The book Patanjali’s dreamsby the writer José Gordon (Mexico City, 1953), achieves what few titles can do: create a smooth bridge between science and the arts. Edited by Grijalbo, the story intertwines perception, knowledge, science and mythology, tools focused on better understanding the existence of human beings.
In interview with The Daythe author explained the birth of this story that covers themes such as divinity, perception, language, history, the senses and time.
“I thought of it as a book that touches both the internal and external worlds that we have as human beings. I feel that sometimes we have forgotten the great importance of our senses and the recording capacity that our perception has. As if we felt isolated, like solitary characters, without being able to notice others,” commented the cultural journalist.
The book tells the story of Patanjali, a wise man from India, who is estimated to have lived between the 2nd century BC and 4th century AD. He is considered one of the most important mystics of the Sanskrit language and was also the creator of the Yoga-sutra, which would later lead to the current yoga meditation technique.
“I loved it because Patanjali’s name means ‘an offering that falls from the sky like a snake’ and I realized that in his texts he proposes the idea that the mind can escape the walls of time and really be everywhere. This proposes reflecting not only on our presence in body and mind, but also the environment that surrounds us,” said the writer.
The story intersects poems, phrases, reflections and visions from authors such as Aldous Huxley, William Butler Yeats, Mircea Elíades, Jorge Luis Borges, Amos Oz, Carl Jung, María Zambrano, Octavio Paz and Antonio Machado, among others. In this way, the author creates a crossroads, a dialogue between dreams and reality.
“For me, poetry is a perception of reality, it is not something that is simply and simply created from the imagination, but rather it requires it to be connected to our world. I think it is essential to refine that idea because we live in a fragmented environment and we do not realize how interrelated we are.”
With this book, José Gordon explores “the intuitive flight” that artistic freedom gives: multi-headed snakes appear that serve as gods that help humanity in the search for wisdom and figures of immortality, such as the ouroboros.
“I wanted to play with the ideas of seeing hidden things, of feeling through others, which is technically what we do when reading: can someone enter another’s dream? Is it a merely imaginative question? It is interesting to see how neuroscience addresses this problem that is called ‘the difficult problem’, which seeks to explain what perception is.
“An example: what is the color red? It is something that not all of us see in the same way and, however, we have a notion of it. I quote the writer Elías Canetti: ‘colors alone are worth living eternally’. We are talking about the great complexity of understanding how all human sensations work,” said José Gordon.
“We have all had the poets’ doubts, but we don’t realize it and we ignore them. I would like this book to help readers open the box where we lock ourselves in through everyday life, see beyond what we have in front of us, open our minds to be able to perceive others, nature and what we cannot see. That was what Patanjali taught me,” the journalist concluded.
the book Patanjali’s dreamsby José Gordon, will be presented on Saturday at 1:00 p.m. at the Rosario Castellanos bookstore of the Fondo de Cultura Económica, located at 202 Tamaulipas Avenue, Hipódromo Condesa neighborhood, Cuauhtémoc mayor’s office. Guadalupe Alonso, Jesús Ramírez-Bermúdez, Fernando Rivera Calderón and the author will attend the event.
The work will also be presented at the Guadalajara International Book Fair on December 2 at 4 p.m. in room E of the international area of Expo Guadalajara. Gerardo Herrera, Sandra Lorenzano and the author will be present at the talk.