brightness, but to someone who doesn't understand, there is no light, and to someone who cannot grasp fully the secrets of life, their greatness blinds him and he is reduced to "seeing" only darkness.

I read this and was immediately reminded of Bikram's "darkest place" riddle. Always underneath the lamp, often the glory and beauty of it shines inspiration, possibility and joy into my life, but often I am in that place, so blinded the magnitude and intensity of the light (that must still be there) that I experience only darkness. Looking back on high school, the years before and the years after it, really life before I started practicing yoga, I see those years as dark, "unenlightened" as it were. It's reassuring to see evidence of a glimpse of that light way back on December 14th, 1990, intellectual and detached as the experience might have been - my recollection of reading "Walden" was that it was a boring slog. Knowing as I do now that Thoreau and his contemporaries were some of the first Westerners to read and be inspired by the Bhagavad Gita and other Hindu scriptures of which Bikram teaches all the time, it doesn't surprise me that Thoreau hits on such a similar point as Bikram.

Reminder to self: Revisit Walden, as well as the Gita!

Warmly,
Carol