Falling Towards the Sky

Summary: I am taking my time to experiment with the sense of sky in modern postural yoga. Halfway through this experiment, I can say that several other philosophical exercises contributed to enriching my felt-worldview with a sense of open sky above me, and so they helped make the yoga exercise (which I find pretty challenging) easier.

A little while ago, over the span of a month, I experimented with modern postural yoga, in order to feel the insights it can deliver. The result of that experiment was that I felt only half of what I was trying to feel. Indeed, these insights can be split into two categories: the “sense of earth” and the “sense of sky”, and I only accessed the first. The sense of earth means feeling grounded, bound by gravity, secure. I managed to feel that one and it was quite nice. On the other hand, the sense of sky is whatever feeling of openness comes to challenge/complete this sense of earth. I think of it this way: if you feel secure enough in how grounded you are, and you have excess energy to show for, then you can experience a sense of openness, because your body is not settling down like a fallen stone; it is springing back up, pushing against the gravity, leaping up into action. It is like a sense of embodied “anti-gravity”. So the corollary of a good sense of earth is a good sense of sky. I, personally, did not feel that strong sense of sky. I felt grounded like a rabbit hidden in its lair, not like a rabbit ready to jump out and take on the world - risks and all.

At the time, my yoga practice was too limited to access the sense of sky.

This is the reason why, this time, I decided to give myself two months to practice this yoga exercise, instead of the one month, like I did before. I think I will make a habit of doing that: allowing myself two months of practice whenever I retry something that revealed itself to require more time. Maybe two months won’t be enough but that is worth a try. Anyway, as a consequence, the present monthly blog post cannot be a full report on my second attempt. This will have to wait. But I am halfway through it and I have had more luck with it this time. I decided that in this post I wanted to tell you about one factor that helped me get it right the second time: the combined effects of several philosophical exercises that supported me. Exercises that I already mentioned on this blog. In other words, the reason why I have had more success the second time around, is that I practiced several exercises that trained me to appreciate the sense of sky, outside of yoga. All these exercises came together and managed to help me develop this faculty.

I think that’s very neat. And I want to tell you all about it. Hopefully it will persuade you that it is really really worth it to try out philosophical exercises, given that their benefits are not completely siloed, and can spill over into other areas that you might really be interested in. In this instance, I feel like several exercises contributed to an overall poetic picture that I like to refer to as “Falling Towards the Sky” (after the title of a song by Jeff Williams¹ ; not the lyrics, just the title). That phrase, to me, evokes the feeling of being suddenly open to the sky. It is a vertigo that you have while looking up. At the same time, it makes me think of the phrase “to fall in love”: it is something that you might desire, something that you might throw yourself into, even though there is a risk inherent to it and you might bite more than you can chew.

I will now simply list off the philosophical exercises that helped me to “fall towards the sky” and how they did it.

1) When I practiced Walking the Land, I encountered an idea that gave me a guiding star, a point of reference that I could use to know if I was on the right track. The idea is this: you know you’re on the right track when you naturally come back to the “target experience” as a simple matter of finding solace there and a feeling of “aliveness”. As Freya Mathews puts it:

“Once we have discovered this way of knowing, there will be no question of remaining ethically indifferent to the living world, marooned inside a plastic bubble of anthropocentrism. To care for it—and seek solace in its presence—will be as natural as doing so is for Aboriginal people, because caring for it will be what makes us feel attuned and alive ourselves.”²

In other words, if you are feeling a sense of disconnection towards Nature, for example if you are trying to experience something mysteriously called the “sense of sky” and your inner city-dweller is feeling sceptical and mocking the whole project (“what? Are you gonna get naked and worship the sun like a hippy?”), the way to dissolve this separation is through actions. Your actions make you feel different things that you can use to know if you’re getting “warmer” or “colder”, approaching the target experience or going away from it. Separation comes with a sense of numbness and obligation (“why should I do X? Convince me. Why should I care about the sky?”) whereas connection comes with a sense of solace, aliveness, and paradoxical self-care (“I care for Nature because it makes me feel good to care about something else than me.”). While disconnected, I form a “concept” of sky and I feel quite smug and smart. While connected, I turn back towards my previous disconnected self and I go “No, no, you’re making this much more complicated than it needs to be”.

2) Spinoza’s metaphysical deductions were also helpful to “fall towards the sky”. Since his deductions are meditations on the nature of reality & infinity, they kept making me think of the thought experiment of the “javelin at the edge of the universe”³ by the epicurean philosopher Lucretius.

In this thought experiment, we are asked to imagine someone standing at the edge of the universe, who would then throw a javelin forward. What would happen to that javelin? Would it hit something? Would it not hit something? Either way, the behaviour of the javelin would indicate not only that this person was not really standing at the edge of the universe (there is something beyond, either an obstacle that blocks the javelin or a measure of length that lets it fly) but also that there cannot be an edge to the universe (there would always be something beyond, no matter how many times you pick up the javelin and throw it again!). I felt that Spinoza used similar dilemmas in order to sharply differentiate between talking about things that are inside of reality and talking about reality itself. He would always offer dilemmas where both options would lead you to the same conclusion about the nature of reality itself. And I was struck by the “epicurean streak” of Spinoza’s reasoning when I last read him. Epicureans are known for their ideas about pleasure, and perhaps less known for their ideas about physics: how the cosmos that we inhabit allows us to fully enjoy our lives. They paint a picture of Nature as infinite and neutral towards us. Beyond our world, there is infinite space, and infinitely many worlds created randomly, just like ours. It’s a picture of reality that is both very alien and impersonal, but also very freeing in its alienness: in none of these worlds could you find a bunch of gods who are personally mad at you.

I feel like when people think about “nature” they think about trees and the pretty blue sky. And they try to enjoy that. When I think about “Nature” now, thanks to Spinoza and Epicurus, I think about the void of space, the unsettling immensity of the universe. I think about how alien this great cosmic desert is. And this really puts me in touch with a “sense of sky” that I feel is deep and real, not just pleasurable and superficial. Nature to me, is reality itself, which is mostly the unknown beyond the horizon, rather than the blue of the quotidian sky. So, it might seem weird that Spinoza would be on the list of things that helped me see the real sky, but it does make a lot of sense to me.

3) The last exercise that helped me is way more obvious. It is The View from Above. Even from here, down on Earth, it is possible to cultivate what psychologists call the “Overview Effect⁴”. You see the Earth from space and you feel flooded with awe and wonder. This awe and wonder can help you realize how strangely and quietly vulnerable our planet is, spinning through space like this. It’s a modest insight really: you simply remember that it exists. We usually do not even manage to remember that. Usually the Earth is the taken-for-granted backdrop of our quotidian worries. To remember all of this, to see all of this, really lets the sky open onto a larger reality. Much like the philosopher in Conversations on the plurality of worlds⁵ , I can exclaim :

“This puts me at my ease. When the sky was only this blue vault, with the stars nailed to it, the universe seemed small and narrow to me; I felt oppressed by it. Now that they’ve given infinitely greater breadth and depth to this vault by dividing it into thousands and thousands of vortices, it seems to me that I breathe more freely, that I’m in a larger air.”⁶

Those are all the things that make me fall upward. I could also add that the first jhanas never left me and that I have been using them regularly to help me deal with any emotional stiffness that would prevent me from throwing myself completely into the yoga exercise. With the first jhanas too, you have this weird skyward dynamic: they feel like a powerful stream of energy going upward, from your lower body to your upper body, and exploding at the top of your head, like a fountain. I never write about them without being tempted to describe them as “literally mindblowing”. That’s really how I feel about them. And since falling towards the sky is about upward vertigo, rapture, ecstasy, they have been helpful as well, though I am yet to resume my jhana journey.

In conclusion: it is worth it to take your time to experiment, and it is incredibly cool how philosophical exercises work together to give you a strong sense of the cosmos: the strange and admirable universe.

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, I talked about Intuitive Action: Doing without Doing, and I also talked about the Trustful Approach as a way to live political conflict in a more mindful way. Take a look around the blog for more exercises!)

(15/05/2025)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

NOTES:

1https://genius.com/Jeff-williams-falling-towards-the-sky-lyrics

2MATHEWS Freya, “’Walking the Land’: an Alternative to Discourse as a Path to Ecological Consciousness and Peace” Published in Joseph Camilleri and Deborah Guess (eds), Towards a Just and Ecologically Sustainable Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; p.10

3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javelin_argument

4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

5Conversations on the plurality of worlds, Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle

6Conversations on the plurality of worlds ; excerpt featured in Wonderstruck: Chapter 2 by Helen De Cruz ; probably based on an original translation, see here: https://helendecruz.substack.com/p/conversations-on-the-plurality-of Translation by Helen de Cruz