We never see anything in its totality. When you look at the back of your hand, your palm is hidden. when you look up at the sky, you are not seeing the ground. Beyond simple planes of sight, our sensory awareness is also limited because the depth of layered vibration that makes up any form it mostly hidden within the form itself. Deep subatomic interactions are rising from a field unknowable through our five senses. All forms are also constantly changing. So to say we “know” anything becomes foolish. What we see as a tree, what we call a tree is a pulsing changing interaction of cosmic and earthy components.
A tree drinks in the sun, air, earth, rain. A world of energy moves in and out of these living things we call trees. Often the mind reduces a tree to the logical components we’ve learned in school, or the homes and furniture made from the tree. When the thinking mind is quieted and we drop the logical reduction of a thing, we open to its mystery and majesty; we feel its life force. But mostly we pinch off this deeper connection; this unity between tree and cosmos and each of us. The tree sky earth rain are not separate, life/death, self/other are not separate, everything is connected to the one consciousness. All rises from and returns to a shared vibratory field. the field is happening through you, as you, not TO you or AROUND you.
Everyone everything is you/us. under every rock, within every particle, there are threads of connection. These threads can never be measured by human outer senses. Ancients have always known this. What we perceive through our five senses is so very limited! The fifth limb of yoga, Pratyhara, is an invitation to move our awareness away from 5 sensory input and because sensitive to ourselves as vibration. In connecting to our vibrational self we open the gateway to connect to the unified field of vibration and we gain access to a whole new world of understanding.
What scientists are calling “dark energy” and trying to measure, trying to pin down and know, is not knowable through our 5 senses. It is too big and too small to be reduced into 5 sensory input. This is why mystics, shamans, priestesses, and kahunas turn inward to understand source/god and to lead and heal from this place of mysterious unity. This is the essence of Pratyhara and meditation.
Yoga is an invitation inward, a path that steadies, calms, and opens body and mind so they become doorways to the path inward. Most people live their whole life with body and mind acting as stubborn barriers to this doorway inward and homeward. Through a committed yoga practice that includes breath work and meditation, the body and mind are transformed from barrier to gateway and the whole cosmos can be experienced within.