Camelots · 8 July 2008
Ask not what your practice community can do for you… but what you can do for your practice community.
Rolling on toward Camelot as we are this summer, and with the ashtangi follow-the-energy vritti at its height, I just got to make the above suggestion.
Forget about consuming others’ energy. How much can you give?
There is an energy market in ashtanga. On a social network graph, I could map its shifts and pulses around the world and within key cities. The expansive tendency is to follow the energy, but involution requires putting down roots. Evolution, I have a feeling, begins with the first but shifts quickly to the second.
What’s it going to be? Changing your life at crucial times in hopes of shaktipat-grace, ok; but day-trading in the endless energy market…?
I love the practitioners who take a love the one you’re with approach to their home space. Everybody loves those practitioners, actually, so (in addition to being the most content) they end up receiving more energy than they lay down day after day.
That’s the funny thing. When you stop chasing the energy, you start being the source.
Yoga practice appears to be a pay-for-service kind of thing, but it’s really not. Sorry. You pay and you serve.
(And gain the world in the meantime.)
<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>
Incidentally… will Camelot-the-Sequel be routed? Why are Warren Christopher and James Baker (not exactly someone outside the blood-for-oil winners’ circle) moving now to limit the executive’s powers to take the country to war? I will not mention the crazy internet predictions false flag events at the DNC or the fact that my beautiful grandmother lives blocks from this year’s convention center. But I don’t trust the trans-national blood-for-oil conspiracy for anything and if James Baker of all people is worried, we and Iran should be too.
<<<<<>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>Also incidentally, the Angels and Demons people are still crawling all over this place.
Super-dreamy: the quad, now slanted over in the best golden light of evening with its grass all vibratory and the rocks of Royce aglow, is scaffolded in giant spotlights. A tall dweeby guy with big hair is lurching around the outlook in the distance, pausing, hands-on-hips, to interact with someone behind a camera 10 feet away. Periodically, someone runs after the tall guy with what appears to be hairspray, as if the hair weren’t already well fortified.
They should have cast anyone else. Ed Norton, Ed Harris, Willem Dafoe (she wishes). Give the nerds a better face, with less air in the head and more fire in the belly. Clear-minded intensity (Obama, JFK, King Arthur, source-yogis present and past) can be dreamy too.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, evolution
, markets-networks-society
Previous entry: Fields of Perception. Inside & Outside. / Next entry: The Shape of Myth
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
testing again…
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 9, 04:32 AM · #
I luuuuuuv Ed Norton. Went to see The Incredible Hulk with the kiddies a couple of weeks ago. Told BF he’s ‘the thinking girls hot guy’. Seriously.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Jul 9, 05:11 AM · #
Willem Dafoe is awesome. I don’t like many of the big league actors but I like him.
Posted by: Carl · Jul 9, 09:10 AM · #
My Dep’t Chair sends out huffy, put-off emails every time a film crew intrudes on our surroundings; the general mood is that the entertainment industry’s frequent interruptions of our scholarly serenity are something like the tantrums of a badly-behaved and ignorant child. We are to be sour and disdainful (which is not asking much… the do park their “StarCruisers” everywhere and leave a lot of shit lying around).
However, I’d drop the attitude in a second if Willem or one of the Eds were involved. Esp Norton, yes. Interesting to see that James McAvoy was hired as the new Norton for Wanted: doesn’t even come close.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 9, 10:16 AM · #
I saw Ed Norton a couple of years ago with Catherine Keener in an off Broadway production of Burn This. He walked onto the stage and I swear, it crackled. He made the entire theater come alive.
Posted by: Anna · Jul 9, 10:18 AM · #
Anyway…. someone emailed from England asking about the title here, so to connect the dots of this ethnocentric post:
Ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you is the famous line from JFK, a line that captures the theme of self-purification-through-public-service that is essential to the Kennedy myth.
The JFK administration is popularly remembered at the American Camelot. I thought this was intellectual-in-residence Schlesinger’s doing, but it seems to be none other than Jackie who began the fantasy.
One of Obama’s key metanarratives is that he is the new JFK, his coming administration the new Camelot. This remains mostly implicit, but they point directly to it at key times, like with the pitch-perfect endorsements of Edward and Maria Shriver just before the Cali primary. The broader myth of a redemptive Obama is well in place, but the Camelot piece is kind of a key interpretive resource among the rich especially. (Talking out of my ass like a humanities professor here, sorry.)
It’s brilliant, but it also scares me. Because there is one really big problem with the Kennedy myth. And that’s why I mentioned the gloom and doom around the DNC. It’s also why I recently posted that Lampham piece, Romance of Death.
As for Angels and Demons (sill filming outside my window), Dan Brown trafficks in rancid low grade grail lore. And the Arthurian Legend, the first Camelot, is the highest form of grail lore. (Not counting Foucault’s Pendulum.)
Finally… is shaktipat-seeking a form of grail quest? I always thought so. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 9, 10:36 AM · #
I’m trying to remember what we coined here last year as the tagline for ashtanga yoga.
The first one was just Ashtanga yoga. Shut up.
But I kind of preferred, in the end:
Ashtanga yoga. Relegitimating the grail quest one true believer at a time.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 9, 10:41 AM · #
Grail quest. Hilarious. Particularly from a Monty Python perspective.
Posted by: karen · Jul 9, 05:19 PM · #
Owl, did you mean to flip around the JFK quote like that? Have just done 2 hours of yoga on 4 hours of sleep and my head is hovering somewhere not on my body. Woozy. Don’t. want. to. go. to. work.
Posted by: joy · Jul 9, 10:21 PM · #
Joy, that’s a pretty funny switchup. Wow! Thanks for catching me.
Guess I’ve been living I President George Bush’s America quite a while.
It won’t be long now.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 10, 09:16 AM · #
Speaking of which, more faf. Priceless.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 10, 11:11 AM · #
Ashtanga yoga. Shut up.
I love that. It may need to become my new mantra since I have a hard time shutting up (verbally and mentally)
If Ed or Willem were lurking around, I would demand photos!
Posted by: Liz · Jul 10, 05:22 PM · #
Ashtanga yoga. Yes, we can!
:)
Posted by: katie · Jul 12, 07:53 AM · #
Hi Owl… Yes, thanks for the reminder about the ‘energy economy’, that is very important. And even moreso teaching…
Edward Norton.. I didn’t realise he was such a sex symbol, I thought it was just me. Ever since ‘American History X’.
Posted by: susananda · Jul 12, 02:14 PM · #