New Age Not Same As Yoga • 27 August 2008

Or, Marxist and Marketing Exec Unite. Ohhh! I am not blogging any more. I keep deciding this. Must redirect those little “I'll journal that” impulses. But… I listened to CP while chopping vegetables for lunch and here I am. Today he’s making the case that New Age Spirituality is a far greater source of bullshit for yoga practice in the west than is consumerism. We got on this topic here recently as well.

What’s the difference between New Age and Yoga? This is off the top of my head, so please add suggestions or disagreements in the comments.

  NEW AGE                                    YOGA

Oh and by the way, it’s weird that the CP-Owl relationship has dissolved into a love fest. Now that we’ve broken bread together, it’s probably irreversible.

The ancient history of the CP-Owl relationship wasn’t so great, you know. I got into writing here because I had an axe to grind and stuff to “figure out”; he got in to writing for the laughs. We disagreed about everything. I thought he didn’t get advaita; he thought I was I a punishing meanie. I thought his progressive politics were a sham; he thought I was angry and overly threatened by benign western culture. I thought he lacked tapas; he thought I lacked middle pathway moderation. I thought he should get his ass to India; he thought (perhaps) I had something I was running from. He while claiming to be a jerk treated me with respect; I while claiming to love everybody lost my temper repeatedly.

Me: an uncompromising person who critiques western culture for a living. Him: a compromiser who produces western culture for a living. What’s going on? Why do we keep agreeing?

Yoga oughta worry about this. If it’s trafficking in beliefs so empty that both the Marxist and the Marketing Exec can see through them and thus stop arguing and combine energies, there might be real trouble acomin.