Monthly Archives: July 2009
Pratikpaksha Bhavanam • 29 July 2009
What if all teachers are actually robots? It’s true. The first time you say the chant in front of a group, your brain is suddenly transformed from squishy grey matter to an empty supercomputer. So actually, any particular instruction means nothing. It has as much “meaning” as much as the temperature in the room, the […]
Lines of Direction • 24 July 2009
The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much […]
Anti-meditation, psychotherapy and physics • 21 July 2009
There’s a swimming hole up the Matilija river in the mountains above Ojai. The last time I went in was January, 2008, and the cold was a vibrating silver shockwave; on a 95 degree day it was not so enlivening but at least but at least I could stay in long enough to notice something […]
Duck Dukkha, Sidewalk Jewels • 15 July 2009
Ok, I stopped making sense. Do-over. Let me first write this like a sixth grader telling you about her summer vacation. Get the sentiments in the right places and the information that interests me in the center. Last week was fascinating. I actually figured out what insight practice is, and that in the past, instead […]
Easy Question, Hard Question • 14 July 2009
What is yoga? Come on, you know this one. But RF is filmed in aporia over the question, as if he’s just been asked What is the universe? What is life? What are you? As if yoga, this ridiculous, historically specific creation of modern humans, is itself the mystery. Five years I have cast about inside […]
Over and Out • 5 July 2009
Back from Encinitas with a head full of this and that, just now realizing I have a hundred pages to read tonight and at least an hour of memorization before settling in tomorrow morning for retreat. The readings are hilarious—exhaustive categorizations of all possible experiences that will arise on the cushion, and all possible ways […]
Tiramisu • 2 July 2009
What does the hidden consciousness look like? Those layers underneath: what neuroscientists call delta state and Patanjali called dreamless sleep. Are they some vast wordless moon-ocean, a space odyssey, the primordial void described in every creation story from tohu va bohu to tabula rasa? Yes. Something like that. Something has opened in my skull: what […]