Ghosts of Mysore - 1 · 25 April 2011

Cold rain this morning. Cherry buds dead on the tree branches, daffodil heads hung low by last week’s snow. Sidewalks were slippery en route to practice. I spread toes to shuffle my boots, and shuffled the music.

Randomizing gave me Major Lazer - Hold the Line. That song was heavy rotation in the month of March, for my one-woman 4:15am dance party upstairs in the ladies’ at the KPJAYI. I blared it every morning that last wrung-out week of the season, when (after years without coffee before practice) I also got a moka pot and a bag of questionable espresso.

Hold the Line is the same song here as there: the subtle body trills from the triple-diamond diaphragm at the root of the pelvis, crashing in to the second diaphargm that separates hydraulic from pneumatic systems in the center-thorax, trilling lightly past the third and fourth diaphragms, and finally setting a bliss wheel spinning right around the atlas bone freed on its axis. Similar to how it feels to be a moka pot, I suppose.

The song goes Imakeya imakeyaimakeya — yeah — Imakeya jeansvibratelikea nokiaaaa. Raw emotion revving. The emotion is an immanent, ecstatic yes to EXISTING—a yes that bubbles over as more specific feelings: delight to practice, gratitude for con-spiracy, love of all particulars. The feelings come in even stronger now, in dreary Ann Arbor, than in the root experience the song recalls.

Especially because the root experience—the dark Mysore mornings of March—is laced in horror.

The emotion of yes-to-existence feels like a buried river in me. From it, other yeses come in waves, surging on whatever serotonin or dopamine is aspin in my spine on any given day, due to asana-pranayama-dharana-dhyana.

I can see the little yes waves sort of clearly because they differ from the rebellion, resentment and anxiety waves that dominated my sense of self a decade ago.

This is one of the small freedoms that practice has created over time. There are a few more choices around how to experience experience. About what to take as a self. About places I can relax into receptivity rather than wasting energy pushing the world away. I like this yes skillset, and so am disturbed to feel the rebirth of a no. A sizeable no.

Like, no to Existence. I mean screw off, Existence. You and your tree buds, yeast rising, puppies everywhere I go. A lot of cavalier manifesting, is what you’re up to. But you know, unlike the action of your nemesis Nothingness, sometimes it’s just tacky to go out and exist. Existence, Nothingness could quaff you without even moving; or it could send in its raptor fleet and annihilate all your work in blooming dust clouds; whichever it prefers. But, Existence, you are a one-trick metaphysic. Always doing this something-from-nothing game. Even when that sucks for the somethings you bring in to the world. How about some Manifestation Planning for once? You’re never going to beat Nothingness, ever ever ever, but you sometimes try so hard that I doubt your sincerity. I mean really: cherry blossoms before a snow? Kittens who won’t live a week? Nothingness is following you with an eraser, so closely you can’t even write down a whole sentence. You can make life, sure. But when you get sloppy all you make is suffering.

These are the thoughts. It feels like my central theory that existence is wonderful is getting pulped by a dialectical force.

So… stuff me in bad Advaita and call Krishnamurthi (not the nice one, but U.G., who saw humans as machines and called his enlightenment the catastrophe). It’s a real question. Why exist when you can be nothingness?

I’m not talking as the black-haired girl who gazed darkly out her dorm window between pages of John-Paul Sartre. Like most people who take bachelors degrees in philosophy and deconstruct too much too soon, I lived those years like a novel. Nineteen got a title, even: Embracing the Void. It took a lot of Portland hipster affectations (especially Hegel and cigarettes) to get the idea of nothingness into my system as more than a concept. But the experience of nothingness seems to have required another fifteen years and kittens. And a succubus; possibly two.

If this is a dialectical undoing, may as well hang out in the space between (A) Existence and (A’) the Nothingness that’s now demanding representation. Between the two is a kind of black hole—a swirling dark column that goes from the bottom of everything to up above the light.

It’s really weird inside this black hole. A half-nothing place filled with whatever won’t die but also won’t live, all floating around like Willy Wonka and the blueberry girl. Sometimes it reels out a crop of frost-bitten cherry blossoms, or a pack of hungry ghosts. It plays boomerang with doomed kittens. I don’t know if the possessed butterflies come from that place or not.

More of this presently.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , having a body , integration

Intrigue · 15 January 2011

A woman called me by name this morning. She was standing on her stoop a few feet away as I passed on a motorbike. She was young and tall, wearing a beautiful green dress; her home was filled with dust and children.

A strange neighborhood in a strange part of the city. It’s Maha Sankranati, so the narrow streets were filled with people and cows beautifully dressed for the harvest festival. That’s why I was there, wandering through to see painted animals and intricate ragnoli drawn in chalk on the threshholds.

I looked back, driving off, and made eye contact with the woman. She was confident and happy. And a complete stranger. Unnerved, I told myself she’d been a worker at the massage place I patronized yesterday… but it’s not an explanation. I just walked in with no appointment, filled out no paperwork, never gave a name.

Things have been even more uncanny than usual. Beautiful adventures in embodied and non-embodied mental states, mostly; plus the usual India-vivid dreams. And days full of weird moments that make me shudder: like a big old coconut whose water comes out carbonated, an ecstatic funeral procession for a corpse covered in flowers, a cat wailing like a baby during lunch at Mahesh Prasad.

Last week, at the moment of a power cut, the combination lock on my door refused to open, only to let me in after I’d finally given up and spun it to a different number. In the next moment, my flashlight also suddenly stopped working, but went back on when I emptied the batteries and found they had been mismated negative-to-negative.

There are sleights of hand, and shifts of mind, in the gaps between what I can explain and what I can’t explain. An interaction with a woman I’ve forgotten, an accidental flick of the carriage in my lock, a side-track taken by happy accident between deep relaxation and REM sleep.

Being here shows my awareness some of its present limits. Tonight I put aside the Lydia Davis and Bhagavan Das on my headboard in favor of Being and Time. Here's from page 322... 

Uncanniness pursues Dasein and is a threat to the lostness in which it has forgotten itself.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit

Apple Mysticism · 30 October 2010

Wednesday, 27 October

It was stupid beautiful this morning. Everything felt light after two days of headache, and last night’s dreams of myself as a Hawai’ian volcano. As a volcano, my high-altitude residents refused to evacuate in time for the rain of fire. When the eruption came, it was peaceful enough that these headstrong squatters had time to call their private jets. Off they flew. They were sad to go.

 

The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees from yesterday's 70 and won't get warm again til 2011. At the market, I’d just learned a new apple, the Mutsu (there’s a lady who teaches me one a week) when I was seduced. A lotus of kale in blues and dark greens, flowering around a soft bulb. Aromatic and bumpy, it brought a rush bizarre images related to communicating with a new species, and then ritually seasoning and roasting and eating it. To my politically correct horror, the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack cued up in the background (and continued to loop in my head for another hour). In this cabbage trance, I offered the grower any price he asked. “Two dollars? 

Blissed way beyond the functional horizon of my sociological mind, I took the next hour off. Dragged the Editor on a drive down the Huron River to Dexter, a village organized around a cider mill, a train stop, and cuteness. We drank warm cider on the riverbank. I even ate half a fresh cinnamon-apple donut. Advanced series is itself a mill: I’ve never asked it to press donuts in to fuel, but it’s burned through worse. [And it did great on Thursday morning—which turned out to be the first day to hint winter in the air, and the first day I not only started but finished practice in the pitch dark.]

Anyway, Huron River Drive. Ten miles of orange leaves, tasteful modernist homes placed in perfect relation to the land, glittering river bends bobbing in geese, and gusts of wind made visible by thousands of tiny yellow leaves. While we were drinking cider, a possum or raccoon died violently in the road. On our return, it was still freshly mangled, pulsing before the ooze set in. Two vultures—one of them enormous—looked at our car the way Richard Freeman looks down his nose in banker’s pose. Puh. When we slowed respectfully to a creep, they hoisted up through the bare trees like Falcours, out over the river. Looked back down their beaks at the Civic, such a clueless foreign species.

We were listening to the Witmark demos, Bob Dylan at an age younger than our undergrads, first recording the songs that still follow him. The recording is about 45 years old, officially released last week. Between tracks he complains—even then—that he sings these songs too often.

When we passed the vultures, it was the opening lines of Hard Rain: I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways…

The Editor muttered something about the Old Testament prophets and then we rounded back on the river. It spread way out in front of us, sparkly and a little blinding. I’m not joking that the chorus started as a wind-gust finally ended things for another big group of yellow leaves. It’s a hard, it’s a hard…

Ok, ok, ok. It’s supposed to get harder. And this is not unbeautiful. Where black is the color where none is the number… and I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it… but I’ll know my songs well before I start singin’…

I think that’s when my hatred and fear of Michigan winters—the depressive darkness I’ve been hating in anticipation for two years—just ended. Old frostbitten toes, ashtanga in the dark, having a life, eh. Existence won't fade yet.

Anyway, Dylan did have to get away from these songs. How could he not? They are just his version of poems you write as a kid. He disappeared in various ways. But now he’s back on in the medium-sized corners of America (tonight, Lansing), and just added a show for tomorrow in Ann Arbor. I’ll be there. We’ll see about the renewal and the decay.

I just read that the ancient Irish had a 3-day November-eve ritual. Samhain. A liminal time, welcoming but fighting the winter. The phase between November eve (the 31^st) and November 2^nd, it turns out, was full of spirit, mystery, fire, family reunion. Plus all kinds of divination based on… apples. Yes, apple divination.

On November 3^rd, you start again in the dark.  Funny, when I was small I didn’t know the date of my birthday apart from “three days after Halloween.” Dia de los Muertos worked for some years in Latin America. But this feels way more fertile and creepy: apples, cemetery walks, roadkill, vultures, orange in everything (including in hair so long I’m tripping on it in tittibasana for the first time since Montana Avenue); and trees that will be skeletons within a week.

Tá mo bhríste trí thine.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , having a body , integration , sound

Rockjaw, Leadbelly, Renewal, Decay · 27 October 2010

We’re over Kansas. Next to an electrical storm that's either humungus or riding up just alongside the plane and keeping pace. And I’m crying, in the dark, watching the light bounce around that stormcloud and occasionally strike down.

Turbulence. The pilot is diving and climbing all over to avoid it, so my ears, eyes and larynx are popping and collapsing with the pressure. How annoying. And odd that my crying would sooth the squishy recesses in my head. Good tears are silky like an Epsom bath. For some reason, I keep picturing the little caves in the lee of Haystack Rock, sloshing full of saltwater on Oregon’s high tide.

Riiiight. So some part of me feels that my head is an awkward, wave-beaten rock? Well, there is sort of a rock in the right jowl, twisted up in trijiminal nerves. Weird to know it’s been there without my awareness for many years. I’d call it a demon, but nah. It’s more a dead zone, old trauma. Inside, it feels like nothing and looks like blackness. To my hands, it feels like gristle. In photographs, it tilts my head to the right when I smile.

Now that I notice the unconscious head-tilt, I wonder how far this jaw-rock’s gravitational pull extends. Is there a relationship with the callus I have to scallop from the outer tip of the right big toe? Why does my car drift starboard when I stop controlling the wheel? Does it respond to weather, like rheumatism or headaches? Where does it fit in the feedback loops of my go-to negative emotions: agitation, remoteness, anger, despair?

The jaw-rock itself, or at least the emotions in which it’s looped up, was pretty active this trip. The annual reunion feels gutted by decay. I wanted renewal: on the surface, that’s the point of coming. Part of me expects year after year of renewal without equal parts of decay.

The last death was the most beautiful. I caught it on the way to the airport. Each year, we swing through the remains of early Denver, drop in to the old train station (now REI-ified as sporting goods store), and look in on the “family” brewery. This is the sentimental little pub named for the old brick building’s first occupant, my great-great grandfather Adoph. He crated his ale and made a frontier fortune in that building. At Prohibition, he cashed out and a second Adoph (Mr. Coors) took over the market. In recent years, the pub that used to brew its own deteriorated in a cultural sense: traded its gleaming microbrew barrels for sports décor and Coors on tap. This year, there are no remains at all. The building is now divided: one side a "Healing Center"—grand opening signs and new age drawings in the windows. The other half is Señor Sol (Mister Sun), a restaurant dedicated, I gather, to burritos and manipura.

It was beautiful when the brewmaster's mansion, where my mom spent early Christmases, was converted to a real estate office. And it's perfect that the last sign of my alternate history as a trust-fund beer princess has repolarized... in to carb-bombs and acupuncture. Dialectally speaking, what better way to to disappear?

The other endings this year are relatively horrible. I won’t say much.

But goddammit, the third weekend in October is engineered for predictability. Structured in dumb routines made precious by repetition, sealed up with positive emotions mixed in tasteful amounts. The generations between Adolf and us were epically demented—I won’t exploit their drama—but with this suffering in our DNA, we chose to choose. Marx taught me that humans make our own history! Ashtanga taught me the value of repetitions I can trust.  In creating this annual reunion, we just touched up the old materials with some trust and celebration. Created space. Came and went at the right times.

Why does doing the same thing, but on purpose, create this experience of renewal? Even as it measures decay?

Thursday, I learned that the half-cousin who saved up the vacation from his 15-year job as a night bellhop downtown has disappeared somewhere called the Superstition Mountains. He had nobody. In a sense, he did the greatest possible thing: chose not to decay like his uncles, alone, feared, and highly-medicated. Wards of the state, most of that line. Instead he found an alchemy myth in the most literal rendition: a story about a secret gold mine, forgotten since frontier days. The newspaper reassembled his obsession from the maps, old books, and years of journals left in his room. My belly wretches at my grandfather’s images of foul play. [Later the Editor offers that J was, in a sense, a legitimate grail seeker: he had seen, only too graphically, his few other options for life and death. And he seemed to want to transcend himself somehow. Also, Hiram Bingham’s biographer tells me he pictures my cousin in Baja with 24-carat rocks in his socks.]

Nobody will talk about it. So much less will they talk about my grandmother's suffering. I honestly did not understand until now how much energy denial requires.

I fear putting words on this. There must be skills around dying—skills consonant with my way of living—but I don’t have them yet. Her cognition is frayed and body mangled in pain. There is a shared thing... this feeling that as we wedged in together on her chair she was very intentionally giving me strength. I mean brute strength. 

No joke: I could not truly, inter-personally, sense her grief, and her love for me, until I relaxed my body. Some kind of resistance sat between until she finally calmed me down to her wavelength. But at first, I sat only feeling her (indescribable) hand in mine for an hour. During that time, the was so patient and warm that I didn’t get flighty. I just understood she had something to say, and stayed interested in breaking the code. Or maybe I just got desperate to connect. In any case, I gave in. That's when things happened.

My body is usually halfway-tense from the pelvic floor to manipura. “Keep the bandhas on when you’re just walking around” starts out as a project. It works like this: Take the deep muscles and the subtle energies in them, bring them across the liminal chasm, and wake it all up. Do some reading, everything from Gray's Anatomy to Sivananda, and spend hundreds or thousands of hours in close proximity to extremely refined teachers and colleagues. Practice every day. Let time pass.

But for me, even as the awareness deepens a decade along the line, the gross-level muscle contractions I initially used to wake up mulabandha still have not learned to release. They are the new unconscious. Meanwhile, my feet are usually cold; I’m intense about most everything; I sexualize flowers and lighthouses; and it takes me sixteen hours to digest a good lunch.

I dunno. But this experience is too bizarre to describe in specifics, and too foreign to come from my imagination. She's still sitting there now, so I wonder how horrible it is to have everyone else refuse intimacy and tell her she is fine. How do their fears reverberate? Sitting up here, I still feel shifted internally, and also sad, frustrated, weirdly fine. And, because of her, relaxed enough to get my first respectable cry in years.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion

Return · 8 October 2010

First, what’s lingering about beauty and rats. Then something new. A quest.

A large rat dislocates its bones to enter houses through holes the size of quarters - the circumference of its skull. This is front page news at the Detroit Free Press. All mice and bats need is a centimeter-crack in your foundation, unhinging tiny shoulder by toothpick-rib on their ways inside. I bet they have the most supple spines.

At our house, the only creatures drawing inside are the silverfish and centipedes in the bathroom. They shudder and bolt each morning at 5 when I turn on the light. All spine, these creatures. There’s also the longest-leg spider ever, who just hangs upside-down like a bud, there in front of the mirror. Won’t move for anything. Do spiders sleep?

At the ashtanga co-op, upstairs from the hippie grocery, the spider plant hangs exactly the same way, sagging dendrites. The plant’s going pale with the rest of us, blanching against the dark of fall. But at least the plant-spiders shudder with the vroom of the heating units on the roof outside. All summer the AC in those metal boxes vibrated my visshudha, but the heat is a much lower frequency. Now, it rolls the practice floor with the depth of a ship’s motor, if that ship were as big as the grocery store. That is the heating system talking the language of muladhara, right up through my feet and inner thighs and in to the pelvic floor. Good timing for root concerns: it is the season to make feral love and mulch the roots, chop firewood, plug holes in the insulation.

Every Wednesday after practice I’m at the farmer’s market, ogling the increasingly colorful riches and composing intolerable blog posts, each just as boring as this one. Do I really want to write about this beauty, which outdoes itself week by week? Or even talk about the kale? There are four local varieties, plus a beautiful, pent-up monk from the Detroit Zen Center who is even more obsessed (with kale) than I am. These monks, in their scratchy winter robes and hipster wool hats, turn out to be a bunch of yoga-loving raw foodists—who knew you could do that in a Michigan winter?

You should see what ecstasies beset the yoga monks when they talk about kale. They bliss in to attention at mulabandha, then wind up to a creative passion at the thought of fondling those leaves, and let loose beyond that to eye-rolling reverie with the memory of the eating. I guess that’s what happens in a sect without statues… you worship your own life.

Or maybe you start a kale cult.

This week I got a dinosaur kale salad with spouted quinoa and an almond-agave dressing, kale chips like the ones Karen makes, plus dried kale seasoning with aminos and tumeric (so that I can season other foods to taste like kale). I paid for these items less than the price of their parts. But how to you calculate the labor cost of a zen monk?

Anyway, a story is beginning here. It was this time of year, in 2002, when a woman on her phone ran a stop sign in front of my apartment in Los Angeles. I was also there, right in that moment, under a street light completely obscured by jacaranda leaves, with my own head wrapped up in thoughts of the seminar I’d just departed – something on macroeconomic cycles in the world polity. There was a wide-eyed moment of slamming my palm in to a red metal surface, though I still forget the impact that left an owl-shaped imprint on her hood. What I do remember is the EMT telling me not to struggle against her IV because my neck was broken and any movement would paralyze me: a threat my traumatized organism took literally for the rest of the night as it lay motionless in the ER. The jaw, with a new chin-chip floating freely from the bone, took several more days to move again. My neck convulsed and unknown head-muscles seized for months, while the doctors doped me on muscle relaxants and steroids and finally, in a last move to keep me from surgery, told me to “take responsibility for this tension” and do some yoga.

Well, that worked nicely.

And now, a cycle of autumns later, the tension patterns are back as whiny ghosts. It may be only my consciousness of them that has come back: maybe as as I’ve opened the body from bottom to top the original block has been here all along. Owl Whisperer has created an awareness of a certain reactivity to feelings of weakness, and identification with the story of vibrant health; but the headache that gently, cruelly pulled me down not just last Saturday but Sunday too was sufficiently long and muscular get my attention. Truth is I'm losing more and more afternoons to this pattern.

So... I’m going to engage this granthi with the resources I’ve got: consciousness and context. The subjective piece is a commitment to investigating that which has been avoided. The context is the University of Michigan, an industrial-era behemoth that runs on the logic of the gross body.

I think this is going to be about institutions and energy, science and spirituality, granthis, kundalini, trauma cycles, mysticism, and code-switching. Working my way through one of the most massive medical edifices that exists, finding the inner edges where the behemoth’s consciousness is ahead of itself. And the edge in myself, which for now feels like layers of memory fused on to bone.

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , sound

Marketizing Insideowl · 7 October 2010

I've been tracked by one Dr. Natura. Dr. Natura makes products with names like KleriTea, ParaNil, and ColoNix. Puns plus lower intestine. You get the idea.

It seems Dr. Natura likes what I’ve said in past years about the Master Cleanse and Dr. Schulze: stuff about getting your sphincter to shift on the fly.

So, the Dr. (a corporate entity, though perhaps also a human one) contacted me last month. After I said I might or might not use or write about their/ its/ her products—and that my commentary might or might not be positive—I received sufficient almost-expired colon remedies to sweep clean the bowels of every last ashtangi in town.

The day after we first spoke, one of Dr. Natura's sister companies contacted me to see if I would also write about an product designed to make women fee self-conscious about their asses in yoga pants—a kind of skirt you’re supposed to wear over your lulus. I told them I would, indeed, REFRAIN from writing about the latter product if they would promise never to contact me again and, furthermore, spread the word to their schwag-marketing friends that I am not that kind of blogger. Thus I will not name this product. Nor will I comment on the ill-timing of the yoga skirt’s launch in the era of girlsinyogapants.com, why pelvic shrouds do not interest people like us, or the improbability of slinging your feet behind your head while wearing a skirt.

Anyway. The problem with Dr. Natura is that after they sent me enough psyllium to seal off an oil well, they commenced lobbying me with emails (even after I requested they stop), and even a hand-written letter.

Promoted with a tag line sure to induce anxiety in any good Christian - "Are you clean inside?", their main product turns out to be the Cleanse for Beginners. A root chakra version of Golstein and Salzburg’s Insight Meditation: the contemplative practice in a box. Wonderful ideas, both; and very good places to start. But, as such, Dr. Natura’s product takes six times longer than Dr. Schulze’s “hardcore” cleanse, so I’d be in no place to write about it until about January (after the supply they sent me has expired). Still, I’m sure that the product is great for beginners (who might actually want their psyllium husk powder flavored like bananas and described as “delicious,” who haven’t talked to enough cleanse-warriors to hear the hazards of psyllium, and who might not care about certain FDA-unregulated claims). It’s gentle and very easy, and the company does seem nice. All very fine.

What isn’t fine, Dr. Natura, is lobbying your reviewers. Or trying to manipulate us emotionally: to feel like your product was a “gift” for which we should write you a loving, public thank you.

It would be cute to turn this in to a cultural studies topic, talking about relations of cultural production and the politicization of everything, name-checking fashionable dead Frenchmen. But cultural critique—which was fashioned out of continental and Birmingham Marxism in to an “emancipatory” tool for modern capitalist times—is dead in the water when it comes to the big fat topic of 21st century capitalism and yoga. Bad advaita gives the theory a back door: when you hit a logical problem (usually manifesting as a contradiction between pluralist "anything goes" beliefs and half-conscious, humanistic "conservatism/ consumption / modern life is bad" beliefs), all you have to do is assert that there’s no write or wrong anyway or that the other guy is projecting. It’s in Stefanie Syman [OR NOT - SEE CORRECTION IN COMMENTS BELOW]; it’s in the nauseatingly immature debate around ToeSox; it’s all over the New York Times’ coverage of yoga. It no longer makes sense to talk about yoga culture in terms of “exploitation,” because critical studies has rotted to the core. 

I mean really. Dr. Natura is not an antagonist on any level; he and I aren’t locked in some dramatic little struggle of cultural production and exchange.  Resources are abundant! The internet is basically free. My blogging energy is an elastic resource. And furthermore, I have no axe to grind about small businesses who want to create new markets for self-care. In other words, I don't see Dr. Natura as a hostile entity: he/ it/ they and I are are different-sized organisms with different needs and wants, but hus existence does me no violence.  (This is the piece that smart people who rely on their argumentative skills to feel free still do not want to get.) Rather than some cultural production issue, the rub between me and Dr. Natura has something to do with the relations of information.

You want to get on the radar, Doc? That’s fine. But you need to do your own emotional accounting and recognize your power here (like mine) is relational. Respect my autonomy; and don’t think of communication as free just because it is easy. In this case, communicating too much with me, without much sensitivity to my feedback, cost you my goodwill. I’m not prude or squeamish about the old human tendency toward market exchange - commerce and money are not "dirty." But if you want to marketize here, it’s only going to work if you take the time to really know the locale. Probably not worth your effort, given the dispositions of the locals. We've usually got better things to talk about. :-)

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , morality

Designs on emptiness · 16 July 2010

Yesterday morning, taking a cup for tea, I’m standing by recycle bins where the old-man-ghost floats at night. It’s warm and still, windows open to natural light and a little breeze.

And I’m playing the kitchen sink transcendence game: leaning on the meaning of life like a stuck baddha konasana, until it goes crack and cavitates down, squishing the immanent and the transcendent right into one long quivering moment. Yesssss…….

There I am adjusting reality when the 30-year-old toaster goes buZZZZZZzzz–pop, the stereo ticks on-off-on-off, and the kettle I haven’t yet touched spikes straight to boiling. I run to the living room, hair standing on end, skin trilling like hummingbird flesh. All the furniture is charged to the touch, maybe because of the water molecules fritzing out in my fingertips.

At eight in the evening, the Editor and I come home from campus and I lie out on the sofa for email-relaxation. A moment before in the yard, it was just another summer night in the Endor village – neighbors creaking in hammocks, fireflies ready to helicopter the flower gardens, plants and mist emanating a slightly otherworldly atmosphere. Then he points out the window and says, “What the hell?” The outside has turned dark orange. “We have to go!” Out in the street, everything is orange and frozen still, there is a rainbow, and at the same time it’s lightly raining. It’s not even planet Earth out there, for a few minutes… then the sky goes back to blue.

Then last night I dreamed that my ida and my pingala decided to make body-doubles. Nestled against each other all over me and twirled together on the double helix of the spine, they are nothing without each other. But in the dream they faced off and showed the right side of my face a sharper and older personality than the left, the left ACL more vulnerable, the right hand more dextrous, the left sacrum-foot always drifting portside on its own. Ida split off and copied itself, so that it could be all ida; and pingala did the same thing. I am not making this up.

Then the two of me turned to my dream and said: We’ve forgotten about Cormack McCarthy for awhile. There are too many butterflies and rainbows here. We need to dream Cormack’s dreams.

No really, I am not making this up. McCarthy is dimestore Elijah—screaming from some hilltop outside of town about how we’re all going to burn. Except Elijah didn’t get his prophecies made in to Viggo Mortenson movies. Last night I saw the two terror images he’s dropped right in the back of my mind forever: humans as braying livestock, locked in a basement in some post-apocalypse future, then slaughtered (fresh, local and organic). And a founding myth even more horrible than the future: corpses skinned and hanging in Texas trees, a warning to new settlers by white men determined to own the West.

So, just for the night, the immanent-historical-ida and transcendent-futuristic-pingala tried out autonomy. They conspired to throw someone else’s nightmares into their breach and expected me not to mind. I minded. At least until I backed all the way out of spirit-space, through liminal half-wakefulness, and entirely in to rational-mind. When rational, I can somewhat decline to host the metanarrative template that is the backboard of all horror and myth.

But yeah. This kind of thing is always going on now; and I guess it’s why my experience here is so intense and interesting. Reality is acting indecisive: it can’t decide where to build its house. Is the foundation going to be made of material (the scientist MO)? Does the whole edifice depend on my mind-knowing (as Owl Whisperer would have it)? Is it all just sunstorms on the surface of Spirit? I don’t mind if it’s all of the above, but the channel keeps changing, and when it does I get these shocks to the system.

This is uncanniness, but nothing like the first round in which I OD’d on continental philosophy at a tender age, losing most of my religion and embracing the void conceptually—with belief and identity. That too was a relaxation process. Even if some days I felt like one of those disfigured old philosophers with their wall-eyes, tangled beards and syphlitic rages, usually at the time I felt liberated by uncertainty, emptiness, and impermanence (the existentialists’ way of talking about the the Buddha's three characteristics of experience - impermanence, non-satisfaction, no-self). Platonists and moral philosophers extol the “consolations of philosophy,” but the payoff for me was disenchantment and bliss, and after that a bit of release from the need to keep theorizing.

The past decade, I have become a sucker for strong method: now this is a comfort. Statistics, comparative-historical inquiry, ashtanga vinyasa, psychoanalysis. It’s clear that they are just cave paintings on the outside of emptiness. Statistics encircles chance and probability; ashtanga is the play of Samadhi; and psychoanalysis… I think of a game of ring-around-the-rosy with the grim reaper in the middle.

Anyway, the comfort is that method solves the immediate mini-problem of action. What do I do with the data? What do I do with my body? What do I do with my ego? But now the shiftyness of reality is physical and mundane: the groundlessness of being isn’t the solution to an analytical problem: it’s the condition of having a self, loving, using the toaster. No wonder all this imagery of ghosts and corpses, dreams that turn dark and leave me for dead. Repetition goes in to the microfears of death and uncertainty—accepted in the abstract but still alive in every refusal of endpoints and silences.

Here’s my sense of it, though I could still be chasing ghosts. Strong method has taken the groundlessness of being, deitalicized it, and is now threading it through my lived experience. Humdrum, humdrum, here we go again today. Losing the hard core of your religion is nice. It makes everything much easier, more honest, spontaneous, and dear. Just between us, I wonder if it’s like that, losing your reality. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , science

Fuel · 28 May 2010

The arcade downtown fills up with church light these summer mornings. Nobody’s on campus now except a few cute young juniors, clawing at their temples to try to make the words come out faster. It’s 80 degrees by 9 am and at Comet they’re serving an espresso called the hairbender—smooth as skyr (another new vice), but with an electric bitter that leaves the tailfins of my tongue glowing for an hour after I finish.

Shinzen likes to say that meditation on the senses offers endless subtle delights—a “palette” of experiences akin to appreciation of fine wine. And just as people expend great effort to learn to taste wine, so too can they cultivate refined perception on any dimension: sight, body-awareness, and so on. Such a hard sell for the bourgeois meditator!

Tasteless cretins!!! You are failing to appreciate yourself on an aesthetic level!!! You need some zen egghead, or at least a decent yoga teacher, to teach you to have a life!!!

This is the best way to turn brilliant academics toward a different kind of life of the mind. On the surface, the appeal is both consumerist and insanely egoic – but the bait and switch happens quickly. Sensing finally kills the need to shop to fill the void; and true experiences of flow render pissing contests over taste… tasteless indeed. It just takes a little sleight of hand to get behind the idiocy of the middle class mind.

Anyway, this morning I took up my tiny espresso cup and saucer like a cocktail and strolled the arcade. The peaked windows really are the same as those of my dad’s church – the building he’s been preaching in now for twenty years. The church is an arc turned upside down with the very tip of the hull knocked out and replaced with glass; the arcade, the hidden backbone of U District, is a great stone corridor of Lost Boysey businesses—antique jewelry, tobacco, a very old “international” travel agency, a “psychic medium.”

From now until Art Week in July (“the world’s largest art fair!,” says the town-proud neighbor who had me over for a brilliant meal of grilled Michigan vegetables and cheeses), I’m afraid Ann Arbor is just going to keep getting cuter and cuter. Let’s talk about this. (1) Wednesday night, sixty neighborhood residents gathered at one of about a thousand nearby parks and then toured the best backyards of the old west side, sampling home-brewed teas and garden salsas and learning how to plant to the rhythm of the blooms—so you have flowers from April to July. That’s what you get in a brainy town with a hardworking, community-minded, vaguely OCD populace: great damn gardens. Furthermore (2), every Friday, about 200 people show up at a house on the hill for the “breakfast salon”—in which everybody meets everybody over local omlettes and talks crafting, canning and pets. It’s not as white and over-40 as you’d expect; and last week they were playing the Kinks. Also (3), next week there’s something called the “loop de coop.” Yep, a Parade of Homes for chicken residences.

Even with my rations of cuteoverload.com cut all the way back to 5 minutes once a week, I’m so close to critical levels of cuteness that I’ve booked a hotel in downtown Chicago for the weekend. Chicago is kind of seedy and self-serious, right? I’m spending the time there with an aggressively hip English prof who only consorts with a tightly policed company of hipsters… though I can’t get there without traversing hundreds more miles of sweet green Michigan. Good thing I have the entire catalogue of Gordon Lightfoot on CD. Gordon, through his scruffy cuteness, is always reminding the ladies not to get too attached.

What else? I had the most graphic nightmare of my adult life on Tuesday night. I was drowning, black sludge sliding down my throat from openings near my ears, coating my feathers so I was glued to the ground. I woke up crying and couldn’t get back to sleep. Spent the next day feeling like a drowned rat. Or baby pelican, I guess.

Why can’t we mobilize for war when it’s against not some aggressor but our own unconscious addictions? Don’t talk to me about how angry you are at some scapegoat-symbol like BP or Obama unless you (1) no longer plan to get on an airplane ever again, (2) drive something that doesn’t use gas and (3) are organizing a new version of Freedom Summer to liberate turtles from sludge in 2010. 

In better news, Angie is giving me Stockholm Syndrome. She’s got ten years on the other biker chicks, and is by far the strongest of the pack. (Cycling, like ashtanga and triathlon, is technically dominated by practitioners in their late-thirties and beyond.) Her soundtracks are all early boomer rock, ZZ Top, AC/DC, the stronger Elton John. We’re doing intervals to Sweet Home Alabama and I love Rock N Roll, and she’s up there gritting her teeth while the traps, neck and face muscles remain perfectly relaxed. (She may be the only exerciser in town who has teased the traps away from jaw from the arm muscles: most people walk around in a mild Cro-magnon screen-lurch.)

The only relief with Angie is is accidental to her music, because those old rockers smoked and sang so far past their energetic limits that there are heavy exhalations built in to the end of every chorus. Hip hop has changed all that: these guys who compete for the strongest, longest hard-driving rechaka and can sustain a sprint for the duration of an entire track. When I try to keep pace with the hip-hop, I find myself pushing single breaths further and further, in a way that keeps the heartrate low and prevents me from sweating. It doesn’t make much sense.

I did figure out how to breathe – much shorter, which brings the sweat; and afterwards the alveoli feel so open, like the pores of the face on hot days. After so many years of playing the edges of oxygen narcosis by esoteric means, it’s nice to fill the body with that substance with something as straightforward as a work-out. A little cardio is good.

Listening to Angie’s 80s mix and using the intercostals to sweep the ribs wide enough for big, heaving lungs, I looked in the mirror and thought of my ribcage like the gull wing doors of Marty McFly’s Delorian. Long and low over the ground, hips working toward level as if on an axle, flux capacitor in the sacrum tapped in to the gas tank.... spinning out, just hoping to combust a garbage-gasoline-plutonium fuel cocktail into transcendence.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Dopamine vrs. Death · 14 May 2010

It is just ludicrous here. I’m trying not to care about spring, because nature blogging is in even worse taste than poo blogging and sex blogging… but decay, sex and nature all come together in the form of these tulips that won’t die. Compost-fed and prurient. Down the street, there’s a whole bed of them –at least fifty in number—and they’re the exact pale pink of Caucasian flesh after a long winter. Pick a gender, pick any erotic body part … these lascivious blooms, pursed together and ready to pop, evoke it. Priapic and coy at the same time.

The humungus tree I visit on the weekends is also budding – little capers pushing out of the husks of April’s flowers. I wonder if they’ll make some kind of cherry? It’s like not knowing the sex of a fetus. And Sunday is something called Flower Day at the Detroit Farmers’ Market: obviously it's going to be a massive porn expo. I’ll go check it out after dropping in to practice up at the stealth shala.

For the new moon, I caught a spin class at the sleek ala carte gym called Vie. When the mirrors tossed the teacher in to my peripheral vision, an annoying talk-function in my brain would respond: “lady Adonis, lady Adonis.” Sculped arms and silicone C-cups shown off tastefully in gym gear that holds everything statue-still. I love her mischievious smile, her joy in the work and integrity of her beautiful form, and her godlike strength. My form is excellent in its own weird way (hill climbing is all sputa k, the fingers curve like the handlebar’s a piano, solar plexus thrusts back like a jet engine) and I’m guessing it is a little uncommon to do this practice on two cycles of breath per minute…, but dayam if these biker chicks don’t make me look scrappy.

In the saddle, I’m soft formless goo from the waist up, emotionless, steady-eyed, and dressed without reinforcements. It would take me a decade to look like her, to rework my musculature and energy; and on the flipside I don’t know what it would take her to loosen the sinew and turn those armpits inside-out. Not that she would want to. She doesn’t look at me and see mastery – she sees a gloopy alien who doesn’t care to exhaust herself but keeps up with mild amusement or even blandness. Breath, voice, heartrate, chemical makeup, eyes, chests, pelvic tilts, subtle energy… our bodies make us mutually alien even though the gene pools and personalities have so much in common. We even have the same name.

But about personality, incidentally. Have you noticed the way that, as a person strives to “be a character,” she becomes more and more derivative? I have a manifesto brewing about how solidifying your personality competes with having a life, and how defining oneself in terms of cultural objects is as dead as Friendster. Maybe I’ll call this manifesto Originality is Overrated: Selfhood in the Creative Commons.

What is it, this need to play a totally defined, consistent, dramatic character? Maybe it’s a search for love, or a fear of mediocrity. It might be a kind of morality: being "true to yourself" defined as staying attached to certain stories and things. Or maybe it’s an effort to be "on," just in case the reality TV scouts are watching. Oh yes, now that one’s got real personality.

I don’t know. But it's the twenty-teens already. Mannered, modernist personalities are not as cool as selves that can receive and adapt to new information. Cool is listening to your environment. Some people have this natural shimmer – the ability to catch and throw light as they move in the world. I love a self that can bracket the stories, notice what’s going on now, and flow with it. Owl scouts don’t think like old talent scouts, perhaps.

We’re doing a half-retreat tomorrow on deepening what Shinzen calls “Focus Out”—meditative attention on the objective streams of touch, sight and sound (to the exclusion of their subjective counterparts of emotional feel, internal imagining and self-talk). Working in this way compromises the Friendster-self because you experience mind as what's in the immediate environment rather than what's "in the head." Closing off the subjectivity valve means that the "I am my thoughts" and "I am my emotions" layers of experience get a rest. There’s still a self hanging around the back lot. Yet putting subjectivity to the side makes the world so much more intense. It’s amazing.

But about emotions. There are two strong, but contradictory, patterns happening right now. First is the probably chemical happiness factor that has been increasing over the last couple of years. God, how much of this is just inversion-induced serotonin or the dopamine-nectar of opening up the cervical spine? How much of it is unanticipated payoff from the glances of real silence and connection that meditation makes possible? Who knows. I often feel, and try not to express, a pretty overwhelming love for everything, and every one I encounter face-to-face. If it’s making me act especially stupid, I try to re-channel the love in to gratitude—a more manageable, socially acceptable sentiment. (Maybe later I’ll be able to experience a lot of love moment to moment without expressing it—I don’t know.) Ann Arbor is teaching me that even mild excitement and openness annoy most strangers, especially if they’re Midwestern and at all cerebral (both very adorable qualities, by the way). It's good. I remember when I was coolly pissed off, distrusting, cynical, and self-isolating. Grrr. I made fun of happy people then too. Morons.

The second strong emotion feels somewhat like things did when I was this edgy person who decided she was an Existentialist. I was going to rise above the whole delusional world then, since Existentialists, besides being dead to metaphysics, are all a bit fascist. It’s a world view that depends on the otherness of others. Hell is other people, right?

Anyway, the feeling now is no longer freighted with images of angry Continental drunks choking on coal soot and typing away in small rooms with rats. It’s actually made stronger, and darker, by the fact that others no longer feel so much like others. The sentiment is a frustrated determination mixed with light despair. There’s an anxiety that doesn’t know its object—and the not-knowing redoubles the anxiety. Maybe I’m reproaching myself for reaching the fateful age of 33 with neither power nor fortune (the consolations of void-embracers) to show for my self; or maybe this is a wave of good old fear of death. Mine, yours, Earth's. Crap. Dopamine don’t stand a chance against death.

Or does it?

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , having a body

Mysticism Kitsch · 25 May 2009

My favorite motto for the practice is still this one:

Ashtanga yoga—reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Might be just me, though.

I remember when the occult—even occult fiction (the kind where professors work out the secrets of the universe in medieval archives) —was something you didn’t really discuss. I read Foucault's Pendulum, the academic-Templar thriller, the summer I was 21. It was sweltering in Washington; there was a shooting in the Capitol building blocks from my office; and I was taking 2 hour runs every night through the woods where they'd finally find that other intern, Chandra Levy. I bough a burlap bag of rice and lived on that plus the hazelnut coffee at Amnesty International, slept in a bedroll in an empty 4-floor townhouse, and spent afternoons off in the dark domed reading room of the Library of Congress. Clever old poems circle the library ceiling, winking down on the study carrels. The best and weirdest is Tennyson:

One God One Law One Element, and One Divine Event Toward Which All Creation Moves.

I'd believed that as a Christian 5 years earlier, and would believe it again as a kind of atheist 10 years hence, but at the time it just made me wonder what inside politics Tennyson knew that I didn’t.

A gorgeous spitfire Columbian named Carlos Salinas, Amnesty's lobbyist for Latin America, stalked the corridors of my office, swearing up one floor and down the other about political violence. He made his nemesis Jesse Helms—whose hearings I monitored for Amnesty that summer—look like a soft-spoken wuss. One afternoon, Carlos heaved in out of the 102 degree swelter after a lunch hour I'd spent answering phones and reading Foucault's Pendulum.

Fuck! Fuck you! This is the first time you're reading it? Fuck! I am so fucking jealous! I can never go back and read it for the first time! It is the best book in the fucking universe!

This from a guy who usually reserved strong emotion for, you know, highland paramilitaries and the parallel state. I crushed on him all summer, beguiled by his profane passions: hatred of Helms and love of the occult. Eco's book is devious.

That winter I'd visited the Victor Hugo/Knights Templar/Illuminati cult in rural Vietnam; and not long after the Editor and I would go to Toledo's Alcazár, where the evil hooded armor of the Templars stands under glass with other clanking generations of medieval "paramilitaries."

Grail and alchemy lore were so good in those years, before Dan Brown ripped off The Chalice and the Blade and the secret history became the mainstream "history" to the tune of 500 million copies. Last summer I got with Ron Howard, a bozo who really only knows how to make movies about high school dances, filming the ultimate Illuminati blockbuster more or less on my windowsill.

Illuminati blockbuster. So wrong! But I found out Saturday that the final product, Angels & Demons, is less bad than feared. There are limits to what soft, uncomplicated guys like Howard and Hanks can generate—compared to the darker academic-illuminati film pairing of Depp and Polanski. But still. I kind of loved it.

Specifically, I kind of love that this is what has become of the western occult, which up until recently was, even as kitsch, profanity-worthy, nudge-and-wink, back-of-the-bookstore. Now it’s an asexual, market-tested cupcake stuffed with Topeka-safe lines about the compatibility of the church and science.

But Sixteen Candles-meets-esoterica feels like a good resolution to many centuries of obfuscation of the “secret knowledge” of the West. Grail lore, the mysteries of alchemy, D&D… what is this but a big old metaphor-game for the evolution of consciousness?

It’s always been so indecent in the West to come out and talk about it, to admit we could believe in such a possibility. So we made it all sub-rosa, generated a whole history of conflict between faith and empirical research. At least it’s gotten progressively less violent by the century.

Now that the occult game has been fairly debased and uploaded—its “secret” nature semicorrupted—is it even fun anymore? I’m still in. Maybe, in these times, revealing what has been occluded won’t kill it. What Dan and Ron and Tom have done is kitchify, denature and demystify a bit of the myth.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science

Justification Machine · 3 March 2009

In school when the tribe really wanted to insult me, they’d call me by my bad name. Ms. Why.

By the end of eight years together (school started in first grade—before that we were feral), the 17 of us knew all each other’s buttons. We were 13 boys and 4 girls, children of corn and beet farmers with a few shadow children whose parents were constantly avoiding the law and wouldn’t be noticed or hassled coming around our isolated county school. And me, a preacher’s kid imbricated in frontier farm society for reasons I’m still not supposed to tell.

Anyway, I never understood why Ms. Why was supposed to be such a bad thing. The more affectionate nicknames based on body size were much more annoying. It was  my curiosity coupled with extreme luck that eventually made me one of the two of us 17 to escape and attend college. I like the Mrs. Why in me, and like the But why? vibe in others too.

But I understand that it can become annoying. We had a little hiccup last week over whether we should chant in a teacherless room. People coming from different perspectives, considering reasons for and against an arbitrary, senseless, beautiful, meaningful, crucial, empty, formational act.

As a public service, I am trying to think up a justification for every belief system that an ashtangi might hold. (There are reasons not to do it for every belief system too. Haha.)

Why chant to invoke the jungle physician with his thousands of gleaming white heads? Well that depends. What’s your belief system?

Proto-nationalist/groupist: You want to be a member, don’t you? Chanting is an inclusion-rite.

Magical thinkers: It’s a mystery. Nobody really knows how the spell works but let’s not risk not doing it. I hear that if you practice on moon days you get really bad injuries, too.

Mythic: We are speaking the unconscious in to existence!

Psychological: Chanting establishes rapport between teacher and student. Chanting without a teacher present calls that rapport to mind and helps us feel supported by the teacher’s. It re-engages the transformative energy of transference.

Scientific: The cadences and vibrations of the chant initiate a shift in brain wave frequency. This is especially true as students reinforce the practice until it becomes a trigger to shift mental states.

(Reactionary Postmodern: Science is the control-myth of the powerful. We liberate ourselves into the randomness, by doing something irrational. Fuck you, science.)

Postmodern: But isn’t it more beautiful that way? (And beauty’s all we’ve got now that we have temporarily deconstructed truth and goodness.) Do what thou wilt, but do it in style.

Postpostmodern: All of the above. With maybe some extra love on the side.

I am learning to appreciate the mindfuck of substituting in a different belief system’s answers to arbitrary questions. So, for example, the Encinitas/Carlsbad shala is our knowledge center for moon days. The dominant belief system of the shala is mythic—they’re a good bunch of practically minded Hanuman-worshipers down there—but the reason they give for refraining from moonday practice comes right out of the Farmer’s Almanac: our bodies are mostly water so like the sea we respond to the moon. That’s science, not myth. Woah! Are you saying it’s about molecules, Tim?

Swapping justification schemes on people is likely to piss them off: it can be harsh to tell a therapy head that transference is empty and we babble like idiots merely to celebrate randomness.

It can also be dangerous: in ashtanga, groupist and magical thinkers like to use “science” for false power. They tell students not to question authority, but instead of stating their true reasons—that they dislike noncomformity or think the chant is magic—they justify their own unconscious power plays by telling students that the system is a perfect science and cannot be altered. That’s a pretty hilarious misunderstanding of self-conscious science, which is thoroughly experimental. This self-contradicting delusion—that ashtanga is a science and therefore is perfect—used to show up a lot. Thankfully, our culture seems to be mostly over it as practice turns us from quack scientists in to real ones. (Admittedly, in addition to the mythic belief system, the scientific one is my favorite.)

Despite the drawbacks, a good sleight-of-ideology mindfuck can create empathy, inspiring a person to shift between belief systems. Sometimes it’s worth taking the risk.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Party Collapse · 16 October 2008

I worry, and hope, that Stephen Colbert will go out of business. Another brand that’ll be hit hard by the coming recession, because the GOP is imploding. Right now. The key strategists are sabotaging each other and the real conservative ideologues—David Brooks, National Review writers, Peggy Noonan—are filled with new remorse and self-hatred. They’re letting go of their party ID, sickened by the too-close association with the knuckle-dragging nationalists out there on the frontier. The racist family-values authoritarians Sarah Palin represents. The “real John McCain” has left the building they claim, abandoning his class (doubly understood) and pandering to the haters.

But is that really it? I think they’re using Sarah—and the regressive culture she symbolizes—as an excuse. The GOP is really imploding not because of some last-ditch gaffe on a cultural dimension but because of economic policy. The ideology that just expired is economic—that of the invisible hand of the market—and it will be a while before the conservative definition of the situation can absorb that. Meanwhile, GOP strategists are reaching down to the uglier parts of the platform and the ideologues are having a really hard time now that they have to see party clearly. Good for them.

So the party is imploding. The few smart people are bailing, claiming to blame Sarah when really they just need cover for their new Keynesian conversion. It’s ok.

I give them eight years to articulate a way more, well, “progressive” conservatism. One that decries the loss of rational thought and classical high culture. The party rose from the ashes of Nixon in 1980 and I don’t doubt they’ll do it again in 8 years. In the meantime, they’re actually going to have to learn something about the economy. The really hilarious thing about freemarket ideology (which isn’t really Smithian so much as know-nothing, do-nothing voodoo economics) is that politicians who promote it are experts in not knowing how economies work. Seriously, how much does the finance-captured policymaking crowd actually understand about the interiors of the “self-regulating” black box? It’s probably too much to learn in eight years, but in the meantime, I look forward to Brooks, Noonan and friends rearticulating a Republican cultural elitism unhampered by the mouthbreathers in Montana. They need to re-learn to fight with pens rather than with swords.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism

Breaking it Down · 8 September 2008

Why do I feel more anger when Sarah Palin mocks the Styrofoam Acropolis set at the DNC than when I think about what is going on right now in Guantanamo?

1. The GOP’s campaign is an attack on my feminity on many levels. Their fun insults me personally... whereas my tax dollars going to torture innocents feels somehow less about me. And for some reason part of me needs to experience these global events as being all about me.
2. Also: she’s messing up the plan! It’s our turn already. No fair! We didn't plan on being foiled by a last minute comicbook nemesis! Those wascally wabbits!!
   

What’s the use of my outrage at injustice if it’s built on self-protective fear and schoolyard reactivity?

I am not sure. I think it’s still useful, but there are also (1) it can’t be trusted insofar as it’s not self-aware and (2) it will spark a backlash in anyone I scorn. But… given that there is just so much straightup killing and torturing going on right now, why not work through the childish, un-self-aware, hateful anger and direct that energy into open outrage? Then act on it in a focused way, and let it go. Hmm. It would be nice to have a leader who could take it to that level.

(By the way, at the time, I really did think the columns were campy. But now: I really do feel they were a nice, fun touch. Kind of like ice sculptures! And balloon drops! Only the columns have the added bonus of being phallic! {P.S. let’s not talk about the hadron collider this week, ok? I’m completely taken by it but the name is a bit much.} The only thing that’s changed is that SP has ridiculed the columns, so I deduce that my newfound like for them is as much defensiveness as it is good humor. Poor ridiculed columns. I hope the BOPL rescues them from EBay.)

Who do some people not know what to see in all this… feel like it’s not relevant?

1. It’s too much information and there are too many issues. It’s hard to see the true difference between these two campaigns.
2. Staking out a moral position is too uncanny. It’s dirty and connects you too much to social events. The intensity of feeling makes one feel that much more ungrounded and disconnected—that much more Camus’ stranger.
3. There is too much irony in acting. Malaise follows from the impossibility of acting, is the 21^st century version of Arjuna at loose ends.
4. Nothing really matters.

Just random possibilites, those. I don’t have an answer to this second question.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

Death Embrace · 8 September 2008

It has been asked: Do rural people really feel hated?

Yes. (Insert a decade of ever more alienated returns home. Also, many painful slips of the tongue on all parts. Cf, when professors say things like religion has no sociological relevance because it’s “atomistic” or that rural America is “empty,” they don’t look smart.)

I think there are two streams of feeling here. The first is straight up fear—the libertarian strain of rural feeling. Giuliani’s sneering use of “cosmopolitan” points to the sensation that rural people have interacting with the cosmopolite: they feel authentic, hardworking and sincere… talking to hypocritical, affected lazyasses. I actually love the critique of hipster-bourgeois consumption (latte-drinking, volvo-driving liberals) that goes along with this.

The second is the desire to be hated for one’s own righteousness, as the New Testament promises—the evangelical strain of rural feeling (for pure distillations of this see Matthew 10:22, Vengeance Rising, etc. etc.). Martyrdom is a really common sentiment all over the place, and (together with anti-conservative haters and liberal snobbishness) it feeds the anti-snob politics that have worked brilliantly for the GOP since Nixon. The GOP’s line that “they won’t like Sarah in Washington but we sure like her” trades on this martyrdom-turned-aggressive vibe. And the thing is, the left keeps feeding it. The too-good-to-hate-you hatred is everywhere. And it’s easy for a progressive to begin to feel it when her own freedoms from sexism, racism and homophobia are being attacked.

I broke down and joined Facebook this summer when I got all sad that my trip home was falling through. The trendy timesuck factor of Facebook always put me off; and the idea of my three main networks coming together made me cringe. But I wanted to feel connected to certain people from high school, and letting those networks intertwine in a single node required a level of self-honesty that was good for me. I don’t want to be particularly available to people, but I also don’t need to hide from them. In the end though, it’s not about who sees me. It’s about who I see with a degree of connectivity. Who I see is SAHM conservative activists, a diesel mechanic, a few people who escaped MT by the one dependable route—joining the military. And the rest who I still remember so sentimentally: they aren’t online. Because they’re working and poor, and don’t live the kind of lives where far-flung global social networks are a reality.

It raises the question: where do we learn about the world? I mostly learn through reading history books, mainstream internet sites, datasets on demographics and public opinion, and making my friends who live really diverse experiences tell me about their lives. How high quality are my data? Why are the people with the best data in the world—American political parties—using it in such different ways? Seriously. I’m asking.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

New Age Not Same As Yoga · 27 August 2008

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

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

  NEW AGE                                    YOGA

Self-affirmation	Self-study
Reincarnation	This incarnation
Chant and pray to spirits and gods for the promotion	Do your best and let go of expectations for the payoff
Ritual	Practice
Superstition	Equanimity
Scorpio, Cancer or Virgo?	Bhakti, Karma or Jnana?
Bliss	Mysticism
I’m too sexy for my shirt	I’m too sweaty for my shirt
Yoga Journal Ad pages	Namarupa
ancient wisdom	Science and research
The Law of Attraction	The Yoga of Action
Consuming Ethically	Consuming Less
Self-adoration	Self-transformation
Asana shows me how much I can accomplish	Asana shows me how much I can let go
Asana makes me feel like a sexy beast	Asana makes me care less about being a beauty object

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

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

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

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

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , self-deception , spirituality

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

Between ADD and OCD · 17 July 2008

I am really ok with a little open disagreement. Seems like healthy exercise for not taking things personally—and not making them personal. Also, it ups the ante on figuring things out and makes for quick learning.

That said, this last thread on whether ashtangis practice something beyond asana is the most elementary thing this blog has ever seen. Conduct the primary series one thousand times and make your own brilliant deductions, Watsons.

Meantime, time for the semi-annual confab on the next tagline for ashtanga yoga. Everyone here? Here are some new ones to surface in recent weeks.

Ashtanga Yoga. Yes We Can! (From Katie, who just got Ekapadabakasana.)

Ashtanga Yoga. The breathing practice with guts. (A quislingism of 0v0 and the LadyGoverNess.)

Certified Teachers. Emotionally secure. So you don’t have to be.

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. So the spirit may live on.

            Or on second thought,

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. Whatever that is.

The one we settled on last time was just

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

But my favorite is still

Ashtanga Yoga. Reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Back to the authorized teachers taglines, maybe the first one would help all of us to accept these legalistic souls who are hyper-identified with the ashtanga brand and anxious to have you know they have "the blessing," like to talk about the (um) sacrifices involved in being a yoga teacher, and incidentally will have you know that’s not the correct vinyasa for Prasarita C. Authorized teachers are the footsoldiers of the code, the Knights Templar to the Certifieds’ Illuminati. It falls to them to keep the faith intact in a sea of anus-shiva-power-xtn yoga, which can manifest as a sea of maya. Brave quixotic knights, they are. Their generation has difficult role to play.

What do you do? Somebody’s got to fixate on the individual trees in the forest. What we tend to think of as insecure legalism also keeps the lineage coherent. In this sense, the “authorized” vibe is our Julia Butterfly. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

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

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

People who dance often tell me the practice makes them feel beautiful.

People who practice ashtanga often tell me the practice makes them feel fat.

The median dancer is 20 years older and 40 pounds heavier than the median ashtangi. 

Other differences in form, state of awareness, and possibilities for expanding boundaries of “self”:

Ashtanga: lotus binds; pick-ups; strong boundaries around individual experience.

Culture of “working on myself.”

Mental states: advanced practitioners (regardless of place in the series) cultivate trance and practice meditative contemplation through tristana, while it’s key for earlier students to focus on the physical forms. Energetic thread is lost when posture takes over and movement stops. Weak correlation between mental state and physical posture because you can’t really deduce mental state from posture.

Dance: free form; spontaneous; weak boundaries around individual experience. 

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

Mental states: most people pretty instantly go in to trance with the pulsing rhythm and the energy of a large, sophisticated group. It seems like they go into either a gut-level, emotion-rich undifferentiated consciousness (a sort of primal state?) or a sophisticated, contemplative state that feels a lot like the open-inquiry stages of vipassana. If they stop moving, it may mean they’re “not feeling it” or that they’re in a trance state in which stillness brings even more depth than motion.

Does ashtanga make one feel fat while dance makes one feel beautiful, regardless of actual body-looks? What’s up with this? If good sex is partner-merging and bad sex is body-critical and self-conscious, what does that make ashtanga?

Also…

What’s the best place for the “self” within an altered state—front and center or “forgotten”?

If you experience emotion as “not mine” and “not-me” in dance, does that limit the possibilities for it to be a “transformative” thing during which you process your own shit and finally, personally, letting it go?

Does ashtanga give you less of an escape from difficulties of transforming the psycho-emotional stuff in your own body… is it more difficult in this respect than other embodied practice? More transformative?

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

Empiricism · 29 May 2008

 

La inspiración es lanzarse a ser, sí,

pero también y sobre todo es recordar y volver a ser.

Volver al Ser.

 

Inspiration is to throw oneself into being, yes,

but also and above all it is to remember again to be.

To return to Being.

 

El arco y la lira

The Bow and the Lyre

 

-Octavio Paz, 1956

-(0 translation mine 0)

 

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration