Intimacy & Equanimity · 8 January 2010

On Sunday, icicles began to grow on the windows of the little practice room. Today they’re a foot long. The heat is dry and patchy. It’s a bit grey in the sky and the ground are covered in four inches of the puffiest soft snow. In the morning it’s crisscrossed with squirrel, cat and deer tracks; and sometimes at night the fluffy white possum who lives under the neighbor’s stairs will roll out and squint at me. My sinuses ache, all the way up to the center of my head; and there’s something in the air that makes me sneeze powerfully at times. In Los Angeles, I feel the rhythms of my environment and move accordingly; here I have moved from euphoria to slight familiarity. My core is warm, but there’s a light contraction in the deep muscles. At all times, they are working harder here—navigating a new environment, adjusting to the dark, dry cold.

I had doubted whether it would make sense to continue 3S as a practice in this environment. Is it sensible to keep the body so open when it’s so cold and brutally dry? Will the Nordic climate and culture, the absence of vegetarian items at decent restaurants, the amazing fish market at Kerrytown, and the proximity of the lake cause me to crave fishmeat? (If so, wonderful! But for some reason I don’t feel right about using animal flesh to drive extreme yoga, and would ramp down the practice if creatures were my usual fuel.)

I had questions about context. The practice seems suited to very energetic, very open people in warm environments, with the support of other people who have decades of experience and dozens of colleagues who know how the series works. I wondered if doing it here, in a cuddly-cozy, hyperintellectual, neurotic scholarly-powerhouse of a town, would only serve to keep me out of touch with my environment, fighting reality with sinewy sentimentality. The opening and the work of it, I thought, require so much surrender and so much will that doing it every day would be a self-punishing struggle. Advanced stuff suffers no fools, and I worried about disrespecting it by taking it out of context. I might need to find a more “supportive programme,” I thought.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, blah. Turns out my body is context enough. This self-questioning was the same as all the other doubts that one has– about practicing while pregnant, practicing while female, practicing while over a certain age. (Doubts usually suffered by women, I’d note.) So it’s winter. So what? So I do what I always do. This machine has been meticulously constructed and, like the Honda, it runs just fine on difficult terrain.

The weird thing is that the old programme is better than fine here. My hips tend to tighten up against the cold, and the opening section of the practice is full of strong re-letting-go work. The strength work warms me up and, together with the backbends, generates a great deal of positive energy that will probably shelter me from the neuroticism that is par for the course for young academics in these parts. (Michigan is smack in the center of the stress belt: statistically, people here are far more anxious and depressed than elsewhere; and the institution seems to take for granted that new arrivals will experience a mental breakdown upon moving here.)  Because the practice is so in-my-face, I can’t sit around and look at my toenails or take 10 extra breaths in postures. Otherwise, it might be much more difficult to learn to practice by myself after years of community support.

The solitude is mostly allright, though at first I tended to get very emotional in the backbends, remembering how much I missed my previous home. I had forgotten the potency of ashtanga yoga… if there is an emotion I’ve hidden under the surface, some level of bending will eventually bring it out. The hardest backbend was urdvha dhanurasana – the one in which my heart is completely exposed and the psoas has to both lengthen and engage to bring me to stand. All the others—even natrajasana—have some element of protection of the chest, and did not leave me so completely exposed. After a week of bailing out of dropbacks, I talked to a home practitioner who is pretty systematic about not bailing out and who takes notes every day on what he did in the backbends. The next day, I practiced through the sadness and fear. Sort of awkward. After three or four more practices, the block went away. Now my body remembers what it’s always done.

I have often wondered if it might be better to practice advanced series alone. It’s so confrontational and intimate, and sometimes a distraction to others. I don’t know about shalamates who have to live with advanced practitioners, but for my own ego it is somewhat liberating to get away from the sense that I’m any different from everyone else. No matter what series you're doing, ashtanga’s all confrontational and intimate—which becomes obvious, again, when there are no eyes or cameras or mirrors. In this sense, the crazy programme has never made so much sense. It seems natural that, after cleaning up all the vinyasas with a teacher to keep me present, I should learn to clean up the distractions and drama that want to undermine me when I do the same practice alone. It was a little messy and exasperating at the first, but now there’s also a feeling of rebirth. Of greater intimacy with my own experience, and much "better" conditions for figuring out that thing about equanimity.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

DeLillo · 27 December 2009

Greetings from Middle Earth.

Don DeLillo is everywhere. I drove in to Phoenix/Scottsdale, the romantic apocalypse of his Underworld and the site where a rescued couple builds a beautiful life out of the desert. Echoing the “they made salads” that he uses elsewhere to signal halcyon days, in Arizona, “they made bookshelves.” So too my friends in Scottsdale, mavens of Amazon Prime.

Libra is a Texas book; and after I picked up my brother at El Paso, we drove in that state for three days and three nights (with excellent stops). In Libra, Oswald the justified paranoiac repeats: “There is a world inside the world. There is a world inside the world.” And in Texas I realized, there is a blog inside the blog. ((0v0)). A private space.

DeLillo lost me when he wrote The Body Artist, a spare short story that never should have been a book. I read it on a Saturday afternoon next to a fire out on Alki beach—Seattle’s little wind-beaten peninsula. Much of The Body Artist is a single opening scene, a woman who has left the city, for some reason, and moved in with her distracted lover. It’s an old house on a remote, wind-pummeled beach on the west coast. In the first scene, the two are quiet in the kitchen, as DeLillo stupidly describes the way the woman pours her cereal. It turns out that her art is bizarre, grotesque but graceful contortionism; and once she moves in to the near-abandoned location, she spends long hours in a back bedroom, stretching and binding her body. She is visited by a feral boy that DeLillo seems to have stolen from David Malouf’s tale of Ovid – some abandoned soul or piece of her own psyche. The story is immature and uselessly sketchy: his editors’ rush to publication dressed up as minimalism. But nine years later the image of that weatherbeaten house, and the nature boy who comes out of the woodwork, returns with unexpected strength.

Anyway. A paragraph about the weather. Today we had freezing rain, though it is presently a balmy 28 degrees. No sun. Seven hours of hazy light. I dislike owning anything that can be measured in bulk, but for now am making an exception for the following materials: silk, cashmere, and down. I also have a new electric blanket, made of synthetic fibers soaked in fire retardant and laced through with electric cables. It’s turned all the way up and wrapped around me right now.

My parents just got on a plane bound for Montana, a thousand or so miles directly to the west. They are roughly a million times happier visiting Ann Arbor than Los Angeles. My mother cooked comfort foods, which in our family means sugar bombs disguised as main dishes. I partook: at least she didn’t decide to cook some animal in the new kitchen. My dad, a feral creature with the energy of a young boy, surprised me with advice for living with other people’s transference. Then he went back to drumming absently on the furniture, slamming doors, and running up and down the street.

The energy of going it alone—and here—is so different. On which, more presently. I’m entering a phase of learning by doing. I’m leading a class in the morning a the Quaker meeting house—something Tim arranged—and may put out a few more tendrils in coming weeks, before departing for Mysore in the New Year. Incredibly, my travel Visa did arrive yesterday: wasn’t sure that would happen, since my nomadism makes it difficult to convince the Indian consulate that I’m a legitimate traveler (i.e., someone with a permanent address).

The drive east was breathtaking, and so joyful. I spent time talking and practicing with Karen and then with Liz, and got very high quality sleep in both their homes. It would be inappropriate to write about how much I adored them in person, and what solace I found in their presence. We sometimes flatter each other on the internet; and surfacy connection comes easy here. So I’ll not try to overcompensate with words.

Time to brew some tea. 

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Categories: arbitrage

Sister Cities · 25 December 2009

I’m listening to a fast-moving freight train that slices Marfa from the surrounding deserts. The others have gone out drinking; and I am in this spare, modern house trying to calm down since I’ve been awake for 20 hours. Everyone keeps saying it’s cold: temperatures vary from the sixties down to the teens within a December day in “far west Texas.” I watch them shiver and wonder if I’ll ever get the temperature machismo I’ve observed up north: this suspicion that only a person of weak character fees cold in the winter.

It is so quiet here; and the stars are the brightest I’ve seen in a while. We just had a three hour gourmet dinner in a red-walled restaurant full of the kindest people with the best taste. Insiders who spend so much energy guarding the boundary of art/not art when they’re out in LA or New York can let down their guard here: if you know about this place and have done the work to trek out here and are casual with the people holding house parties, then you don’t need to be further tested. Mysore has a bit of that; and for the community and creative renewal it brings him, Marfa is my brother’s Mysore.

From the dark dirt street, on the other side of the 8-foot concrete walls, the house is dusty and abandoned – whiskey bottles on patio furniture and a naked light bulb over the door. But oh, those are Maker’s Mark bottles; and the porch rockers are a little too sleek for a lonely ranch house; and the light is actually a giant-sized, hand-blown stylization of a naked patio bulb. Inside, this house has worn-in (but not worn out) wood and concrete floors: distressed in the way that certain excellent jeans come broken in: strategically grooved in to a comfortable everyday fit with the body. There are candles burning—the kinds of candles you buy in museum gift shops.

One of the living rooms has been converted to a performance space. I’m sitting here with a mut so beautiful that I wonder if she was bred to look like a mix. My brother is off at a house party: bars close at midnight in this town, so that’s how the population of avant garde artists rolls through the night. Tomorrow, while he and his friends sleep, a cold morning walk around the tiny civilization here, then practice, then play, then the drive.

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Categories: arbitrage

Epicureans & One-Technique Freaks · 23 November 2009

There’s a pitfall of having it all—of Shinzen’s method, which teaches you every level and angle of meditation at once. The regulating principles are honesty in practice, and commitment to pursuing a different kind of triple bottom line: concentration, clarity and equanimity.

The hazard is dilletantism: using this richness as a buffet, a collection of refined habits of being. I often make the hedonistic appeal to non-meditators—it will enhance all your sensory experiences, your relationships, your embodied subjective pleasure, and so on—but this is like telling someone that the reason to practice yoga is to get a great ass. True and legitimate so far as it goes… but….

His system does offer everything. In addition to unprecedented and (but of course) unselfconscious sharing of his own specific experiences, he has gathered every meditation technique ever under his umbrella of practices. From there, he’s developed a complex technical language to make all those practices in to a mutually understandable family. It’s all so geeky that only the hyper -systematizers, the intellectually voracious, people with burning questions about the history of consciousness, and all-out nerds really resonate with it. (Turns out, this is a lot of resonators.)

But honestly, it’s genius quality R&D, an achievement that expands and deepens all techniques instead of dumbing them down for translation. It also kills any school’s claim to methodological superiority: if your method is so hot, TM, why don’t you let your students try a little heart practice? Ok Vajrayana, claim to have the truest energetic secrets, but why don’t you let your students meditate on the world zen-style the next time they’re cleaning the floors? Bhaktas, what do you do if you have a day you feel like an atheist?

Anyway, maybe like all meditators who begin from curiosity instead of from suffering, I am epicurean. I aim to be a connoisseur of sight and taste and sex and emotion. Not to mention, as Ram Dass used to say, a connoisseur of my neuroses. A connoisseur of pain, even. Once concentration becomes strong, vipassana practices can be just that—fascinated razor-flaying of inner and outer experience, with ever so gradually decreasing regard for the positive or negative valence of that experience. That’s what you get with the trifecta of concentration, clarity, equanimity: a good life even when it’s bad. A fascinating life even when it’s pointless.

Pursuing a beautifully refined, mindful version of the good life is fine, and I think an unproblematic goal of practice for superficial people. (Can I say that?) But: sometimes I forget my main question about the nature of reality and consciousness. Working in the sense-experience that is most difficult for me has suggested to me that there may be something to what Daniel Ingram calls being a one-technique freak. I am just not that much of a visual experiencer, but have been staying quite a bit with this “sight flow” business the past weeks. The difficulty and non-naturalness of the technique mean that "insights" come easy as I take the technique from first grade to maybe fifth grade levels. There's a steep learning curve--enough of a challenge to radically sharpen my focus and engage me so strongly that I don't mind setting aside my more pleasure-infused mindfulness techniques.

The sight flow work is hard and disconcerting. In a way that techniques of body-based meditation and watching my thoughts are not. Meditation that’s inside of myself—inquiring in to the nature of my personality or spirit or emotions or body—is easy to engage. It has a certain charge of selfiness that my ego thrills to experience. But bracketing selfy sensations to see the world and self more as objects: this kind of practice lacks the personal shades that often drive my curiosity for practice.

It feels like a good idea to stay with this outside/ objective/ Zen-like practice a while, get good with it, see what other shocking if useless understanding it creates. 

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Categories: arbitrage , integration

Focus on Change · 20 September 2009

Two overcast Sundays. On the Palisades in late morning, the ocean’s the color of the sky and the ultrafine grass is so perfect that it might be fake. Welcome to Santa Monica.

I’m up at fourish, then take four hypnotic hours in Mysore space—the first two in the dark with the doors thrown open, the silence driving my awareness fairly deep. Then at 7 the other necessary ingredients arrive and I take two more hours on the move in yellow-gold light from floor-to-ceiling windows that face in every direction, following not my own breath but theirs, letting it lull me around the room. Lucky to stay in that headspace a second shift, as the soufflé I began cooking at 5 rises and finishes to perfection, and then disappears when we roll out of the room, satisfied for now.

These Sundays, thanks to freeconferencecall.com, I’ve been meditating with Shinzen or his students. People call in from five continents and put their consciousness in phonespace. After a 30-minute session of what sounds like dead air—twenty of us sitting quietly on the line in, say, Swedish forests, Scottish laundry rooms, Taiwanese park benches, South African parking lots, Santa Monican beach cliffs—he says “Good job everyone. That was really great focus.”

As if he knows, sitting out in his farmhouse in Vermont! But the thing is, he probably does. I have little doubt in the phone-space intuition of a man who his building a digital dharma successor, who speaks—like his teacher Suzuki Roshi—of emptiness and form in terms of zero and one, whose teaching reduces to equations like suffering = pain X resistance.

Are we of one mind, there on the line? For Shinzen, no problem. His consciousness has undergone several beautiful crises and now he can convert the world to greyscale on a blink. He’s seen something more meta than I can grasp with any amount of assumption-excavating philosophical contortion; his default state is a pulsing, vacant fast-blip movement of energy. Or it’s a love-nourishing void. He describes both—the zero and the one. I don’t get it, but it’s an awareness that you feel must be refined down beyond the bits—even in phone space, which to him might be no different from parking lot space or some laundry room or my irreplaceable perch here at Ocean and Alta.

Of course I am a different person here than anywhere else. It’s still all about my sense of self, which needs reference points even if it’s no longer so concrete as it was. In fact, unmoored a bit from my stories and a few samskaras, I seem to look to my surroundings now more than ever to know what I am. The physical world seems to bounce back and amplify the joy that is wanting to circulate. Never have I felt so strongly that my mind was reflection of the sky outside and whatever sounds are in it.

Two weeks gone from this place and it’s already surreally shifted. I glanced up from the gasoline pump at Federal Avenue and the crumbling corner building I’ve looked on daily for years was gone. Poof. Not even rubble. This is the problem with LA—nothing is ever as valuable as the shiny-smooth new thing you could install on top of it. You can’t walk down the same Santa Monica Blvd twice.

I told Shinzen that I’ve shifted my locus of experience away from the pelvic floor. On my first Vipassana retreat I learned to choose a place in the body where I could always take the awareness home—a touchstone for every time a conversation flew me off the handle or emotion really sucked me down. This is a great technique. I began by learning to be aware of the MB whenever I was talking to someone. Rather than dividing my attention, grounding it in the body actually made me more perceptive, a better listener, more able to catch subtle layers of interaction that otherwise would remain unconscious. The funny byproduct of this technique was that I learned to focus on movement, to meditate on a single vector of data as if it were a single point. Because after a while, the pelvic floor stops being a thing and becomes electricity. It’s like focusing on the breath: what you take to be your stillpoint expands, contracts,  disappears and surges forth as much as you can bear to notice.

This summer, I’ve shifted the touchstone from the pelvic floor to the jaw. In part, this is because 3S is working my jalandhara bandha and kechari mudra, healing old pains in the neck, and doing a number on the thyroid in a way that forces the body awareness—finally—in to the head. The head is a body part, after all—not just a brain receptacle. In a sense, it’s harder to have head awareness than pelvic awareness. I’m not all that sexually repressed anymore, but I am in a sense still at war with my brain. And I’m still carrying all kinds of weirdness in the jaw—tension I’m determined to let go.

Shinzen found the shift interesting. He loves the pelvic floor, and reminded me that in China they call it the ocean of energy. “But”—paraphrasing—“the jaw may not have the same experience of energy flow that you find at the pelvic floor. That’s fine. If you’re resting there to try to cause things to break up, you’ll fail to notice what’s actually going on. If the energy there is not moving, that's not bad at all. Just pay attention to what it is doing.”

Oh yeah. You don’t release the jaw by using determination.

By the same token, I’m hesitant to come down all that harshly on my tendency to see my self as my surroundings. It is a much easier way to be than identifying mainly with: my resumé and pedigrees, my spiritual experiences, my ambitions and plans, everything I've been through, how hard I've worked, my issues, my secret backstories, whatever I'm accidentally good at, my analytical capacities, my funny quirks, etc., etc., etc.

I have tried those and found them pretty transient, usually unsatisfying, and not actually me. Place, too, is transient; and half the time I do know that I am not my surroundings. But it may be a while before I understand this on the level of intuition. 

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Categories: arbitrage

Ashtanga Ann Arbor · 4 September 2009

Monday I drove Pico Blvd from Santa Monica toward downtown, straight toward the wildfire smoke roiling in the east—smoke so dense that for days it generated its own precipitation, perfect white cumulonimbus billowing over the greys and ashen browns of the destruction. For once I sympathized with the forward-thinkers, the Editor among them, who say the dream is dead and life here is a mindless pillage of resources long depleted. It was earthquake weather this week; and gas was well over three dollars a gallon. The state is closing parks and libraries and selling off its treasures, its many-jeweled crown of the University of California is putting professors on furlough and grad students in the gutter. Apocalypses and lost causes rather turn me on, but I thought I’d come out to Ann Arbor for a while anyway.

The flight was horrible—a red eye next to a woman suffering hot flashes and large enough to need more space than just our armrest. What do you do but defer to the good mother? She blasted the air and I folded myself up like a beatle (thank you, ashtanga) and froze through the night, sleeping never and marring my record for idyllic air travel experiences. Using Shinzen's practice of finding the image stream and disentangling it from emotion, the mini re-traumatization showed me the seeds of the bitter hate that I have for cold: two incidents in my early twenties that have left an abiding, personal anger toward weather under 60 degrees. (One, a monthlong ski-camping trip during which I frostbit my right toes on riverside subzero nights, and the second a night on the shores of Lake Ometepe with nothing to keep warm but a bottle of Nicaraguan rum. It’s funny that, for all the trauma I witnessed as a child, the main scars in my body were collected late in life. And they are in a sense trivial—almost comic moments of fun taken too far. Still, I can almost not bear the cold—emotions of victimhood and fear overwhelm me.

By the time we landed in the pink sunrise over Lake Huron, I was fully, bitterly dissatisfied, albeit grateful that the loathsome circumstances would deepen my love for Detroit the second I stepped out in to its 80 degree heat wave. But then I didn’t. It was fifty degrees on the ground—cold enough to chill both produce and owls in T-shirts. The subliminal voices telling me to run back to California began to scream and I slid from regular dissatisfaction (a loss of equanimity) in to the swamps of despair (dissatisfaction + drama). But the Editor—now Professor to the likes of us—doesn’t have the option of leaving. He’s faculty now in one of the finest departments in the country, so even as I remain professorly free labor in the original sense, I am going to have a more than passing relationship to this place.

The chill-induced hate and fear hollowed out depths that have, in the days since, been filled beyond capacity with delight and pleasure. This exaggerated ambivalence is the calling card of culture shock: and it still happens, no matter how jaded I pretend to be, no matter that by now I’ve lived in four countries and eight states. When I’m in culture shock I get a temporary case of borderline personality syndrome—in which every one and every thing is either perfect or from hell, and every new experience is a new up or down vote in the referendum on the new culture.

Sound like your last trip to Asia? In the first days, Ann Arbor’s approval rating pendulumed between zero and 150. Characteristically for my manic body politic, the euphoric, delighted, yes side wants to annihilate the dissatisfied side. Though ultimately, if joy is to win, I don't want it to happen through dishonesty or repression. But at some point, I guess I’ll just learn to let satisfaction resume her natural place at the wheel.

Last night in the front yard, the sleekest, cutest creature of black and white wrestled imaginary playmates in the grass (this morning I found a beehive she’d unearthed in the front bushes—poor bees). Who knew skunks were so beautiful? The light of the streetlamp—yes, this is downtown Ann Arbor, we’re four blocks from Main Street even if this place has an enormous back yard that feels like a campsite on the Olympic Peninsula—made the fluffy blinding-white of her head and stripes shine out as she tumbled and undulated her potent, gorgeous fan of a tail. The creature rolled over and over, batted the air, danced and jumped, burrowed in to the grass. She made what felt like eye contact with me as I stood in the beveled lead-glass front windows of this ornate old house—but like the other creatures all over this zone, she views humans as benign. I thought of my first grandfather, a mink farmer who killed himself when furs became unpopular and he lost the farm… does my chest of inherited furs contain no skunks because consumers associated the most gorgeous pelt ever with skunk perfume? Very good… I’m happy I will never have the option of throwing one of this girl’s own grandparents round my shoulders when Ann Arbor gets bitter fucking cold.

Meanwhile, I’ve acclimated to 50 and it takes next to nothing to steam up what is surely the finest solo practice space that is. The Editor would lure me here with this; and it is better bait than any. The building is a restored townhouse, maybe 90 years old, with knotty pine floorboards and engraved brass fixtures, heavy mouldings, a clawfoot tub, and blue tilework in the kitchen. The practice space is about ten feet by twelve, with a north window that looks into pine trees and a west window opening up over the roof to the forest out back. It’s so motherfucking juicy in there I don’t understand it. What could be the power of this little room? It may be that the space is the perfect size for one (I could fit three, if the locals—who tend to like a lot of mat space—can pretend to be New Yorkers), or that the previous resident—an artist for Google—was very good at clearing spaces to make energy flow. But I suspect there is something deeper and older going on around here…I don’t understand this town yet, but it has some weird power and grace, and some kind of intelligence that has nothing to do with its having the highest social capital in the country.

I rolled in with a paltry mess kit: seven tealghts and a stick of incense superstitiously lifted from the home shala, doubts about Ann Arbor, and samskaras about the cold. But on Wednesday I woke at 5 (2 o’clock in LA; and having not slept the previous night) drawn to the little room’s gold floors waiting across the hall in the dark. The heavy walls—a whipped plaster just painted pale yellow—echoed breath back to me; one of the floorboards creaked loudly under each jump-back and crashed when I fell out of a handstand.

This space will make me quieter. Working the echo in the floor, getting light enough to make its reverb disappear, letting whatever forgotten history and strong energy this place contains lift me out of the dark and the confusion.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Trinities · 13 August 2009

I am discovering the most beautiful coincidence.

Breath-Bandha-Drste = Talk-Feel-Image

Two systems, Vipassana and Ashtanga, mapping each other one to one. I didn’t plan this—my own designs are not so elegant.

When the pairs integrate, what I have is three streams of being—Talk, Feel, Image—and three perfectly-fit drainpipes for diverting or even shutting down those streams at will.

Breath covers talk... as bandha covers feel... as driste covers image.

Breath-Bandha-Drste is the holy trinity of the ashtanga practice—the places you lodge the attention so it doesn’t spin off in to something stupid. Breath is what is is; bandha is the deepest movements of the inner body--pelvic floor lightly and diaphragm subtly lifting; and drste (or, if you like, driste) is the gazing point, whatever it may be for the posture.

Eureka! SKPJ's triple esoterica corresponds to Shinzen’s somewhat arbitrary triad—the three major vectors he uses to deconstruct subjectivity. I’ve talked about his model at length in the comments the past month, but here is an outline. Like any map, it is imperfect. But I’ve been rolling with it because, well, because it works and I especially love the number three.

So, say there are three kinds of experience-of-self: emotion in the body, talk around the ears, imagery projected around the head. The shorthand for it is: Feel-Image-Talk.

A sense of "me" arises when the the streams of feelings, mental talk and images come together as an apparently solid thing. For those who have not asked, like William James, “What are the elements of me?” this clog of inner experience appears to be solid much of the time.

Go through life experiencing your self like this—as a pulsing undifferentiated goop of 1) emotions and 2) visualizations and 3) mind chatter—and thus be enslaved as their multiplicative product. For example, mind chatter ramps up emotion, which is in turn exploded by visual fantasy. And so on. But! Part the streams—perceive how the three move together and apart and only flash alive in the briefest moments—and find some home in the chilled-out space between them. Emotion minus image is just body sensation. Talk minus emotion is just words passing. Image minus talk is an artful silent film. Living with space—living spaciously—is still a life. It’s just a life easier to understand, control (no joke), love and enjoy. This is Shinzen's model.

So anyway, I roll out of bed every morning with little use for all this epistemology-ontology Vipassana stuff. Breath-bandha-driste, that’s it. It’s habituated and it’s all I need. And now I’m realizing that all along I’ve been using this system to stem the triple tide of subjectivity. It is a fairly elaborate little tool for keeping quiet: like a Swiss army knife with not only a blade, but a corkscrew and a pick.

In the mornings, what fires up first is the talk-stream. I wake at 4:30 ready to write a thousand words; and the practice is to put that on pause for another four hours. The key for me always is to listen in to the breath and follow it like a passionate devotee. But of course It covers my otherwise dominant auditory thought-stream. If the object in “talk space” is the sound of my breath, the sound of my thoughts fades to the background and increasingly—with time—goes blank.

Image and Feel spaces work the same way. If something triggers a fantasy of any kind, taking the driste from peripheral to harder focus usually makes its imagery fade if not give up and die. It’s so obvious, but I am only now learning to watch that happen. Just try to conduct a good fantasy while you’re devoting your attention to the tip of the nose.

Same for being caught up in emotion. My emotions travel around my chest, belly and jaw. But in the midst of some drama, if I just place the best of my loving attention, I stop being so convinced that those feelings are “me.” If experience is what matters, well, the pelvic floor is equally me; and so is the gazing point; and so is the breath.

The key is this. Breath-bandha-driste are relatively neutral, objective streams of experience. I can hear, physically feel, and actually see them. They are, in a sense, manifestly “not me.” But mental chatter, emotions and imaginings—they are made of unalloyed mindstuff. They feel like my special little creations and are easier to mistake for “me.” As such, they are far more highly charged. Much more likely to high-jack the attention and take it for a ride.

Just compare the energetic charges. Which one of each pair is more radioactive? Breath/Talk, Bandha/Emotion, Driste/Imaginings.

The so-called “tristana” is chill, while its rambunctious twin the subjective triad is anything but.

This ashtanga practice is complex, as humans are complex. This practice doesn’t just throw you a blank wall and ask you to focus on the void, or give you a single mantra and let you dissolve everything in to that. Rather, it provides its bizarre breath-bandha-driste trinity.

It is built for flexibility and the flow of several single points. It is prone to insight. It has the power to create space.

For a long time I thought that this bewildering instruction to focus on many things was too much to ask. But suddenly, knowing myself better, I find that it is and always has been so much to offer.

God it’s a beautiful system. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , sound

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 as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?

…We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all….

Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of this central active self consists, - not necessarily as yet what the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel when we become aware of its existence?

First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances and hindrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, tendencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the other way. Among the matters I think of, some range themselves on the side of the thought's interests, whilst others play an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsistencies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which obtain amongst these objective matters reverberate backwards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all men [sic] might use. But when I forsake such general descriptions and grapple with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in these introspective results, let me try to state those particulars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and distinct.

In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an effort, are felt as movements of something in the head. In many cases it is possible to describe these movements quite exactly. In attending to either an idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere, the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example, without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, convergences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs. The direction in which the object is conceived to lie determines the character of these movements, the feeling of which becomes, for my consciousness, identified with the manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible thing. My brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of varying sense-ideas….

In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.

--William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)

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Categories: arbitrage , science

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 other than my own nervous system freaking out. What I noticed was the light from the water rippling through the trees.

In that context, light waves that move exactly like water across tree leaves is sense pleasure. Undulation, beautiful shapes, colors. The senses mix with emotions and thoughts: delight in body and company, plus a knowledge that all this is special in time and place: the experience is historically unique, so I mark it as precious. An aesthetically perfect moment, a collector’s item.

A week earlier, there were light waves in oak tree leaves, reflected off a pond in the mountains north of LA. Equally if not more beautiful, but the consciousness of that moment was nothing like my Matilija reverie. I was at the end of silent retreat, with a slowed-down mind and abundant strength and clarity for working in the different spaces of consciousness.

Doing “spacious awareness,” then, was letting the observer step out. Or rather, acknowledging that the observer wasn’t located in my body per se, and certainly was outside of time and space. It was an observing without categories—difficult but not impossible to outline in words. Light was a wave, the branches and leaves were a wave, and so were my seeing eyes for that matter.

Nondual awareness—what’s called mahamudra, dzochen, anti-meditation, oneness consciousness, “calling off the search,” spacious awareness, nondual mind, whatever—is a primordial soup. Undifferentiated peace. It’s not a high “knowing” consciousness: when I’m in mahamudra, my brain stem is turned all the way on. I’m in the awareness of a lizard recently crawled up out of the sea, of an infant recently forced in to the world. David Malouf wrote of a feral child who would say in a thunderstorm not it is raining, but I am raining. Mahamudra is that: consciousness observing itself.

I must say it is utter bliss. My first experience of it years ago changed my understanding of what was possible with human consciousness, what depths of joy we could reach as humans, what the world is and what I am. And up until last week, I thought I had to do three or four days of retreat to go that deep. I now realize that after so much damn yoga and some sheltered mahamudra practice in the past, my mind is strong enough to go in to nondual consciousness somewhat easily. I am guessing that some focused instruction and heartfelt practice is all it would take for any ashtangi to touch in to this practice.

More interesting is what I learned last week on the way down to anti-meditation. In past retreats, I’ve used those days to just watch the thoughts as they slow down and gain some “insights” on their content, though admittedly my main reason for going on retreat wasn’t self-analysis but just the delight of mahamudra. My insights were on a level of: Oh, I have these specific emotions, they circulate in these patterns. My planning mind works like this. Blah, blah, blah.

Seriously: blah.

What I have not understood before is that there’s the possibility of watching thoughts like a physicist, not like a psychoanalyst. Who cares about the content of thought? If I want to psychoanalyze myself, probably the least effective way to do it is when I’m all slowed down in a quasi bliss state. Last week, I finally learned that there is the option of looking at thoughts as things and breaking them in to component parts. (For example, on Shinzen’s model, subjectivity comprises thoughts that are visual, emotional and verbal. But there are a lot of physical models.)

This week, this understanding has impacted my practice strongly. We have so many options for how to relate to discursive thoughts as they come up in practice. Some people bash them down sort of violently; others ignore them or let them fade to the background; still others surrender to them and go for a ride. Here’s Daniel Ingram’s Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book:

If people start with “just open to it” and yet don't develop strong mindfulness… then their practice may be less like meditation and a lot more like psychotherapy, day dreaming, or even self-absorbed, spiritually-rationalized, neurotic indulgence in mind noise. It was noticing the high prevalence of this activity and the pervasive and absurd notion that there was no point in trying to get enlightened that largely demolished my vision of being a happy meditation teacher in some mainstream meditation center somewhere.

Psychotherapy, on the other hand, can be a fine undertaking, but it is a completely different endeavor from meditation…. When purposefully training in concentration, we decide to be mindful of a limited and specific concentration object, such as the breath or even a rarified state of consciousness. We do not, however, investigate the individual sensations that make up that state, as it would break apart under that investigation and produce insights. If we are not looking for ultimate insights at that point in time, then we should avoid investigating that state. However, we do apply energy to stabilize our concentration, and this produces rapture, a characteristic of the early concentration states.

As I’ve said, I follow the breath. There is some bandha in there—especially kechari mudra—and some simply resting in the energy of the room when I’m with a group, but what I try to do is just breathe. In the past, when thoughts could not be pushed to the background and demanded some attention amid my simpleminded, workaday concentration practice, I would look at them directly and see what they told me about myself. Usually this was, “Wow, I still feel really threatened when Betty stares at me… isn’t it interesting how I want to scream at her right now?” or “I’m pretty unnerved by how hard this guy is pushing next to me… why can’t I just allow that he’s going to have to do it this way for a while until the receiving/inhaling half of practice kicks in?” Blah, blah, blah.

This week, I took less of an interest in my little psyche. Thoughts of this nature came up, and instead of taking them as an opportunity to analyze myself, I broke them into pieces and scattered them to the air. Is this an image, an emotion or a verbal thought? Where did it start… in judging, in visualizing, in some part of my body? When I recognize it as a thought, then what form did it take? Poof. Inhaaaleee, exhaaale, etc.

The first obvious effect is that practice becomes less about me and “the way I am.” It gives far, far less fuel for the story of myself that I’m constantly telling and takes some air out of the idea that practice is a personal project. For a while, there has been a sense of momentum, a sense that I’m being carried along by a routine that is taken for granted and not really subject to my own doubts or negotiations. But smuggling psychoanalysis in to practice at the interstices has always been sort of fun, a way of enabling practice to still be all about my unique personality. The mat was just a bit of a sofa, and every sofa’s a stage.

And to the degree that mat became sofa, the momentum was interrupted. Moving back to discursive mind always re-introduces for me the problem of effort. The problem of the doer and the difficulty of the thing to be done. When discursive mind is not active, I experience practice as pretty fluid, sort of hooking in to some high-tech massage machine.

I’m not sure how well the physicist’s method of relating to thought will work as it becomes more subtle—I probably won’t know for months. But I have a sense that it’ll actually increase my joy on the mat. Physics is simply less interesting to me than psychotherapy, so if thoughts pulverize more quickly, it may just be that much easier to stay quiet.

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Categories: arbitrage

More Equations · 28 June 2009

Summer indulgence: driving all the way across the city to practice with my alchemy teacher in a juicy, complicated space. Sixteen point zero miles in as many minutes—blasting blues rock on the freeway as the cylindrical US Bank Building and its lesser neighbors grow large in the opaque white smog of June. Singing something that wakes up the pelvic floor, I approach downtown from the west as the sun comes toward it from the east, infusing the fog until it glows bright in my eyes. It becomes near-blinding just as I touch the brake and swing north from the 10 to the 110 at the Staples Center. A pretty intense little kriya—why wake up with nauli when you can have sixteen dangerous minutes alone on the Santa Monica freeway?

So… time = distance, shala = kitchen floor, inhale = exhale. The balance of my mantra, SO ABOVE SO BELOW, also reminds me that nothing much is free. What you do = who you are. I do freeway penance in 36 minutes of slow-going on the other side, east to west, sixteen point zero miles of stop and go, listening to Iran news on BBC radio. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, until…

Practice is incredibly sweet. The space is full of symbols left wide open to interpretation: every time you lose your drsti there’s some other image in your grill, just asking to be incorporated in to the arbitrary symbolic lexicon. The giant photograph of a teenaged SPKJ taking adho mukha in shades of purple: I gaze blearily toward that inverted skull and let it pull 25 long ut pluthihi breaths out of my tired lungs.

Most subversive, though, is the ceiling devised by whatever perverted architects threw this mini-mall together decades ago. Beautiful crossbeams above the main space meet in a perfect X, and if you align your own body with that X you realize the great cylindrical ventilation duct just above it is nothing les than a shiny silver lingam to the strong white supports of the X. One might think Siva and Shakti were missing from the shala’s pantheon, but they’re only disguised as neutral background architecture, laughing down on us as we drift in and out of alchemy on the floor.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , morality

Sex, Pie & Parkour · 9 June 2009

From what I can see, the first layer of my subconscious is about as complex as an episode of the Tele-tubbies. There was the past life regression guy who told me that what’s in there is recollections of my previous incarnation as an alienated medieval priestess who deplores religion, wears blue and silver robes, and walks around in minimalist cathedrals under really nice skylights. But I think he was sucking up, as they tend to do in he divination profession. In truth, what’s in there seems to be a whole lot of brightly colored objects that make me drool.

I’ve been trying to initiate lucid dreams from that place. Rather than fading in teleport-style from a half-dream, my idea is to recognize from within a deep, unshakeable dream that I am in fact asleep and therefore can mold that universe at will. Put a little will back in to the state of surrender, yes.

This is Stephen LaBerge’s method, which I’ve been loosely following since the grown-up acid trip that is a month in the Mysore social scene. It’s not that Candyland is a problem for me or (like many who are compelled to learn lucid dreaming) that I have demons who chase me at night. It’s just that I want to see what is beyond Candyland, and after that I want to with lucidity make all the dreams just STOP so I can find out if Patanjali’s version of Samadhi (conscious, dreamless sleep, right?) is really all that great. Is dreamed stream-entry still stream-entry?

After that, if dream-Samadhi happened to get boring, I’d just go back to Candyland and play. Hmmm… sex or pie? Every unenlightened lucid dreamer’s dilemma.

Or parkour.

But that’s the thing, at the moment. Most nights lately my dream-mind doesn’t understand the notion of “separate self” and thus won’t let me have a body. I’m not even a character in my own dreams, which is great in the moment if a little confusing in the morning. (Which I supposed is what you say after a rave, too.) So: mostly it’s just a disembodied float through Candyland. I suspect it’s not that I’m all merged with the world soul in there. More like I’m not even separated from the primordial ooze. (PTF alert, as with any and every spiritualization of lizard-brain.)

Last night it was purple Mike ‘n’ Ikes floating over a waterfall. They were dissolving in the water and nourishing the grass in a vast green valley bordered on the north by steep snowy mountains. Everything was in a warm golden glow.

Later a wolly mammoth wandered out from an opening in the mountains, swaying down in to the meadow where he ate chewy orange pumpkins whole, storing them in his giant hamster-esque cheeks. There was a lot of excitement about the mammoth.

Later, delightfully, more mammoths showed up and there were pumpkins everywhere. They kept swaying their big hairy heads back and forth like Stevie Wonder.

Then there was a flying diplodocus dinosaur, with a hot-air-balloon-like fire mechanism in its butt. The butt-fire would periodically ignite, sounding off like an air balloon on the rise. The diplo would float off, sort of like the inebriated snake in the old animated version of Robin Hood.

Apparently I got very excited about the flying dinosaur and started yammering about it in my sleep. I told the Editor the creature was floating and using its webbed feet to move through the air.

So go fly with him.

But I don’t have a body…

It doesn’t matter. Just fly.

But I need to have a body and I can’t find it. I’m trying to see my hands… (becoming upset)… I can’t find my body!

The Editor tired of my yammering and left. Meanwhile, back in the dream I was the dinosaur (I was also everything else, including especially the sky), but was also trying to manifest my human body. Why I wasn’t content to be a lucid dinosaur and fly around in that body I don’t know… maybe I didn’t like the fire-butt mechanism and wanted better powers before I went fully lucid. At least that was the excuse I was making in the dream. Maybe I was stalling.

So I struggled to manifest a body, growing an appendaged human on the back of the floating diplo. I think the strategy was to grow a dinosaur-human hybrid beast, then inhabit the human part and separate it from the dinosaur. But before that could happen, I woke up because my back was hurting as if someone was sitting atop me digging in her heels. In the morning I was scratched up between my shoulder blades…. It seems that floating-dinosaur-owl was trying to get nascent-human-owl off her back.

Which reminds me. There were also three monkeys; and they were wearing smooth golden hats. They were sitting on the side of the mountain, tilting their heads to the side and looking out at everything in a quizzical way. What do the monkeys know?

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Pathologies of Los Angeles · 29 May 2009

People aren’t afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles, actually. They merge like fast little fish made smart by evolution. Especially on the weekends and at night, because it’s no longer about getting to work; and especially in June, when the cool cloudcover from the bay makes for perfect driving conditions. People deplore this town for its car-ness, and the atomizing socio-environmental catastrophe we have created here because we insist on driving. But there is something nobody admits: driving here is great. We go as fast as we like on the freeways at night, listening to trip-hop or bad Britpop, windows down, exiting smoothly on to thoroughfares made for the rich countryside that sat here 50 years ago.

The bad word on the city is that we spend absurd proportions of our income on high-end cars because it’s socially normative to drive a Porsche even before you make it big. That’s true. But also, it’s just nice to have a fast car on roads built for sport driving. At night when it’s empty out and a little bit humid from the gloom, I’ve been taking the long way home on the Sunset hairpin curves, the ones immortalized by the Beach Boys and mortal for many daredevils since. I understand that this way of living is actually a choice to do environmental violence by staying unconscious, but it feels so right! We need new bass-driven ballads for this dirty guilty pleasure. Los Angeles, I need to get over you, forget it could be good like this. I love you for the wrong reasons...

Anyway, Friday evening. Alone after-hours in the art school café, leaning back in a wooden folding chair. The dashing professor for whom I graded Ancient Greece exams years ago just trammeled through on the way to the hilltop parking lot, looking increasingly like Johnny Depp-as-historian-of-the-esoteric. June gloom, eucalyptus, sycamore and pines outside the wall of 20-foot windows before me. This morning when I taught a client about the relationship of the arches and the adductors, asking he root down in to the earth to draw some kind of strength up, he scrunched up his nose and said, “So like… I am getting this… but what would be, like, the next logical step?” Seriously? Ok, forget trikonasana, do you want to learn about a place called the pelvic floor? A few minutes later I heard myself say the words "second chakra" to a soccer jock.

Well, he asked for it. But… here’s another pathology of Los Angeles: the world of anti-form that tries to compete with the world of hyper-materialism. In my mind, secretly I used to call it kundalini gulag. The KG is the tendency in some of us to get hyper-reactive to LA materialism—the worship of cars and youth that forms the spiritual center of this town. In trying to be anti-materialistic, we buy straight in to spiritual materialism, for a yoga that’s all about feeling energetically superior. A practice that’s about coming off as the most psychically gifted, and sexually potent, and “humble” person in the room. Ok. This is still power yoga! It’s still all about proving oneself and being better than other people, just this time on a post-material level. Spinoza said somewhere in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that there is no one more arrogant than the one who is caught up in his own humility. And this is the essence of the kundalini gulag—a display of humility that barely masks energetic elitism. Too bad you can't have aura contests and chakra-offs down on Venice beach. That would take care of all of this craziness.

I have gone in for some of the metaphysical arrogance too. Caught myself making a harsh joke about the “superficial” OCD factor of Iyengar the other day. Hmmm. Am I starting to believe the pseudospiritual pablum numero uno— that the “world of form” is an "illusion"? That lived experience is “all in the mind”? Riiiiiight.

So I’m thinking some Iyengar this weekend. Hopefully as OCD as I can find. Thing is, the class that works schedulewise is one of the only advanced sessions in the city, and it’s taught by a SCARY little German man who, with his jaunty grin and spiky hair, is just adorable enough to get my guard down before he kicks my ass. But I need to remember that there is nothing adorable about an advanced Iyengar teacher, not even this Mr. C with his funny shorts and strangely beatific expressions. I wonder how mad he’ll be at me for showing up at class with nothing but a lot of the other guy’s yoga under my skin. And under the wings of my kidneys and the eyes of my elbows too.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

Space · 19 April 2009

So it’s glorious here. Forgotten fruit in season, a bike valet at the farmers' market, friends happy together, people saying “President Obama” on the radio. Spring quarter on campus, deadlines that ask for integrity and not acts of sleepless masochism, actually good art everwhere, Wolverine looking intense on billboards, the most perfect weekend playing on repeat, my hair turning weird strawberry blonde again as the 6-week brunette washes out, an appointment for contact lenses because I’m ready for cheap sunglasses and finally tired of the wire rims between me and people I’m teaching. Artists talking about how it’s time for high stakes creation and academics having the economic stakes raised in a sort of useful way. Let it be a little tougher for a while; let us get a little more serious… Serious can still be light.

::: It has been given to me to live this life; and it’s  allright for that living-out to be beautiful and fulfilled no matter the conditions.:::

No more apologies for being complete. Nor distrust of beauty, for that matter.

In this, these particularities, what makes Los Angeles itself? What makes me different when I am here? Three people have said that it feels like I am closer, reading here now compared to reading here a month ago. Isn’t that funny? The intimacy is increased, even as there’s nothing different about the url or where you sit as you read, and even though I never email personally anymore because my inbox has grown over in vines and stubbornly refuses to open anymore.

Space is a category of the understanding. No: that’s not Sri Aurobindo or some shit. It’s Kant. It’s good phenomenology too.

But in any case it’s interesting… to observe that space comes in to play in perception across a flat screen as much as it comes in to play in chopping kale, merging in to freeway traffic, scratching a dog behind the ears. And it’s not just in your head; it’s in mine too. I feel closer too. More cradled by taken-for-granted meanings, supported by relationships that have some age and meat to them, at home in the arts and the sciences I practice. Less en thrall to huge amounts of new information flying at high speeds into my grill.

In a sense, it is freeing to be able to take the perspective of the culture you inhabit. The more you move around, the more languages you speak, the more you understand intuitively that every history and culture is accidental. The more you can see from the integral meta-vista. But even so there is a richness to being able to participate, in a grounded way, as yourself, wherever you are, without compulsively translating everything in to some previous worldview or language. Hold steady, little scientist. There will be time for translation when the space changes.

I’ve been ruminating on PJ these days, feeling what space he occupies in the categories of my understanding. Early-early practice in the dark alone, a happy crooked-toothed version of him on the floor, propped against the wall. I light a candle that casts a shadow above and behind the photograph, a dark space in the shape of Teotihuacan or one of the other flat-topped Mexican pyramids. And PJ’s inside the pyramid-shadow, buried, preserved in middle age, seeing me through the dark. As he passes over, it’s easy to imagine he would pass in to this space even more strongly if that’s what I ask. I don’t think that I do ask that—other avatars resonate more strongly with me—but right now he also feels, well, closer than before.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration , science

Here to Mecca · 13 March 2009

Blue-dark mornings of daylight savings: driving the long curved road that leads from my house to the shala under a brilliant waning moon, early enough to catch the roosters waking in the country-sized estates that line San Vicente. Jasmine is just starting to push through the morning cool; when I return it’ll be heady summer and the moon will look the same.

I’m in a weird space. Work has been amazing, but also shitty. That’s my practice more than practice. These advanced theories that practice is suffering and self-noting, that it’s just mental and physical hygiene that prepares you for more important practices… to be brutally honest, I’m just not there: and the theories feel so outside of anything like participating in nonduality or just being on the breath. Maybe it is more interesting to hold back from saying what yoga is. But work… this is indubitably a field of loss and gain, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. What "arises" in that space is way more revelatory of where I’m at in my maturity. It is useful in that sense. But the point is also that I become useful. It is nice, not distracting or bullshit delusion, if unsustainable to become absorbed like this.

What if I brought the principles of practice to my work? Get out of your own way, follow the rules, just do it systematically with all the energy and focus that you have. Well… I’d never have a creative thought. But still, might reduce the less useful fluctuations.

So, packing today. Let’s see:

manduka,

bikini,

vitamin C.

I think that’s everything.

Oh, download Shinzen Young for the ipod. And gather together the many items I am supposed to courier to Mecca—so much for taking care of the ounces so the pounds take care of themselves. And practice disguising the bend, so nobody gets the big idea to slam me to the thighs in chakra bandasana.

Otherwise, I’m happy to surrender to what will be and don’t much care what that looks like. Am I excited? Nah. But interested, yes. And content about it. So after a long-awaited memorial service tomorrow, I’m off. Time now to write a little speech for that other pending goodbye.

A couple of little feathers that have drifted by recently and stuck to me, from the following sources. First, a speaker at the business school in a lecture I watched to update myself on developments in the “strategic management” literature, absurd capitalist self-help regime that it is. Pretty good insight though. Second, a distillation of Christopher Titmuss’s discussions of relationship. And third, a reading of Shinzen Young.

Making decisions prematurely is the mark of an amateur. 

Lovingkindness is a practice, not a feeling.

Live your own life, not someone else’s.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Human Creativity · 11 January 2009

I was in MacArthur Park this morning, practicing with friends in a grand century-old house that’s been a mansion and a craft shop of sorts, a fraternity, an apartment building, and now an ashtanga space. This—bohemian, in your erstwhile livingroom, with a man repairing furniture in the kitchen, a Salvadoran woman walking by the windows with fruit for sale and a Jack ‘n’ the Box billboard filling the driste of the farsighted—feels in a sense like how it should be. Kid on the instructor’s hip, unmufflered engines in the alley, vendors screaming in the street. Practice.

So much more creative than the way most choose to live in this town—antiseptic, paying the jacked-up rent, with dues to some corporate studio whose propaganda features stickthin yoga teachers spandexed in all white. MacArthur Park is teeming in creative risk-taking humanity, colorful, fecund, noisy. Yeah, scraping a life off the surface of society is a grimy affair. And beautiful. The things that people think up in order to live, and live well. Learn the insults, keep your head down, act a little knowing. Dodge the obvious punches and see so much beneath.

There’s this wave in me that rises and falls on my faith in humanity; and I drove home fast to Mountain Goats survival anthems, feeling so lucky to be part of the world now. Human creativity. The element that can never be predicted by any model nor explained by any theory. And it’s the main thing! Everything.

At the close of the day, the tide got sucked all the way to the floor. I sat in my car for the better part of an hour in the blocks surrounding the Federal building. This is where you go to demonstrate in LA. Yeah, I know the story of the conflict over the holy land, and am named decisively for one side. I know how everything that has happened the past 60 years is supposed to be god-made and how I’m not supposed to say I understand unless I have skin in the game. But this time, I’m just letting the celebratory violence and the death-wishes mystify me. What am I doing rejoicing in human creativity in these days—these months—of destruction? Yeah—I tried not to hear the lyric edge of John Darnielle’s flat out neuroticism this morning—but yeah. We are going to make it through this year if it kills us.

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Categories: arbitrage , markets-networks-society , social theory

Field Recordings · 25 November 2008

Somewhere in the suryas, I heard a sparrow trapped in our rafters. No…on second chirp I located the little guy in the eves outside, just opposite a old white cube of a speaker mounted in a corner. My teacher caught me grinning, later, on an even bolder little birdsong, as I moved in to some form or another.

Half a practice later I noticed a vendor calling out her wares down in the street. Just like Nicaraguan Sunday morning—the bread lady with her fly-covered pico pastries; the anciana with head-balanced basket of market fruit bellowing out peaches—meloooocotoooon— so clearly you hear her 10 minutes away; guy with the sausages bringing up the percussion section with his salchichichichicha.

Wait.

No street vendors on the richest corner in Los Angeles.

And what happened to the gayatri mantra, usually coursing so softly under the sound of the others’ breath?

By the time I found savasana there was a freaking din going on, a bunch of put-put motors that could have been mo-peds and a gravelly roar as if the garbage truck lost its muffler or some very large tractor lost its way en route to a local mansion-demolition.

Real time sounds of a Laksmipuram morning, it turns out, recorded some years ago when my teacher set a microphone below a shala window during practice.

This kind of thing could go wrong very easily. But this teacher has good taste. He fades to the background except for when he doesn’t. Can get away with dropping a rose petal on my forehead in Savasana—gutsy and easy to do very badly—because it’s actually my favorite scent and I don’t even notice the source until the petal falls into my lap when I roll up to sitting. He never intrudes on my practice except for, say, on a day he sees from my passing Vira 1 (of all things) that my psoas (of all things) is a tiny bit tense (how could you see such a thing?) and could use some unexpected but unobtrusive, suddenly-invented adjustment to trick it into release.

Good taste is bold, but not gratuitous. Direct and open, sure of itself. How many artists can hold back from over-adornment, from dominating physical or sonic space, but also will take conceptual and aesthetic risks?

In their own context, the hollers of street vendors or growls of auto-rickshaws may not always be so beautiful. But I suppose that in some peoples’ memories they are so. For me, the intimate association with others’  associations was sublime. And the India-related sublimity was only possible because primed by years of appreciating ambient music. Stacking two contexts aurally within one space, with half the ambience being self-consciously artificial… I actually don’t have words for the aesthetic perfection, the transcendent this-ness, of the experience.

A lot of students missed it altogether, letting the foreign sounds mix with those of two Oaxacan men lugging a planter across the slate patio and Mercedes SUVs honking at one another on the quasi-country highway below. For those who did notice the auto-rickshaws and street vendors and mufflerless trucks, the reaction was dramatic—from irritated to ready to catch a flight to Bangalore tomorrow.

For me, I can only understand it as art, because otherwise the delight I took in the creativity… and the music I found in the ambience… well, it’s stupid if it isn’t art.

If there is a place for sublimity in the space of practice, I’m not sure what aesthetics illuminates it—I suppose some metaphysic of quality or dialogic merging of the experiencer and the experienced. I usually shy from the idea that the thisness of physical practice can enter the realm of pure art, but shit. I dunno. Experience that just is, that plays catch-and-release with transcendence instead of grasping for it; play that sees this moment radically another way on the basis of otherwise worn out forms. I guess if moments of practice can be aesthetic experiences—with a sublimity that’s so far beyond scrivenerly formalism… well, I guess I’m finally getting comfortable with the idea that practice might be sometimes art. I’m shocked to find myself here.

Line drawing by Rita Taraborelli. She works mostly in other media and says her drawings are just for fun, but I love them. She’s new to ashtanga, so I’m wondering how the practice will relate with her muse. Rita’s photos and her website.

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Categories: arbitrage , having a body , sound

Mental Recession · 17 September 2008

Are the boxes of deskstuff carted yesterday out of Lehman just so much mindstuff, Mr. McCain? The houses bought on nothing and the cars with the no-interest loan—these are also whisps of consciousness and not part of some self-sufficient reality?

Everyone in fiscal conservative land wants to say this is a problem of trust and coordination.

When did the fiscal conservatives turn in to new-age mentalists? Is it just that this line is an easy means of denial? Are they solipsists? (I'm not joking.)

To call this only a coordination problem and collective loss of trust, and to pursue solutions through propaganda and only that is to deny that the entire American economy is rotting at its core.

The people who have been telling us for ten years to “trust” and buy are the ones get the fees from our transactions. To them, our trust actually is commodity. But for the rest of us, the commodities look more like macbooks and condos. It’s all the same.

The whole reduction of the institutional failure to only a coordination problem feels like more bad avaita in my life.

I don’t even understand advaita, but do see some keen people who have bothered to take it deep practicing a metaphysics that understands that both the mind and the body—both ideas and the physical world—are equal contents of some consciousness. The substrate of reality is nondual big-mind or somesuch; and the apparent differences in its contents (that is, mind versus body) are trivial. Ok, sounds like a sort of tedious philosophical argument. It makes sense to me insofar as I can practice spacious awareness when I sit vipassana, but whatever.

What amuses is the clearly bad avaita practiced by westerners interested in eastern stuff: the attempts at nondualism that actually are extremely dualist because they reduce all of experience to the content of individual consciousness. For example:  

If you let go of all your fear, you’ll be able to take your calves in a backbend: no concrete limitations there, just emotional ones. The body isn’t real—it’s a collection of mental tics. The physical is an illusion.

Good avaita is slamming the wall and declaring “This is god!” (the physical is a manifestation of oneness, just as much as the mental). Bad avaita is slamming someone to the calves in chakra-b because the resistance there is only fear (the body is not real but only a container for mental problems).

Good avaita: the economy is fucked backwards and forwards!

Bad avaita: there’s a mental recession but the “more real” economic fundamentals are in no doubt. (Again, this is a reduction of the physical to the mental that actually just serves to deepen a dualism between the two.)

How much pain do we have to experience before we admit that there is a structural barrier to taking the calves in a backbend? And to how many suckers can get mortgages? Practice plays with just that physical structure—affirms that the physical is not less real than the mental. And ultimately makes space to see the edge where the physical and mental interpenetrate and don’t have to be isolated in “opposite” realms.

For someone who came to this practice wanting to pretend it wasn’t really about the body, the affirmation of physical reality that I do every day on the mat is the best way to realize that the physical is not reducible to the mental. Sometimes a charlie-horse is just a charlie-horse… a fluctuation of consciousness, yes—but embodied consciousness.

For me, pretending that the body is a shadow of the mind is a kind of retreat from the physical immediacy of reality. I recognize it as a lie I sometimes tell myself. For the mental-recessionistas, pretending that the crisis isn’t physical is a way of avoiding the more difficult physical realm of hunger and disease and homelessness and unemployment and pretending this is all about the numbers.

This uncanny marriage of mentalist New Age metaphysics to conservative if not regressive politics, led by the "we make our own reality" Rovians, continues to give me the shivers! But... maybe it makes sense. 

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Yoga, a "personal philosophy" · 26 August 2008

or, Working With What You've Got, 101.

Yet another week of annoyingly non-mystical bedtime reading. 
From a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
 

Inculcate a personal philosophy that allows you to focus on the project at hand to the exclusion of all other distractions.
 

Well, what sort of “personal philosophy” do you mean, sir?
Oddly, I suppose I have one that will do.

Which does, and does not, feel sort of wrong.

 

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Categories: arbitrage

Trading Neuroses · 21 August 2008

My dream life consists of dancing plushie toys, brightly colored fish flitting amongst oversized livingroom furniture, and forests of cotton candy and singing cows. I know I know; it’s the subconscious of a toddler with a charmed damn life. I’m not a complex person. (At least I prefer not to be at almost all costs.)

The Editor (who, unlike me, doesn’t rise at 4 something in the morning) talks me to sleep each night and takes inventory of the mumblings. I try to resist, but he occasionally manages to feed an his own little joke-images into the mise-en-scene as I’m tumbling through the suggestible crossover realm before deep sleep. His little tricks don’t really qualify as subconscious disturbances.

Lately however, there’s been some bad news in Candyland.

Last weekend I dreamed my adorable, squeaking niece was half-chihuahua. Taco Bell had made her its official mascot. Her halfling picture was made into stickers and she was all over TV. Squeaking. But with gargoylish chihuahua ears and a grotesque little chihuahua body. I was taking solace that at least Taco Bell would pay for her college but then I got into a fight with her grandma, who said chihuahuas can't go to college.

Monday I dreamed I was canoeing in a fjord in winter during the Cold War (a Soviet fjord? There was a hangar-like submarine workshop in an ice floe somehow, with a mean hammer-wielding mechanic staring out the door as he floated past). Impulsively I put my head in the water and got really cold, and then water rushed in to the canoe. Then! all my companions sprang shut like contracted roly-poly insects! The turned grey and covered in scales and became freezing cold roly-poly bugs. I pulled them out of the freezing water cried to the submarine man for help and he laughed. And I couldn’t help my friends come unstuck even though they were all very upset and cold and about to die. I woke up begging the man to help them. Not ok.

What’s going wrong? Is it my night-time reading?

Lately, rather than little poems or scriptures or ancient aphorisms before bed, I’ve been reading anti-anti-anti-romantic bits about the writing process. Like THIS, and the below. The author of the excerpt, Paul Silvia, is a behaviorist for godsakes. Is there a philosophy of the human I dislike more than behaviorism? Ok, maybe fascism. But this guy quotes BF Effing Skinner in polite conversation! (No good terrible very bad bad bad: Skinner’s the rat researcher who black-boxed the mind in the 60s and from whom psych is just now sort of recovering, and only sort of). Here’s a passage from Silvia’s How to Write a Lot (pp.45-7):

“Wait,” you might say. “So far, this book hasn’t said anything about writer’s block…” I love writer’s block. I love it for the same reasons I love tree spirits and talking woodland creatures—they’re charming and they don’t exist…. Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department….

Writer’s block is a good example of a dispositional fallacy: A description of behavior can’t also explain the described behavior. Writers block is nothing more than the behavior of not writing. Saying that you can’t write because of writer’s block is merely saying that you can’t write because you aren’t writing. It’s trivial. The cure for writer’s block—if you can cure a specious affliction—is writing….

Just as aliens abduct only people who believe in alien abductions, writer’s block strikes only writers who believe in it. One of the great mysteries of the writing schedule system—a spooky mystery, in fact—is that scheduled writers don’t get writer’s block, whatever that is. Prolific writers follow their writing schedule regardless of whether they feel like writing… oblivious to the otherworldly halo hovering over their house.

Soo… Let’s be honest. Isn’t it good? I guess it’s upsetting on the subconscious level to get my bullshit subverted right before bedtime, but this is some transformational scripture and I’m learning to deal with it. Not at all beautifully written, annoyingly behaviorist, patronizing, not in any way fun… but also… true, inspiring, and awfully useful.

An excellent little mindfuck of a bedtime meditation. Thanks, Paul.

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Categories: arbitrage

Ashtanga and Imperialism · 16 August 2008

CP wrote this post yesterday—one that’s difficult for many of us to handle. I’ve been waiting and hoping for just that kind of sacrilege out of him, and he delivered. In the comments (which are a terriffically honest and interesting conversation about the future of ashtanga), someone asked me the following:

For those of us who are long finished school but are still interested in these matters, what theoretical perspective has replaced tired 1990s neo-Marxism [and 1980s post-colonial theory]? I am serious. Please save this practicing lawyer from the tedium of her daily life by discussing some theory!

Ok. Trying to make a short answer. I’m just going to freewrite a bit and post whatever comes up off the cuff. Because if I try to make a coherent I’ll spend hours! It would be so delightful to build a study group or seminar discussing different philosophies’ and social theories’ perspectives on the moral, cultural and spiritual puzzles that the east-west meeting of ashtanga creates. I have a background in philosophy and social-political theory but rarely work in these literatures because they’re disconnected to real life. The mind likes to be bound; and I like the constraints of doing research on the ground—theory can say anything it wants without the discipline of real-world data. Abstract rhetorical wars are too easy.

Anyway, I should clarify that neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory have not effectively been replaced by something called post-modernism. Postmodernism is a disposition rather than a theory, and as much as it’s intellectually dishonest and stupid if taken to extremes it’s also the condition in which we all live. It’s just a suspicion of metanarratives (Lyotard’s line), or an awareness that all knowledge is situated in someone’s perspective and some matrix of power relationships. Postmodernism at its best is a background question of Oh yeah? Says who? It doesn’t stand alone as an interpretation and it explains nothing.

For me, by far the richest node of theory and research about culture and social philosophy now is in the little subfield of the sociology of culture. A lot of the subfield is bad, but the good stuff expresses what to me are the there most important aspects of what is now good theory: (1) non-essentialism, (2) a bit of self-aware empiricism, and (3) an attempt to synthesize all the modernist (Marxist and other) binaries like material/ideal, economic/cultural, structure/agency.

Briefly, non-essentialism (1) means that you don’t think race, nationality, culture, etc have any transcendent reality. They are social phenomena, or ascribed and acquired characteristics. This is huge—it takes the neo-Marxists’ critique of reification and follows it to its logical conclusion that culture itself is socially constructed. It means you don’t buy the idea that someone with brown skin is “naturally” a soulful dancer or the idea that someone with south Asian ancestry has a “natural,” superior claim to yoga. People are just people. Cultural artifacts are just artifacts. Which is not to say culture does not go deep—the ways in which we grew up, for example, determine our understandings of the world perhaps more than previous (non-empirical) theory could recognize! Culture may not be real on an “essential” or transcendent level, but the ways it shapes personal knowledge appear—based on research—to be very deep. As culture becomes increasingly complex and fast-changig globalized, this just becomes all the more interesting.

So (2) empiricism is the sense that social theory that isn’t rooted in examination of the world is probably BS. Seriously, how do we know that cultural traits are socially constructed? Well, for example consider how race works in Brazil vis-à-vis how it works in the US. Totally different ideas of what is blackness and whiteness, what characterizes race, how many races there are, etc. (Yet at the same time, some things are common: racial hierarchies priveliging white skin, the possibility of becoming more white as socio-economic status increases, local beliefs about the essential qualities of different “groups,” etc.) It’s complicated. The sense now is that even universal pronouncements about social construction have to be made in reference to something real. Pure theory is a joke. Even in philosophy, the richest areas of development are empirical—biomedical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. For me, my hero of empirical social theory is Pierre Bourdieu. He makes me think, first, that pure ideas without social research are boring and, second, that living one’s life as a kind of social theorist—always considering the theoretical presuppositions and implications of action—is a rich and beautiful form of practical self-awareness.

The third characteristic I see in present-day theory, a valuation of synthetic work (3), is both the most interesting and the most difficult to summarize. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, theory was obsessed with “difference” and “play” between the supposed binaries of male/female, dark/light, material/idea, structure/agency, objective/subjective, inside/outside, etc. etc. etc. And, since Hegel, the idea of the thesis-antithesis dialectic of consciousness has been encrypted within much social theory. To be brief, now there is a sense that theory does not have to be just about structure or agency, not just leftist or rightist, just about material or ideal, just from the subjective or objective point of view. In fact, theoretically insightful empirical work SYTHESIZES these apparent opposites. This is a dangerous idea, because it resonates with the wacky Integral people with their fourfould AQAL framework, and because it sounds an awful lot like eastern mysticism, what with yoga being the “union of apparent opposition” and all that. In my own work, I strive to synthesize whatever oppositions I find in the world, and not just settle to oscillate from one side to the other. Incidentally, this is why I find it difficult to take a hard line either way in the present debate on the regulation and commodification of ashtanga.

I have saved my withering remarks for the ashtanga mercenaries for the end, so hopefully they will be missed by anyone who will find them offensive, and only read by people who understand the lightness of heart— but also the impatience with self-deception —with which I write.

Anon’s critiques of the cultural imperialism of Cody’s market analysis, and righteous indications that Cody has transgressed against Edward Said, indicate little more than that Anon got a fancy western education before s/he went off to India and discovered huself. If Anon and likeminded western practitioners who see themselves as guardians of the Eastern authenticity (oh essentialist modern concept!) are the true guardians of the lineage, it is only because they’ve performed another level of the cultural appropriation of which they accuse others. They are, as Bourdieu would say, the cultural imperialists par excellence, both appropriating the tradition and then pretending to be its owners and protectors.

In case anyone out there didn’t quite catch it… Yes, traveling to India to practice ashtanga yoga is “imperialist” for both ideational and economic reasons, both material and ideal, both personal and collective. If you are actually concerned about “imperialism” because you think (erroneously, I’d say) that culture belongs to particular nationalities and races, than you really have no business traveling to India nor raging against anyone else for being imperialist. Because to the degree that you think you own ashtanga, you are the biggest “imperialist” of all.

The same people who are out to defend the integrity of the tradition are those who are extremely identified with it and fantasize that they own it, through all manner of superficial language study, celebration of holidays they actually know little about, professions of love for certain kinds of cuisine. But do these people really understand the culture they are appropriating? Do they see only light and spirituality in India—do they fantasize (ultimate Imperialist self-deception) that the beggars have equanimity or that Indians themselves are simply “more spiritual.” Do they recognize that they are using India as a playground where their currency and passport buy easy living and implicit international protection? Do they see that they see “spirituality” because it’s an easy life where they don’t have to deal with a more grounded spirituality that comes from their own early experiences, don’t have to deal with the economic pressures that give so much value to their dollars, don’t have to look their own history in the eyes but can instead vacation in an alternate spirituality with rituals that are easy to love because they’re different and new, and seem to offer an escape from all that is too real and too dark and to dirty to examine at home?

I’ve departed from social theory to psychological theory here at the end, but if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t this the terrain for examining this particular war over who owns ashtanga? The “imperialist” slur is a red herring, is it not? I suspect that when we westerners tangle over who owns ashtanga and whether it’s ok to see the practice from a (creepy but not at all irrelevant) marketing perspective, we are fighting at a deep level with ourselves.

Apologies for the incoherence and doubtless typos all over this post. I wanted to respond to Monkey’s question, but also am not going to take the time to make the response shorter.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , science , self-deception , social theory

Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

House Like a Lotus · 6 August 2008

First foot I set in Boston was in step with CP who, like Ee in SF, met me in the lobby of the Hiton. CP walked me through the Back Bay with a secret ebullience that comes as easy as his not-so-secret wit. He paused and got wistful down in the street below the shala.

-There is really nothing like the smell of this place...

-The smell of transformation, yes. I like that.

-I don’t know that it’s transformation... gesturing to the seedy first-floor pizza establishment and the seedier kids on its threshold. More like pizza.

The Editor, sleuth that he is, followed the scent all the way to the source. A good large New York style slice, it turns out. The late night bites I took Monday fueled practice eight hours later from the inside, at the same time that the subtle—almost tasteful?—wafts of lightly burnt cornmeal crust and days-old marinara marked my senses. Is the anise-tinged dry decay of the Nag I burn each morning at Brentwood much different?

At Back Bay they spin to center with heads facing in for Savasana, though being myopic it took me three days to notice. This morning, head to center, I woke up looking in to a stained glass lotus hanging exactly above my head. An old fashioned pizza parlor light, like the one over the Editor’s and my living room table the year we were dirt poor in Seattle. Maybe the pizza essence is not wafting up from two floors below but just left over from times days this was the restaurant’s banquet room?

Waking under the lotus, pretending to take my mind back up inside it, I just thought house like a lotus.

That’s a book I read late in August the summer I checked out all the Madeline L’Engle titles at the public library in town. I was maybe 11. I think the book begins on the Acropolis in another cradle of civilization, narrated by a confounded young girl who definitely confounded me. Oh if my parents had known the things I read in the children’s section of the public library. But at the time I finished the book without really understanding the imagery or meaning of the eponymous lotus.

This morning I looked into the lamp thinking ­house like a lotus and sort of recovering that little seed of my apostasy. My explanations for my migrations away from the poor rural country and for my losses and gains of faiths tend to rely on luck and personality. But as the more buried history comes up, the accidents that began my own deviating line of experience seem to be located earlier and earlier. What was the unremembered accident that even oriented me to that book? What are the limits for explaining the growth and change, the evolution and homecomings, of humans when my own history is so forgotten or lost in my unconscious?

I don’t know. My historywriting ambitions, of self and others, get humbler the more I try to explain. But they have also been so hilariously, totally inspired by the impossibility of explaining anything. Especially this week.

Why is it that even as a deep non-believer in all the systems I love best, I take so much heart from the true believers who have the virtuosity and intelligence to do their practice with extreme skill? But the true believer sociologists are all undoing their premises from the inside out too, and the interesting ones know it and see the discrete steps of this process rather than throwing up their hands in a weak boring mutiny on “truth.” This week a few of them made me remember this whole vocation makes sense for me in whatever history gets written. Of course I’m an historian. It’s right there, so obvious, in my own history. Funny I had to go back inside the lotus, here in America’s little cradle, to remember again.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration

'Til we grow beards get weird and disappear into the mountains--- · 29 July 2008

Something about these crazy arm balances, I tell you. I went into the hip-hop archives of the Owl House CD shelves Sunday, and drew out The Eminem Show. I cannot endorse this record because it exhibits high levels of misogyny, pandering to children, preening rhymes so obviously non-spontaneous he probably copped them from a songwriting dictionary (but who doesn’t), and, sort of, the dreaded cultural appropriation. Also: it’s good. Sorry, embarrassing; but yes. I thought about stemming my habit on Monday, but it’s been the Show all week here. In my fragile 5:40 am state, it’s true that I can hew to the lowest common denominator.

The record was already two years old and tired four summers back when I was learning the first series. But I stayed in a similar can’t-quite-change-the-record groove for days on end at exactly this point in late July that year, and it worked. The rhythm was a little different: the Editor and I would go to campus around 8, and for two hours I’d write notes in preparation for my upcoming field exam in Economic Sociology. At 10:10 I’d sneak back up the parking garage, and secret through the backstreets of Beverly Hills listening to that record loud like a white university-schooled fool while the middle-aged men from Michoacan and San Salvador trimmed trees and hauled grass clippings at the curbs. I’d cut back to Wilshire at Comstock, where the country club forces you back into the big arterial, and hit just a couple of lights before landing at a now-bought-and-decommissioned (thanks, YW) beautiful little studio in the heart of downtown Beverly Hills. Park in the free garage on Beverly drive and take a manduka and change of clothes from the trunk, in time to be on the mat with hair braided up at 10:30.

Interesting that these are still my practices—Econ Soc, astanga, driving my Civic—and that a return to this place in the annual cycle shows me how much it is the same person now and then. Also, the country is weirdly the same one that the record—with its backwards E evocative of financial crisis and much to say about clueless White America and horrible wars and dirty Dick Cheney—addresses: will we throw everything away as manaically as we did in Fall 04? It took the dense evocations of Eminem’s bad but good record to see me and us in this light again. What’s different? Some edges softer and some harder, I guess, a shift in sense of humor and ideas about this and that. Maturity in some areas, loss of orthodoxy in others. Oh, and an even more obvious alternative come November. On both levels, this year’s shift in context will be a little dramatic. The four-year cycle is concluding.

In aught four the Eminem show ended when I parked the car for a week and flew to another city for the annual disciplinary meeting. Same this year. When I come back, it will almost feel like fall.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , sound

The Logos and the Tao · 26 July 2008

I dreamed that I was doing a comparative analysis of The Logos and The Tao.

My subconscious, apparently, has its own sense of humor.

The dream is funny because the Tao and the Logos are both concepts that purport to be the one thing. Reality’s underlying substratum. The logical principle. That which has no equal, no opposite, no split-apart twin. The Most Meta.

The two concepts are also different in very many subtle ways. That was the point of the dream: I was comparing the concepts to see where they lined up and where they mapped different territories. Where one conception of “the way” falls short of capturing the totality of experience, at least vis-à-vis its own distant reflection in a split-apart concept of “what’s really real.”

So comparing the two reveals that neither is natural or complete—each has a social history, has edges, has the ability to express some stuff and the inability to express other stuff. If you research enough of the world, you find there is no one way dammit. It's contingency all the way down.

Comparing is interesting because you come up against harsh evidence that everything has a history. I like that kind of spelunking, but lately I’ve been just annoyed with comparison as a mode of analysis. “Compare and contrast” is a jayvee operation—a frosh exam. Simplistic. Pre-statistical. Non-causal. Abfuckingstract. When you strain to see what is similar between two cases, don’t you lose all the interesting, highly specific aspects? Is it not more useful to focus on JUST ONE THING? Like, one-pointed style?

The tao and the logos are two things and one thing. But not one thing in the way I want it. My unconscious is having fun with that.

I googled the collective unconscious, an activity almost as automatic as dreaming. Turns out a lot of people have done compare-and-contrast projects on this.

There’s even a book, The Tao and the Logos. Has the words “literary hermeneutics” in the title (kneejerk eyeroll… hermeneutics is too circular even for me). But… the authors are quoting Rilke (p. 86 & seq.). It’s all ok. Better than jayvee. Check it out:

Though we exist but once and never again, says Rilke, to have lived once fully is in itself worthwhile:

even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

…Here we have one of the most powerful pleas in modern poetry for the power of language. Saying is conceived as more intensely ontological than things themselves could have ever dreamed of being: it is language, the naming of simple things—house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher—that brigs things into existence and defines what is uniquely human. Rilke proclaims:

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.

One thing, two things. Red things, blue things. I don’t know.

Comparison is about creating abstractions, and also about ignoring case-specific qualities that don’t generalize. Maybe I can do that, but still find specificity in it. My two research cases are “one” thing, insofar as I can find what’s sayable. The tao of social science is that banal. Tonight, I will read Herakleitos.

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , science , social theory

Process mindset, release of expectations, peripheral vision, problematizing documentation · 20 July 2008

All those terms have the same meaning here.

A client who is also a personal coach says she chose me as a teacher in part because I have a “process mindset.” This disposition “makes everything ok,” and turns experimentation and “failure” into play. It doesn’t give a shit about accomplishment. Doesn’t think about “results.”

This student, who describes herself as “fixed mindset” and “goal oriented,” has the, well, goal of becoming process-oriented. Because it seems like someone goal-oriented is less able to experience flow, does not experiment or learn very much from foul-ups, is less happy in general, and is more attached to getting things.

Ok. This is a useful conceptualization. Process and fixed mindsets. And I guess for YOGA practice, a process mindset is pretty helpful.

But what if you’re a writer? What if you’re a scientist? What if you want to contribute something for godsakes?

Not so helpful: this spontaneous, flow-oriented, “screw accomplishments” sensibility. Let me just confirm that.

Should I really be immersing myself in a practice that makes me even more process-oriented and even less interested in objectifiable results?

There’s the rub. This whole personality-definition just legitimates my endless playfulness. At a time when fixating on results would particularly annoying and painful.

Here’s what I’m thinking. If I can generate results as a byproduct of happy but sincere action, staying in process-mind is possible and—this I can verify—way more fun. I don’t swear off or denigrate results, but as long as they keep coming, they can stay parenthetical. They can be at the periphery of my field of vision. Just like my body parts when I put them in an asana. This is ideal, though. An anti-goal that is really a goal. I'm not there, when it comes to the writing-practice. It means being good. 

Here is what else I’m thinking. Of the blogger called CP. Cody Pomeray, Dean Morarity: alternate names for the man who catalyzed a whole movement of obsessive thing-creators. But what did Neal Cassady himself create? Enthusiasm, relationship, life. His life was his art. That it got documented is an accident: how many other artists- detached- from- product never made the history books? What unwritten, unpraised current lies there?

But then… getting praise isn’t the point, in that current.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [30]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , science , social theory , spirituality

The Anusarian and the Ashtangi · 14 July 2008

Excerpts from an exchange I’ve been conducting with Dale, an Anusana practitioner in Austin, over the last couple of weeks. Chez Liz.

……………………………………………………………….

DALE: My "moon days" in the sense of adventure and release from tension that you project are -- most days. Most days I have the wonderful freedom and opportunity of being able to choose what kind of yoga I do. And I find the same sense of unleashed adventurous joy in that as you obviously do when unchained from the work for a day.

Obviously, I'm not very dedicated :-).

Have you thought about tasting a different style of yoga on your off days/Saturdays?

……………………………………………………………...

(0v0): I'm not sure about yoga “tastings”? A little anusara, for example, does taste nice in terms of sensation, but if it were just about the feeling in my body... um... for me that is not what it is about. When I choose every day what yoga to do, the mind takes over and has a field day. :)

……………………………………………………………..

DALE: Well, it's quite true that I'm not a dedicated Ashtangi :-). I last had a stable practice schedule 4 or 5 weeks ago, but at that time I was doing 1st series or a half-primary 2 or 3 times a week, 2nd series once or twice a week, Shiva Rea vinyassa a couple times a week, and sprinkling in a few flow classes.

Wow!! How dedicated! NOT. I am about as dedicated to yoga as I am to chocolate (mmmmmmm, chocolate). In reality I am merely as bad a glutton for yoga as I am for chocolate (mmmmm, chocolate).

So when I sound like I'm "try[ing] to show [you] all the real way," it's just like saying "I know you like Baby Ruth, but dude! try a Snickers."

I practiced all last week at a Baron Baptiste studio. It was alot of fun - nothing earth-shaking, but I learned some different ways to put flows together. And practicing in a 90F room was interesting. It was enough to keep me from losing heat, but not so much that I felt like I was being heated from the outside. I think that the external heat did contribute to some overwork that I did (& made me painfully sore), but I've done similar things in unheated practices, so I can't blame the room. Fun! You ought to try it (or not :-). Because it is fun! Fun celebrates the unquenchable joy of the Divine. Go grab a blue cowboy and dance!!

And yeah, I think that it would be a good idea for everyone to try some other yoga activities. Why just do the same set of poses, in the same order all the time [rhetorical question...].

Is it ok for an Ashtangi to lift weights? How about go for a bike ride? Ok to do aerobics? To go dancing? To take a different style of yoga class? To swim or run?

If one of these is not like the others, why??? Why would swimming be ok for an Ashtangi, but not a Baron Baptiste vinyassa class?

You mentioned my love affair with Anusara. Well, it goes beyond that. I have become an Anusari in the fundamental sense - I do everything in the Anusara style. Vinyassa, Ashtanga, lifting weights, whatever - I do it all in the Anusara style. I actually do very few Anusara classes anymore, because I'm having too much fun doing various styles or vinyassa these days. But the heart of Anusara isn't any particular sequence or activity or set of poses. The heart of Anusara is a way of doing - a way of being and a way of doing. So when I do vinyassa or Ashtanga or Shiva Rea or whatever, I do it in the Anusara way. Whatever I am doing with my body, the principles of alignment apply, and the mental/spiritual/emotional practices apply.

I wonder if there is a heart of Ashtanga that transcends which series you are working on, or whether you are practicing Mysore or in led classes. To me, the heart of Ashtanga might be something like maintaining the integrity of the breath and the breath-movement connection. I think that Ashtanga also teaches patience, nonGrasping, truthfulness, meditative mind, and the magic of "rinsing the spine," as your teacher describes it :-).

Could you swim or run in the Ashtanga way? Certainly. My swimming would have as its goal proper breathing, and then adjusting my swimming motions to be maximally in tune with my breathing. I would swim with the intention of mastering the form, but without grasping for the outcome - after all, if I just practice my swimming, all will come.

And can you practice freestyle vinyassa in the Ashtanga way? Why not?

Oh, and I don't hate Ashtanga. Remember that I've been practicing Ashtanga on & off for about 6 years. I got totally bored with primary series for a long time. But about a year ago, I started working on second series, and eventually that get me started back doing primary occasionally. But this time primary is fun, because I do it with specific things that I want to work on in order to improve my second series work.

Next in the Ashtanga realm, I think I'll tart working on The Rocket. It doesn't depend on increasing your flexibility in certain ways like 3rd series does, and it emphasizes strength and agility. And it looks like a blast :-).

…………………………………………………………………

(0v0): Cool comment. I think you're on to something with your insight into the different dispositions of different schools.

Is it accurate to say, following the chocolate metaphor and your earlier comments on tasting, that your practice focuses on enjoying the sensations in the body? There's attention to the delights of the senses (and embodied experience) and the beauty of symmetry? There's attention to dileating a path to joy?

These are valid principles for sure. Ashtanga's personality is something different. Hmm.

Maybe I'll try to write about this later.

…………………………………………………………….……..

DALE: Interesting.

Yes, I practice purely for the love of the practice. I enjoy the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the practice, but I do not practice for any other reason than that I groove on it.

Considering yoga, if you practice because you love the practice, then you need look no further for the reasons that you spend so much valuable time and energy on it. Your desires and actions are aligned.

But let's say that practicing is not your most favorite thing, or even one of your top 10 favorite things. Then why practice? As David Swenson says, "It's only yoga."

Perhaps it is to achieve some healthy physical or psychological results: losing weight or gaining strength or a better range of motion or better balance or concentration or stress relief. Cool !!

Maybe it is training yourself to overcome difficult obstacles, to persevere, to see yourself physical capabilities clearly, accept yourself utterly, and then make improvements in a determined yet nonHarming way. Groovy!!

Or maybe your practice is like sitting meditation in Zen - you do not practice with any expectation, but only because you know that it is good for you. I can't argue with that.

Or maybe you practice in order to have some sort of religious or ecstatic experience, like the dervishes. Well, that's alot healthier than peyote :-).

And if you practice as a religious discipline, that's wonderful, too. I think that a person's religion is their business, and as long as their religion doesn't tend to make them mean people, I think it's wonderful.

If you want to say that Ashtanga's personality is different from enjoying the practice, then consider this - is there a standard & necessary motive for practicing Ashtanga? If someone has a different motive or a different experience in the practice, then are they doing it wrong? Is it no longer Ashtanga? Is Swenson wrong when he says that it is only yoga?

I think that one can practice for many reasons, and have a variety of different experiences, and still be doing great yoga. I have students who are growing in their yoga, students who want to get stronger/faster/better, students who are trying to age more gracefully, students who are recovering from breast cancer and need to accept themselves more completely, students who just want to have a good sweaty time, and students who come to class for the companionship. Who is wrong & who is right? Maybe each person's practice has their own personality.

I do not see a fundamental difference between Ashtanga asana practice and other yoga asana practice. In fact, I do not see a fundamentat difference between traditional asana practice, and applying those same principles to running, swimming, or basketball. Each of these can be practiced using the same principles that illuminate our asana practice.

So - why do you practice? Is it a mixture of "love it" and doing it for other reasons? How is your experience of Ashtanga practice different from other yogas?

What do you think of the idea of doing other things in your life in the same way that we do asana?

…………………………………………………………………

(0v0): Dale, Thank you for thinking through this with me.

I wonder if your idea of “enjoyment”—defined as being “my favorite thing to do” and something that “tastes good” and associated with sampling/tasting varieties, and physical feeling-good, and understood as being intrinsically self-legitimating according to a “do what feels good” ethos—is particularly tied to the ethos not of living life to the fullest but of consumerism.

The metaphor of eating connects to a larger sense of pursuing happiness through inputs of sense experience. There’s a lot of mental fluctuation in the sense-seeking, chocolate-savoring, variety-loving practice you describe. Which is great fun, but what’s this really doing to the mind? (Perhaps the character of practice you describe is oriented to pleasing the mind, whereas my own orients to quieting it.)

What you describe are wonderful immanent joys, but are they transcendent? Do they connect you to the peace that passeth understanding? (What is their relationship to the fifth-eighth limbs of yoga—or are these not a part of Anusara’s personality?)

That said, I am intrigued by your implicit argument that Anusara-style practice is an end in itself. That’s sweet. It can be done for any apparent “motive” but is a whole experience in and of itself. I wish I had an interesting or noble answer for my own motivations for practice—moral improvement, increasing my love, knowledge of reality. These are real side effects of any devotional practice, but if the reason I get on my mat every morning is a combination of love and inertia.

I dunno. What I can tell you is that every morning my sweetheart asks me, “How was your practice today?” And I often have to say say, year in year out of my routinized and not always physically blissful ashtanga life, “Amazing. It was the best practice EVER.”

Each day is different, in content if not in form. Because I hold the form constant (which many would expect to be boring if they hadn’t tried it for a while), I’m able to observe/experience my self—breath, subtle body, mental states, and more than anything the increasingly accessible edges of my unconscious mind—with a pretty crazy level of subtlety.

Is that possible in any physical activity? Maybe. You can do mindfulness practice in a lot of contexts. (There is a difference between saying “it’s only yoga” and “it’s only asana”—I believe you mean the latter.) But I find certain pretty special rarefied states of consciousness are possible when you combine mindfulness with vinyasa and the extreme kinds of nerve-cleansing that this method particularly brings. Ice hockey or flower arranging or most asana will not necessarily work the subtle and emotional bodies quite to the brink in the same revealing, wonderful way, even if we want to say—ever so nondualistically—that all methods are the same. Maybe that’s fine. Ultimately, it’s only chitta vritti nirodaha.

When I say today was the best practice ever, this does not always mean that practice has been gratifying. Sometimes it’s taken me to the places that scare me; usually I’ve cultivated too deep a state of trance to register “fun” or any delight in my own physical capacity; sometimes I’ve practiced with colleagues who are actively, deeply suffering on their mats beside me. The joy is about something other that the more sense-oriented idea of fun. It may even be tinged with sorrow, and always contains a sense of my own smallness in the greater scheme of things. It’s actually really humbling to devote yourself to a routine in this way, and just let the routine take over. It’s not about what I can do or achieve; this is why ashtangis sometimes say the yoga does us rather than we it.

Though in fairness, I have to admit that part of my delight in practice IS purely immanent: because I do the exact same thing every single day, over time my body has become somewhat gravity-defying, open, and strong. You don’t get to practice intermediate or advanced ashtanga if you approach practice as a sampler or “achiever,” but only by just giving yourself over to the routine. Sampling this practice leads to suffering and injury—it’s just too difficult otherwise, and I’ve seen a lot of people torture themselves with inconsistent practice. The method only really opens you up to the degree you are fully capable if you follow it every day for years, and even then only if you’re lucky enough to have a healthy body and avoid serious injuries on the way. Maybe that’s really boring. Maybe ashtangis are boring people. The kickback is an indescribable chemical cocktail—especially from the crazy backbending while riding the breath—that no other physical experience I know can touch. You don’t get that kind of experience by sampling, just because so much is required in terms of skill and physical development that you must have a super-intelligent, repetitious method.

And even that passes. The crazy thing is that, as this practice passes in to its third generation and we see the first wave of American teachers do intense physical practice into their sixties and the living “guru” of the system turn 93 this week, it’s becoming pretty clear that the outgrowth of this practice is that joy becomes independent of sense-based physical enjoyment.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , integration

The Shape of Myth · 9 July 2008

MC Richards said this.

The ancient Trinity

of Truth, Beauty and Goodness

lives in the modern ideal of

Surreality, Nakedness and Freedom.

Or Revelation, Redemption and Compassion.

She was born in Idaho, schooled in Portland, PhD’d at Berkeley… then settled at Black Mountain, home of the geodesic dome. I’m tracing her loosely. Where is my Black Mountain?

(A book, a film, a song.)

Apollo and Dionysus still percolate as I wonder whether the commissioned post about them can be realized. I dislike when concepts get mission creep and endeavor that operative categories can be firmed up. Apollo and Dionysus not same as masculine/feminine; not same as yin/yang; not same as extraversion/involution. Et cetera! Threes (see above) are nicer than twos, but I'll work with what I've got.

Sure it all goes to the One, but meantime let's keep our shit straight.

 

Meanwhile Ron Howard, who invaded my summer once before (when he filmed Far and Away in my home, the middle of nowhere), trapses back and forth beneath my window yelling "Action!" while cranes dangling humungus light-diffusing balloons grumble around the quad and students hold out their camera phones to capture Tom Hanks in professor drag (we could show him some things--god why'd he cast Forrest Gump for this?). My friend N said we're like bird watchers hoping for a glimpse of a celebrity--so common out and about--behaving in its natural environment. Bird watchers, social scientists... what a strange summer.

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Categories: arbitrage , crypto-Hegelianism

SLIV: Scylla and Charybdis · 25 May 2008

How do we resolve the conflict between shapeliness, or control, and our sense that we are never entirely in control, in that we can never entirely close the gap between the work we envision and the work we create? Hoagland writes that “control exacts a cost too: It is often achieved at the expense of discovery and spontaneity.” He writes in praise of unsubordinations against the dominance of “repression as a useful agent in creative shaping.” The call is not to let anything go, but to allow for passionate excess, and the irrational… Do we admire the Navajo basket, not only beautifully designed but also so tightly woven that it can hold water? Or do we prefer nonfunctional pottery, the howls of the Beats, the delirium of Dada, the splatters of Pollock? Do we have to choose? (A glance toward the dance floor: The Talking Heads sand “Stop Making Sense” to a perfectly rhythmic beat.) Can’t we admire… Flaubert’s meticulously considered Madame Bovary and mark Twain’s uncivilized Adventures of Huckleberry Finn… the wilde-eyed riffs of Moby-Dick and the canny constructions of Borges? We can, and will—so long as, whatever its temperament, every map, every story or poem, persuades us of its purpose and justifies its methods.

-Peter Turchi, Maps of the Imagination, p. 21

Around here, allowing for vices, letting the little irrationalities have their space: I am finding a kind of sanity in fennel seeds, chewed slowly the way an old man chews his pipe. And an herbal coffee substitute called Teeccino, discovered on Friday at an environmentalist conference where the very fine catered lunch did not have a vegetarian option (they eventually brought me a plate of steamed broccoli) but did feature un-coffee.

Dissertation today. I will not see what the rest of you did yesterday—the film about the anthropology professor whose off-campus, esoteric adventures do wonders for his sex appeal. But after I crashed yesterday there was this wonderful old BBC program; and tonight I hope to get to Steve Dwelley’s latest, which will doubtless be a subtler and more true discussion of what I’ve been trying to say about the letting go, and the training, of the mind during yoga.

Letting go is: deferential; humble, intuitive.

Training is: intense, expert, intentional.

So: intuition and intention. Both in meditation practice; and in writing practice. Or:

Will without surrender is a tight-ass; surrender without will is a wuss.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , spirituality

Cutting through Digital Anonymity · 6 May 2008

Me: Are you there?
Gary: Hello. Welcome to Verizon's chat service. How may I help you today?
Me: Are you real?
Gary: How may I help you today?
Me: Gary, this is urgent. About a threatening phone call I just received from an unlisted number. I need the number traced and I don't know how to do this. Can we talk in person please? Internet chat is ridiculous at this point.
Gary: If you wish to speak to someone you can call Customer Service....This is a chat service and we do multiple chats at a time. I can give you the code to trace the last call that called you, but there are charges for that service. We also have an unlawful call center that I can give you the number for assistance with this...
Me: Already did *69 and it’s unlisted. Am a PhD student and not going to just throw money at this to set up weak protections.
Gary: Our Unlawful Call Center (UCC) specializes in calls of a serious nature that include a threat to your life; bodily harm; excessive, obscene, or harassing calls; kidnapping; and Bomb Threats. To use the services of the UCC, you must be willing to take legal actions against the caller. We regularly work with law enforcement agencies to resolve unlawful call complaints….
Me: Verizon might want to know about what happened here. Because the threatening call originated with an automatic sales call then referred me to a call center. It was the person at the call center who harrassed me. He has my phone number (read it to me over the phone so he can see it through his interface at work).
Gary: You can contact law enforcement or use the information for the UCC to report harrassing calls.
Me: I'll use the UCC. One more question for you:
Me: I want to get my number changed. This individual who harrassed me (it was horrible, horrible what he was saying) has my home number.
Me: He may have already traced it to my identity through a reverse directory.
Gary: In order to protect the privacy of your records, we need to verify the last 6 digits of your account before we can place orders or make any changes to your account. Once you provide this information, I will be happy to proceed with your request...
Me: Thank you!  What is the VERY first thing we can do right now to protect me? Not “place orders.” Is there a way immediately to delist my phone number? Or change it?
Gary: Through web support I can change the number but it may not be done right away. It is guaranteed to be changed today....
Me:I know how much dead air there is between me and customer service [by phone]. While i have you live i want to do everything we can immediately to protect me and my family from this freak.... (i'm in the fucking phone book, but if we can erase the listing in whatever online directory, good: anything we can do to anonymize.)
Gary: As I said, this won't be immediate. The due date is sometime today. It could be shortly but we don't know how busy they are at the Central Office. There are charges to make the number unpublished. I will look those up for you. You can go to Superpages.com and submit requests to remove you from the online listings, but please refrain from swearing. That is not necessary.
Me: Sorry. You're right. I'm just scared because of the things this man said to me and trying to act quickly. I will go to superpages and also report this incident to the UCC. Again: you are changing my actual home phone number or just delisting it?
Gary: I can change your number at no charge this time (usually it is $40.25). To make your number unpublished there is a charge of $15.00 and a monthly fee of $1.75. We would be changing your actual number and if you want the non-published that is the costs above.
Me: I will pay the fees to depublish if this includes online publication. Does it?
Gary: No. Non-published means it will not be printed in our printed directory and it will not be given out by Directory Assistance...that is it. It has nothing to do with the online services.
Me: Ok. I'll take what i can get.... How do I ensure that the UCC people can get the number of the company that originally called me and then directed me to the call center where he works?
Gary: I have no idea what they can do, I am web support and can only advise you of the department to call...
Me: Ok. Is there any other way you can help me considering the time-sensitive nature of this situation? Or any advice as i go?
Me: Oh, and i need my new number :)
Gary: Thanks for holding. Your new number is [ahem]. Unfortunately I can only advise you to call the UCC or to contact law enforcement.
Me: Works for me. Thanks for your help man. And thank you for being kind unlike the guy who just harrassed me. Cheers.
Gary: Sorry for the problems! Thank you for using Verizon's chat service.

The call that started this is from a company that rings through to my answering machine every day. I’ve gotten off every list but theirs. I’ve done “press 1 to be removed from our list” several times, so today pressed 2 to speak to a representative. He said he was in Daytona, but the connection quality and language make me think it could have been India or Bangladesh. The way he harassed me was so calmly businesslike, stilted, and so unbelievably obscene that I thought a coworker had smuggled him a fake transcript and he didn’t know what he was saying to me. It took about 10 exchanges for me to realize he did know what he was saying. I did not get emotional—figuring either anger or vulnerability could be turn-ons—but asked him to put himself in my shoes. Said: “Do you really want to be cruel to a stranger?” He said he understood and that he did not want to be cruel. I asked him to promise he would never do something like this again. He said: “I am very sorry Madam. I promise I will not call you. Please forgive me.” I forgave him. Then I hung up and spent the next hour quasi-anonymizing.

So interesting to have the archipelago of my global digital identity shored up like this. The limits of anonymity have less to do with a monolithic national “big brother” than with the breakneck innovations in marketing and digital communication, and the fact that "regulation" and national boundaries are years and years behind them both. Even as ideas of what makes for sexual obscenity--and the emotions that happen when different boundaries get crossed--remain located in particular spaces, cultures, religions, economic classes, genders. It's not like the guy on the line shared my specific, historical concepts of sexual harrassment, women's rights, and professional deference.

But when it came to the notion of compassion... he was both able and willing (at least for a moment) to meet me on that ground.

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society

A small bridge · 5 May 2008

The workshop this weekend was sweet. For someone who is often drained by social interaction, it was surprising to see how inspiring and energizing this community can be to me. I sat around the edges, an active wallflower. I don’t often step back in this way—being in a group is all or nothing and usually involves getting sensitive to each individual's needs. But the relationships in this group are mutually supportive at a deep level, even as we transition into predominantly spoken interactions.

Sunday, I stayed afterwards and talked to my teacher—who I won’t see for a while—and then slipped away before someone buttonholed me in to the group dinner. Drove down the ramp and stopped short as a light, determined and quick walker darted into the sidewalk space I was about to cross. Who else dresses in all black and moves with such Newyorkish purpose on a spring evening in Santa Monica?

It was my PhD adviser. Same age as my other teacher and twice the body weight if just as light on her feet, she bounded around to the driver’s window and said she’d been thinking of me all afternoon, because re-reading a book she knows I love. I wanted to hug her, but I kept my hands on the wheel while we talked.

What a beautiful transition, one teacher still upstairs and the other there on the ground, and my path down the ramp linking the two. One a hippie ex-engineer who dropped out and found a spiritual path, one avid and brilliant Marxist feminist who just by staying with her work accidentally became a major player. Both big names despite themselves, anti-self-promoters who laugh at the organizations in which their work is embedded even as they believe so deeply in the value of giving themselves as they can. They are both (unlike me) coffee lovers and easily could have met on this street some other day this spring, bumped in to each other in line and laughed together at some little thing in the world around them. I never realized it, but their dispositions and aspects are so similar, and nothing like mine. But otherwise I'm their only link.

I am back in her hands, for now.

Here’s a passage from a really disturbing talk by Bell Labs physicist R. Hamming. People who identify with their work and become one-dimensional research bots drive me to blogging in the margins, obviously. I have very different notions about how to enjoy and cultivate my energies and mind, and how many dimensions of myself it’s possible to maximize at a time. But this tribute to the shadow-benefits of one-pointedness did give me pause…

Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , social theory

More PDA · 27 April 2008

So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.

The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.

So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.

When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.

In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.

I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.

I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.

But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.

Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.

This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , sound

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?

I was all interested in neuro-linguistic programming from Milton Erickson through Bandler and Grinder to the self-help guy Tony Whateveritis. That was all about suggestibility and the idea that there was a sub-conscious mind. (Side note: the first day I practiced with my teacher and he said “just establishing rapport…” I knew he was hip to the NLP and probably an eclectic like myself… which of course turned out to be exactly right.)

In that line were yoga nidra of course, the intriguing Edgar Cayce, a lot of dimestore self-hypnosis New Age nonsense and cheap evolutionary theory á la Robert Anton Wilson, and finally a mysterious, ancient cassette tape I had mailed in from a distant archive like a character in Umberto Eco. On it a woman called Jasmine Riddle intoned the most potent yoga nidra sequence I’ve ever found, but I can’t tell you what’s in it because I never got past the second minute without my mind shutting off. It would return 50 minutes later, Ms. Riddle whispering to me to wake up. I guess I could try to crack her code but I don’t want to re-request the thing through ILL because my reputation with the university library is already sketchy (seriously).

At the same time, that first year, I was starting to explore Vipassana. Which, at first (shamatha practice) was all about concentration and operated on a simpler idea of the mind than the hypnosis people. For Vipassana, for a practical purposes the mind was just the house of “attachments” and “suffering.”

Together, the NLP and the Vipassana led to a relational question (usually the best kind question): what is the relationship of meditation and hypnosis? (And: which framework is better for mapping my experience, or do I need both?)

The Vipassana people will tell you meditation is not the same as hypnosis. Not the same! Of course they will say that: if it were the same, you could get the method without the metaphysics (the metaphysics being the belief system anchored in the Four Noble Truths, though they will also tell you that this is not a theory but a fact revealed by looking inside, like Socrates supposedly revealed geometry to the boy in the Meno). Over time I found a few very good answers from Buddhist scholars for why meditation and hypnosis are different (along with a lot of answers that made me suspicious), but none of the answers were so good that I remember them.

So now I am concluding the fourth year, and I am still not sure—experientially—what is the relationship of meditation to hypnosis. But what is different now is that I trust myself more as a first-order experiencer and when applicable a second-order witness of that experience. And, I’m a lot more interested in the tones, textures, and subtleties of altered states, and in the meaningfulness that seems to arise out of them after the fact. Also, there is the whole phenomenon of other minds (not the so-called "problem of other minds," thank you), and the ways groups actually share and collectively deepen altered states.

Outside/objective approaches would just quantify things: measure brain activity and be done with it. What if they found that the elecrtromagnetic map of asana (which I experience as meditation ranging from light to deep) is the same as chanting (which I experience as full-on hypnosis)? Would having it quantified externally as 1=1 answer the question?

Actually, yes. And no.

The problem with the subjective side is that once I’m in an altered state I’m not much fit to gather data. And since I love altered states my reflections on them are colored with the emotions of wonderment and joy that I associate with them after the fact.

Is there some kind of meditative-hypnotic spectrum that cannot be reduced to an electroencephalograph readout? Inside, there are other spectra in play:

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

Just to mix it up, I practiced this morning with the Gayatri Mantra droning over and over in the background. Swaying right out of my body just standing up, but sharp and focused for the rest of it. It was pretty strange and delicious. Chocolate with chili powder.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Obliquity · 25 March 2008

● The old scorpio archetype is one I don’t mind measuring up against my personality as a kind of interpretive tool. There’s a freaky lot of resonance in that collection of traits. I’m less excited about the things said about the Aries moon, but the alpha debate geek in me lives on despite my fantasies that she’s just some adolescent growing pain.

● Nothing brings her out like sparring with the Daily Miltonian, which I did a little bit yesterday out of public view. Phew.

● Turns out one thing we can agree on is the way that boy-clubby creative communities—a piece of Americana all the way back beyond the Beats—make us both want to run for the fringes even as we recognize they have a kind of special creative greenhousiness.

● Which reminds me that one boy-centric orbit I romanticize and draw on is the whole decades-old Whole Earth Catalog / TED / Long Now Foundation Bay Area sensibility. Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, those guys. Can’t help it. Brian and his friends (other groups of them too, I guess) knock me out.

● All of which reminds me of the two suggestions that seem to be shaping my thoughts about blogging recently.

● One a blog post from Kelly: short is in. Nice! [via Rex.]

● The other Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. A kind of chance-embracing, post-divinatory pack of trump cards meant for drawing on when you feel like making a fast creative change of tempo.

● Drew a card the other day, and it said:

● Ok. And then today the card said:

LOOK CLOSELY AT THE MOST EMBARRASSING DETAILS AND AMPLIFY THEM.

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Categories: arbitrage , power of suggestion

NIN · 13 March 2008

 

Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious,

and they must be brought into connection with action.

They must be woven together.

 

-Anaïs Nin

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , integration

Author's Notes · 11 March 2008

I am going to speak in a more personal manner, directly to you, for a second. Yes you.

I’m aware that this blog has a lot of readers, and I’m not sure why this is so.

Most of the feedback I get about my blog writing is that it’s

(1) impossibly dense,

(2) mildly crazy, or

(3) laced with objectionable ideas (about either science or spirituality, depending on who you are—I seem to offend in both directions).

So... I’m not sure why you come here. Is it the effort to piece together the story behind writer? The hopes of catching some oblique community gossip? The thrill of a new vocab word?

I write about a small subculture in an easily recognizable location, I and the subjects of my writing (myself included) are not terribly difficult to identify. 

I feel comfortable with this. I’m a trusting person and this has brought well-intentioned and generous people into my life. It is trust others, as much as strategy, that has brought me into the good life that I have.

But because I am candid here about my feelings and some of the thoughts I’m working through, as the readership grows I do worry that what I reveal here could do harm. Is this crazy? Well, the worry comes up.

There’s a lot I don’t discuss—specifics of asana, teacher-student relationship, my intimate yoga-person friendships. I’m trying to embed some modesty into an inherently public kind of writing. By keeping some things quiet I feel more freedom to talk openly about others.

Maybe this effort to protect the more sensitive aspects of this practice is actually keeping me from revealing good parts of myself and the most interesting aspects of my experience. Stuff that it would be good to work over in a journal.

No point to be made here. But I felt like giving you a little flicker of the self-awareness that this whole wonderous but also edgy and strange form of self-expression creates in me. Most of you are not at all comfortable with the whole concept of writing a weblog, and see it as a slightly discomforting thing.

But it’s not like that. It’s like this.

You are welcome here, but I am going to try to stop thinking about you and what you might think about me.

Yours as ever, (0v0)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga

Tripping the Dreck Eclectic · 9 March 2008

I can feel you all out there bristling that I’d fill this space with ideas that are not “all mine,” that I would present this system as if it could be valid. Do devil’s advocacy for a dangerous idea that can’t hold together without tinges of hierarchical thinking, essentialism, determinism and necessity (dispositions it’s easy, these days, hate). It’s pretty irritating, I know.

But back to the idea of migrating concepts from one system to another, disrespecting them, taking them out for a night of slumming through the dreck of eclectic thinking. I guess that's a smirch on the integrity of any system.

Bring it! It’s 2008! Here, concepts are free-floating against the background of god-knows-what. They are not locked away inside isolated systems. Concepts are happy whores. Tools-at-hand. (When is somebody going to nail me on the Heidegger shit?) They are rafts to sail across whatever river, and to abandon once we reach the shore. They don’t belong to anyone. They’re loose women. I’m done trying to reign them in and judge them by the rules.

So I wonder:

What would spiral dynamics say about my reaction to spiral dynamics?

Is it more interesting to deconstruct a tool or use it to deconstruct yourself?

These are richer questions than What is wrong with this worldview? We already know how to locate the contradictions in a worldview and tear it down. Who cares? Who needs perfect worldviews?

I offer that it is worth suspending the meta-critique to look (from whatever point of view) at what is revolutionary about the proposition that consciousness evolves. The possibility that people are not all at the same place in their, well..., development of consciousness. (Insert quotation marks as needed.)

Come on. Think about where you have been in your lifetime. The ways you feel your awareness and your own ego changing. Just use your personal experience and nothing else, but subject that to some close, detailed examination. Before you turn on these questions one last time, turn them on yourself.

You are already acting on the assumption that consciousness evolves.

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Categories: arbitrage , social theory , spirituality

Breadcrumbs from the Owl of Minerva · 6 March 2008

Are some people deeper than others? More highly conscious?

Oh, don’t ask that question, Owl. It offends my egalitarian values. Personal development is equal opportunity! 

Um. Sorry.

The first objection any pluralist will have to the spiral dynamics story is that it is hierarchical. Later consciousness is bigger than earlier consciousnsess. Shit: there’s development (which smacks of colonial politics right there). Hierarchies mean power and power means authority and those two together mean domination. Which the powers of social science and the humanities intend to delegitimate and deconstruct in Mighty Supertwins style. Ready steady go!

Hey, I’m in. Except for on this topic. Stay with me: I'll just make a quick incision and then it will be over:

If consciousness evolves, there is this logical problem of everything seeming to flow necessarily toward one predetermined end-point, what the Greeks called a telos. What about chance and openness to changing the course of history? What about unforeseen catastrophe? What about human choice over the matter? The other big problem with teleological theories is that the reek of conservative post-war thought—the functionalist systems theory that saw society as a well-ordered mega-organism and said social action was all about roles and structure and nothing about agency and sensuous individual human creativity. Great picture of the 1950s, that, but the ‘60s changed all things thank god.

There are other problems too. All structural theories, including my beloved Bourdieu, are like that: you can’t lean on them too much or really take them seriously, because they generate inner contradictions and collapse. This stuff is interpretive, not explanatory. You wield it lightly if you understand it at all. Spiral dynamics is an uber-theory that academics cannot use because it's unfashionably large--a borg subsuming all the psychological, sociological, economic and anthropological time maps produced the past century. Do you think there’s some sense in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? In Habermas’ picture of communicative sociality? Or did Aurobindo ever do it for you? All of these are theorists of the evolution of consciousness— smaller players absorbed in the bigger game of spiral dynamics as it’s understood today.

To clarify, spiral dynamics as we're talking here is a map of the evolution of societies. But what is really interesting and threatening is that it also contains maps for the evolution of individuals’ consciousness. Color-coded maps! Most people in this zone would dial in at green/pluralistic, but there are a few turquoise integralists running around without even knowing that this is what you are. And there’s tension because the ashtanga world also contains blue fundamentalism, purple superstition, and red primitive ego. But no matter where a person is at on this map, he still contains multitudes—the authoritarianism, superstition and pure ego, etc., that he personally passed through on his way to the present point of view. It’s not a class system because none of the stages are bad! They are what they are and if we think they're bad that's our problem. For me, It’s a pretty beautiful, subtle picture of wholeness and a validation of all the mentalities we personally experience even if we are consciously seeking to increase our own consciousness.

If the idea that consciousness has evolved seems improbable, well, what do you think of the idea that life itself has evolved? Uh huh. We don’t dispute that natural selection has reordered and expanded the content of life itself—made it more complex and, well, higher-functioning.

This doesn’t have to mean everything’s going to a predetermined destination. We do have some examples of what seem to be very highly-evolved states of consciousness that give hints (and don’t even tell me you don’t believe that shit is real, because most of you have briefly tasted from it, ashtangis); but as for end points, it could be bad or it could be good or it could be up to chance. (There’s the suspicion that some higher energy is in play, of course, but I'm not the Owl of Minerva so how can I say?) See what my friend JJ says at the end of the video I embedded below.

The only really audacious claim that spiral dynamics makes is that yes, some people are more highly conscious than others. And while all people are beautifully whole and perfect wherever we are... we happen to be at different places on the ladder we are all, if ineptly, probably  (hopefully?) climbing.

None of it is my idea (see esp. Ken Wilber, or William Irwin Thompson), though when I delve in to the map of consciousness and use it to interpret the beautifully diverse mentalities and worldviews of those around me, the system does blow my mind a bit. If you want to know where it would place you, read some recent Ken Wilber (the last I read was Integral Spirituality and it did the job fine, with an even bigger Integral philosophy encompassing spiral dynamics), or google. Integral people are all over the web, creating culture and doing some of the most subtle but audacious analysis of our world that I have encountered anywhere. It gets to me, because even though they don’t have the tools of the pluralist sociologists (exemplars of The Statistical Age), they have an arguably higher consciousness.

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Categories: arbitrage , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , social theory , spirituality

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

Yes. Breakfast with the ineffable again this morning. Probably, it is always this good but my mind forgets to note it.

Oh who am I kidding??? This is special. Serious. Fucking. Alchemy.

How many days in a row are we going to hit paydirt like this, kids? Are you wondering the same?

Yeah, you give up the digging of a thousand shallow wells. Choose a method and just mine it mine it mine it like a dirty methodical little drone…, and now and then you hit a vein like this.

Think you can take it to the bank? Want compensation for your efforts or your surrender? Want to buy in? Riiiiight. Not packaged for resale. It’s here and it’ll be gone soon. I’m too much my teacher’s student to hold it or him or us tightly, and this only increases the joy. Like contemplating death increases your living.

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right (hello: what is that hangup about except self-sabotage? It’s ok, we all get in our own way; but we don’t have to keep doing it forever) is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

Many days, there is no assistant. A few who have been at this thing a little longer will give a neighbor an adjustment in supta vajra or pachimo. I’ve been doing a pretty strict counted practice this week, and this highlights strongly the relationships that facilitate my rhythm and those that do not. One companion, I can come to the top of a vinyasa, shift over for his supta vajra, breathe him through it and take one step to the mat without ANY shift in mental state. He doesn’t reach for any talky talky connecting, doesn’t put some kind of lowly beta-level awareness on me. And I come back to the top of the mat just like I’d added a posture—supta vajrasana B—between chakorasana and bhairvasana. Two others on that same train in the immediate perimeter, but another who hasn’t quite caught on. I love her just fine, but if the greater good is to contribute to the collective rhythm that supports the alchemy, I have to let her wait for the teacher. Because his awareness, given which he’s doing and what he’s done, is less fragile than mine.

I got in the car and this was on the stereo, loud. (What I get for blaring Back in Black, from the Unholy Los Angeles Driving Mix cd my brother made a while back, because I thought it a good way to toast RP this morning. Or at least so it seemed on the jaunt from bathroom floor pranayama to the door of my car, as the CDs live in a big cramped bookcase in the hallway. And it did work nicely for cruising Santa Monica Blvd in the dark, though I did frighten a homeless man at a stoplight. Anyway I took the highroad--Wilshire--back here to the working class fringes of Santa Monica, trumpeting Prince's version of the apocalypse and definitely in a state unfit for operating a motor vehicle.)

That’s a lot of apocalyptic Americana from twenty years back. But AC/DC and Prince never knew the shift in consciousness would look like this. This quiet, this early in the morning, and as much about working hard as it is about letting loose.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

About Alice · 15 January 2008

I was not kidding the other day. By the way. About Alice Coltrane.

Bebop piano as a child; a young life all in jazz; then an India Period that never really ended. She founded the Vedantic Center of Los Angeles and produced a modest discography of sharply blended, yet beautiful, new age/ jazz/ indian/ soul harp-sitar-tambourine. A brilliant life. 

And an anchor to many. Here is her grand-nephew talking:

For a long time it’s been difficult to come to terms with her death. She was such a big presence for all of us—she really held us together. But not we’re all readjusting and gradually finding it easier to talk about her again. Slowly, we’re starting to bring her up in conversations and telling stories about her again. When the time is right and everyone is comfortable just remembering her for the special person she was, I’ll finish [the documentary I am making about her]…. As far as my relationship with my art is concerned, though, we never really talked about music much. I mean, she knew what I was doing and she always expressed and interest, but really she was much more of a spiritual mentor to me, someone who gave me guidance and insight because that was always the biggest part of her own life.

Here is the truth about the way women are remembered, the way we are reviewed and recommended and talked about and seen: it’s about a woman’s associations. Her connectedness, her ability to facilitate transformation, to collaborate, to create togetherness. With a man, what is remembered is all drive and ego and accomplishment. I wish we’d memorialize more in the middle. Most of the obits of Alice lead with her husband, follow with her bandmates, and around paragraph seven get around to something about Alice herself. Embarrassing, that extremism. And yet Alice was one who contained traditions, who connected people. It’s good, after all, to be remembered as a goddess.

So I’ll mention that of course her appellate name came from being wed to John; and that the speaker above is Flying Lotus. Her grand-nephew and an hypercreative, synthetic Los Angeles hiphop artist who will soon be large. I like him very much, and love that his feel is all Alice in hip-hop. The quotation is from Wire magazine, Nov 07. (Owl-House subscriptions ceased upon advancement to PhD candidacy: The Economist, The London Review of Books, The Yoga Journal. Subscriptions maintained: Veneer Magazine, Wire, Namarupa.)

For Christmas, the One Who Will Not Be Named gave me transcendence. I mean Transcendence. I will check out the IP situation on this record and do a reader giveaway if it’s not robbing some trust or foundation. I shouldn’t be listening to this record alone, with so many transcendence-hungry, Culver City-loving, Vedantic-friendly, jazz-listening, covertly chanting, secretly sitar-loving people in this thread.

If I ask for your address, you’ll know why. Or maybe you should just begin now.

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Categories: arbitrage , sound , spirituality

For Those Who Would Yearn for Cave Retreats · 14 January 2008

I am the taste in water,

O Kaunteya;

I am the radiance

Of the moon an the sun, 

The sacred utterance

In all the Vedas,

The sound in space,

The prowess in humans.

-Vr 7.8

 

Yoga is not a reclusive meditation in some distant mountain hermitage; rather, the hermitage is found in one's heart, and in the hearts of others.

The ultimate yoga for souls is to attain a state of full-heartedness — a heart that offers itself in unremitting, unconditional love in response to the divine yearning.

This yearning, the greatest secret of all, is pronounced as "You are so much loved by me.”

…The Gita insists that human life is meant for hearing this innermost song of the heart. It behooves souls to search for this song, and upon hearing it, to listen to the divine love song as it resonates in everything, everywhere, and at every moment

—to hear it through the hearts of all beings and in all of life.

 

This is from The Bhagavad Gita: The Beloved Lord’s Secret Love Song

Translation and commentary by Graham Schweig, 2007, p. 109 and p. 278.

Emphasis mine. Gender liberty ("prowess in humans") also mine.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , spirituality

Yurts · 1 January 2008

My brother is obsessed with Quonset huts. But he despises yurts.

Since we were kids, the Quonset has beguiled him. (If you’re following the pendulum, he just moved from Paris to Marfa, probably in search of more Quonsets, which do not often appear in Montmarte.) Back in our childhood, a Quonset was basically the most interesting thing on the rural Montana architectural landscape. Driving past one was the middle-of-nowhere equivalent to spying a VW Thing on the LA freeway. It’s a hassle-free, snowdrift-proof residence! It’s an echo chamber! It’s a grain silo cut in half! It’s a giant speedbump! It requires no special skills to erect!

Equal and opposite to the aesthetic delights of the Quonset is the aesthetic mistake of the yurt. After an unfortunate booking at the unfortunately named "Treebones" resort—made in the hopes that yurts would be something like Quonsets—he realized that yurts are not ok. Terrible feng shui in a yurt, especially with the circle-in-a-square relationship that comes from putting a bed inside. Gimmicks, yurts. Hippie novelty. Mindless design. Bad form.

So when I realized I’d be doing my new year’s yoga in a yurt, I had a doubt. Why amid the most incredibly beautiful land adorned only with gorgeous and lovingly appointed buildings would anyone plant this alien and inefficient structure? What misguided UFO aesthetic was infiltrating this immaculately cultivated zone? And how could I possibly negotiate bliss within it?

Actually, it was ok and better than ok, the yurt yoga. First, there was the Arthurian symmetry of practicing in a circle. Funny to see a few of us westerners feel strange pointing our feet at others (folk taboos also—just like lattes and ringtones and pubic hair fashion—travel across cultures in the days of globalization). But after we got comfortable with that, the little bolus of energy we created was perfectly shaped.

Second, our particular yurt had something called an “incinerator toilet” which burned its own contents rather than draining them off. So every time someone visited the loo, the yurt would be infiltrated with the scent of burning samskaras. Which was actually very nice, once I stopped worrying we were burning the yurt.

Third and best, though, was the window at the top of the structure. It was circular and convex. There facing the center of the yurt and practicing in the round, each time we would pull in to urdhva mukha and gaze to the tip of the nose, each crossed eye would pick up an image of that window. You see double with your eyes crossed, of course; and the double-vision of the circle window created for each of us a pair of giant, ephemeral, visionary spectacles looking right into the cosmos. Gazing inward to the tip of the nose; but at the same time picking up that beguiling image created by our own flawed but amazing senses.

So anyway. Yurt yoga is allright for these reasons.

I am back from ashtanga retreat with many new threads before me. And a sense that the year ahead will make a coherent and beautiful weave of them. Sealed off 2007 in the cold cold waters of Matilija Creek and 108 collective Aums; and initiated 2008 with a dawn-light jacuzzi soak and ashtanga.  But this is all for now.  

Happy new yurt.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Saturday XXXVI: Koans and Syncretism · 28 December 2007

How many unbelievable remarks can your MIL drop inside of a single Christmas?

Wait. Don’t answer.

It’s a koan. The answer is inside of me, but I am still working it out. It’s probably zero, but at the moment the figure I have is much higher.

I wonder which will happen first: I solve the koan or my head explodes. MsIL are like that. No, no. I mean koans are like that.

And in any case the sister cities Portland and Seattle are so beautiful to me—looking down from the Fremont Bridge in morning light, docking downtown on the Bremerton ferry—and it even snowed giant wet fluffs and R’s grandmothers were both hilarious. Truly and beautifully. So maybe I’ll add them and some more personal images to my flickr, but those images will be marked “for friends only.” If you are a friend and care to look in, make an account and tag me. Maybe later this year I’ll even break down and post friends-only asanas: something I’ve long considered not ok. Maybe not, though. But as you might have heard, I’m in a phase of prohibition-breaking....

Including “prohibition” itself. I broke the 5-year seal on alcohol consumption on the solstice, and that has been interesting. Do yoga and alcohol mix at all? To be blogged soon, even though it makes me uncomfortable in a way nudity does not.

But first, Ojai retreat for New Year’s ashtanga intoxication. The teacher who is hosting says I am on new-student probation (“We will put you in the yurt if you are bad”). The others I suppose are bodyworkers and therapists and all-around Pacifica sympathizers, so things might get a little syncretic. Transpersonal jungian astral analytic shamanic ashtanga? I hope so. Now shhhh. I think ashtanga can hold it together. It’s strong like that.

● Nice podcast about Rumi from last week. Rumi: “a world class thinker relevant to our painfully compartmentalized world… [for whom] the body is not an obstacle. It is a tool to be used for the journey.”

● My god, Laura Huxley died last week. The first thought I had was that she went before I could meet her, but that’s my problem. You can hear her syrupy hypnotic voice here, read her talking about her life here (read it); and the NYT obit is here.

● You already saw this if you read the paper: the dying Indian profession of letter-transcribing. Terribly romantic on multiple levels.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Yoga Sin Ropas · 16 December 2007

I did not go to naked yoga today in San Francisco; and that is why this post is not password-protected.

The only reason for this was a full schedule, not fear of or distaste for the concept. I’m sort of interested, actually, in finding out whether the people at One Taste can pull it off with any grace. Whether they can keep the spirit of inquiry open, and a lid on the especially creepy intentions the whole prospect of naked yoga could attract.

Speaking of attracting creepy intentions. Google-searchers: I should tell you now that the rest of this post contains only some reflections. Not actual naked yoga. If that is the idea, keep googling and be rewarded. Though what you may find might actually be sweeter and less exploitative than it first appears.

I’m interested to know how the ashtanga set responds to the prospect of naked yoga, which seems so American in its all-or-nothing audacity, and (for all OneTaste’s efforts to be metro and cosmo and so very refined) inseparable from a tired 1960s vibe. Do you figure it is stupid or prurient or imbued with a moist, floppy ick factor? I caught some heat last week, like this:

Ed: Naked yoga? You have got to be joking.

(0v0): (Sheepish looking into my lap.)

Ed: You’re serious.

(0v0): (Swallowed grin, looking at ceiling.)

Ed: Hookaaaay. You do what you need to do…

(0v0): Oh come on! It’s just that it makes you uncomfortable!

Ed: You’re right! Why would you even want to hang out with these people? And hang out with them naked no less? Are these really the people you need to, uh, “connect” with?

(0v0): Ok check it out. These are not dirty hippies with sweaty pubes and they’re not new age flakes masking sex addiction with “tantra.” They’re Integralists: urban, supergroomed, interested in “consciousness” and all the ways to expand it in everyday life. They’re not even hairy because half of them are shaving to look like Ken Wilber!

Ed: Uh huh. Naked. Yoga.

(0v0): Yes! If I’m blogging to inquire what yoga means for contemporary spirituality, I have to check this out.

Ed: “Check out.”

(0v0): Uh! It’s not going to be sexual! Come on! Nothing could be less sexual! People don’t even know how to objectify other people in everyday life when they’re not wearing clothes! Besides, I’ll go to a women’s-only class. Just females. Nobody is going to be coming after me.

Ed: Sure. Because. There. Aren’t. Any. Lesbians. In. San. Francisco.

My guess is that for amateur nudist yogis, the naked factor is a source of discomfort and the practice is to explore and learn from its special weirdness. And maybe delight in it, if there is some luck in it all. Looking at the ethnographic research on American nudist colonies (Sociology is very important!) or friends’ experiences at naked parties in college, the activity centers on establishing “normalcy” in the absence of clothing. Nudes do this looking only in others’ eyes, limiting topics of conversation (and denying thoughts of sex), adding extra physical distance, and doing anything else to dial down the eros. Nudity threatens both social and personal order, and even for the few willing to play with that edge there are a million reasons that naked yoga would be a lot farther from an orgy than, say, a Saturday night at the club or a Sunday morning at charismatic worship service.

This discomfort that nudity creates for groups is the reason it could be a rich variation to throw into an asana class. Such as we practice it, yoga may at first be about getting comfortable in your body. But after that, yoga is about once again getting uncomfortable. The reflections and transformations that practice inspires involve intimacy with fear, with not-knowing, and with impermanence.

As people practice letting go, their physical bearing becomes refined. We go from colonizing space and moving in on it with all manner of bags and water bottles and accessories, and indulging our discomfort and wild fearful minds with fidgeting and pee breaks and conferences with the teacher… to less and less of this outwardness… to a narrowing right down toward stillness. It’s hard practice to let the accessories go: I’m so conditioned to peeing 20 minutes in to practice that my body gives me the promt even when my bladder is empty. It’s just my body toying with me now, asking for little vacations.

I’ll let that flourish go eventually. And I don’t see how, under dedicated circumstances, letting go of clothing would not be just another exercise in stepping away from the accessories I use to keep from reflecting clearly and then transforming. So… why wouldn’t I research that?

This existential discomfort stuff—there is a possibility to do it playfully. And in a way that lightens your touch on the rest of your life. I bet there are some naked yogis who get this hilariously well.

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

More Shiva · 12 December 2007

Shiva, the god of eroticism, is also the master of the method by which the virile force may be sublimated and transformed into a mental force, an intellectual power.

This method is called Yoga, and Shiva is the great yogi, the founder of Yoga…. 

Assuming the various postures of Yoga, Shiva creates the different varieties of beings… Then in the posture of realization (siddhasana) he reintegrates into himself all the universe which he has created.

                Alain Danielou, L’Erotisme divinise p. 42

 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Both And · 10 December 2007

Some sensitive came around today with the tip that active & receptive, will & surrender, are as Siva and Shakti: we contain both, and cheat ourselves in any reduction to one disposition or the other.

Which reminded me of the brilliant and controversial Wendy Doniger’s words on Siva as the embodied resolution of apparent opposites. Here.

 

[O]ne must avoid seeing a contradiction… where the Hindu merely sees… correlative opposites that act as interchangeable identities in essential relationships.… Tapas (asceticism) and kama (desire) are not diametrically opposed like black and white, or heat and cold, where the complete presence of one automatically implies the absence of the other.

They are in fact two forms of heat, tapas being the potentially destructive or creative fire that the ascetic generates within himself, kama the heat of desire. Thus they are closely related in human terms… opposed but not mutually exclusive.

The mediating principle that tends to resolve the oppositions is in most cases Siva himself. Among ascetics he is a libertine and among libertines and ascetic; conflicts which they connot resolve, or can attempt ot resolve only by compromise, he simply absorbs into himself and expresses in terms of other conflicts.

Where there is excess, he opposes and controls it; where there is no action he himself becomes excessively active. He emphasize that aspect of himself which is unexpected, inappropriate, shattering any attempt to achieve a superficial reconciliation of the conflict through mere logical compromise.

Indian mythology celebrates the idea that the universe is boundlessly various, that everything occurs simultaneously, that all possibilities may exist without excluding each other.

The myths rejoice in all the experiences that stretch and fill the human spirit; not merely the moments of pure joy that we want to capture, nor the great tragedies and transitions that transform and strengthen us, but all the seemingly insignificant episodes and repetitious encounters of banal reality which the myth… teaches us to sanctify and to value….

The conflict is resolved not into a static icon but rather into the constant motion of the pendulum, whose animating force is the eternal paradox of the myths.

                   Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic
                                                                pp. 35-36 & 318

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Will and Surrender 101 · 9 December 2007

I ran around last week saying, in conversations all over town, such things:

I’ve little patience for those who are mystified by their own emotions. Outsmarted by their own samskaras. Why be so involved in and fascinated by yourself? Why be so terribly intrigued when you catch a glimpse of your own interior? Know thyself already!

And it was an amazing week in connections and conversation. Fatigue and openness, everywhere. Boundaries and schedules and conceptions all softened, all over this town, and new interpersonal understandings getting forged in atriums and cafes and parking lots. My mind was not so much with my work. It was with this town and its yoga archipelagoes—the ones I usually avoid in my shyness and unavailability for lunch and off-to-campus professionalism.

These are some responses others gave to my hard sell of the soul.

Well, ok. But how can you pretend to know it all? Are you only protecting yourself, putting too hard a definition on what you are? You contain multitudes—why close yourself off from that?

There’s a great oscillation in this exchange, I suppose, between how much of myself is what I stipulate—what I make happen—and how much of myself is what I receive—what I let happen.

For many people I know—both the academics and the yoga practitioners—some form of creative visualization—some kind of setting of the intention and then being present for that intention to manifest—is key to getting through life. Intention-setting and manifestation is a disposition important to the western contemplative culture since long before the The Secret vulgarized it with so much narcissism, and one which exists just as strongly if less clearly stated in academia. Go back to Shakti Gawain for an early, useful articulation of the principle.

But it has dawned on me in recent weeks that this is not how I operate. Which is bizarre, considering that for many years my life was about making happen exactly what I wanted—the scholarship, the job, the relationship, whatever. This was especially the case in my late teens and early twenties, as I was leaving behind one life and methodically opening up options and adventures for a better one. Those years were all guts and muscle and willpower, and I would not change them. Intentionality saved my ass.

For those who have known me all along, it’s not surprising that these are the questions plumping out between the lines of our dinnertime and holiday party conversation:

What do you want? What are your plans? Come on! Have you distilled your intention already? We're waiting.

God these are hilarious to me. And I’m irritating certain old friends by not offering sharp answers and clean calculations. It’s just that they want me to be happy and fulfilled, and they worry at how often these days I say that I don’t know. At how often I demur when the future comes up. How can I know who I am if I am not actualizing some brilliant plan day by day?

But the weird truth is that I’m not even interested in creative visualization right now. Forward-tilting, active intentionality seems nowhere near as rich as receptivity.

I am not endorsing passivity—but simply talking about the condition of being really interested in the dynamics of my environment. About letting things happen through me, even, without jockeying or asking for them to happen a certain way. It’s about realizing that my intentions and visualizations—the ideas of a single person—are boring in comparison to the real environment just outside my head.

To even begin to sense what is there—what doors are sitting there open—I have to turn the volume on the willpower way down.

Now that I’ve written this out it seems so obvious. Will goes stale if you cannot turn it off and tap into your environment. I do every day this practice that is the simplest distillation of will and surrender—a practice that illustrates perfectly how it works to bring activity and receptivity into balance.

The owl who has no patience for those who mystify themselves is the owl whose self is drawn down into a tight little self-propelling trajectory. Sometimes you have to make yourself small and simple to move around and get into position. But, having done that, I’m in a place where I can not know for a while. I am not operating on a vision or with the power of my will. And, in that, I’m comfortable with a little more mystery, which I find by letting the boundaries of my identity go a little bit slack in order to allow the unknown to talk back a little more audibly.

At least for now. It’s not an unfrightening place to live and who knows how long I can keep my nerve.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Yoga Is Dangerous IV: Christianity · 2 December 2007

Yogis everywhere linked last week to Pat Robertson discussing yoga on ABC.

Watch the short video, but here’s the central comment:

[T]hey have some stretches that are part of the yoga regime which are very good for you. But when you get into that other stuff, and you’re into a higher consciousness, and you’re supposed to merge with your spirit in with the ever-present god, and gods everywhere: it’s a form of pantheism.

I’ve been waiting for those links to generate commentary beyond the Look at That! impulse, so I can figure out why you all find Robertson’s words at all remarkable.

Not that I don’t understand gawking at fundamentalism. It is a freakshow at times, but this clip is relatively open-minded. He doesn't fear-monger or say yes to the question of whether yoga "has its origins in evil." This looks like a little opening in the black-and-white mind Christians took on during the culture wars.

It’s not like he misunderstands yoga at all. It is about “higher consciousness,” and “merging your spirit in with the ever-present god.” That’s why he has to object to it, ultimately: it really is hostile to his professed monotheism.

Fundamentalist Christians are always confusing themselves on the monotheism thing. Is that they should worship only one god or that there exists only one god? And what about the Devil? Is Satan an alter-god? Just a placeholder for the problem of evil? A minor angel fallen to earth? Are good and evil equal forces, or is it true that (as terrified Christians chant whenever doubt arises) “God is in control”?

I’ll tell you what Robertson taught in the 1980s: the universe is black and white. Every single action, thing, and thought is either good or evil; and there is a constant spiritual battle between darkness and light playing out beneath the surface of all reality. The world is just an illusion beneath which the true clash of angels and demons—the true contest of heaven and hell—is playing out. If this sounds odd, get yourself a Frank Peretti novel for some light holiday reading and thank me later. You’ll laugh your head off, but that’s the cosmology I’m talking about. Speaking from experience, it’s a fun and romantic worldview.

It’s also primitive and divisive. You grow out of it.

That Pat is not standing up equating Siva with Satan and that he’s giving Christian teenagers everywhere an out—it’s just stretching, Mom, don’t worry about me praising Ganesh or anything—is a beautiful step forward. It falls to Christians to become pluralists—to stop seeing other religions as just varieties of Satan Worship. This is a growing process, but many will go through it before they die. 

It's their time. I have escaped that world to ask you to be patient instead of laughing them back into their caves.

Fundamentalist Christians need this. If they can learn to quiet the mind and follow the breath without seeing that as a victory for the dark side, they’ll find their way out of painful delusion more quickly. Because here is the situation: Christian fundamentalists are terrified above all of their own minds. That is the blackest of black boxes, prone to co-optation by the devil, even as “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Remember, we are the fallen. Earth is the precipice of hell, and we might fall further at any moment.

It’s impossible for me to convey the fear and self-distrust with which Christian fundamentalists live. Because they believe that quieting the mind exposes them to possession by Satan, they live in fear of contemplating their internal states. The person who gave birth to me has tearfully asked me that I never, ever “stop thinking” (i.e., quiet my mind) because nothing could be more dangerous.

The only escape for many is the rare experience of what they would call (n.b.) surrender to god—a state they reach in moments of praise or prayer. The minute those experiences end, though, they will clarify that they have not merged with god but merely given over to “him”—to be “cradled in the arms of the heavenly father.”

Enough of that back-door mysticism, though, and the fundamentalists start to open up. They start to realize that the experience of god is being generated in their hearts and minds, and they start learning to look inward to find it. They start inching in the direction that they have generated culture wars, and authority structures, and reams of scary bedtime stories trying to resist.

Yoga doesn't own the higher levels of consciousness, but it can give a person a break from the world of black and white. Nothing could be more dangerous!

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , self-deception , spirituality

Inverted, Again · 20 November 2007

I returned from Denver two months ago now, the night of September 17 and the week of the equinox. The next day, after 22 months of 6 am beginnings, I spontaneously shifted to an evening practice. (I was needing a shake in more ways than this, as has been noticed and remedied)

The change from a 6 am to a 5 pm re-set time completely inspired and supported my life. Hello, inverted world.  

Just before I switched, this is what was going on. Practice had become zero-sum. I was pouring energy in to it and into the room, but not getting energy out. Finishing with a dull mind. For a long time, practice basically increased my life by greasing down my bones, making my muscles into useful little things, and smothering me in endorphins. But suddenly this fall everything was off.

When I switched to the evening, this is what it was like. I’d get up when a little light came in the windows, and milk the practice habits of focus and freedom from food-distraction for a solid three or four hours. Right there at home. Have a late breakfast, then do whatever researchy administrivia until driving to practice at 4:30. I sealed off my office at school (where the Kandinsky pages stayed stuck on September and my old plant kept the faith somehow), and didn’t put on real clothes all fall. Dissertators are known to be neurotic little moles, so nobody got too concerned.

All this time, evening practice was fucking gorgeous. Much stronger and more focused than my predictive stereotypes—that evenings are tired, hypermobile and littered with the day’s thought-refuse. And I’ve gotten this biofeedback thing going with my evening teacher: her eyes are so good, and her empathetic understanding of what I need to heal and strengthen the systems of the pelvis is so accurate. She sees the smallest movements in the hips and belly—movements my proprioception either doesn’t catch or gets wrong—and feeds it back. And somehow creates a space where I can calmly work my ass off. Her method is to heal her students by strengthening them.

I’ve laid down more muscle this fall than ever—partly because I was stalking kukkutasana but also (maybe) because I was eating closer to practice. I didn’t have to catabolize or simply draw energy from the breath to lift in to this or that, but could feed off whatever I’d eaten a mere 6 hours before.

The space has been dim and mahogany and radiantly warm, with me and some regulars whose energy I now know better than most any other co-practitioners ever. A couple are super-transparent and subtly perceptive at the same time, and we’ve played with each others’ energy in ways that generated all kinds of heat and some good jokes. This is what led me to ask if practicing together is intimate: hearing my friend across the aisle chuckle when I licked sweat off my nose in a transition—knowing we’re in this together even though I cannot really see him for lack of lenses. Knowing he’ll catch my risen amusement in some sound or movement that is both part of my practice and a response to him.

Over the months, my energy shifted. When the time change brought earlier sunrises, I slept through them. The morning energy spike got dull, because the truth is that I love asana more than research. No shit. Dissertations are hard, and you try to get through them by running away from them. It can seem like a good strategy.

So I practiced in the morning last week, not because I wanted change but I knew the visiting teacher would tweak my vinyasa up to the most recent specs. Ok ok, whatever; The method is only an end in itself insofar as you have no life. But what does this different practice do for my work?

Well… it does a lot. It’s like I flipped over the hourglass a second time and clicked right in to a new writing phase. A little bit of unfamiliarity with my life sharpens my mind. Just a little bit. Too much unfamiliarity would be distracting.

It’s wonderful. I feel so much more awake and I have renewed passion for the questions at hand. I have to say yes to this.

I am all for consistency in asana practice, but writing has to run the show right now. Between relationships, practice and work, it is of course the latter that is least personal and least easy. I want to be in love with the inquiry on an intellectual level—and it’s the deepest satisfaction when I can move from that feeling—but this work is so warped by strategy and professionalism that the questions sometimes feel arch or facetious. When I merely take the questions at face value for the sake of contributing to knowledge: this is where the bullshit lives. When don’t give this thing the best of my energy, my motives can become overly pragmatic and instrumental in a way that makes me despise the game for telling me how to be.

I can’t do work that is motivated by competition and getting ahead. I can’t. I won’t. I will attack such things from the inside: the pattern is all to clear and I can’t say it’s a bad one. Ironically, this comes from many years as a wage-worker (clerking, sales, waitressing) where I could sign over my body but keep my soul to myself. The inverted-world man on my shoulder would be disappointed at that subservience. Still, when I feel a deeper part of me is owned by mis-motivated work, I get rebellious.

For all the instrumentalism, there are heroes doing social science—amazing people who are in it just for the desire to find shit out and not for the prestige or the security. I work with a few of them, one of whom is just autistic enough to be perfect.

The thing is that I can always create a meta-critique. This is my mode of self-deception, and a way to keep from fulfilling the work into which I have written myself—the work I’ve spent six years creating myself to create. In every subtlety and back room of my subconscious, I’ll tend to devalue my work on the micro level. So insofar as tweaking the vinyasa (otherwise known as the “order of putting things together”) on the macro level keeps me conscious, I have to do that.

This inverting pattern, for now, is the best thing I can figure out. A method for making practice give energy to my life, to make life more full than it would be otherwise.

Maybe there’s a clue here about why they’re always tweaking the vinyasa at the AYRI.

Hey suckers—made you look.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXXI · 10 November 2007

Not much going on here. Taking the car to the shop. Taking the skates to the beach. Taking the Editor to a contemporary dance thing, which I don’t expect to understand all that well. No contortion today as there is a small piece of concrete occupying my stomach and making no signs of assimilating.

Last month I found an independent, spotless coffee shop with loose genmaicha and sturdy tables, where I’ve had a few excellent Sunday afternoons. But then I had my 2-year old niece and her folks meet me there last week. I am always overlooking distance, assuming that people experience the world in basically the same ways. But the truth is anyone in my family is so culturally distant that there are few public spaces we can equally share. Sad. I didn’t care that they were loud and filthy because delighted to see them, but the owner was horrified. I suppose my BIL rolling in and ordering “a Diet” and a mass of whipped cream in a cup for the kid didn’t set the best tone. The owner shuddered at the mess when they left.

The episode complicated our business relationship. Both because I felt rotten about it, and because I was disappointed at her lack of sophistication. Does it really have to spoil your aesthetic identity to have some simple people pass through your space (especially if escorted by your regulars)? I could ease up in that way too. A lot. Flirting with cultural boundaries (of inter-class mingling, food, and acceptable exercise forms) is the theme this week for that reason. Meanwhile, I need a place to work on Sundays.

After months of asana-free moondays and an abnormally grouchy afternoon, I broke down and took a flow class last night. Full on corporate flow, with music (Dntel, Radiohead, Elliot Smith and… this?). Interesting that mention or marketing of Diwali was nowhere to be seen at the corporate studio, which I suppose is a good thing. Very sweet and skilled teacher, although I see after a long break from the flow world, the distance between this and my practice is laaaarge. Still it did take the edge off the monkeymind. I think this is because the astanga method has trained me decently well: just assuming some postures does this pavlovian thing of mind calming and body releasing. But I doubt it would have that effect if I weren’t trained in a silent, contemplative, non-performative version of asana practice.

I’m wondering whether the American invention of Flow yoga might have more in common with ecstatic dance, modern choreography and pilates than with krishnamacharyan contemplative asana practice. Flow yoga is either self-expressive or transports you out of yourself entirely. Contemplative asana is different in the mind-state it cultivates and in its intention. Both are good. I probably need to dip into the strange subculture of spontaneous ecstatic dance—not “trance dance” (which sounds horrific, though please correct me if you like) but the grassroots stuff akin to raving—in order to understand better how it relates to this unique American creation of Hatha Flow.

Definitely a crack in my cultural comfort zone, that ecstatic dance stuff....

● Mary Taylor and Richard Freeman started a blog. When I lived alone last year, on rare (and I do mean rare) nights I’d want to hear the sound of another voice in my house. R's recordings are good for that. I have not yet listened to those archived here.  

● Junot Diaz is so good. So fucking good. There’s been a ton of press, including a boring interview with Terri Gross. But this week, Michael Silvelblatt (the national treasure) truly got him talking. About how reference-dense writing is encyclopedic of the world; about the fear of abandoning the OLD stories and the OLD masculinity because this means a man has to put his body out into the world and be so much more open to whatever experience is there for him. About Trujillo’s rape-dictatorship and the de-fetishization of sex. And about reading as a collective act. “Reading is a debt we owe to a collective even though we may practice it alone.” LISTEN. 

● For Norman Mailer, who is dead today. A short 1971 news story in which he condescends to feminists ("diaper Marxists") at Town Hall, with all the NY literati there to watch. A comic snapshot of the ideas and alliances of the day. “We broke our hearts trying to keep our aprons clean.”

● The Blog Readibility Test. I am Junior High School Level. Nice!

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Saturday XXX · 3 November 2007

On this date in 1976, a 28-year-old C.E.J. drove a white VW Beatle through the snowed-in cornfields of Yellowstone County, past the feedlot with the cattle billowing steamy breath in the cold, five miles down Airport Road past the hilltop cemetery, around the corner and down past the country doctor’s house into Laurel, MT, a railroad town with the highest national rate of alcoholism, if not poverty and Evangelicalism rates to match. She parked at the high school, home of the Laurel Locomotives, and hauled herself inside to the voting booths set up in the gym with their levers and their curtains. They cut her to the front of the line.

I like to believe she voted for Carter, but the truth is it was probably Ford… though the negation, as they say, was in her belly.

Later that day she had her first baby, and took it home to her fireplace-heated, century-old Ranch house under giant cottonwoods on a rise above Canyon Creek. And the two of them would pretty much stay there in that grove, safe and doing nothing but cooing and eating and rolling around in front of the fire or out under the trees, for the next three years.

Thank you, Mom. I’m sorry I don’t really remember it.

I was increasingly together this week, relatively clear in mind and action. Please let it be an emerging trend. And I practiced a little harder than usual. By Thursday the edges were finally pretty well burnished and I thought somewhere in standing, “Is this what it takes to get to surrender?” It feels nice to be spent like that on a Thursday, spent in a Friday way.

But then right at the end, without putting any particular try into it, I made a convincing UKK-B for the first time since GT knelt down and talked me into it in August. Hello. I wonder if that is a regular part of my world now? I told the Editor that I had a feeling UKKB was really miiiiine and he said not to be a pose-whore.

“That’s not practicing yoga—that’s just doing a couple of moves you can do.”

Moves. Hee hee. We’ll see what happens Sunday.

Today, birthday things. All day. First some links.

●New issue of Veneer is out. 

● I’ve always felt Sigur Ros were cheesy and trying too hard to sound “beautiful.” But just a second. Maybe it’s just that they can’t help it. Here is a trailer to some film they made about their home. Beautiful. Otherworldly. They are screening tonight and playing an acoustic set. Think I'll go.

● I received this record (Sally Shapiro, mysterious Swedish disco princess!) as a gift this week. Sad disco, nostalgic synth. I like its moody precision, and like how it accompanies a night drive on the freeways of this decrepit city. Here’s a video of one of the singles.

● Via Souljerky, David Lynch and Donovan are hyping a new university where TM training is required. With a lot less style and too many words, here’s the same arbitrage happening at UCLA. Good discussion in the second article of the history and practice of MBSR.

● Very intriguing. Techsattva is a podcast that wants to "make sense of several systems of thought at once.... By denying the completeness of any one system, Techsattva hopes to... get a view of connections that exist between them." Wonderful intention, but we’ll see if they can do much with it. The recent show is on the subjectivity of neuroscience. About time. Includes a discussion of the implications of new neural feedback (like biofeedback, but more finely tuned) for meditators' state awareness and state maintenance. Nice.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , science , sound , spirituality

This is What Democracy Looks Like · 26 October 2007

● In the Authoritarianism is Old School news category, an MIT professor has issued a manifesto against bloggers commenting on papers presented in the workshop he organizes. Because, you know, we wouldn’t want the people reading online about what happens behind closed ivory tower doors in Cambridge. Academics have "rights."

Elitist.

Welcome to information age, Sir.

● In completely unrelated news, this week an ashtanga teacher quoted Sutra 1.11--

A yogi desirous of success should keep the knowledge of Hatha Yoga secret.

--to a blogging student, suggesting she not discuss her experience with others.

Nice try.

● Meanwhile in the ashtangosphere, there’s been excellent discussion this week this week about liberals and conservatives (boom boom boom boom). On this score I am a liberal who appears every bit the conservative. Others are true conservatives who outwardly look to be liberals.

In my case, I play along with the method in order to simplify my life and my mind, to support others on the same road without distracting them, and to respect a crazy brilliant tradition. Not because I believe the rules are true, or that people who follow them closely are better.

I take heart in this discussion because it shows how simple conversation denatures the sectarianism that’s strengthened by closed doors. The most liberal practitioners here in the post-authoritarian world have strong community with the most conservative.

Hello. 

The question for us is always 'how can we turn information into transformation?' How can we use the sacred texts to lead people into new places with God, with life, with themselves?

-Richard Rohr 

Let a hundred flowers bloom.              

-Richard Rorty

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

Knowing, Being Known · 24 October 2007

Is practicing with someone intimate?

You sweat with him, learn his breath, come to know the ways his energy changes and the ways it is constant across the days.

So what? In a way, I’m tempted to take the “shala solipsist” position on this question. That whatever’s visible in someone’s practice has more to do with how she was trained than with her essence. As someone suggested recently, central to the shala solipsist argument is the insight that the ashtanga atmosphere fosters rampant projection. You get no verbal or eye-contact feedback from others; thus what you think you perceive is very much about you. Besides, even to the degree you are perceiving others in themselves, what’s in play during practice is just one side of a person. And that side doesn’t really tell you anything about how kind they are, or how thoughtful or intelligent, or what motivates them or makes them laugh.

But I don’t know. Maybe it is just that I sort of hate conversation— the way people use it to bulldoze each other, hide from each other, or whatever: because there is so little listening that happens in most conversation. But I feel like a conversation-free zone is rich for sensing people in far more interesting ways than usual.

Not that what you are doing during practice is sensing other people. You’re just picking up on them, mostly. But I think that this can actually subvert our habit of projecting. When we are trying to figure someone out, we go straight into our own cognitive patterns. Being-with in practice is simpler, less goal-oriented. You are just creating some community, not struggling to reach an apparent understanding or establish a shared point of view.

I have a sense that students vary in the degree to which they project their inner experience out into the room. Some days we project, sure; but other days the agenda flickers out and we become incredibly receptive to the environment. Maybe too receptive. Some days we are just so damn self-conscious that we become ultra-present; some days self-consciousness advances to a state of cluelessness; and now and then a person will truly go tharn. Sometimes the will is strong; sometimes surrender is literal and fairly complete. It varies. But I feel that learning to ride that over time with certain people is intimate.

I don’t usually break the sound barrier with fellow practitioners. But when I do, it’s with someone I know I want to relate to in that way. And by that time we’re already so comfortable with each other that the sides of us that play the friend role engage easily and with a little bit of delight.

Is yoga practice ineffably personal? Are my own perceptions all I can ever know?

When I love someone a lot, I grant them mystery. I refuse to make assumptions about how they feel and what motivates them, and give them the power to reveal to me exactly what they choose.

Though for all practical purposes: give me a break. If you have any intuition at all, and a basic capacity to bracket your self-centeredness, other people are easy. You yourself are easy.

Practice is really not so serious or “personal.” Yes, it is about your experience. But as you spend time with others, the boundaries of that self become a little blurred. You’re not just a monad on the mat: if someone is beside you and you’re not blocking them out (which does need to happen sometimes), then in non-trivial ways your experiences will be part of each other. How is that not intimate?

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Categories: arbitrage , beta state , having a body , integration

The Yoga/Hipster Problem · 22 October 2007

Dear Frustrated Young Men,

I understand what you are saying, guys. You’re getting hooked up on Match.com with apparently normal females who ten minutes into dinner explain they “can’t have” the bread-oleo because of a gluten intolerance recently revealed by their “amazing,” ayurveda-savvy acupuncturists. And then it’s off into their narrative of the post-grad self-discovery of “the breath” and “being in the moment,” and, oh, incidentally, getting really svelte and maybe, just slightly, more compulsive. (And, by the way, have you read Autobiography of a Yogi? It’s amazing.)

And it’s really all so vain and boring that thank god you can busy yourself on her half of the bread basket. You go home to your equally player roommates and discuss how the whole thing is nothing but a vanity practice for girls approaching 30 and determined to keep their whispiness.

Ok, great. But does whispiness really have to bring all this new cultural baggage? Lapses into darth-vader breathing in moments of intensity. Extreme experimentation with the diet—periods of veganism, rawfoodism, gluten-free-ism, non-alcohol-ism, non-sugar-ism. Disdain for soda. Loss of interest in rock music. Piles of CDs by old white guys named something-“Dass.” Classes in dead languages. Devotion to one’s “teacher.” New levels of credulity in astrology, moon cycles, and something called “doshas.”

I understand the worst thing is that the yoga enthusiast’s interest in her own body is endless. There can be no surfeit of acupuncture, massage, cleansing, rolfing, reiki, vipassana and anything else that involves lying motionless doing nothing. There is even a sense that changes in bowel movements mean something. And somehow, with all this self-monitoring and bank-breaking self-care and “healing,” they still need periodic “retreats,” “cleansings,” “renewals.” How can you be renewed from a life of incessant renewal?

With all life events manifestifesting in body as shoulder tension, tight hips or headache, and this Scientologic obsession on getting “clear” of these manifestations, is there no sense that an extreme mind-body connection can be really unproductive? Can’t these people just get over themselves sometimes and use their brains exclusively, regardless of whether this makes their asses sore?

And then there is the real trouble. Because where did they get the idea to run around town in frumpy fold-top cotton-poly pants and strappy little tanks emblazoned with “Be Present”? What happened to skinny jeans? And let’s not even start in on the “esoteric” dead-language tattoos on the small of the back (which they call “the sacrum”). And why in god’s name are their shoulders getting so sinewy?

I know, guys. The whole incorporation of the trappings of yoga into legitimate popular culture is openly hypocritical and just bad style.

It just makes you want to drink PBR and read Bukowski. (I mean Maker’s Mark and John Fahey—Bukowski is so 2005.) And in the meantime you want me to explain why any of this has to happen.

I’m working up a way to make it easier to cope with the yoga/hipster rapproachment, but I don’t have much to help you yet. The yoga thing is so experience-based that manifestoes don’t capture it. But I’ll get back to you on this.

In the meantime, you could try making friends with the inevitable. I’m not saying examine yourself to find the roots of the conflict or anything crazy like that, but just while I’m thinking about this, I would recommend taking a class. Forget about all the places with an ad in your local weekly. Don’t get anywhere near anything calling itself anusara yoga. Systematically avoid free events at the store called “Lululemon.”

Rather, ashtanga yoga is really your only option because of its high level of aesthetic tolerability. Ironically, to avoid the soft edges, bad pants, and branding that makes you cringe, you’re going to want more tradition, less popularization. So I recommend you take an ashtanga class. Notice the men (triceps? Interesting concept); notice (if I may) your breath; notice the pleasant soreness in your spine afterwards. Repeat that each day for one month and if you still wish you could purge all the trappings of yoga from popular culture, then, while I am still thinking this over, my next suggestion will be that you read Autobiography of a Yogi.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration

Bad Hands · 10 October 2007

Had my blood drawn yesterday, as I do every few months. Went to the little window at the back of the clinic, to the phlebotomy man. Mr. S. He has soft grey hair, and his skin glows. He always seems so happy to see me and notes from the density of my forearms that I am "still working out."

He’s sort of an artist about the whole thing, drawing blood. Says my name and little else in his singing Indian accent: just some sounds to let me know to trust him: “ready… ok… breathe… yes… that is all.” I guess he’s done it thousands of times, this strip of little movements that he has turned into a dance.

He seems to love doing it perfectly. Just as I stand, he darts to the next room for two Motts apple juices, one of them refrigerated and one from his reserves. I used to try to refuse them—the irony of having straight corn syrup foisted on you after measuring for a lipid panel—but it’s clear he’ll feel wrong about the entire episode if I don’t take them.

He always says goodbye wistfully and with love, tells me he will see me in a few months. As if there’s some chance this is our last time together. He must think I have some tragic disease, wondering if each meeting is our last.

Or maybe he has known a lot of patients who one day just stopped coming in.

Yesterday, it was Mr. S who wasn’t there. I know he’s supposed to work on Tuesday mornings.

The young woman in his place was all wrong. Expected me to just know what to do, so nervous about her own movements that she was not at all able to cue me—with both voice and little body movements—through my part of the routine. No human connection, no response to my little weaknesses—the stopping of the breath—when the needle goes in. No emotional signals to let me know it is ok and finished. No food.

I turned on my cell later and someone was booking a private with me as a birthday present for a friend. How do you lead a stranger—stranger to practice, stranger to you—through her first sun salutation? How many times to you have to practice that strip of activity before you’re the master of that dance and your partner can just release into your guidance? How bad is it for her when you’re just thinking of your own movements so much that you’re not merging with hers? And how much of a difference does it make if you’re really there for it, really see them and feel them in a way that means something?

And where is Mr. S? Was he the one with a tragic illness… his emotional doubts about our meeting again more about his own situation than about mine?

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body

Fall · 7 October 2007

Textpattern went on strike this week. It’s a young program and still wily, but I like that. Having this outlet sealed off ought to have narrowed my life right down, but it did not. Turns out that I have a long way to go before I achieve sociological one-pointedness (thank god: I’ve witnessed what damage that can do to a person). Conclusion: it helps to have this bin for orthogonal thoughts.

Thanks to those of you who asked whether I was allright, fussed about the error message (for those who do not want to hear there are multiple errors in your root elements, maybe you need to work on that), and especially for the generous offer of server space.

Anyway. It is fall.

I keep taking people for walks on the palisades. It’s the time of year you can see Catalina Island in detail. I am listening to Bat for Lashes, eating pomegranates, and going tonight to the premiere of Control, the Joy Division biopic. Should be good and dreary.

Meantime, am looking for autumn-appropriate occult reading for bedtime. (I think it’s in A Whistling Woman where A.S. Byatt has the gorgeous tangent about November being for creepy fairytales, but I prefer the Editor’s version. A good scientist, he tends to go in for the dark side of rationalism in the fall. But he’s already advised me not to reveal what embarrassing creepy Alastair Crowley nonsense he’s been bringing home from the library this week.) This brings me to the questions DZM sent over, about books. So, ok: no playing around here.

In other news, my parents (who are obsessed with National Parks and frightened by The Urban—the first time they visited me in LA someone stole my dad’s Bible out of their car) just announced they have a conference week after next in San Diego. They asked if I’d meet them next weekend in my choice of the three following locations: Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Torrey Pines. Real difficult decision there.

Not that the Canyon and the Desert don’t have their charms.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Inverted · 1 October 2007

I’ve been a morning practitioner since before I remember. (Short memory, or more like short identity-horizon.) By now all the routines in my life are tipped toward 6 am, where I stop for half a minute. Then the mechanism rolls over into a new cycle. Click.

Week before last, my morning practice space was booked with a kind of class reuinion, so I shifted to the evenings. Class began at 5, doors at 4:30.

I was not particularly enthusiastic about the shift. Practicing in the morning is my idea of really living, in a way that I wouldn’t know how to describe. Also, I’m convinced that I cannot get my mind to perform well throughout the day if I haven’t first cleaned the slate… and that my body will make me crazy if I don’t spend down some energy and stretch out the worst of the tension first thing.

On the other hand, evening practice is suboptimal on many levels: mentally, you’ve got far more static to contend with; physically, there is the fatigue of the day as well as in my case too much openness in the hips; and digestively, you don’t have the significant calming effects of a 15-hour fast (yes, I do frequently skip dinner).

That’s what I knew two weeks ago. Thought I knew. After the first week of evening practices, I did it again. And now, I’m about to do it a third week. God, what am I doing messing with the machine I thought I had perfected… at a time I most want it to run like clockwork?

I don’t know. I guess I’m letting the machine run itself a little bit. And right now it wants to stand on its head.

I’m still working out all the ways this changes the rhythms and the functionality of my mind and my body, given the intense things I am asking them to do this year. But what I saw the first week is that if I take the energy I’ve trained to spike in the mornings and sublimate that back into sociology, my writing is more focused and less full of shit than it has ever been. It’s strange not to practice first thing. Moreover, I recognize that I’m milking a spiritual tradition not of my own making but now of my own body to feed the pursuit of western “science,” and I’m not convinced that science is worth it. But, maybe it is.

Finally, I don’t know how long I can keep it up.

More on this as I realize what is going on.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , spirituality

Saturday XXV · 22 September 2007

I accidentally flew first class back into Los Angeles late-late on Monday. And for the first time after this restless desultory summer, it feels like a place I want to stay for a while.

So now I will go down to the workshop and construct a machine. This is my life for fall: practice, research, write, relate, sleep, repeat.

Clockwork is what I want. Small little interlocking orbits. From which novelty is meant to emerge.

I don’t know if the machine will work as intended. 

As for Colorado, I’m not going to write about my grandmothers whose selves are shrinking, my 87-year-old grandfathers who are becoming the sweetest caregivers, the avuncular difficulties (me too, ESJ), the good cousins plus the horribly criminal one, or the pair of ghosts that haunted all family events. The trip was a body blow, but not in a bad way. I need to get reality-checked like that sometimes.

Except I could have done without all the Nabisco. That’s the thing about working class roots.

Monday I practiced in Boulder, which contrary to my expectation did not make me want to ply the U of C for a job next year. So much for expectations. But my perfect brother and I did have a good lunch outside on Pearl Street after the rain, and then drove the Hyundai back to DIA. In the Avis shuttle I hugged him and his three bags of Telluride Film Fest paraphernalia, and sent him off to a three month artist residency in Paris. That part is always a little wrenching.

By the way, that last post generated more stats (189 distinct visits a day? Who are you silent people?) and more off-blog email contacts than anything heretofore published here at IO. Maybe it’s just the gossip factor, as Tiff experienced a while back. Or maybe there needs to be a support group on the subject.

Saturday links, for the first time in a while:

? So I keep watching the trailer for Southland Tales. Mike Davis apocalypse-ness with Wm. Gibson plot devices, Pixies soundtrack, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s flashy teeth, dystopic Los Angeles, choppy reality TV edits and gratuitous color saturation. And, if you are into that, a side of Justin Timberlake.

? Podcast for AF et al. Robert Spellman discusses the “key distinction between the theoretical and the yogic, and how that distinction relates to artistic practice.” Bear with the first few minutes of ham-handed metaphysics, because afterwards he discusses how practice can render a “clarity and accuracy of being.” Good thoughts about the different ways shamatha (one-pointed) and vipassana (insight) methods interact with artistic process. He quotes Chogyam Trumka that vipassana introduces the conceptual mind back into meditation after that mode of thought has been set aside for a period of time.

Spellman seems a reader of John Dewey, which is nice. This marriage of pragmatism and contemplative practice hits close to home.

If the above is inspiring, Anna Douglas has some talks up at Dharma Seed. I have not listened to them, but her understanding of meditation and creative process is interesting and sort of deep. She is a doctor of psychology who has practiced vipassana for 25 years and shows strong Zen leanings.

? I decided to link my Goodreads profile here (also in sidebar) in order to encourage myself to keep it current. Hey you: get in, be a friend.

? Funny entry in the geekipedia: Collins-Dawkins Faith Smackdown.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXIV · 9 September 2007

Been thinking about Puerto Cabezas this week. A category five laid down there on Thursday.

A few years ago I spent a week on the isolated Nicaraguan coast, lying around in hammocks, drinking batidos sin leche, experiencing an awfully advanced stage of giardia, and avoiding eye contact with the various America’s Most Wanted characters slithering around with schoolgirls. Definitely remote enough for a fugitive: getting there took a 12-hour drive down a dirt “road” in a retired US school bus (SRO unless you were a chicken and thus got your own seat in an overhead rack), followed by four hours in a cigarette boat down the Rio Coco.

At the time, things out there looked like this. Now they look more like this.

I don’t know how the story of Felix got buried this week. It’s wild.

Forget the other links here and just read the AP story.

Clark bobbed in the ocean for more than three days until relatives of his dead friend, Vendless, found him in the water near the Honduran coast.

His body was covered with open wounds from exposure to the sun and sea, and he was burned by boat fuel and a rope that he had used to tie himself to his sinking vessel. He was delusional, unable to explain what happened or recognize his friends.

Later, on land, he sat on his couch in Puerto Cabezas, still shocked nearly speechless. When Vendless' mother, Rosa Miller, came to see him, he told her through tears that he held on to her son's body until Thursday, when the stench became too much to bear and he let his friend sink.

Miller broke down crying with him, kissing him on the forehead and reassuring him that they would try to find Vendless' remains.

                      ……………………………………………..

In this installment of Know Your Empire, a bit on the US-Puerto Cabezas Connection.

US marines left their names (like Clark and Miller, above) and sometimes their blue eyes among the residents of Puerto Cabezas, and their grandchildren, during two lengthy occupations in the first half of the 20^th century.

Puerto Cabezas and Burlington, Vermont, are sister cities. Burlingtoners often organize delegations to Nicaragua, especially in the wake of catastrophe like 1998’s Hurricaine Mitch.

In 1984, the United States mined the harbor at Puerto Cabezas. Really pissed off The Hague. But Ronald Reagan thought it would be good for local residents. They were getting a little bit ahead of themselves.

In 1961, with Nicaragua into the second generation of the Somoza kleptocracy, a regime more than friendly with the US, a group of mercenaries set sail from Puerto Cabezas for Cuba. The mercenaries were defeated at the Bay of Pigs.

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Categories: arbitrage , markets-networks-society

Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007

A migraine woke me at four in the morning last Saturday, three days into silence. The headaches started two years ago and I take them like the scrappy little Rocky Mountain pioneer my dad raised, but this time the entire tone of the thing was different. Intense. Hard-edged.

Guess that’s what it feels when you have zero options for migraine-distraction. Not even mental options.

I could feel the thing’s specific location in the physical brain, and the pain was both more intense and less horrible—the latter because this time I wasn’t angry at it for interrupting my day. What did I have to interrupt?

I usually take control by creating distraction. It’s a competition for which one of us—me or it—will determine the day’s activity. I win if I get on with it, even if I move around like the hunchback of Notre Dame and have to call my brother for sympathy. When I start losing, I fortify my position with Excedrin. Other women in my family bypass this stupid struggle and automatically drug up the first day of the month. They’re smart. But it was the men who taught me how to relate to my body, so I’m stubborn.

By 9 am, I had spent five hours in the fetal position, exploring the sharp edges of the pain but afraid to just go into it and know it fully. Hello, fear. That resistance was building up all over my body. The sensation was coming in waves, but the fear just kept getting harder and thicker brick by brick. No way was I going to sit my body upright and take my attention to the center of that space behind my right eye.

Admitting that, I hunchbacked down the hill to the kitchen, and asked if there were any caffeine on the premises. Yes, contraband was available, said the big angelic chef, but would I like to try some ginger tea first?

Here is what I thought: I want DRUGS, not SYMPATHY! Said: Thank you. I will sit over there.

She cut up a whole root and boiled it. A half hour later, still hunched over a table, I told her that I was probably hallucinating, but I could feel a blood vessel in the front of my head dilate and move the pain around. She said I wasn’t hallucinating.

I still didn’t have much awareness of anything except the place behind my eye, but after the ginger took the fear out of the pain, I felt interested in checking it out. So I went back to the cushion and mildly hallucinated for the rest of the day.

God it was trippy. Enough physical “pain” to keep me oblivious to the outside world, and so much inner entertainment that I got lost in it. For hours.

When I’m quiet enough not to need the anchors of breath or mantra to keep my insane mind from writing novels, I like to watch the light play on the backs of my eyelids. But this time it was a whole show. A little hawk or comet or dandelion fuzz—some kind of flying shadow—appeared and swooped all over. A shadow dervish. I had wild dreams that night—so much for Patanjali’s dreamless sleep—and then the dervish came back the next day and stayed until evening.

Sitting there out of time, watching it, had nothing to do with nothingness. There was a stable emotional tone of absorbed amusement. It didn’t feel profound or important: it just felt fun, like an innocuous game.

I didn’t want it to end.

Which must have been obvious, because on Sunday night an instructor climbed on the dais, before the pair of Buddhas (a dark male one and light female one) and said teasingly, “Well aren’t you good meditators! Let go of the sitting posture. Let go of the activity of medititating. Just be mindful. Just get up and leave.”

I went to bed scheming about how I have to do a month-long or more. And laughing at myself for the reaching: literally, this time, a reaching for nothingness. Is that why we invest all this time in sitting practice, for the bliss payoff? Maybe we’re just addicted to a mental state—and contemplation is just our method for getting there.

I don’t know. If my deepest motives are just so much spiritual materialism, though, I’m not ready to dismiss them as bad unholy desire. I am hungry for insight and pleasure. In love with the journey, seduced by the grail quest. All of it. Badly.

So I get attached to mental sates. If I didn’t, I’d have quit the astanga practice years ago. At least you can’t make too much trouble when you’re in a trance.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Sharpen Your Nerves · 4 September 2007

Last Thursday morning, Isaac Brock appeared to me floating in a cartoon cloud and hissed: “Sharpen your nerves!”

Then he cackled and grinned at me with a mouthful of teeth filed down to points. Screamed: “Sharpen your nerves! Ahh haa haa haa!!”

Fine Isaac. I’ll stop being a lazy ass, sitting here on the cushion layering interpretations on my immediate experience.

But I wondered: what if you took notes on a meditation retreat, to snag some of the really good interpretive thoughts before they flew away? Would it make it easier to let thinking go?

Turns out that no. It would keep your brainwaves a little spiky, because you’d need to whip up some focused discursive thought in order to write. And yet what you did write would be stupid and empty later.

I know this because the next day I tried writing a few things down. Stupid things.

Here’s from the notebook:

“There are turkeys! Large!”

“Wanting to hug everyone. Must practice non-hugging. Do not molest.”

“Ghee. God we’re weird.”

Now I’m surprised I had to preserve these words, and others which are dumb enough I won’t even transcribe them.

It makes me wonder if the deeper moments of awareness and sensation I experienced during the week week, moments which seemed tinged with the ineffable, were actually vapid nonsense. Probably. But just in light of my present state of mind. Trying to interpret, and evaluate, that state of mind with this one is problematic.

What’s salient there is trivial here; and the contrary is even more true.

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Categories: arbitrage , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

Holy Bones, Part III · 3 August 2007

This past April first, I picked a water bottle off the floor and felt a rung fall out of the tensegrity sculpture that is the low back. A shot of tension, direct to the left quadratus lumborum. Ping.

    (Interpretive interlude courtesy a teacher-friend.)

>> April Fools of all days. Hmm. the Fool is the 0
>> key in the Tarot Arcana. It is connected with
>> revolution, genius and sudden and unexpected
>> change.

For months I’d been doing a practice that ended at Durvasasana and then went straight to the calf or knee-grab in the backbending scene. Might’ve had something to do with it.

      (Interpretive interlude courtesy wikipedia)

“Durvasa is an ancient sage, who was known for his short temper. Maledictions or curses he gave in his rage… ruined many lives. Hence, wherever he went, he received great reverence from humans and Gods alike.”

Through the first of June, everything was chaos and tension. Insanity. The Q-L made a fist and just wouldn’t let go, the kidney beneath (according to my masseuse) became crazy-inflamed, and a second fistful of tension coalesced and stalked all over the place, from the erector spinae to the psoas. It spent two weeks high under the right shoulderblade, for no good reason at all. I practiced first series for a month, negotiating with the tension, as my spine turned into a cartoon of a piano keyboard dropped off a cliff. In May, I edged back into second, and in June with the storm mostly pacified I broke down and got some bodywork. One brilliant session of acupuncture, and then a cycle with my chiropractor, who moved the L-4 and compensating T-5 about two miles back to center from opposing directions.

I got back into the full program, and that’s when I could see clearly that the foundation was off. I don’t know when the movement took place, but the sacrum had somehow shifted toward the back of my body. And it was tending to spiral to the left, which left the right side of my body even more stable than usual, and the left confused.

     (Insert your preferred interpretive interlude here.)

UHPadangusthasana is half rock, half jell-o sculpture. This is the case even when the pelvis appears aligned, in that the crests of the ilium are balanced. There is a little piece of pure pain, the size of a lemonhead, resting in the inner left edge of the sacrum itself, maybe just alongside on of the false vertebrae. This isn’t in any of the S-I joints, I don’t think, but rather just sitting there sucking on the edge of my halfway-evolved ancestral tailbone. I don’t feel it when I bend forward or back, but rather when I stand on my feet, purposely bear down hard into the ground, and go looking for sensation. It hurts a lot, but only on command like this. Bizarre.

As a side note, it might useful for one or two people if I wrote about the difference, for a woman, between bearing down in the pelvis and pulling in and up with the pelvic floor. A friend and teacher put this into words for me last week, pointing out that a woman’s pelvis will separate (SI trouble, anyone?) if she bears down into it, and that lightness and lift are found when she does the opposite. I’ll come back to this later if anyone asks.

Meanwhile, the lumbar spine and the whole pelvic complex, really, have restructured around the shifted sacrum. It’s a new body in this sense, and I’m not sure how to operate it. In bending my back, it doesn’t hurt (and the lemonhead of pain doesn’t light up): it simply doesn’t move. (By ashtanga standards, that is.) Before April, dropping back into a backbend with the feet parallel beneath the hips felt normal, and nice. It was about working the rotation of the thighs and the energy in the balls and arches of the feet. Now, the same movement feels like a drama, mostly because the low back does not participate the way it once did. Aah, she went off to college and forgot all about me and never writes home. In kapotasana, whereas as going straight into the ankles and walking to the calves was once the protocol, I now drop to the heels and leave it there: this clarifies that the last 3-4 inches were previously coming all from the lumbar spine rather than the thoracic. So maybe leaving kapo at the heels from now on is a good idea no matter if realignment happens or not.

In any case, the recent drama and fear around backbending are obvious to anyone observing. I am, they tell me, a transparent girl. A month or so ago I started facing up to the closing backbending sequence, the first time with another teacher. When I hit the floor about a mile from my feet on the last dip and walked in no more than a palm’s length, she was perplexed. I came up and she asked about pain. “No,” I said, “It just doesn’t move.”

Well, that’s where you start. We kept at it, mostly because she kept me honest. The main teacher returned and I continued to face up to the back body, even though I was not enjoying it and I rarely do anything I don’t enjoy (shallow owl). God he gave me a serious look those first few days, but after a bit we re-found the lightness there.

Telegram to the sacrum: come back home, will you?

Well, the sacrum started talking back. I have always avoided any kind of snap in the S1-L5 joint, envisioning a new line of bone dust shaved off my skeleton, and a backbend or three subtracted from my lifetime, with each pop. But the first few cracks of the sacrum this time around were phenomenal, and as my teacher predicted I actually came not only to accept, but to expect, the snap. The first one was on a Monday around the solstice, and instead of the usual electric shock it hit me like a sedative. I drove home in a stupor. The next couple of weeks the sacrum went through its chatty toddler phase, moving around and drawing attention to itself all day. These days, S1-L5 sounds every few days, quietly.

But still, it hasn’t really shifted. Or, it has and it hasn’t. Maybe it’s taking the plate-techtonics route and I have to wait a few more eras for observable change. I don’t think I’ll get the satisfaction of a dramatic recovery on this one.

Last week in jest I told the Editor—scientist, materialist, de-facto atheist that he is—the list of indications of a misalignment in the first and second chakras. Because the thing is, I’ve had some utterly bizarre hangups this summer, mostly having to do with family bullshit and dissatisfaction with the shape and size of the investment portfolio, and various annoyances with our apartment. All things that never get to me. The next day, in just and yet dead serious, the Editor asked me to do whatever it takes to realign "the pelvis.”

Sometimes it’s the most mundane, practical experience that makes you a little bit of a believer in the interpretive side.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration

Holy Bones, Part II: Reading the Entrails · 31 July 2007

I mentioned over a week ago in this space that I would write out my dark night of the sacrum in the next posts. Interesting how the commitment has clammed me right up.

There is avoidance here, a wish to be able to speak of the thing in the past tense. And there’s also a hesitancy to “own” the thing. I don’t want to identify with it—and that’s for the better—but I also have a fear of granting that it is inside of me. That, in a sense, it owns me.

Ooh but we can be superstitious about our pains. I am looking for a way to face this that isn’t in the form of complaining but that also doesn’t dive hopelessly into pain-interpretation. Because it is possible to read the pain patterns with all the misplaced sincerity that a shaman reads chicken entrails.

I’m all for interpreting my entrails, but not as if they contain a big scary-serious message from the beyond. And on the other hand, I’m all for expressing that I’ve been stuck, but have a childhood-engrained disgust for whining that sometimes gets my tongue.

Meantime, groping about for honesty, here I am, talking about this “injury,” this “shifting,” this dark night of more than just the sacrum, as a “thing.” Interesting.

We are always creating objects. What’s up with that?

It’s ok on some level—completely ok. We objectify as part of the process of transcendence. It’s only nasty to objectify the wrong stuff, like the beings we’d do better to treat as subjects. But yes, we do turn processes into things. Sociology and Buddhism both criticize this rigorously: Sociology in the critique of reification (which grew out of Marx’s “fetishization of commodities,” through the Frankfurt school’s cultural nonsense and into the critical work of my hero Bourdieu), and Buddhism in the injunction not to treat feelings or processes as if they were “solid” when truly they are fleeting. Both disciplines are always on the watch for what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is part of why I feel at home (albeit on the margins of) both.

But sometimes there’s a place for concreteness. I’ve been excited this week about Hegel, the original owl-of-minerva curmudgeon who I never really understood. His theory of history, which I’m now learning is uncannily adaptable outside of western philosophy, is the “phenomenology of spirit.” Shit. What? Long story.

Basically, it’s something about how in the process of growing up and out—in the process of becoming our ultimate essence—we step up out of (Wilberspeak: “transcend and include”) certain stages. And then turn back and regard those stages as somewhat concrete, done-over-and-wrapped-up, elements of ourselves.

Maybe this is obtuse. But I’m caught in a liminal space here, between being wordlessly inside a process and being able to stand outside it and mark off its boundaries in words.

I will keep trying… even as I keep falling on my face in UKK-C. (A chicken pose, no less....) I plan on making it there eventually.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XIX · 21 July 2007

Allright. Today I’m abstracting 12 law journal articles—on the WTO, labor standards and environmental regulation—for a globalization archive. Very nice to get paid for reading the intimate details of a history I need to know anyway. But: no relief to the suspicion that I'm not fully living these days.

These articles are thin if long, and I’m planning to skip the footnotes, so the work will not take much mental energy. I’ll unplug, put my head down, and push though.

The dissertation is different. It’s turning out that I periodically have to take a spin around the quad, or the coffee shop, (or the blogosphere) to keep it together. All that time the deskworker armies are “wasting” online? In some of us, I think it’s as much about vital mental recovery as it is pure effing off. (Not that effing off isn’t the half of it.) Daily, I can pull off at best a couple of two-hour periods of deep concentration. The rest is surfacy, frenetic administrivia, and thus benefits from breaks to walk around talking out sentences, envisioning little worlds. A lot of talking to myself, lately. During the surfacy hours, which seem awful, I am (below the surface) processing ideas, reflecting on data and (most importantly) recovering for the next writing session.

I have professors who can write a great book in a summer, meditation instructors who can sit for eight hours without going to pieces. In comparison, I have the mind of a child. Too bad there isn’t an academic shaktipat to bypass the ridiculous experience of learning how to do this rarefied, sober-ass practice. I have almost no experience of feeling hemmed in, negative, inept (and understand those who can't stand to see me frustrated)—maybe if I did I’d be less mystified by why this is hard, and better at rolling through it. Phhht. For one whose greatest flaw is impatience, this is the perfect design for madness. Swear to god.

Here’s some Saturday morning trawling, as per usual.

? The Editor likes to have the occasional almond butter sandwich, yet thinks I am 40 years too young for recycling the little bags. So yesterday I surprised him with a godawful sandwich transporter, just before (thanks to bindifry) I learned of a companion product. The bananaguard. J—Mr. Bento meets Americana? I’m considering waiting until they re-stock the glow in the dark model.

? Alex Grey: winking at the artworld, or naïve representationalist? AF blogs the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, with photos and veiled nostalgia for the pre-art school days.

There's something about the way that true believers work...: as if they've never been critiqued, that their ideas are worthy of a masturbatory squeeze into the consciousness of others without second consideration.

? Turns out “IO” is the Latin exclamation of joy, and the precursor of the exclamation point. More history of everyday sybols. 

? Two friends just went to see the hugging saint, Amma. They stood in line for hours for whatever it is she’s got. Here's what Salon has to say about it.

Innocuous and intimate, the hug is a brilliant gesture for a reputed saint to make, a cosmic download about compassion and connection delivered in a package that's about as challenging and exotic as a Hershey's kiss….

If humans are nothing more than neurologically programmed DNA machines, why not run sacred applications that bring happiness and meaning and active compassion?

The writing is hipster-anemic [“As a fan of alt-dolls and vinyl figures, I'd have to say the Amma dolls are pretty cool”], but not in a bad way. Nice quotations from Amma and great discussion of her transformation into a brand and marketing empire.

? I could be alone here, but am amused about Joe Bageant’s new insider-outsider ethnography (review) on returning to his redstate roots. Apocalyptic fundamentalism, anti-union wage slavery, xenophobia, poverty, the American Dream, the whole bit. Good argement that a community can make two responses to being marginalized and screwed over: revolt, or dive into patriotic myth.

? Nice HBR article on forecasting: The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.

Prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of action in the present can influence future outcomes. That world is the stuff of myth and superstition. The one we inhabit is different… the forecaster’s task is to map uncertainty, for in a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity.

Comforting, under these circumstances. The author advises to hold strong opinions weakly, look back twice as far as you look forward, and to distrust the hope that revolution will arrive overnight because disappointment may lead to giving up in the moment right before the transformation actually arrives.

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Categories: arbitrage , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

Music For Airports · 19 July 2007

The windchimes rustled in practice this morning. They’re soft and deep, and slow. Very Music for Airports in tone. (Their maker must have intended that—it’s too perfect to be coincidental).

They probably rustle often, but we don’t always have our window cracked like we did today, and I’m not always aware of sounds besides the background whispers of a teacher and the diswasher-like drone of the ujjayi chorus.

Today, the breeze touched the chimes little just as I entered tittibasana, ringing a subject-verb-predicate into something like my front-brain. Tell V. your method. This one’s for her.  Can you practice a posture as homage to someone—besides sages and wild creatures, that is? Anyway, I came home to email from V. asking for advice on just this matter, so clearly the chimes were telegraphing the same.

Music for Airports is a guilty pleasure for me. Guilty because corny, together with the rest of early ambient; and a pleasure because after about two seconds of listening I lose all self-consciousness about genre and cultural meaning and all that. A year ago, after a week of vipassana, I drove north out of Marin and pushed play on track 1 just as I made into the clouds that were hanging on to the Golden Gate. I hadn’t said a word in days, and figured the sound would ease the transition into Sunday morning Mysore practice on Divisadero. Really, the record is beautiful, and might have been written exactly for an empty morning drive in clouds across the Golden Gate, when you haven’t spoken or even much cogitated for ages.

I was the first one to arrive at Divisadero by a half hour, so broke the seal with some Sanskrit in a big empty room. Later C arrived and, to my horror, went to the CD player. No no no no noooo: please no music for yoga.

She played Music for Airports. Practice was amazing.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Monads · 17 July 2007

Thanks to those who went in for the what is fashion? Rorschach test the other day. I didn’t give you anything to go on, and you turned up many good and unexpected bits. I have this tendency to seek puzzles and hidden ironies in the things humans do (think Freakonomics, the apotheosis of the academic gimmick), but there’s a non-ironic nub in the things you say: people simply want to beautify, to imitate the beautiful, to copy those around them, to create “in” language that both demarcates a group and demarcates an era.

University is about closing off most thought-worlds in order to nurture and perfect singular lines of reasoning. This makes paradigms robust, but closes the mind. Bringing the conversation here opens me up to charges that I’m assuming too much, that I’m saying nothing but stupid common sense, that I’m forgetting to see the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. Most days, the fact that organized society exists—that we’re not all anarchically killing each other but actually live together in crazy complex (beautiful) organization—blows my mind. But some days, here in the iron cage not only of bureaucracy but of extremely patterned thinking, I forget to be amazed. Could it be that our natural tendency is toward organization—not entrorpy? And that ingroup-outgroup dynamics are the primitive form of organization? Aaah, so.

The main reason I brought you this question is that I’m trying to think of what I might be missing about ethical consumerism movements—especially sweat-free campaigns and (less so) the new environmentalism of green industry and (cough) carbon offsetting. The obvious way to conceptualize this (at least green consumerism— sweat-free movements are harder to nail down) is as a social dilemma: we’re all gonna die when pollution chokes us out, so the best a girl can do is to encourage others to pollute less while herself covertly enjoying the “personal utility” of polluting. Moreover, she can use green consumerism as a coercive device— stigmatizing those who don’t practice it and motivating them to join the in crowd and do it. So it looks like a classic tragedy of the commons: individual rationality (using as much of the free resource as possible) leads to collective irrationality (we hit the margin and go extinct). Very Freakonomics.

Thing is, this doesn’t do it for me. First, it doesn’t help me understand why anyone would give a shit about their T-shirts coming from a sweatshop (whatever that is). And second, I don’t think most people really, practically, believe that we’re all gonna die from pollution. So I opened it up to see what people think about where imitation trends come from. I think the thing about existential anxiety and not wanting to be alone is pretty rich (and corresponds nicely with where neuroscience is going).

I can’t even begin to investigate this stuff, really, until I settle on a unit of analysis. Is it a society (whatever that is)? Is it individuals? Dis, with other tough-minded, clear-thinking individuals who see the social whole as equal to the sum of its parts, says: “Strictly speaking, groups themselves don’t think and act, individuals within groups do.”

Ok, yes. This is the part where I kiss your little typing fingers for letting the monads in by the back door. Monads! A decade ago The Editor and I discovered the little gremlins. I actually have no fricking idea what a monad is, but I do know that “monads have no windows.” What? Ok, so when I say a human is a monad, all I mean is that it’s a self-contained organism. When a human does something, all the “parts” of the human do it. They don’t get to do something else. When I take a bath, my spleen doesn’t get to stay out on the balcony. But, if there even is such a thing as a society, it definitely isn’t a monad. There’s not some dominant volition that necessarily takes its constituients to and fro without any say from the parts. Action at the level of a society just isn’t that clean: some of the subparts are joining the infantry but some are going to Canada. Some pursue only money, some art, and some would trade it all for an ounce of enlightenment. Or sex with Jon Stewart. It just makes more sense to try to explain and predict a monad’s (individual’s) movement than that of a society, especially if all a society is is a collection of monads.

Except, I would submit, it isn’t. Network theorists and biologists (the most cutting edge social thinkers in the game, I’ll admit) see groups as “emergent properties” of interactions. This has the advantages of being beautiful and of focusing analysis not so much on concrete individuals themselves as on the stuff they do. Groups aren’t made of people: they’re made of relationships. That’s a really great idea. And it’s great for explaining how groups form on, say, the playground or the internet. It’s all just interactions, over and over, and with time groups emerge.

Yet...this individual, processual version of reality doesn't work for everything. Would you study a school of fish like that? (Or junior high girls?) Or a dictatorship? A world trade agreement? A religion? Many groups are more than emergent: they’re institutionalized. We don’t reproduce them merely as individuals: we are born into them and die out of them and the group lives on. Stuff—like the weight of history, or the fact that groups aren’t made of homogenous or equal parts—gets lost when we say a trend is the aggregate of social actions.

I’m interested in what the regnant ideas can't account for with respect to something as irrational and bizarre as a bunch of US students making common cause with a bunch of Chinese workers. These people are monads… but have they through interaction created a kind of transitory group-level entity? Whose actions and efficacy are not reducible to those of its constitutients? (Mmm... Leibniz meets Whitehead.)

In case you missed it, the implicit question here is: what are the limitations of oneness?

I don’t know. A rote Marxist would say ethical consumerism is just the last gasp of late capitalism—a dialectical move to preserve the system just a little longer while it suffocates on its own contradictions. That’s a little too system-level to me: Capital, alas, is not exactly a monad. As usual, I’m trying to find a middle path between the view from above and that from below.

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

Five for the Archive, Part IV · 21 June 2007

Finally...

5. The future. What are your practice goals for the future?

Of course I want the present conditions to last, but I know that someday relatively soon practice will be often alone. Maybe that will be two years from now, and maybe ten: at the moment there sits before me a hilarious range of possibilities for where I'll spend the coming decade, and under what conditions.

Therefore: part of what I’m learning here is both to set and to richly fertilize a me-sized piece of ground that’s fruitful under whatever conditions blow in. Every day. There will be easy years again, and harder ones after that. What I'm asking of practice is that it carry me through whatever, because I know that if nothing else I'll live more deeply and richly and honestly for that continuity.

So it’s all about cultivating the height of energy and the depth of focus that render practice powerful—the relaxed intensity and no-bullshit grace (moral grace, aesthetic grace, spiritual grace) that I’ve only seen a few in the over-50 generation pull off. And they pull it off consistently, not just on particular days—because the kind of strength I’m talking about is more in the synapses, and wherever, than in the muscle fibers.

So I’d like to keep practicing until the end of me, sensitive enough to adjust the knobs to make it sustainable on a daily basis. This is about supporting life that it should be more abundant, not about taking life to support practice.

Also: discover what I have to give to the larger project and to individuals’ practices (support, energy, whatever), and give it. Maybe do some research in the more scholarly sense on yoga as a system of science-morality-spirituality-art for our own time.

And probe the edges: today, that’s the primal fear that comes up in pranayama, the apparent practical obstacles to a deeper sitting practice. In asana, continue with the back-injury puzzle as it gradually works its way back to center. And if this makes any sense at all, I’d say in general I’m working from the ligaments. Mine don’t need to lengthen any more, and especially in the pelvic girdle/ hips and (when inverted) the shoulder girdle/ thorax, my aim is to render the ligaments stable for the sake of postural integrity and long-term strength. For me these days, this is where I’ll find balance and sustainability. These details, and the kinds of shapes I happen to be making with my body, will change every year, but I hope my inner life and relationships with the world will become more and more stable over time.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , spirituality

Metaphysical Car Wreck, Part II · 7 June 2007

…As I was saying just before sleep the other night night: Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at our most sincere—when we’re not using the practice to construct a self-image that’s worked-out, insightful, balanced—we’re capable of practicing without looking at whatever it is we don’t want to see. 

Ok. So, it is easy to conflate practice and therapy. Personal time, quiet time, reflection time…, and the leavening sanitymaker, the place we air out the anxiety or the rage or the giddiness. 

Westerners are tormented by our selves, and we know it. The main way we run is by consuming. (Good thing for the capitalist elite, for now.) Meanwhile, floating around the ether are, let’s say, three broad entry-points to facing the pain: drugs, therapy, and religion. Let’s take all three treatments at face value, as if the do what they claim to do. So, drugs mainly go after symptoms. Nevermind all that: it’s not conceptually different from “retail therapy.”  

But self-analytic therapy and contemplative practice look for causes and, at their best, rip pain-sources out by their roots—the first by acceptance and/or release, the second by detachment. Contemplative practice posits that we have reactive habits which bind us; therapy posits that we split off, repress and project pieces of our inner experience in self-deceptive, painful ways.  

Both are accurate pictures of inner life, and both “solutions” are semi-successful. In fact, Western common-sense understandings of what it is to be a human are entirely shot through with everyday assumptions that both psychotherapeutic and contemplative theories of human experience are largely true. For pragmatists who define truth as “what works” (the Buddha; William James; me; you unless you’re a committed solipsist or other philosophical nutjob), then, the insights of each approach qualify the other’s status as any be-all-end-all solution. 

From this practical, non-fundamentalist perspective—cooking up nourishment with whatever happens to be in the kitchen—here’s the question of the day. What to do about anger—e.g., when a troll shows up in your community and both infuriates you and makes you act in ways you later regret? 

Here’s Ken Wilber taking contemplation and therapy on their own terms, and making them complements. When it comes to contemplative practitioners who use practice to transcend anger, yet have bits of anger they’ve previously split off and projected, he writes (IS, 129):  

Denying ownership [of anger] is not dis-identification but denial. It is trying to dis-identify with an impulse BEFORE ownership is acknowledged and felt, and that dis-ownership produces symptoms, not liberation. And once that prior dis-ownership has occurred, the dis-identification and detachment process of meditation will likely make it worse, but in any event will not get at the root cause. 

Does it work to rely on Integral thought here? Not that I don’t have a passel of doubts about this overall system: its central metaphor, the AQAL matrix, is one big philosophy-eating box plot. And its proponents seem to spend their efforts in forcing the world into its color-coded schema (I’d rather see them working to integrate the schema back into itself at the roots)—this focus leads to a lot of talk about the matrix, and less talk about experience. There is in this, unrestrained, the colonialist impulse of conquering-by-mapping (a trouble that Wilber, the original master mind, doubtless understands because his grasp of the last 30 years of social theory is awesome). And even though my hero Pierre Bourdieu deployed much of what I like best about Wilber’s sensibility decades ago, Wilber can synthesize like nobody’s business, in ways useful to people all over the epistemic-ideological-geographical-cultural map. In Chapter 6 of Integral Spirituality. He makes simple the complementarity of analysis and contemplation by describing pathologies in the ultimately more transcendent and interesting practice of contemplation (126): 

Once… repression occurs, it is still possible to experience the anger, but no longer the ownership of the anger…. I can practice vipassana meditation on that [disowned] anger as long as I want, where I… simply notice that “there is anger arising, there is anger arising, there is anger arising” – but all that will do is refine and heighten my awareness of anger [as a an object outside of me]. Meditative and contemplative endeavors simply do not get at… the fundamental ownership-boundary problem…. Painful experience has demonstrated time and again that meditation simply will not get at the original shadow, and can, in fact, often exacerbate it. Amidst all the wonderful benefits of meditation and contemplation, it is still hard to miss the fact that even long-time meditators still have considerable shadow elements. 

No kidding! Shall I name names, or will an awareness of our own shortcomings be sufficient? 

I love the idea of asana practice as a refuge, and in the past year of family trauma it has been nothing but refuge to me. I don’t doubt this or regret it: I’m just damn thankful. But if we think that having a practice means we don’t have to work on ourselves in other ways, it is a refuge from the world? Or, again, from ourselves?

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 12 May 2007

The real argument of last Saturday’s wisdom quiz was that fools seek situations where they don’t have to think deeply or engage fundamental questions. The wise eat it raw, and don’t need their world to be pre-digested by preachers or teachers or ideological shorthand.

I've been thinking about this in relation to the commodification of music: the smoothing, compressing, normalizing, generalizing, predigestion that happens to its perfectly edgy elements when an artist makes a bid for the big market. The difference between the genius Regina Spektor's penultimate record and her last, whose final track "Summer in the City" for all its soupy abstract over-beauty I can't heartbreakingly get out if my head.

However! I intend to get back to troubling about Monday’s meeting with my adviser. In which: I try to sell her on ethical consumerism (for a dissertation chapter, that is). Meantime, today’s links are all provocative and question-opening. May we remain open to the questions.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the “position” of Insideowl dot com.

? PORN. Oh; I forgot. Not only is the internet edifying as hell and the ultimate community-builder--a ceaseless human wonder--but... what can beat skin? Great video from Good (safe for the office).

? NYTBR Review of Hitchens and his clever new religion-screed.

“The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”

? Buddhistgeeks discussion on the birth of the seeker. Fantastic question and good connection of hungry-mind and the will to achieve, but is this as good as it gets?

? So is some kind of spiritual or kosmic consciousness the only hope for reversing the insane tide of consumerism and capitalism gone astray? Social scientists, take note. Daniel Pinchbeck at realitysandwich.

“In my head, I keep writing my movie of the next few years. In this gripping adventure yarn, the ticking time-bomb of ignorance and greed gets defused at the last moment by teams of stylish secret agents of consciousness and compassion, working in coordination across the planet.”

? Gadfly artist Bansky makes the New Yorker. Iyengar says never degrade that which another holds sacred. When is this not the best advice?

? Is all moral philosophy just a post-hoc legitimation scheme? Great article on the neurology of moral judgments in the WSJ science section.

? ALSO, candy. Math rock this, but ooh I like it. Watch. (Yes, they always sing like that.) "Atlas" on Altertube.

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Conversion Story, Part II · 8 May 2007

As I was saying, I keep practicing astanga because it gives me a body. In a layered, dynamic way that makes me curious and more alive. It’s a low-maintenance thread of ecstasy one can pick up and run with for years, without a dealer or tryst-schedules or the baggage of a charismatic religion. (Ecstasy may seem precisely the wrong word for embodied presence, but Milan Kundera makes a nice case for the term.)

I grew up in a prairie on the eastern slope of the northern Rocky Mountains—on a ranch in rural Montana. My mom was and is a therapist for people labeled emotionally disturbed (but strange and violent pathologies do sometimes grow out in the empty country—this is the world where Matthew Shepard died strapped to a fencepost), my dad a preacher. We were off every grid from plumbing to television, but—even in the idyllic years before meth—never bored.

Rather, I learned early to find transcendent experiences by generating natural rushes in the out-of-doors: my dad was a sometime wilderness guide and our family were serious climbers, skiers and cyclists. I loved to go into the miles of contiguous cow pastures and run, sometimes for hours. My dad, whose hyperactive, mongrel Irish constitution I mirror, had a tendency to shout in joy to God in the middle of some empty snowfield in the Beartooth mountains or atop a peak miles from any sign of civilization except a USGS seal, but for me the ecstasy of running around outside had no connection to Christianity. [And I didn’t understand until later that, for my dad, God only revealed himself (sic) where there was no sign of society, which for him symbolizes only corruption, shallowness, commodification.]

Though I shared in my dad’s corny gratitude for natural beauty, and relationships, and being alive, “God” was something that scared me and made me think on my supposed sins. Being intensely alive was a way to get out of that God, who mostly showed up at church camp and late at night in my basement bedroom.

Where God was really upon me—in church—I wasn’t one for expressive charismatic devotion (or displays of piety)—so I didn’t give my folks’ communities much by way to measure my spiritual commitment. But I did show a strong will, uncommon bookishness, a penchant for logical argument, and a bit too much curiosity—all qualities that signaled “Godly leadership” in someone of a different sex, but the stirrings of Satan in mine. By early adolescence, as the culture wars heated up nationally and white-peoples’ evangelical-ism became apocalyptically politicized and fearful of “spiritual warfare” lying just below the surface of daily life, their congregants and friends started letting me know that I was an outsider, and alienation from that whole lifeworld reinforced itself bit by bit.

Very afraid of becoming a prairie wife, and with some stupid luck on a compulsory pre-SAT (administered in part so the military recruiters would know where to assign people?), I broke out of the ranch’s split-rail fence as a charity case to a school near Portland, Oregon. I studied philosophy, and added a journalism degree with the intention of becoming a foreign correspondent like Graham Greene (he was a fitting illusion for that time in my life). I took a year of Hebrew, enough to read the Old Testament with the greatest awkwardness, and enough to see a difference between the bullshit of Leviticus and the beautiful truth of Ecclesiastes, and to start to get suspicious of the Apostle Paul and his come-lately religion-making projects. I found my friends and an eventual spouse among the artists and contemplatives outside the college's Greek mainstream, worked in a winery-brewery and later a newspaper, for the little that the scholarship didn’t cover, and drank hard enough to engage semi-meaningfully with Hegel and do those Montana origins proud. More interestingly for today’s question, I took long bikerides and runs out into the wine country as a matter of course, without asking why I did it any more than I reflected on the runs in the back pasture... while my delicate, creative, chain-smoking friends shook their heads at my non-beatnick ways.

My parents told me to join an evangelical church in town and I nearly did, but then realized I’d be faking it. So I told them I wouldn’t, in language so strong I still regret it a decade on; and for the next four years the little relationship we had was angry and resentful. This severed my last connections with "legitimate" spiritual practice for several years, though I was finding a lot that was transcendent in the human spirit and in the collective effervescence of humans gathered together in, well, solidarity.

This is because I went away to Central America, both in college, and on a postgrad Fulbright, and was born again politically amid studies of US-funded insurgencies and absorbing what was left of the cultures of solidarity in El Salvador and Nicaragua (Cuba, not so much). Liberation theology was instrumental and fuzzy at the edges, but it was an emotional match and goddam were the marimba music and the mural-covered houses of worship evocative....

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 5 May 2007

Today’s extra four hours of sleep brought to me by: the American Sociological Association, Air France (“please keep your eye cover, with our compliments"), and... the Quadratus Lumborum.

Managing to sleep past dawn is reason to celebrate, but there’s a large chink in my equanimity. It’s going on five weeks without the endorphin-levels I’ve come to take for granted: 15 or so deep backbends a day make a big difference when they go away. Practice is the province of a different body, which today has me in a strop. Anyway, a few Saturday links, as usual:

? Christianity catches The Secret.

This is truly amazing: conservative Christians were unlikely to buy into the “law of attraction,” both because it signals the dreaded “new age” thinking, and because it directly contradicts the “God is in control” cosmology. But I guess there is no limit to how far a self-serving idea will travel. And, if it brings on some gratitude practice, so much the better.

? Speaking of syncretism: punk rock yoga. More punk than yoga. 

? Vanity Fair has a spread of airbrushed photos of “leading lights” of yoga. A few of them are very nice, but overall: Godhelpus. Not linking it, so google at will. Apparently this is part of their championing of ethical consumerism, which culminated in last month's "Green Issue." Commodify your good intentions!

? Are you wise? A sociologist’s scorecard.

? TLS review of the new book Inequality.com, which critically examines the potential for the web to foster news kinds of democracy and social equality.

In a clever reading of McLuhan, the authors suggest that his famous term the “global village” should be read less as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of far-flung places than as a forecast of the 360-degree surveillance.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , social theory

Saturday VI · 18 March 2007

Uh oh. Interesting proposal in my in-box this morning, to assist a philosophy of science class next quarter—a small honors seminar. The prof is a chemist-philosopher who has written a great deal on the (very exciting) periodic table, and has a way of shredding those who poach physics to substantiate the claim that everything is connected. Given that I use sociology to make that claim, this endeavor would sharpen my schtick. And it would take me back to my undergrad years, of running the philosophy club (very Secret History) and writing papers on truth-claims of the Institute for Creation Research.

I ought give thanks for my grants and focus on the dissertation, but I haven’t taught for nearly a year and it itches. And I don’t have a strong practice of saying no, in general. We’ll see how the schedules mesh.

Meantime, since yesterday morning got away from me, here’s the usual Saturday sweep, a morning late. Hope all is well with you all.

? New issue this week of of democratiya, “the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes.” Short reading-investment for decent context on global politics debates. The review of Saskia Sassen’s historical sociology is a bit awkward but covers key questions and ideas.

? The Guardian reviews Terry Eagleton’s new book. After all that overcooked lit crit, his popular writing (especially The Gatekeeper) has been delightfully smart and kitschily quotable. His new offering is on the meaning of life. What a public service.

? For an even more refined version The Secret, an infographic.

? This is amazing. Thic Nhat Hahn has returned to Vietnnam after 40 years of exile, fomenting Buddhist revival. For the ceremonies, “Marxists are invited to recite passages and statements from Marx which reflect his spirituality and his love for humanity.” That’s saying a lot, considering the so-called Marxism of the government that locked him out. SB, I thought you would be particularly inspired.

? William T. Vollman is one of the greatest writers writing, but he’ll be gone before he’s appreciated. He’s uncynically human, mercilessly so. Here’s the new book (& LAT Review), about poor people. Poor people In general. Bold guy.

? To see. Documentary arguing that “the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human.” It's a modern history of the rational actor model, the theory of action that makes mainstream econ and poli sci into such abstract-theoretical exercises that I got out of that business and into sociology. The film is only airing on BBC, but the linked article is a nice, practical overview of the theory, and an outline of the its worldly consequences. 

? Chris, T-shirts.

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Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

Saturday IV · 3 March 2007

Back in the city and I'm spent, even with that strong full moon pulling the sea and the seedlings up from Earth. This should inspire the usual sympathetic placebo effect, but I'm still in a Pacific Northwest Winter body: a little damp and torpid. I'm contemplating the possibility of an espresso, after a long hip stretch and a load of laundry. First, though, the multi-slacking (thanks, N) of downloads, email backlog and a blogroll. Some highlights below.

 

The NYT profiles visionary Stewart Brand. Stay with it through the dull beginning.

He notes: I get bored easily — on purpose….   [Look for] young scientists with low thresholds of boredom, because otherwise you get researchers who just keep on gilding their own lilies. You have to keep on trying new things. Well... I do like this positive spin on hungry-mind syndrome. 

Driving around the Willamette Valley yesterday, Lindsay and I did spontaneous comparative sociology of the astanga and the triathlon subcultures. Shored up many amusing similarities. Here’s a nice background piece on my side of the phenomenon, by a great teacher and writer I met last year on retreat.

Also for driving in the rain/ driving rain, Modest Mouse (note guitarist Johnny Marr of the Smiths).

So the lead article in the new American Journal of Sociology is full-on qualitative, historical analysis—no stats? And it’s by some grad student? And he gets a veiled hagiography of theosophist guerrilla-messiah A.C. Sandino past the censors? (See those gorgeous old photos.) 

Wait. And the author is also a singer-poet? (I wonder if he’s seeing anyone.) 

For subscribers, the new AJS also reviews work by Eviatar Zerubavel, the sociologist of cognition.The book is The Elephant in the Room: Silence and Denial in Everyday Life. There isn’t yet a subfield yet called The Sociology of Self-Deception, but in some ways this elegant picture of conspiracies of silence and collective forgetting would fit. Thus the plug.

 

Also flirting with the censors, Alan Wallace and Shauna Shapiro have a new article in the American Psychologist. They draw on Buddhist “experiential inquiry” to render four keys to general well-being. And, Wallace recently presented at Google, in their Tech Talk series. 

 

Finally, a little more Ira Glass. It's just that his current radio-TV arbitrage experience has him saying interesting things. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday II · 17 February 2007

Saturday morning again. What amuses me today is all a little random, but I figure the “yoga and social theory” designation can be expanded and contracted as needed. 

Similar to the diaphragm. Peter Rangar recommends breathing. Not only is the connector of mind and body, he says, but practiced deeply and consciously it’ll make you hyper-perceptive. Not that yoga bestows strange powers. Nobody’s saying that. 

The film Suenos Binacionales took Audience Favorite at the All Roads Film Festival. It’s by Yolanda Cruz (with whom I was detained and interrogated near the Mexico border in 2004 by officers of Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and Jerome Manet (with whom I am detained and subjected to self-interrogation in Virabhadrasana II on Saturday afternoons by Annie Carpenter). They are beautiful humans and what they do is world-changingly brilliant.  

Control-Alt-Delete? Liverpool art professor Jonathan Harris talks about curating digital globalization, and the limitations of cyberconnectivity to open up the rarefied worlds of “academia” and “art.”   

M is starting to feel that Team in Training (help) could be more awesome. He’s planning to train a new breed of free runners, so get ready. Seriously, though, these people are masters of the urban environment. I’m in awe.

Museum of Lost Interactions. This is about the sociology of design. It is a little random. Go here if your name is Alex or RJ.

A nice, funny review of Murakami’s new novel, along with the suggestion that his characters are global regulars, thus they love him both in Seoul and in Sighet. “Just like the odd events that overtake Murakami's lukewarm heroes, globalization is a process that is, by virtue of its ubiquitous complexity, at once mysterious and banal.” 

Me to J (after a graphic reminiscence of late night “bacon

    cheese fries” at Shari’s):

How was that ok with your 20- year-old ethics?

J: Give me a break. I didn’t have food ethics.

Me: How was it ok with your 20-year-old aesthetics?

J: Pulp fiction! John Travolta! Hamburgers! It was cool!

 

You know who you are. “Food adulteration” historian Bee Wilson knows too. She reviews the Encyclopedia of Junk Food and Fast Food.

 

Tiny House slide show. Simple as cool.

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Categories: arbitrage , having a body

Saturday Morning · 10 February 2007

A while back when I lived in the tropics for a year, in a fiberboard and corrugated zinc sort of lean-to, I thought about luxury. Because I had all kinds of it: unlike my housemates, I had a laptop computer, occasional dinner in some excellent restaurant, the option for hailing a cab on days I didn’t feel like a 90 minute walk home through dust and crushing sun. A careening 15 minutes in a 1983 Lada, in that context, was far more meaningful than a jaunt these days down Sunset Blvd in somebody’s Porsche. Luxury isn’t absolute: it arises out of contrast. The ethical implications of this make me squirm, but anyway. 

Saturday morning is not like the others, and so I revel in it like crazy. I get up after the sun, scrap the esoteric breathing shit, don’t bother like usual to pack 2 meals and 4 bags of books and clothes for the day, and clean the house and my in-box until 10. At 10, the minute the despised Click and Clack come on the radio, I make for my friend J’s vinyasa class, which after six days of Mysore is a long cool iced tea. Now that I look at it, housecleaning and late morning vinyasa flow maps exactly on my (unkind) stereotype of the uninspired Brentwood housewife life. But god is it nice one day a week. 

Cleaning my in-box includes a couple of hours picking up links that have been sent me during the week, reading the smart mags and the not-so-smart ones, and a blogroll. This week, I’m going to try posting the notes I’d usually send to different sub-sets of you, to see if that’s useful. If I post something that’s 5 days old and so stale in internet time, it’s because when I read/listened to it this morning, I liked it anyway. Cheers. 

Princeton ESP lab closes. “How do you get peer reviewed when you don’t have peers?”

 

Jenny Diski explains Second Life to the over-30 set. I love her writing.

 

On neuroplasticity, or changing your mind to change your brain. No surprise to you fans of habits-and-will student John Dewey, or to yogis. (Skip the first 30 min.) 

 

Lethem on The Ecstasy of Influence in Harper’s. Read it as his typical looky-here cultural omnivorism, or an exploration of the boundaries between self and others.

 

Say Everything. NYM sociologizes the generation gap in privacy. Similar theme.

 

MIA video.

 

Buddhist geeks. Sort of promising.

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Categories: arbitrage , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , sound

Neurolinguistic Programming and Siva's Terrible Aspect · 5 February 2007

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s 90 minutes of ineffability, that is, from observing T’s good old vinyasa yoga class. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, here is what he said: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.” 

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose gorgeous 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night put my date in near-ecstasy, though it was a little emotionally overwrought for me) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-help genre. Though I hear it has its charms.)  

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side. Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50. A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself. It shows me to a minor place, in a sense, but a good and joyous one.  

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural.This is because the teacher, my teacher for the season, deeply understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near beta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.  

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship. This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office. 

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound

Prolegomena to any future manifesto · 25 January 2007

I. Matthew K says he didn’t see this coming. Me neither. I’m blogging because slow deductive academia is giving me a cramp and because Charles J told me to do it while I while I was entering a suggestion-receptive state. (That is, in the 15 minute brain-wave stretch we learn to do on ourselves before astanga practice.) 

II. ANYWAY, more later on faith in academia and the hooey of hermetic seals, mentioned earlier. The Dawkins posse have rallied at the edges this year in the most brilliant way. It’s a belief-purge!! I love that they’re screaming at us to get serious, root out superstition, and take verificationism to the limit. And: they are delusional. But that’s another day. I still take their point that skizoid belief systems are common and problematic.

III. Attempts at cleverness after yoga practice:            

A----So, what kind of sociologist are you?

B----((Lost for words))

A----That is… are you a Durkheimean, or a Marxist?          

B----(((Mental images of fuzzy Marx peering over my shoulder))) A nondualist! 

Yeah. It’s just as easy to keep the practice in an airtight container. “Me time” for achievers. But what when it eventually turns fom a consolation for daily life into its baseline? Then you might want the easy way out – cultivating alienation from the day job, or quitting it, because you can’t feel “authentic” doing it anymore.  Whatever.

IV. There’s also the possibility of pushing back into intellectual life, and the empiricist limits its placed around mind, consciousness, morality and evolution. The edgy ones are doing that in a way that’s loaded to shoot up kind of a lot of previously serviceable theory—looking at things like evolving value systems, the social nature of selfhood, and…mind. This is the time for revolutions in everybody’s working assumptions on the nature of consciousness and self, for practitioners of both inner and outerworldly research. Daniel Kahneman gets it. The Dalai Lama gets it. So do you, friends, if you’ll suspend the hipsterism with me for a second. 

Science is more a disposition than a methodology.  “Research,” as much as it’s inspired by speculation and intuition, is the bracketing of (1) faith and of (2) authority.  Research is investigating, first hand albeit aided and undergirded by traditions, what is the case. Do you really want to leave that work, in any realm, to somebody else? 

So before you yell at me to please go back to talking about the nature of American Empire, class divisions and social boundaries, and the subversiveness of the journalism profession, let me say that I’m doing all that while having bought in to the woo woo. Which, at its best, has a way of burning off the bullshit, because if we’re just reliving dead inquiries (while consuming the same culture over and over), there are simply more important, revolutionary, inquiries to join. 

So, what about: consciousness (yours and, um, transpersonal); evolving value systems; the proposition that everything is connected; the social nature of self; the push and pull of experimental faith and, its near-enemy, self-deception (?). 

If I can make a leap across the lacuna the rest of this journal seeks to fill in, all this is why I’m thinking about... consumerism. I submit that consumerism, a pervasive habit of being now, is a mode self expression through affectation of cultural objects, contributing to both self-commodification and group-creation with others of like taste. With consuming being so dear to self-creation, it’s not shocking to see some moves to make it “ethical." To feel better about ourselves when the label says sweatshop free. Yet... maybe, for all its great logistical limits and its self-congratulation, this new, aestheticized social value forges new connections between humans, and actually changes not only our minds but our future. What's the relationship of social networks and personal identity/value, and the implications of such a relationship for, well, social structure?

On which more later. For now, let me note that for the love of Karl, changes in consciousness are, oddly, a subject I’m not quite welcome to discuss up in the tower when we sit around in our empiricist caps. That’s ok, because for the moment I’d rather work some thoughts out here, in everyday language that doesn’t have to wait four years to get published on some journal that 30 people will read, sitting defensively at their desks.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

The Hermetic Seal · 24 January 2007

This is an experiment in dissolution. My life is in two disciplines: academic analysis, and inner experiments. At the melding point, is the stew any good?  

Here is why I ask.  

Even for a breakout preacher’s kid, it’s not ok to look faith askance in the ivory tower.  Colleagues I love run tight poisson models of the probability of social protest, predicated on certain assumptions about the nature of the universe during bankers’ hours.  And then in the rest of life we have, unexamined, the belief, faith, meaning, and the morality, religion, conviction, habits, and relationships, entitlements and things we choose not to see… that are the conditions of our productivity.  Keeping things in their separate spheres.  Uncontaminated.  

Social science, where we’re more insecure about our truth claims than the natural scientists, can be a dry, 20^th century realm. Abstraction; deduction; certainty. Suspicious not just of metanarratives but of metaphysics, meaning, and definitely of mystery.

I’m not looking to bring matters of the spirit up to the ivory tower, or transfer the intellectual wonder of the latter into some folk realm of meaning. Those are two versions of arbitrage—bringing the ideas of over to the other. Great career-builder, arbitrage.  But neither the first—some taxonomy of consciousness—or the second—self-help for scientists—strikes me as all that great. 

Rather, my question is whether the two hemispheres of inquiry can, pulled to center, make a more interesting whole. Don’t know yet.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , science , social theory