Can you split an atom?

How very ironic that the asana that takes its name from the one who makes whole (through devotion) should be the splits. Just what gets split?

Splitting hairs, splitting fruit, splitting right down the middle. 


Do I separate?  Not this, not that. Do I divide and conquer? 


Or do I gather it all up, press it into one tight kernel of energy and explode it?

It’s a most perfect dilemna. Since the invitation of Hanumanasana, or rather, experience of doing the pose (and shall we take it one step further still and say being the pose?), is precisely about remaining whole in the very act of splitting. As beings who are continually navigating between good and bad, in and out, black and white, this or that ad nauseum, we think we have to choose one or the other. Hanuman tells us we can be split but still occupy the center. 

Note #2 Hanuman is whole
The other day I was talking about Hanuman to a friend of mine. He’s a scholar with his feet firmly planted in common sense and for upwards of 30 years (long enough to grow a tree one can sit under), has stayed the course through all the comings and goings and TV sitcom/melodrama of a yogic path transplanted to American soil. When I shared the flash I’d had about Hanuman not doubting himself, he offered me up this word: apnaapan.


One of those delightful words that is difficultly translated into English, but in that sneaky way of a language based on vibration, just repeating apnaapan seems to unlock a juiciness that bypasses brain and something deep inside the cells knells recognition.

Roughly translated, it means "oneness," or as an adjective “belongingness.” My friend was suggesting that doubt has no place at the Hanuman party - it’s like that state of wholeness that has never been torn asunder.

For Hanuman there is no split. He is not a self divided, someone lost and then found. 

Spiritual masters whisper this truth to us in so many ways: what we seek is already within; there is nothing to gain, it already IS. 


And rather than take his comment in the “wrong” way -  meaning, rather than getting depressed (as I might have another day, thinking damn, I misunderstood) -  I was greatly encouraged. 

Even in the midst of the turbulence of opposites, opinions and confusion of directions, there is oneness. So perhaps devotion is merely remembering this state of original Oneness, not original sin.

Inside the beat of recognition is resonance. Pulsation. 


Like a light switch turned on, with a passing brush stroke, in the beam of attention each mote of matter sparkles. 


In happens simultaneously with out. Immanence meets transcendence and there’s the form: a snapshot in impermanence, flow arrested. 

The monkey steps into the mirror and emerges as me. One wave rolls into the ocean and another one rolls out. Are they the same wave? They appear to be different, occupying different slots on the time-space continuum of first this happened, then that happened. 


Separations exist. Dualities polarize. But in holding the center, remembering apnaapan, I can straddle what appears to divide me.