Vibration I · 23 July 2010

It’s a tiny bandwidth, the culture represented here at the largest fair in North America. The parameters: midwest-middlebrow home and body adornment, made from clay, wood, wire or glass, early twenty-first century period, with a touch of what the natives call panache. But this narrowly specific style has concentrated here and reproduced, booth after booth booth. All all the same mood, the same message, copied in another material in slightly different size, sometimes better quality, sometimes cheaper, maybe in different shapes, but usually in the colors aqua, lavender and forest green. It feels relentless and driven, like reproduction of a species, block after block after block on my walk in to campus.

I don’t understand that there should be so many producers of so few ideas. But the same happened to indie rock and the great American novel – certain corners of culture generate as many producers as consumers. Mimetics, an idea well hated by all other ideas, says that pieces of culture act like genes: inexorably reproducing and fighting each other to survive. In other words, objects and ideas have their own sex drive.

Well, for what it’s worth, there is one mutation in this generation of Art Fair. Out behind the Sociology building, there’s a less-traveled corner of random ideas: one booth of wax people (a security guard, a maid, and a bunch of nudes), a bunch of huge, colorful mobiles to put out in your yard, and underneath those, two men selling didgeridoos. (I know, didgeridoos are really sexual. No wonder they got stuck in the back corner of Art Fair with the nude sculptures. But nevermind. I’m not trying to talk about sex here. I’m actually talking about didgeridoos.)

One craftsman’s didgeridoos are much more beautiful than the other’s across the way, and his booth is beautifully decorated and inviting. I was so interested by the idiosyncratic swoop and the smooth, dark wood if his instruments that for once on my desultory way to work I stopped. He had an incredibly strong, refined rechaka, letting the breath go slowly, and rarely sneaking it back in with swift, soundless inhalations through the nose.

The other guy was just scrappy, sitting out in the sun smelling of body odor, with his instruments dangling sloppily from the booth’s upper scaffolding. But he had a crowd, so I stopped again to watch them watch him. After I’d been standing there three times the duration of the other guy’s exhalation, my solar plexus began to hum.

Woah. He was doing something right. Maybe chakras require a vibration that’s steady, if they’re really going to respond to sound.

The craftsman just kept playing on a circular breath. The Editor and I sat down nearby, and eventually me second and fourth chakra-ganglia got the message as well. I wondered how many of his crowd noticed the fascination in their bodies, and how many were just puzzled by trance. And how many were merely drawn in (as I first was) by the crowd itself—just copying the other visitors' attentiveness. In any case, no wonder the second craftsman doesn’t care for matters of form. His creativity is on the level of the subtle body.

I suggested to the Editor that this skill of circular breathing made the second vendor an expert, whereas the first was still stuck in form and mimcry. I added that maybe circular breathing is just as subtle and difficult as learning to climax without ejaculating. But I think I was supposed to edit that part out.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , social theory , sound

Make your own psychotherapist · 9 July 2010

Or, Lucy and the Eye with Rhinestones.

Art Fair is coming. It’s a craft fair so powerful they call it art. Take Ann Arbor’s baseline homeyness—characterized by my corner coffeeshop, which sells cute, fluffy edibles called “pasties” and decorates with home-made wire sculptures of imaginary animals—and factor in an invasion by thousands of crafters: the entire customer base of Michaels, basically. I have visions of bric-a-brac, rhinestone jewelry, and hand-thrown tableware. How many Birkenstock sandals can one town accommodate? Our population will increase by 50% and the major streets will shut down.

The professors flee. But apparently this is my summer for staying put in one place and experiencing unwanted raptures over insects, vermin and plants. (I should not have waxed eloquent about my poo back in Spring. That was the start of this reverie stuff.) I’m concerned that despite my aesthetic displeasure with Art Fair, the inner onslaught of happy will compromise me again. I might feel compelled to participate, despite lingering distrust of people who participate in anything. First thought: sell home-made birdhouses? (My folks are both wonderful crafters and DIY ideologues, though as a child I grindingly refused to learn anything that wasn’t from a book.)

Considering recent conversations, now I wonder: how would one represent the art of psychotherapy with the tools of crafting? How to reimagine a useful version of Lucy (the modern craft-booth mountebank who Charles Schultz created out of raw, unrecognized misogyny)? How to embrace the logic of the marketplace, in which transformation itself is transformed from process to product?

Well… here’s what I got. There is probably a section of Art Fair for dog sweaters and catnip toys. We could put it there.

                                          FLYER:

Do you worry about your ego? Does it do things that you wish it wouldn’t? 

It’s ok. A lot of us, especially liberals, are ashamed of our egoes and try to cover them up as much as possible. But having an ego is like having a body: you can’t leave Home without it!

Americans are bunch of ego-potatoes. We have have grown equanimity-resistant and toxic. Some of us are so obese that range of motion is severely limited! But just as we work through the shame about having a body and learn to take care of it through diet and exercise, so it is possible take good care for your ego.

Human organisms perform some of their functions so well that we’ve learned to do them unconsciously. Breathing and heartbeat are two examples of automatic processes that can go awry. Two of the functions the ego system performs so well that they become unconscious are: projection and rationalization. A modicum of projection and rationalization is necessary to get most humans through the workday, but in ego-potatoes these functions work about as well as an alcoholic’s liver or a food addict’s kidneys.

Just like other exercises bring the breathing and heartbeat functions back in to consciousness and reorganize them efficiently, this product is designed to shore up projections and rationalizations. A real therapist works better, but has the disadvantages of being accident-prone and expensive. With the build-your-own-therapist (BYOP), funds can be conserved for shopping at Michael’s. 

            HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN PSYCHOTHERAPIST:

Here are some common statements combining an extreme projection with an extreme rationalization—in this case a rationalization for running away. Most of these sentiments were harvested locally, from the artist’s own psyche; and all are normal responses to modern life.

This is a good statement-structure to begin with because running away and self-isolation point to a part of the unconscious that is ripe with the fear of discovery. The intelligent part of the ego knows this, but one has to combine acceptance with good technique to coax out the fear. The BYO Psychotherapist will give the ego a safe place to do exactly this.

For phase one, please choose the statement that most resonates now, or craft a similar one that creates an even better freak-out. Please note: to be technically efficient in phase two, this first statement should contain both a projection and a rationalization. 

Again, having an ego is like having a body. It lets us be in the world, and is naturally good (and naturally a little stupid in places). So… as the breathing and heartbeat calm down, be confident that the statement with maximum resonance is the best one for now. Just be creative and enjoy the funny feelings this might create. That is the flaccid boundary of the ego beginning to vibrate. Check it out: as the nervous system chills out, phase one turns in to an epistemological massage. Mmmmmm…..

● My boss had so many issues that I had to get away from her. I’m my own boss now.

● Bloggers are horrible people. I couldn’t expose myself to them anymore, so I stopped writing.

● The people in this spiritual community are so competitive! Their practice is empty. I will find better friends who understand that competitiveness has no place in a spiritual refuge.

● Facebook is full of freaks! I can’t trust those crazy people in my life. Delete!

● People who care about money have bad hearts. I shun material wants and work only for trade.

● People who do this yoga practice are delusional. Their stupidity sickens me. I’m out.

● People here are intellectually (or spiritually) dead. They just pollute my mind. I keep to myself.

● My colleagues are evil cutthroats. I won’t play their reindeer games. I’d rather be marginalized.

Now phase two is easy.

Construct an echo chamber with six plain white walls. It should be a comfortable size for your ego (though most egoes will expand or contract easily if the dimensions are not exact). The walls should be extremely resonant. They should also be perfectly insulated from (and to) the outside.

Use some fingerpaint to depict a beautiful eye on one of the walls. The iris should be the exact same color as yours, but the look in the eye will be accepting. The eye will regard you the same way the sun regards the earth: Hello over there, you janus-faced old beautiful world.

Also, it might work to give the eye a comfortably subversive quality of knowingness. Then put the fingerpaint away and climb inside the cube. Close the escape-hatch and set the timer for 50 minutes.

Look calmly in to the eye for a moment. Then lie down on the floor of the echo chamber.

Remember your sentence from phase one, and say it a few times silently. Then whisper it aloud. Over the course of the next 50 minutes, repeat the sentence incessantly at a gradually increasing volume.

By the end of the session, you will be screaming. It will be loud. When there is so much vibration off the walls that the words reverberate senselessly through your organism, and you feel you're just at the point of boiling and freezing at the same time, and you know something in you is just about to die, that's gooood. Please scream the statement louder.

When 50 minutes are finished, stop.

Repeat daily for two years or until reality crumbles. Whichever happens first.

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

Status Seeking · 19 June 2010

You found the one time of night when the birds are quiet. The Editor said this last night in his sleep, when the 2:30 train stirred me enough to drift downstairs to my meditation spot.

There’s an old man spirit who tends the kitchen at that time of night.

Many nights like this I feel him hovering above the recycle bin, when I’m half-dreaming, the birds are silent and the train’s jostling. (I wonder how he feels about the things I do in private: talking to myself, hanging upside down in from the basement rafters, twirling the rectus abdominus back and forth across the belly.) Later in the night I always lose track of the kitchen-ghost, as I fall in to a second round of sleepiness and the night birds fill up the outer edges of the sensed world.

Their calls thicken the air along with the humidity, and bring back the only other summer I’ve spent east of the Mississippi, interning on Capitol Hill in 1998. Another ghost—the self who walked down the Mall to the Hirshhorn for Cuban films on Thursday nights, and otherwise spent evenings under the reading room dome at the National Library, sifting 1970s Nicaraguan newspapers and working out the logic problems from Copi and Cohen’s perfect instructional text.  

Weekend mornings that self would take a three hour run through the Falls Church forests where they’d soon find the remains of another intern, Chandra Levy. I was interested in the quality of the air and in the flora, back then—but oblivious to the menacing fauna waiting in the bushes for taller quarry. I still sense the ghost of the old perceiver, but the 21 year old psyche was blood sharp, innocent of death and heartbreak, achievement-driven, and fascinated by flinty personal connections she only found with an idiosyncratic select. (How boring.)

This is what a ghost is: it’s a neuron taking a hairpin turn. That’s why they make the skin on my neck turn to scales and the spine flip back on itself like a pill bug mid-freakout. Ghosts are uncanny not because they affect the manifest world but because they point to my own ephemeral layer. It’s kind of like they have ray-guns that fire evanescence. Acccck! Take cover!

Silent selves, watcher-selves, dead selves, past selves… what’s real is their power to haunt. What’s freaky is the way their present-absence subverts the solidity of this self. When the train shakes the house, the birds stop, and the air above the recycle bins gets all pre-teleport sparkly, who am I to claim metaphysical priority? The ghosts around here really get in the way of status-seeking of the ontological kind. Damn them.

There’s a staircase down from the Arb to the flooded edge of the Huron. Mike Kelly more or less lives there, his mind in the river and a stream of mystic warnings coming out of his mouth. I guess any good town needs a prophet, and most good artists are prophets too: in his upside-down planter of a hat, moss-beard and water-logged Velcro shoes, Mike plays both roles well.

He moves in and out of the river fully clothed, re-arranging boulders at a wide spot to create rapids in the shape of a heart. He’s sculpting the sacred heart of Jesus, it turns out, given that Jesus told him to create this thing and it’s through this heart that the river flows, down toward the railroad trestle where 30 years ago Mike hung one-armed to paint a giant graffito: PRAY.

Mike talks to the junior professors and high school kids who wade in to the river these days. Tells them about the rock bass mama who lives under the ledge, or advises them which parts of the current to avoid.

Watching them ignore him and the thrift store clothes swirl around his body, I thought of John the Baptist and the words in my head were riverjordanriverjordanriverjordan. That’s when he turned right toward me, eyes blazing like nothing I have ever seen anywhere and told me about 1992, when he finally left India and went to get baptized… in the headwaters of the Jordan.

I told him nothing—just played the polite young scholar too shy to cut him off. But I was actually cheering inside, realizing that he’s not even a little bit insane. He probably was mad when he took up residence on the riverbank and started moving around boulders and calling their currents “art.” But now all he speaks are “flow” and “love.” Impermanence and the “heart of Jesus” are not different. Fixing the boulders is perfect. The freezing of the river is perfect. Haphazard kayakers slashing up the heart and sending him back in to the depths to re-start the work: also perfect. PRAY is what keeps him in the river, which is the same as being in the heart of Jesus, which is the same as perfection, which is not different from love.

I’m not kidding that this guy sees clearly. His sentences and paragraphs are much more cogent than keynote conference speakers. He reads people more accurately than anyone else in town. And, to be honest, his metaphysics hang together better than they do for us creatures of the solid state.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , social theory

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

Make you stranger · 11 April 2010

We did four hours of dzogchen with Shinzen today. Dialing in to the world-soul on my decrepit MotoRAZR. Kind of steampunk.

Other instruction I’ve received in antimeditation—mahamudra, “choiceless awareness”… they’re all going after the same insanely beautiful, left-brainy receptivity—wind up spacing you way out. Melt you down on your zafu in to a boundless, peaceful, primordial blob. Hi, I came all this way to make myself jellyfish? Feels nice, but disorienting and nonreplicable.

I suppose that spacey instruction could work, were concentration superstrong from years of practice, or at least primed from days in retreat. It any case, of course Shinzen’s guidance for becoming a bliss-blob is razr-sharp.

Let what happens happen. As soon as the intention arises to do anything, drop that intention.

Sometimes this doesn’t lead to the void, but directly away from it—directly in to shallow unmitigated chaos. The most lifelike sexual fantasy I’ve ever experienced was through dropping the intention to meditate, sitting there in a room full of sophisticated meditators. This is not a complaint. (I did feel a bit paranoid and guilty, that afternoon, once I recovered self-awareness.) And no wonder - dzogchen privileges lizard brain, teaches you to learn to turn off the upstart impulses of seeking, doing, wanting to let nature turn the wheels of consciousness. Something that feels sort of protozoa-primitive and highly evolved at the same time.

Anyway, perhaps since it was dzogchen day, Shinzen amid apologies took us on a few tangents. At the end of a particularly wonderful one (which I grabbed this laptop to transcribe) he said this:

I’m aware that as I get older, I am becoming weirder and weirder. That which does not kill us makes us stranger.

How beautiful that quaffing nothingness, or bending existence, or whatever mystical shit it is he does has not made him harsh, or cool, or intentionally distant, or vague. Or sanctimonious. What does it say about a practice when it does make one increasingly closed, distant, knowing, cool? Shinzen is weird, taking spontaneous riffs that sometimes make no sense to us, but it seems a modern-zen effort to say what he can. Not intent on projecting a self, but not protecting one either.

What the heck. Here's a little goldmine.

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Categories: esoteric shit , spirituality

The eff in ineffable · 3 April 2010

Already, the days in Ann Arbor are so long. That phase of yellow light just before dusk doesn’t hit until sometime in the eight o’clock hour. I have been taking my phone for walks up the hill, letting the cool air open up breathing channels clogged in Mysore street-soot, watching the sun radiate in the grass of the park. There are purple crocus buds pushing up in the tender spots and new highs this week in the 60s. What a weasel I am. (Edit: three days later the back yard is solid purple in crocus and the magnolia tree—all flowers, no leaves—is causing me to act out in ludicrous ways. Also, it's 80 degrees.)

Somebody told me Ann Arbor has more greenspace per capita than any other municipality. I’ve gone from one embarrassingly charming enclave to another. We know that I can make ecstatic community with leisure-freak ashtangi expats… so now I guess the thing is to make it with an out-of-control crowd of spring flowers. I just can’t get away from exhibitionists.

I’ve tried to talk about the ineffability of the three weeks of practice after I changed my ticket, but it comes out meaningless. Makes me sound as mystified as the seekers whose big question in life is “What is yoga?” (A question that reveals how little their asana practice has taught them about their own minds: the needling of Sharath for definitions of yoga reveals how few of us actually sit. People who access dharana, etc, don’t wonder what is yoga.)

But never mind all that… I actually am sort of mystified right now. I’ve been instructed that the mental states reached in asana practice are a shadow of what’s possible when you sit and take the body out of the field. And that’s been true so far. But I don’t know. There was some crazy collective effervescence those last three weeks. It would have been insane not to stop everything else to let that process reorganize my organism. I don't know if it'll effect me beyond what it was, but even if it doesn't, there's a different sense now of what is possible... a memory that thrills and leaves me a little bit achingly excited for the rest of my life from here.

Do peak experiences change you for the long term? What happens to people who spend accumulated hours of their existence really alive? These are dumb questions, but think of it. Eventually we’ll be able to get a handle on brain states in asana the same way we can check in to a workshop to refine the backbending. Biofeedback, yo. Just another tool. It won’t take the eff out of ineffable.

Anyway. Back walking the streets of utopia’s History Professor ghetto, a friend out in Portland has been talking to me about her new normal. A surgery every week, loss of most of a breast and some lymph nodes, bowing out of a triathlon season or two, an IV portal right in the middle of the chest, and the anemic, cowering wussiness of positive thinking books about cancer. Yeah. Decay, destruction and death. The bliss-monkey strategy is to not think about them, ignore those friends actually wrestling with them, and focus on what feels good. L, on the other hand, is fighting cancer with funny, with scalpels, and with toxic chemicals. It is so inspiring to be a little part of the support team on this one.

And about decay, ok. For these weeks of ineffability, my knees got hashed. The past days, as I became attentive to my body again (somewhat... solo practice is also weirdly wired, but maybe I'll shut up about that for a while), I realized that both joints were inflamed. The tibias were becoming immobile and the AC ligaments constantly shifting over the inside edge of the joint. So… if I want my knees to open up to a new level, they’re ready to go. A mentor told me to just keep practicing and not worry about it. But as long as my ACLs are still intact, I’m all for “attachments.” And for some clear negative thinking to pull back from that particular edge. So these days, lots of modification is there. Castor oil compresses. And, ok, some woo-woo talking nice to the knees and asking them to hold it together for the team.

Tomorrow, Easter, somewhat less decay will be on my mind. I’m thinking a short drive in to the city to practice at the stealth shala, followed by a gospel music gathering at the Detroit Opera House. In the afternoon when he’s done preaching, my dad will ring up and shout, He is risen! (I think this was some kind of Open Sesame code language in the hippie Christian underground at the dawn of the common era.)

For most of my life, Easter has been the zenith of my loathing for the whole religion, the day its rituals really made me shudder and gag. It was good to use that irritability to get distance, but this year the whole thing feels so obviously mystical. I mean, come on. Who pretends their god comes back to life at the same time the plants are exploding with the reproductive drama? Turns out the maharaja of Mysore had to die and get reborn every year too. And I figure northern people especially need some ritual around this stuff. For now I’m back to being of the north, so... fine Dad. I will open up the fortress this year. He is risen indeed.

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

Navratri · 16 March 2010

It’s a kind of heavy water-heat that stews the marrow in your bones, turns the gross sheath to one malleable substance. Which in our case happens to be shot through with shakti. Walking around can be like swimming—parting the air under the trees, feet not quite on the ground.

There’s trash in the streets, but in the morning they smell of jasmine, and nag champa at night. The jasmine is has a bite to it now, like it did last March. Less floral and more peppery—so strong that I keep smelling the bike-basket full of it when the merchant rides up outside the shala each morning. That’s the one tiny bit of fresh air—as a cool medium delivering jasmine-pepper, wafting on to the stage in the one moment I need oxygen the most. There’s a tall brass jar filled with ghee, and the candle whose wick is soaked in that ghee flickers when the jasmine wafts in. This flickering is what makes me think the cool jasmine air is not just a weirdo aromatic hallucination falling out of my spine like another bit of post-backbend LSD.

Not that I’ve ever had the pleasure of doing LSD. I just do chakra bandasana and, like the nadi shodanites also do, see what body memories bubble up from the marrow thereafter. Entire full-sensory recollections, of meaningless whole-moments from years or decades ago, keep flickering in to re-possess us. This is consciousness on the move? It is a kind of knowledge of one’s karma?

Everyone around me is learning this bizarre and improbable body maneuv—taking kapo heels from the air, for godsakes!—and I’m teaching a Scooty Pep to turn like my old Gary Fischer even though it’s built like a Ford Festiva.

Sharath observes from the stage, says little things that blow our mind (including, at conference, some talk of the Yoga Korunta and a story about Vivekenanda stopping time one year at the Worlds Fair—a tale that separated the sheep from the goats in the shala, or at least those who got through Autobiography of a Yogi from the literalists). The room is his Sony Playstation, as a friend put it; and at this point we are some pretty agile little operators. I suppose the controller-to-remote bot connection is as good as it’s going to get for a while.

But we’re still not all the same. Run three hundred globs of substance through this tightly contained system, and on the other side of the process the bodies are way more evened out energetically but still show so much culture, gender, and personality. The shala’s a whole damn migratory bird sanctuary, really.

I love to watch us move, coming down the steps at dawn after practice, nothing but coconuts in our heads. The energy is mostly in the uddiyana-manipura, though there are also a lot of sexy pelvis-MB centric descents, and a few friends—who now I realize are the easiest bunch to love—with their shoulders released and hearts blown open. I can’t see myself, but my guess is I’m reflected in the airy not-so-secret nerds who for all the bending are still essentially heady. But it’s good. The sanctuary needs nerds too. It’s helpful to be able to spot and snag an egghead these days, when I’m working on getting my complete-sentence skills back together.

It’s my mother’s birthday today. Her age keeps changing—she loses and gains years the way India loses and gains hours on its clocks: arbitrairily and confusingly—but we’re pretty sure this is the big six oh. (This trip has been a lot about her an my father, when it comes to the liminal space I’m trying to light up.)

And, back to my mom, this is also the start of Navaratri—the Shakti bookend to Shivaratri. Nine nights in praise of Goddess—starting with Kali and Durga for purification, then three days with faces of luck, then three more in wisdom—Saraswati—then a tenth when one begins new things.

Then I fly. Not bad.

On airplanes in India, this country that has given us Kali and Durga and et cetera, one is not permitted to travel with what a dear friend calls her pocket rocket. If the contraband is detected, the authorities are instructed to confiscate it immediately. Well. Thank Kali I have been uninformed of this prohibition. (Meanwhile, said friend has been traveling with the rocket in her carryon, just wishing for detainment.)

I always praise contemporaneity—forget nostalgia for life before google, vaccines and airplanes—but ancient India is definitely dressing down the modern when it comes to Shakti. Maybe there is something to this Yoga Korunta business, for that matter. Maybe I’ll give the traditional a bit more of my time. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

Offswitches · 23 February 2010

Lights cut out in the shala this morning. I was upside-down in a prasarita as the raft of us went under. Then after a moment the generator bellowed so strong I could feel it in the floor, and the glass of Sharath’s new office flickered. The terraced chandelier and the sconces relit, and we were back in motion. Nothing different, no ruffles in the fabric of reality, no jokes about Samadhi in the gaps.

Two weeks ago, on Shivaratri, Narasimhan was discoursing about abhinivesa in the noon heat. We began to hear a marching band from the street (at least I think I wasn't the only one who heard it...). The band turned a corner and zeroed in on our location, but he spoke right through the din. The rest of us stayed with him. The band oompaed past the opaque windows behind his head, and still he made no reaction. Nothing. At that moment, the beeker-shaped bulb on the wall flickered and went, the fan cut out, and the suddenly power-deprived water purifier in the next room started to whine. Narasimhan stayed on discourse like the TMer he is on mantra, preempting the self-referential humor or differerance that would have made “abhinevesa” the joke instead of the subject.

I did get pretty far out on the limb of dharana this past couple of weeks. Lots of bhakti, and then the first and second padas sort of took up residence in my Circle of Willis and wouldn’t leave. Woo hoo, mind transplant! Best vacation! The usual cognitive tics replaced with rhythmic Sanskrit wisdoms. It is very good to go there for a period of time, to break old thought-cycles and find out how my heart responds to the energy savings.

But also, creativity surges in the gaps that the new rhythms plugged. The way writing usually happens is like this: I’ll be walking down a staircase or cutting a vegetable or washing my hair and three or four words will make contact with a feeling, and then together they’ll hatch some paragraph. This is a good process, and one that stops when the Sutras are staging a sit-in.

Today I remembered Franny, from Salinger’s book, which I read in college while tending the front desk at the library. She gets her cognitive function snagged on the Jesus Prayer and, both absorbed and unmoored, goes from bliss to misery to bliss.

Depth at the expense of complexity? I dunno. But my friends the hashtangis are a warning to me: empty mind not same as quiet mind.

The last few days I have fumbled around for the off switch and found it, gotten back in to work. It seems my subconscious is willing to get behind that decision, more or less. That said, I love a little steam of devotional babble. Maybe there is something to the notion of praying without ceasing.

But anyway, about the subconscious, such as it may be. Twice this week I’ve dreamed of a huge airplane filled with many rooms. A flying arc. The hallways are filled with friends in the shapes of animals: a heron, a mayura, pidgeons and crows. Birds inside a bird, I guess.

But the image that comes most nights is of a huge cylindrical monument on the side of a mountain. It’s red with gold at the edges. Sometimes the edges are covered in small yellow light bulbs. The sides are scalloped and the base rises to a high point in the middle. The monument is able to spin in circles on an axis that drills down from the center in to the ground, and at times it can also tilt from side to side. The first time I dreamt it, I thought it was just a stupa—like the crazy Vajrayana monument at Gampo Abbey, overlooking the Nova Scotia sea. But it is also like an upside-down top or dreidl, the spinning children’s toys; and when it tilts it is exactly like The Round Up, a greasy carnival ride I used to take at the fair between roller coasters.

Mostly what is happening in the dreams is that we are hiking up to the red stupa circus ride, or just standing there looking on it against the backdrop of some Himalayas, but also sometimes painting it, and sometimes dangling off it over a cliff. The sky in the dreams is enormous, and there’s a vast ocean as well as incredibly beautiful, mysterious mountains.

Sometimes people come and jump on the red stupa and it spins like crazy, until they stumble away and throw up. (One time, I was spinning and someone I love threw a breaker to shut it off.) Sometimes they worship it.

And, sometimes… they use it to illuminate the rest of the landscape.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit

Embodied knowledge · 3 February 2010

Narasimhan was a delight today, commenting on Sutras 42 and 43 of the first pada (this Sanskrit business is great for my foot fetish, incidentally). Since reading Daniel Ingram and later picking up on the whole Wilberhead/Integral discussion of states and stages of being, I have become kind of sucker for maps of the refinement of consciousness. It’s really obnoxious, but fascinating. 

I have kind of rolled my eyes at the Sutras’ map of consciousness, because there’s just not much there compared to later and more articulated traditions—traditions which speak to more complex modern beings who possess, I want to believe, a greater capacity for rapid refinement and growth.

But… then Narasimhan brought it to life today. He didn’t do what I, dumbass, would do: create a giant grid comparing vitarka, vikalpa, savitarka and savikalpa to other descriptions within the samatha/vipassana model and whateverthehell else I could root up. No… he talked from informed experience. Like this:

At first, the mind believes itself to be stable. It sees the world outside as chaos, and tries to defend itself against the chaos. The boundary between self and world is strong.

Then, once one begins to practice yoga, there’s a recognition of the inner chaos. The world itself appears to be relatively stable—what varies are the inner reactions to the world.

Then, one learns to hold the mind itself stable. That stability becomes a fulcrum for investigating the fluctuations that continue—taking the mental changes as objects to be investigated.

After that, he got necessarily vague and mystical, talking about the re-dissolution of the boundary of self-against-the-chaos. I appreciated that part less well, given my own lack of refinement.

It’s amazing to learn Patanjali from a mystic. So much for my idea that this version of classical yoga offers a merely mechanical philosophy of mind. And so much for my depending on books to learn a  living philosophy, to be honest. It really helps me to get in the presence of people who travel the dharana-dhyana-samadi street regularly and understand their experience as such.

I guess Narasimhan and Jayashree, and Sharah for that matter, have seen a lot of us logocentric, sort of uptight westerners pass briefly through their spaces. We think we can learn yoga from books; and we are mistaken. This compulsion around book-learning and “Do it self” (my first spoken sentence, as a little one) must be the background agaist which Sharath says, again and again: Spend as much time with your teacher as you can. You have to learn through experience (implicitly, your own and that of your teachers’ teachers’ teacher...).

Monday Jayashree did a miniature head-wobble and gave a huge smile. ("She's just a bucket of love," said J, my first yoga teacher, who taught that Friday night class years ago at UCLA and who's here now, coming along to Sutra class at my urging.)

Jayashree said: You don’t have to always follow along in the book… we have a sense that if there is a text we can be in control. (And Narasimhan, beside her, echoed about the false sense of control in book learning).

Then, together, they said: YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF THE TEXT.

And she, again and again, repeats: Listening is learning. Listening is learning. Listening is learning.

Learn to depend on me for the words. Watch me chanting and imitate me.

Still I cling to the text, and am learning the Devangari script so I can read the Sanskrit rather than the English pages (weren’t you guys supposed to support my in resisting that project??? So ridiculous!) Here’s what Jayashree has written on the back cover of the book:

Srutiparampara dates back to Vedic period and has a tradition of approximately 5000 years. It evolved as the best means of preserving and transferring knowledge acquried by Sages and Scholars. Sruti means listening and Smrti means memorizing. The Guru (Teacher) used to recite and the Sisya (Student) used to listen, repeat twice or thrice and then store it in his memory. Then propagate the so acquired knowledge from Guru to Sisya through generations. Even today the Sastras, Music and the fine arts are taught in a traditional environment in the above system. 

The knowledge is embodied.

Duh.

No wonder Yoga Mala is so thin.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , sound

Gone · 14 December 2009

Sitting in my old autoshop on Santa Monica Boulevard, while the Honda gets its spine adjusted and lymph cleansed. On the fiberglass chair beside me a pile of exams – final grades signed, sealed and delivered.

Yesterday my least woo-woo friend, Greta, hugged me on the Palisades and said Your drive across the country is going to be so cleansing.

This had not occurred to me. The cleansing quality of driving hundreds of miles through the should-be-Mexico desert, hundreds more through Texas hill country, then even more hundreds up the Mississippi silt corridor and in to the gorgeous, tragic hills of Tennessee, then another couple hundred along the jagged knife edge of Illinois, cutting right in to Michigan as the solstice turns over. All that territory passing through the windshield, from the front to the back of my mind, while I do Shinzenian “sight-flow” and see how the body works as it becomes ever more a sub-mechanism of the Honda.

It is cleansing, though not like a juice fast. It occurs to me to distinguish between gross body and subtle body layers, and suggest that it is easier and easier to contact the subtle if you just practice practice practice. And eventually, for long time practitioners, major body changes might be as likely to originate in the subtle as in the gross layer.

If you meditate long enough, just sitting there, the body goes to pieces. Excruciating disformations. But then(!), the old monk’s frame reorganizes from the inside. Shinzen’s students call it opening the central channel. Nonsensically tantric for a bunch of empiricists, but maybe all that quiet puts them in contact with an inner force.

The new openings in my body the past couple of years did not result from physical interventions. I don’t take much interest in muscle relaxants or stimulants (though Excedrin is excellent for a migraine), have stopped doing organ cleanses (though the gall bladder thing would be great if I had the time), and (though I could use major restructuring in the traps, scalenes and atlas/axis) don’t get bodywork. I don’t take breaks from practice or change up the programme. So… the patterns in the physical layer are routine: a seven-day cycle, within a moon cycle, within an annual cycle.

If my body opens, it’s because I let go of a stagnant emotion or stupid story, or dismantle a wall against some person or type of people.

The way I figured this out was doing Five Rhythms dance every week. Go in to some kind of theta state in that setting, and good things happen. One nervous system becomes integrated with all kinds of others. Negative emotions get really fluid and want to disintegrate.

Other ways the subtle body seems to get moved: gratitude/listening; allowing certain conflicts to erupt and settle, even if this is mortifying; being good to my parents without a fucking agenda; spending time with the Santa Barbara ashtangis, especially their teacher; sitting Vipassana retreat; meditating on the body for a long damn time, until it drops away; using sociology to see the ways humans war against each other with the use of mental categories and identites.

The hard sell is that doing this shit improves my backbends. On the level of vanity, it works as “subtle body massage” (though who knows if it would still work if I were doing it with the intention of getting better backbends). In any case, the kundalini gulag in LA has figured out the effectiveness of subtle body intervention. (And I’m surprised this is not of interest in the blogosphere—there’s no reason that the internet should confine us to gross body awareness of practice). In certain parts of Cali, it’s just as likely that you’ll go to an aura reader or a chakra healer, rather than taking a salt bath or getting a massage, in order to open the body. Recognizing that the subtle body is real and totally changeable doesn’t mean you’re all spiritual and shit, but it is fascinating and rewarding.

Anyway. This morning I woke up late after an intense bedtime phone talk and realized/decided that the sad is done processed. The way my grandma, who came of age in the Iowa dust bowl and moved west after her husband survived the war, would say done finished.

Went to practice late, very tired from whatever processing I’d done in my sleep, but so much lighter in spirit. Realized/decided that fear of kicking my feet up off the earth in Viparita Chakrasana was the exact same stuff as this fear of picking up and leaving home that I carried for more than a year. And, today, by way of this noticing and deciding, it was true that the block was no longer there. (This was also true because day by day I have built the muscles and opened the spine, and gone right to this edge and looked at it day by day as well—all of this is in the context of rote practice.)

Well holy shit. Sealed the deal by going through the motions of Viparita Chakrasana, for the first time. And then, immediately, did it again a second time, and a third. OMG !  !  !  Ok then.

Bridges of sinew, waters of grief: this fear has gone.

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

Nathas · 23 October 2009

One has to sing the song of nonentity using one’s meagre body as an instrument.

One’s self has to be entirely absorbed.

You will never be able to understand jog.

What is the use of asking for it?

Child, listen, spirit has made an abode in this body of dust.

Spirit is in everything as a thread through beads; it is in the breath of life of the living….

Spirit permeates everything as blood runs through the bodies of women and men.

…………………………………………………………………………….

Cleaning my desk this afternoon, while you-tubing to The Nature of Consciousness by Alan Watts. Beautiful. It's a bit like running across youtube footage of the Hindenburg's explosion: how has my life not yet intersected with this crucial historical document?

Anyway, in the bottom of a drawer, I found a notebook with the above written on the last page.

I was writing, or trying to write, an article about nothingness last week. I'm not really ready to be writing about nothingness. This and AW might have helped a bit.

I don’t remember when or why I wrote this in the notebook, or where I read it. Google doesn’t help. But it feels a little like the HYP.

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Categories: esoteric shit

Who are the whistle-blowing yogins? · 18 October 2009

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit

Easy Question, Hard Question · 14 July 2009

What is yoga?

Come on, you know this one.

But RF is filmed in aporia over the question, as if he’s just been asked What is the universe? What is life? What are you? As if yoga, this ridiculous, historically specific creation of modern humans, is itself the mystery.

Five years I have cast about inside my mind and through texts ancient and modern, cast my legs over my shoulder and my tongue right up toward my brain; and still I write this journal to idle with the question. I let the question idle, let it mix with my waste and give off fumes. Useless.

And as long as I remain mystified about the nature of my practice, I disattend to a much better question: What is existence, life; what am I?

Our life is a faint traicing on the surface of the mystery allright, but I’ve just realized that I’ve substituted an easy mystery for the hard one. Because… the hard one is hard; and… the easy one is easy.

What is yoga?

It’s a stupid question!

I did a “teacher training” years ago: it opened with a sharing circle in which 40 people went around the room, reciting their names and their personal, precious answer to the easy question. Each question equally vacuous, emotive, a performance of self, a display of ignorance. Equally shallow. Mine included. All 40 definitions equally right in our happy, non-confrontational, SAFE pluralist world in which everyone is equally insightful, equally deep, equally qualified to teach. (As long as you can cough up the grand).

Here's an old bromide to dissolve the other 40:

Yoga is the calming of the fluctuations of the mind. Its goal is samadhi.

And, according to Gotama Buddha and about every aspect of mainstream eastern practice since, Samadhi is the basis for insight in to the nature of reality… it’s the starting point for answering the big question. (This is the interesting part…)

Technically, the old school definition of yoga is relatively wrong now because the 40 teacher trainees are relatively right. There are as many yogas as product brands and self-identity projects: choice and relentless, obsessive self-expression and affirmation are the logic of capitalism. Democracy and easy credit (not Nagarjuna) are why we say that everyone is already equally enlightened right now.

I am not nostalgic for the shores of the ancient Ganges; and I do not assume that Patanjali-era humans were deeper or smarter than we are now (they actually sound kind of facile, and didn't have good abs). But what if we "trainees" had been humble enough to set aside our little stretching hobby and take an interest in the simple project—the concentration project? Humble enough to let it just be that? Educated enough not to be mystified by the easy questions?

I don’t know.

Also: what if we didn’t mystify this “samadhi” as something irrelevant—restricted to the ancients and to RF—but actually just got our shit together and DID it?

That I do know, accidentally; and many people reading this know it too.

Or so I have been instructed this past week. Let me suggest, as per these instructions from various first-person mind researchers, that samadhi is a one-pointed concentration that anyone can learn simply by practicing it in a regular, dedicated fashion. Someone with the dedication to do asanas every day already has the baseline scheduling and tapas in place, and can choose to add mental training to her workout. It takes hundreds or thousands of hours or whatever to find samadhi, but then you’ve tasted it and can recognize it the next time. You can get back in to it within ten or fifteen minutes anytime you set your mind to it. It’s so accessible, even, that there is a whole modern literature and research programme dedicated to it: the work on flow states. And so common that all kinds of meditation teachers have a term for it: access concentration.

(Search term: "ACCESS CONCENTRATION".)

For what it is worth, this is not only a basic teaching that seems to be implicit all over the place; it’s also accurate to my experience. So is the first part below.

Two things about access concentration.

One: if you go there consistently, you will unwittingly open yourself up to even deeper states of absorption. In a mostly forgotten literature, these are called jnanas. On which more later. I can’t believe I’d never even stumbled over this old framework before, but it is incredibly grounding, comforting and inspiring. If MB is the key to the queendom, the jnanas are a crude interstate map.

Two: once you’ve learned absorption—not a particularly hard project if you consider ashtanga yoga itself doable and if you give it as much time as you give your backbends and stuff (or, I would assert to much disagreement…do it during your backbends and stuff) —there is something that comes after. Something to which this concentration yields access.

Most yoga hobbyists don’t want the next step because they’re doing the sense pleasure thing. That is completely ok. It's also why the ashtanga world is the insane, sometimes vapid, party it is. But for those who want the next step, or who cannot say no to it for stupid reasons they don't understand, there seems to be a specific (beautifully specific) way to use refined concentration to ask the hard question. The one about the nature of reality and who am I.

And, for someone who is already a super-skilled concentrator, the hard question is weirdly tractable. Workable. Askable.

Having open hips doesn’t hurt either.

::::EDIT:::: If you just got all the way through that and are wondering what I'm smoking today, that's cool. I just re-read it and am wondering the same thing. Not sure what to do with this, but since we've already generate a comment thread, I'll try to, er... play it as it lays. Good practice in recognizing the effort I am always putting in to doing-being-myself and looking like a unitary character here and elsewhere.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

Ammabots · 19 June 2009

They call them the Ammabots. I met the first one, dressed in flowing white with her pupils dilated big as dimes, just inside the Radisson. “Your first time?” I smiled yes. She peeled a blue dot from a strip of paper and stuck it not to my third eye (as I somehow expected) but the edge of my sweater. And then I ascended the stairs in to an incence-filled bot-populated marketplace that seemed designed especially for the hipster Village Voice and Salon writers who would be infiltrating on their funny-cynical assignments. Circus of snark right there, for anyone who would fixate on the level of cultural otherness that is the Amma roadshow.

The exoticist set pieces on the business of east-meets-west have been written already. Hopefully some such accounts of the Amma Show include the part about the red velvet umbrella emblazoned with gold OMs. Amma twirls the OM-brella above her head as she enters the enormous conference room every morning at 10 o’clock. The room holds its breath, bells clang, and an invisible invocateur booms OOOMMM from bass-heavy speakers. My dad has a hollowed-out horn of a bull that he blows in the sanctuary when he preaches the horrible story of Jericho: the amped OM is the same portentous tone and drives any beta state hangers-on straight in to trance. Amma has the beatific gaze down perfect, the large fleshy mass of her sways like seaweed and without question she glows. You’d have to be dead not to feel that aura. Or on second thought, maybe the dead feel it even better than the rest of us.

The day I was there, I was set to meet L and G. G is a retired special forces operator who knows even more than I know about counter-insurgency warfare, but not because he’s read about it in books. He finally left the military in his sixties after some bad years in Colombia, fed up with Clinton-era drug war tactics. He went the next level more badass, and joined the Vajrayana in Tibet. He later settled in So-Cal because it’s where the women are best looking and the weather kindest to his hard-trammeled joints. But his ‘Nam-era hatred of hippies has always kept him from going fully native here. L, a woman thirty years younger than G and five inches taller, is my kundalini collaborator and in her work life some kind of cult actress. Unlike G, she drinks many kinds of Kool-Aid. Yet she is too in the moment, every moment, to be a bot for anyone in particular. She is dialed in to Crazy on her own terms, and knows too well from the receiving end how empty every groupie becomes. She is as open as G is closed, but neither of them is signing up for anything.

I’d talked to them by phone minutes before I entered the great hall, and then there was the commotion with Amma’s arrival. I somehow found myself all the way at the front of the hall, within 20 feet of her, involuntarily entranced. I knelt to touch the floor, find my own inner body in an effort to ground myself against the force of Amma’s astral wind. A rope-bodied man in white robes looked to me with those giant pupils and drew me over to a space he magically created in the crush of seated devotees. Forgetting G and L, I decided it would be a good idea to turn off my phone. 

I sat next to the man as Amma settled in to her throne and the 5-hour hugging juggernat fired up. A little train of chairs was arranged, two by two, from the back of the hall all the way to the saint. Visitors would go to the back of the line when their number was called, sitting in pairs in the last seats. As those at the front of the hug-train received their squash and their chocolate kiss, each pair of visitors would rise and move up to the next seat in the procession. I could see the composure of self and body begin to break up as people got to the last four or five seats before the hug. The actually physical vibration (which several of us mistook for earthquakes in the 4 or 5 Richter range) began to shake them loose, cognition would fate, the body would become slack, sometimes tears would begin flowing. By the time they entered their embrace they were ecstatic mush, and moments later would stumble away dazed, blessed, briefly transformed, forever a little closer to the astral plane.

Holding a number that would not be called for several hours, I settled to the floor next to the man in robes. He glowed at me as I took up a lotus and faced Amma, “Have you ever been to India?”

Aah, the litmus test. Soon the man, a 55-year old Finn called Rishi who has been following Amma everywhere for 13 years, was telling me of his first meeting with his guru. The day he met saw in Helsinki, he knew. But he gazed upon Amma now as if it was the first time, wept and smiled to me as if I were also participating in his inner experience. I told him Amma had been in Mysore when I was there in March, but I skipped it. “ Aaah, it was not your time yet,” he said, and asked my name. I gave it and he looked serious, “So you are a blessed one, a saint as well.”

“Who are you calling Saint, Rishi?”

“Ah yes she gave me this name to give me difficulty. It is my task to live up to it…. You know, she cannot be understood. She is mother, she is love, but also… she is in ABSOLUTE CONTROL of everything here. She is fierce and everyone does exactly what she says. The task is for my tiny mind to manage that contradiction, of total control and pure love.”

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your head explode. Put an end to the vrittis, allright. I wanted to ask Rishi about everything he’d forked over for this deal—the home, sexuality, creative life, personal love relationships, self expression… the energy-blooms of all the lower chakras given away so that he can stay in Amma’s delta-wave forcefield and sustain himself on the one glorious love-emotion with which she infuses it.

But living on mother-love all the time has consequences. You become an emotional if not spiritual infant, do you not? Emotional addiction, trusting too much, taking responsibility too little. The spiral-eyed vulnerability and, well, neediness of the scenester-level devotees to any guru… have you ever witnessed that side of bhakti…?

The connection of Rishi and myself was uncomfortably obvious. Through the portal that is Amma, he was giving his self, jacked to the matrix and pouring himself in. So with all the other bots, creating a caravan across the spiritual desert of planet Earth, hoisting the mother on their shoulders. And to that mother, through that awesome portal of her, myself touching in for a hit of shakti, faith, love, delight. A free hit, as long as I stay grounded and recirculate it in to my own ecology. It is good that the darshan is free… but in the greater energy economy it is not really so free. I go to the see he hugging saint, and to the degree she really moves me I am playing with her fire, taking it and spreading it somewhere else. It’s a little like the tapas-strong thread that snakes around the inside of AVY culture.

There at Amma’s feet, before L finally found me and dragged me to cognitive safety outside the 100-foot perimeter, one of my synapses half-fired off a thought about Mary and Martha. If Jesus were alive now, he’d have a road show at least this well produced. And where would I be? Facing in, taking the blessing like Mary, or bustling around keeping the business of spirituality in order like Martha? As with yoga institutions, insiders pay dearly for that “special association” they seek. Energy and levels of insight are drained off to feed the system, so that the more secure seekers can touch in, take the benefits, and get on a little bit better with their lives.

The benefits of the one-off chocolate kiss are not trivial, though. To see what heights are possible with human energy and consciousness: this inspiration is so great that it almost distracts me from this new little undercurrent of love that's been deepened in me by no effort of my own. 

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society

Pathologies of Los Angeles · 29 May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guru on the move · 19 May 2009

Another earthquake today. I was in my office, retrofitted, secure. Like the quake in ’00 in Seattle—I was five stories up in the Casy building at Seattle University—watching the quad sway back and forth while the psych professor next door screamed that we were all going to die. Strange. Today the sociologists all said, “Oh it’s nothing. There’s nothing new going on here.” That’s what they always say. Conservatives.

But do you feel it? A little shape-shifting in your universe?

In addition to the super-evolved identity-snatching spam bot, there is also a Fed-Ex poltergeist here this week. The delivery guy rang three separate days and I let him in, only to go downstairs to meet him and find the courtyard empty.  So finally I picked up and asked him, “Where ARE you man?” He named an address a half mile away and I told him that under the circumstances I’d be remiss to buzz him in.

Not to grasp too much for meaning, but in my personal symbolic lexicon, action at a distance means SKPJ is on the move. Wonderful soul! What is it like out there? Is there any resonance of our love and loss, any power whatsoever in our pujas?

I am not suggesting one take the Tibetans literally, but it’s interesting what they say about the bardo. A being might take 42 days to cross over, they say; or much much more… but in any case those first days are crucial. This is the first big opportunity, they say, but most souls miss it because frozen by fear.

This passage is from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, a.k.a. The Art of Dying a.k.a. How Not To Do It Again. Listen how beautiful.

First of all there will appear to you, swifter than lightning, the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness, and it will surround you on all sides. ...Try to submerge yourself in that light, giving up all belief in a separate self, all attachment to your illusory sense of self…

Buddhas and Bodhisattvas will for seven days appear to you in their benign and peaceful aspects. Their light will shine upon you, ... Wonderful and delightful though they are, they may frighten you. Do not give in to your fright! Do not run away! Serenely contemplate the spectacle before you! Overcome your fear! …Realize they have come to receive you into their realms….

But if you miss this realm, you will next be confronted with the angry deities, threatening you and barring your passage…. All these forms are strange to you.... They terrify you…  and yet it is you who have created them. Do not give in to your fright… flee them not! They are but the contents of your own mind... If at this point you should manage to understand that… you will find yourself in a kind of paradise.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

DIY and Not-So-Private Minds · 10 May 2009

Somehow between Cross-fit and the apocalypse, I’ve got this idea that I need skills. I admire people with skills. You know… CPR, vegetable gardening, computer hacking, lock picking, multiple languages, fire-building, kombucha homebrewing. You never know when you’re going to be lost in the forest or trapped in a burning building or get a flat tire in downtown Detroit.

A first batch of kombucha is burping away under cheesecloth in the kitchen. I’m taking care of the little guy while his owner is away for the summer. No other way to refer to the soft rusty half-shell kombucha blob with its light eau de vinegar: it’s…he’s… very much alive, and happy to culture some tea for you as he goes about his business of cell division and just sitting around. Nice of him. He’s already beginning to split off a little twin, a little mini-blob that will be equally happy to render the human-addictive substance as a by-product of his unassuming kitchen-shelf existence..

I love domestic chemistry, playing with fermentation. It’s disgusting! The blob is just slippery, ugly raw information that has to be tended and fed and allowed to reproduce itself if it’s going to live. I massage him under a warm faucet before sliding him back into his brine, talk to him, let him split and send the new little guys on to another and another.

What’s this little guy’s kombuchu parampara? Does his lineage go all the way back to the grow-yr-own fermenters of the 60s, or was he brought to life just recently for the Californians with their panoply of celebrity fountain-of-youth practices? Can he trace his progenitors all the way back to that very first kombucha sage-gods? I do hope I’m drinking the original, immortal nectar of the ancients here.

Mmmm. I am also, ridiculously, switching to Mac. Why did this not happen a decade ago? The machine is one sleek piece of aluminum, tricked out with extra RAM and already a better extension of my self than the long-suffering Inspiron ever was. And god so beautiful on the inside, too. Yes, I don’t just love her for her looks. I’ve been waiting for this little machine a long time, asking the universe for just the right file structure, aiming to manifest the perfect processor. And thank god, it all feels so right now, nevermind the chunk of first-home-savings I'm down. But... what if I get stranded somewhere without wifi...?

...Speaking of DIY, or not so Y… when we get together I can see your thoughts. So can anyone. Not to unnerve you or anything. But the line a thought makes across the body as it travels, tiny tensing like a snake under the sand, the way the neck flexes, the drop in the breath.

If your attention is on a sound or motion beside you, this is the way the body registers it. If a new emotion shows up, it moves through the head, neck, shoulders, low back. An emotion is by definition a bodily event, but very often thoughts are too. A thought is not just content--the thing that is thought--but also a wave in motion.

I say this because of the aspect of practice that is about isolating myself from the thoughts of others. Some teachers, (even if they’re not getting the petty clairvoyance that pranayama seems to bring up) experience a mysore room kind of like air traffic control. The trick seems to be to kill the volume. Allow and trust the planes to fly themselves, don’t take the controls of every one who radios in for help.

But for students who claim nobody can know their motivations or thoughts, that it's a private matter whether they’re actually focused, ummm. The mind is really not that private.

Especially not in the company of body-workers or anyone who is very intelligent below the belt (or even below the neck, for that matter). In the case of teachers, yes, some are not perceptive. But chances are they've just gotten good at pretending not to see others' thoughts, both out of respect for and to protect themselves from all the static.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , 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

The S.S. Kali Yuga (UFO Roundup) · 6 January 2009

(Ghost Ship soundtrack)

The Editor rolled over in his sleep the other morning and said, Soy un naufrago. He’d been watching Shogun, the 1980s epic of cultural insensitivity about an Englishman shipwrecked amid samurai intrigue in 1600s Japan. But Naufraugios—shipwrecks—refers in to the West Indes. It’s what Cabeza de Vaca, the 1500s sailor who was after the fountain of youth, not Japanese trade, called his chronicle of mucking around Florida in a quasi-psychedelic daze. Anyway, shipwrecks, sailors, samurai intrigue. Since the Editor’s writing about South American history I guess his subconscious pulled the story closer to home, into the territory of Spanish rather than English plunder.

Me I’d been dreaming about iron cages, a recurring theme since I started reading Max Weber years ago. I tried to read Sivananda’s Self Knowledge on New Years but found it awfully disciplinarian. But before I put it down I felicitiously misread this line: “Even in this iron age (Kali Yuga), when the vast majority of persons run after women and money, there are earnest and sincere young men who want God and God alone.” Iron CAGE? Kali yuga? Sivananda said Kali Yuga’s an iron cage?

But I thought hyper-rationality was the iron cage? (This is what sociology has taught me all along.) Sivananda says Kali Yuga IR-rationality is the iron cage? Oh oh oh! Is everything the iron cage? Are Weber and Sivananda saying the same thing???? I woke up this morning at 4:40 and googled “iron cage kali yuga.” Yes, this is the kind of near-shipwrecked idiocy that wakes me up before dawn.

Duh. No such luck. Iron age (Sivananda) not same as iron cage (Weber). Pseudo-spiritual irrationality (Iron Age) not same as hyper-westernized rationalization (Iron Cage). But it was fun to think it all came together for a minute. The result list instantly revealed my error but in so doing brought everything right back to SHIPWRECKS! The first hit was this awesome song by the metal band Therion; second hit was the 2002 issue of UFO ROUNDUP.

Thus, I learned this beautiful story of The SS Kali Yuga, an ironsides ghost ship lost to Lake Huron in 1905. The clairvoyant Chippewa stood on the shore and bid it godspeed, as they did I think for the Edmund Fitzgerald. Maybe the iron age and iron cage are not so far apart.                                                            ………………………………...........................                               

The USA's five Great Lakes are famous for their ghost ships. Many are the vessels which have "sailed away" and vanished, never to be seen again.

The story begins in St. Clair, Michigan in the spring of 1889, as shipbuilders put the finishing touches on a brand-new wooden "oreboat" 270 feet (81 meters) long and 40 feet (12 meters) wide. Only three years earlier, the Merritt brothers had opened up the Mesabi "Iron Range" in northern Minnesota. Tons of high-grade iron ore were coming out of the mines and heading for the ports of Lake Superior. Ships were needed to ferry the ore to the steel mills in Buffalo, N.Y. and Cleveland, Ohio.

The hull was quickly sold to the Cleveland Cliffs fleet. Her new owners cast about for a suitable name. But nobody could think of one.

Then a member of the company's Board of Directors read an article about India in the Detroit Free Press. The article made mention of the Kali Yuga, a Hindi phrase which the newspaper translated as "the Age of Iron."

The Board thought this would be a fine name for an oreboat. So a champagne bottle was swung, and the newly-christened Kali Yuga slid down the ramp into Lake St. Clair for her shakedown cruise.

Trouble was, the ship's American owners misunderstood the meaning of the phrase Kali Yuga. They thought it referred to the Iron Range boom in the USA's Upper Midwest. In actuality, the phrase Kali Yuga refers to the last epoch in the Hindu cycle of world-ages.

In the Vishnu Purana, time is divided into four distinct world-ages. First comes the Satya Yuga or Golden Age, lasting the longest. Then the world enters the Treta Yuga, a less civilized and harmonious period, which is followed by the Dvapara Yuga, an age in which humankind has grown more violent and decadent still. Right before oblivion comes the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, which lasts for 400,000 years.  A better translation of the phrase Kali Yuga would be "the Age of Chaos."

The oreboat soon lived up to her name. Although no sailor ever died an accidental death aboard the Kali Yuga, the vessel experienced some weird paranormal phenomena.

While downbound on Lake Huron in August 1897, the Kali Yuga encountered an impenetrable fog. Crewmen taking a break on the Texas deck were startled by a sudden sound--the barking of a large and very angy dog. The barking and snarling, followed by a bone-chilling howl, sounded as if they were coming from the fog a short distance, no more than 100 feet (30 meters) away. But the Kali Yuga was in mid-lake at the time, at a point about 15 miles (25 kilometers) northeast of Presque Isle, Michigan.

In June 1899, crewman Bob Sandover had a most unnerving experience in a night fog on Lake Superior. While working alone on deck, Bob saw what he thought was a "double" of the Kali Yuga on the placid lake only 33 feet (10 meters) away. Through the roiling mists, the "other" deck looked identical to his, and his doppelganger mimicked his every motion.

Gripping the rail, Bob shouted, "Who are you? What are you doing out there?" The doppelganger stood erect slowly and faced him. Bob gasped. The "other" sailor was his identical double in every detail of facial feature and dress. The only difference was the double's eyes, which radiated an aura of menace.

By way of reply, the double squatted down and appeared to be writing something. Then he lifted a square piece of cardboard with a hastily-scrawled message on it: Get off that ship! The double's lips curved in a sinister smile. And then he and his Kali Yuga shimmered and vanished.

When the ship docked at Detroit, Bob Sandover promptly quit and found a berth on another Great Lakes steamer. Never again did he set foot on the Kali Yuga.

And there was another curious fact about the Kali Yuga. She could never keep to a schedule. Season after season, she invariably showed up late at her destination. Her owners appointed one captain after another, but the Kali Yuga never quite shed her reputation for a tardy arrival.

In 1900, Captain Fred L. Tonkin of Painesville, Ohio took the helm for the summer. This time, "the Kali Yuga was long overdue" but "she showed up all right. She had been caught in a gale o' wind and had lost her rudder."

And then came 1905, an ominous year in Great Lakes history, highlighted by "a gale of November" that sank dozens of ships and provided Duluth with her all-time most famous shipwreck, the Mataafa. So many ships went down in that gale that the final fate of the Kali Yuga has been virtually forgotten.

On October 19, 1905, the Kali Yuga pulled up to the iron ore docks in Marquette, Michigan, on Lake Superior's south shore. Once again, Fred Tonkin was her skipper, and her chief engineer was Charles A. Sharpe of Cleveland. There were 16 men aboard and one woman, the cook.

"The weather had been bad that fall. Lots of the older schooners and steam barges were wrecked that season...Nobody worried much, however, as she (the Kali Yuga) was one of the strongest and best wooden steamers on the lakes, and well-kept, too."

Early the next morning, October 20, 1905, the Kali Yuga weighed anchor and steamed away from the ore dock. As she sailed past Marquette's distinctive red brick lighthouse, Sharpe came to the pilothouse and pointed out an unusual sight to Captain Tonkin.

There, on the stony beach, stood a dozen Anishinabe men and women, all dressed as if for powwow in bead-worked black velveteen clothes and ceremonial headdresses. They all looked pretty grim as "the medicine chief (today we say spiritual advisor--J.T.) carried the eagle staff and chanted."

"Who are those Indians?" he asked. Captain Tonkin, who had often sailed the upper lakes, answered, "Chippewas. Here to see us off, I gather." (Editor's Comment: My guess is, the Anishinabe spiritual advisor had a vision of what was to come, and they went down to the shore to invoke "the One Above's" blessing on the doomed ship.)

There was a stiff wind, and the seas were high on Lake Superior. But the Kali Yuga reached Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan safely and passed through the Soo canal and entered Lake Huron.

"The skipper of the Frontenac told later of seeing her about four that afternoon some seven miles (11 kilometers) off Presque Isle Light in Lake Huron," not far from the scene of the "barking dog" incident. "The master of the L.C. Waldo also reported seeing her about dark (6:45 p.m.--J.T.) between Middle Island and Thunder Bay Island." A gale was blowing, "and it kicked up a terrific big sea."

Because of her reputation for tardiness, "no one was unduly alarmed when she didn't show up exactly on schedule...They figgered that maybe she put in for shelter somewhere along the east or north shores of Lake Huron."

"Her sister ships of the Cliffs fleet searched hard for her. Her owners sent out tugs after the wind let up to scour the lake for signs of her, but no good. They all came back with nothin' to say. No wreckage, no nothin'."

The Kali Yuga "was lost on Lake Huron in 1905 and never a trace of her was found...She didn't ever show up, and nobody ever knew where she went down, nor why."

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Categories: esoteric shit , sound

Things We Burn · 1 January 2009

Or, Secret Society Solitaire

Last night began with Dom Perignon 1985, a kind of woody downtempo bubbly that looked like brass. There is this brilliant guy, friend of a friend, who has been saving that bottle for years until his novel went to press. Since the publishing industry is as fucked as sociology this winter, his ballast against namelessness—the bottle—came out last night. I apologized to be drinking up his wine of immortality-achieved and he said No, I’m letting it go. Gave me a beautiful smile and real eyes I’ve never seen since I met him ambitious, steely and 7 years younger. The Dom would have meant something else in a different year, but he’s not saving it anymore. Tomorrow we die, published or not, so tonight we drink. I loved that.

I drank more after, and a third, and ate many good things. Nothing much unless you can't hold alcohol and you’ve promised the fervent ones you’ll join them at sunrise for secret practice. The shala was closed today, but the keys have gone and proliferated so many times, passed around like Dead Poets Society talismans, and so the kids in early 2S plotted to sneak in for New Years contortionism. Reminds me of stealing in to the golfcourse-edge pool at the country club on Montana summer nights, when I was a teenager who could hold her liquor.

I love ashtangis who, after several years’ habit-building in first, are getting in to the backbends of second. They are the most religious. The passionate belief that causes and results from survival of this phase is exactly the mood that gives ashtanga its good rep: it’s what makes this practice the intriguing, glowing dead poets society it appears to be. Yes: we do meet secretly in caves; we do recite love hymns, we do make ritual sacrifices and trade secret objects and hand signs. The 8:00 start at the Silverlake shala across town was TOO LATE for these people today, so I was in the shower while maybe still drunk-ish at 5. I’m not so fervent now—I’d have drawn out a slow if willful kitchen practice around noon if not for wanting to support the new backbenders sneaking in for a dip. They sort of twisted my arm into playing teacher; and I sort of relented because it was a different kind of day, despite my rule against teaching mysore, because it felt like a conspirational morning outside of authority-space.

E o anonovo, o nove—the new, the zero-ninth—so the Brazilians who practiced on my left and right had me know over post-practice chai.

Dear god! Old year gone.

There is no logic out there, no meaning that one moment carries over any random other, but damn if I not a ritualist little owl.  I didn’t even know it until I started writing this thing… but turns out I love the cycles of time, am a celebrant. I thrill to be living inside of history; and this is why I write. Life is as sacred as we make it.

Last new year in Ojai with the SB ashtangis… we each wrote down a secret and at midnight threw it in the fire. Something to burn. You know my secret? IVORY TOWER RESENTMENT. (I just remembered: earlier that day cursing as I drew my card-of-the-year out of the tarot deck. The Tower. In retrospect: that’s completely obnoxious.)

Disdain for academia had turned from healthy skepticism to a heavy trip, and scholarly good faith into an assumption that colleagues were incurious, brain-in-jar, normal-science bores: I burned it up, innocent of the institutional crisis that would pin us new scholars to the ground in 2008. I’d be sunk right now with that lodestone.

Last night just before we went out I remembered this reverse-resolution ritual and felt thankful for what my life has been because of it. But shit. The chance to make more meaning was greater than my desire to preserve the beloved thing that had to die. I squirmed, contemplating my secret 2008 weight: Spider-Solitaire.

I am immune to television, role-playing games, gambling, celebrity news, and all sporting events. But solitaire. Criminy. I wanted to jettison the corny yogi ritual rather than the Solitaire… which only increased the resistance and the meaning and the delight of my trivial act. I marched to the Editor’s laptop (Solitaire cannot live on my laptop—it is too potent!), went through the motions to delete, then sealed it in with a dump of the recycle bin.

So. 2009 is an experiment in solitareless living.

I am not as monkish as I once was. I can turn large amounts of food and small amounts of alcohol into a light, easy practice on 3 hours’ sleep, if rarely. The body is, for now, more forgiving now than it was when I was a new backbender. Getting off easy is sometimes a false experience, but this year, I’ll take it. 2009 is already kind.

From Gosia Janik, whimsical ashtangi artist in Poland.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

ZANORG · 14 December 2008

Tonight I turned my tender-monkey grooming ways to my laptop. Burnished the old girl with pointy little q-tips intended for home manicures, and removed all the keys to see what was going on with the sticky e.

Ohhhh.

The keyboard was filled with flax seeds (three varieties), chia seeds, hemp seeds, and lint.

The keys were a little scrabble quiver on my desk, so I stole up the first two words I saw and popped them back in to the middle line of my console, which now reads:

                                 XTHIS<NOW!:

In the Boggle game that is my new keyboard, there is also ZAP!, POW!, HIC> (Latin for here), PROG, BYE, YES, PAN, LMFAO (oops) and ZANORG.

What is this last formation? A message in some Dell computer kabbalah? May its meaning be revealed in time, oh mystical Inspiron.

ZAP HIC THIS NOW ZANORG hides my true configuration, the fast hacker script DVORAK. That pattern we had to know by the touch in the days before pop-off laptop keys, so at this point the key symbols are useless to me except as some kind of new mnemonic. It’s not like I ever really look where I’m going, but I hope XTHIS<NOW!: catches me sometimes.

It’s so immanent!

Is there an answer here though to this weird suggestion I’ve been puzzling—that traditions of practice must be taken up and led by women in order to remain useful? I don’t know, and I’m all out of little treatises for now, but I’ve also been looking at this heap of keyboard letters and thinking of Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote about alphabets and labyrinths and also has this story called The Immortal.

It’s so beautiful—go read it, in the collection The Aleph and Other Stories. It’s about the meaninglessness of a “heaven” that is without time, in which you could live your own life and that of any other as many times as you want because there was no horizon on duration. (Usually we talk about utopias in space—as outside of this physical place—but this reminds me that Christian heaven is both out of time and out of space: somehow its transcendence is based on its foreverness.) Borges’ story is about the spiritual thrill of thisness, of being in time. Thisness in time is fulfillment.

It’s like we forget this because thisness is what we have.

I have sometimes wanted to avoid the association of “the feminine” with immanence. Why is groundedness, which is no less crucial than lightness, and no less thrilling, all wrung up in our archetypes with wombs and earth and sacred chalices and receiving and goddess stuff? And mystery, gnosticism, the body? Why does this all go together? Why draw from this heap of signifiers that actual female people—so different from feminine archetypes—are what the old practices lack?

I think it’s just a shortcut, a way of saying wake up, wiseasses. There’s so much mystery around immanent spirituality, maybe because if it’s right here immediately then there is no journey. People want a journey. So much mystery about the body so that we can grope for years through the labyrinth in search of it.

Sometimes there is no labyrinth. :)

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , spirituality

On Madness · 7 December 2008

I wanted to keep myself sane in my practice. Like in Solaris, the Tarkovsky film, wherein a cosmonaut journeys far to a planet where something has gone very wrong among a crew of explorer-scientists. A mysterious presence, some animus in the planet’s living ocean, has driven them mad; and our new explorer must find the reason while himself withstanding the hallucinatory pulsing of that ocean.

I had seen the advanced windmill-tilter ashtangis, longtime in league with durvasa and the nataraj, lose their shit in a variety of ways. (How many not-crazy advanced practitioners do you know?) So I think that is what I was doing here all summer: charting a course through third series that would allow me to stay grounded and rational, capable of taking others’ perspectives, emotionally even keeled. I wanted a firm-enough reign on my unconscious that its contents would not populate my everyday experience unbidden, would not run rough-shod over my conversations in the ways that freak out the rationalists. (I love free-associators and intuitives, but post-rationalism doesn’t play in social science cocktail parties at all.) I also wanted to push back the veil into my shadow on my own time, rather than forcibly unifying the known and unknown only to have the latter take over the show like it has among the many egomaniac-libertine "gurus" of this world.

I did find a few techniques in my effort to keep it together. Little practices for counterbalancing the aggressive nature of this programme, for grounding myself in the midst of a growing dis-position toward wild-eyed, hypervata butterfly-sage. Envelope breathing, various embraces of earthen feminity, a focus on the roots in the feet and pelvis, self-cuddling. These are very good. I will write about them if others would find them useful. But they’re nothing more than sandbags against the tide of the Solaris sea.

What I’m seeing more clearly now is that practice creates personal insanities—there’s no  intensive practice disorder we can write up for the DSM. There is just a systematic removal of your defenses, a revealing of sharper parts of the personality and darker parts of the shadow. People who claim practice makes a person angry are mistaken: practice simply tends to remove barriers to the expression of buried anger. Same for terror, narcissism, vanity, whatever. Don’t tell people practice will make them feel a certain way: experience is specific.

On Solaris, what ultimately drives you mad is the way the universe reflects back to you your own desires. The planet knows your neuroses and projects them right into three dimensions.

I see now how it is Quixote upon Quixote to try to save myself via technique from the 3S Crazy. Serious crazy is in more or less in you, though perhaps the greater proportion of those who self-select into this practice do have copious serious crazy latent. Removing defenses isn’t necessarily a good idea: often, it is functional to leave them in place. In removing them, I feel it’s more urgent than ever that I care for my psyche as more of it comes in to view. I want to say that this is enough, but it seems like there is another small thing.

Solaris comes from Stanislaw Lem’s story about humankind’s two-sided inadequacy: both to understand the human heart and to understand the universe.

It seems something happens as you become very aware with the body. The physical does not always require full attention as you go on, so you learn to follow other trails of experience in the breath and the subtle body (&c.). As you do this, the subtle body techniques that never made sense physically start to yield new experiences. They’re still just techniques, but as the body itself becomes refined the techniques start to engage something… else. You almost don't have a choice about this happening, if you're advanced contorting every day with a refined, fluid exterior and the mind focused if not clear. My guess is that this is how people become not little-kuckoo crazy but instead go knocking on the door of the Universal-Kuckoo. I have no idea what it’s about. Do we need a modern wizard school where we can learn to integrate the mystical stuff back in to the constant stream of experience? Cervantes meets Tarkovsky and Philip K. Dick. It’s such camp, this third-eye-gazing, spinal-breathing, psychic mula-jalandhara connecting nonsense. And I guess that’s why it’s safe to have it out here, because it’s just pre-modern nintendo for people in caves with nothing to entertain themselves but the stringy little muscles in their underfed bellies. It’s not dangerous or esoteric so much as it’s useless. And then suddenly it might not be useless. Without Hogwarts or spaceships I don’t know how to keep it from turning me weird other than to normalize it, laugh with the experience. And ultimately, again and again, come back to relationship as the true ground of practice.

Here is the Doctor, now resident on Solaris and cautioning the arriviste savior-scientist:

Science? It's a fraud! No one will ever resolve this problem, neither genius, nor idiot! We [space explorers] have no ambition to conquer any cosmos. We just want to extend Earth up to the Cosmos's borders. We don't want any more worlds. Only a mirror to see our own in. We try so hard to make contact, but we're doomed to failure. We look ridiculous pursuing a goal we fear, and that we really don't need. Man needs man! [sic]

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , science

For V. · 2 December 2008

Shoulda known it would come around to the master key eventually. It took almost two years, which is about right. But wow. What am I doing? Stop me now?

This’ll stop everything. Go grab a tennis ball, right now, and sit on it. Right in your perineum in the Janu-C style. Keep sitting on it.

Distracted yet?

Ok, see ya.

Hahahahahaa. It’s ok. Everything is ok. What does it take from the inside to be fully normal and ok with this? Keep sitting.

Talking about the MB is like talking about kundalini. You can answer the questions on several dimensions—physical, subtle and energetic, psyche/consciousness. And no matter what you say you feel like you might be delusional or at least inviting scary visits from the secret order of the Knights Patanjali, bound by blood and oath to guard the secrets of the lineage for eternity. Either that or you just can’t get the young Wittgenstein off your back: whereof though canst not speak thereof ye shall pass over in silence.

Note that in these hilarious conferences that yoga teachers give, answers to questions of MB and kundini are usually one-dimensional. Rarely integrated. So in the Yoga Matrix, RF says kundalini is the opening of the heart, but does not treat physical and subtle body aspects. (Maybe some people experience brilliant heart opening without light explosions, or chase monkeylike after light explosions but never learn to love: in part the non-integration of these subjects may result from the fact that our own experiences are specific and diverse. Right on.) In most ashtanga discussions MB is treated as either kind of mystical (an interpretation which either irritates you because it’s sort of BS, or has you intrigued if not obsessed), or simply as a muscle contraction, but rarely as play of mind and body. And hell, what I’ve been saying about the MB is specified to interpersonal relationships—o mejor dicho, to its effects on “transpersonal” awareness?—and that is even another aspect of the jewel. I’ll follow up V’s question about this interpersonal aspect to try to keep myself honest, but should say I’m not good at discussing the practical aspects. Many ashtangis are not good at this. Susananda is, though. Maybe a combination of personal experimentation/practice and reading clear descriptions is the best way to play with finding the MB. I don’t know though. I’ve never tried to teach it. Sorry, secret Illuminati knights; I’ll be silent after this. You don’t need to send out the assassins or anything. We're just sitting on fuzzy yellow bouncy balls. It's nothing.

For me there are two reasons the MB is in play in this specific situation. It keeps my shit together. And it makes me fearless.

First is just this aforementioned groundedness, specifically the ways this plays in relationships. Some Vipassana teachers instruct people to find a place in the body to "ground the awareness" whenever they're speaking and listening in conversation. The teaching is usually to select the place one feels MOST at home, most connected and secure. After people investigate and try different things, they often settle on the feet or chest as their home base. From that point forward, cultivating an awareness of that place amid relating with others is a practice—a practice meant to keep one from getting caught up in drama in a way that leads to abandonment of one’s moral precepts (in Vipassana, that would be right intention, right speech, and so on along the Noble Eightfold Path.). So here, being in the body shapes experience, providing space for specifically moral grounding. But that’s built on something more basic (and sort of brilliant): an always-peripherally-present technique for self-awareness and being in the moment.

I take the Vipassana teaching as suggestive in two ways. First, grounding awareness in the body may or may not be coupled with Theravada social morality. I think it’s nice if it can be, and I like the openness and personal responsibility vibe of the Eightfold path. But the yamas, also precepts for virtuous relationships, are good for that too. I dunno. You actually have to study (horrors) and be reflective and (if you’re me) get some outside advice to figure out what social virtues you need to practice. It’s all grounded in self-awareness and the MB doesn’t care what operating system you choose. Though godhelpyou if you go with Vista (i.e. clunky, narcissistic New Age “ethics”).

Something more interesting I see in this Vipassana teaching is the recognition that oscillating between interaction and specified body awareness creates a certain kind of mental state. Maybe it puts a theta wave into your otherwise excited beta state. Who knows. Experiment with it.

Meantime, what if your home base could be not merely the feet but the pelvic floor—a place in the apparently physical body that is directly responsive to your breath and awareness, that doesn’t even really exist for you without a bit of energetic contraction. The pelvic floor isn’t thoroughly physical, and this is why the purely material discussions of it are so unsatisfying and invite re-mystification. When you dwell there, all this useful distinguishing we do of mind and body or of physical/subtle/causal starts to get undermined!

It’s a physical/subtle/causal space, but only if you let it be. Some people experience it as just physical or just breath or just “transcendent.” That is interesting too. No matter what, taking the awareness to this space will probably induce a light trance. You may only notice if you already know your own mind quite well, and can detect when parts of it are slowing down. (Being a reflective person doesn’t mean you know your own mind: you have to meditate to learn to distinguish and deepen interior states). I don’t know why it works this way—why lightly engaging the MB would shift my consciousness. It actually makes no sense to me at all. But for us 21st century humans, it is nice—and useful in the 7^th series, which is family relationships—to have a constant inner mala of light trance to course through the tide of our collective ADD.

So the last thing, fearlessness. Intestinal fortitude. In my case, most of the way I relate to my family would remain in shadow if I hadn’t started becoming self-possessed in the lower body. I have this difficult inheritance, a big Christian Fundamentalist family. If a belief system would lead you to turn on your own young, perhaps it’s tragically flawed, not just old-fashioned. I’ve come out pretty easily for a lot of funny and weirdly interesting reasons I’m not allowed to discuss, but in general Christian Fundamentalist culture has disfigured itself in its fight against modern society. You think I was joking about the no-masturbation contracts? Anyway, like I said before, it has turned itself into a kind of “disease” of the lower chakras, a culture organized around the control of women’s sexuality and creativity. Members, and women especially, are systematically taught to fear everything that would fall in the “chastity belt” region. You don’t feel this area, don’t speak of it except for with a vague indication to “down there,” don’t look at it, and definitely don’t ground your awareness there.

Seriously, it is so weird to live in a world in which the women cannot even swivel their hips. And no wonder all the altos in the church choir get converted (as I was) to airy Soprano II: easier to rely only on the diaphragm (not the nether guts) if you don’t have to sing the low notes. I could go on, but this is getting too anthropological even for me. Suffice it to say that being in possession of the lower chakras—whatever that may mean practically, psychologically, interpersonally, whatever—can make for a major advantage in this crowd. They’re running on five cylinders; I’m running on seven. Is that unfair? Eh. We all play dirty sometimes.

Ok, enough. I see from my loquacity that this is the tip of some iceberg. Is it time for icebergs to melt…? For my part, I’m going to shut up now before this turns in to the MB blog. Horrors. So much for all the hard spook-work that’s been done over millennia to keep this stuff esoteric. God. Maybe this is the apocalypse after all.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration

Too Intense? Part II. · 26 October 2008

Someone asked if there's a magic bullet that’ll resolve the contradictions we generated on this topic. Maybe I could argue it's the red thread of kundalini...? Alas, sorry. :)

There is a refinement within and radiating from the body some old practitioners—I won’t try to deny that. And I can’t say what it’s about.

For what is at stake here, though, I think there is an elegant principle that resolves most of the antinomies. I usually hesitate to go integral, because the first layer of the theory (the fourfold table) is nothing but a compass with no intrinsic explanatory power; and the second layer (the map of the evolution of human consciousness) tends to either piss people off or reduce everything to evolutionary pissing contests. So I’ll ignore the second layer. But… the parsimonious, four-cornered map does organize the different kinds of concerns everyone raised about the prospects of this intense physical-psycho-emotional-whatever program. According to this map, every "moment" of existence (for example, me here now = a moment) can be seen from four angles at once. Inside and outside, collective and individual.

1. Inside-Individual (psyche, subtle body)	2. Outside-Individual (behavior, gross body);
3. Inside-Collective (Culture, shared values)	4. Outside-Collective (social structure: class, ethnicity, nationality, gender)

It’s not as obnoxious as it looks, I swear. When you hit a conundrum with the integral light saber, it explodes it into four. Who knows if this makes things more tractable or multiply more complex.

Is this bizarre practice suitable for a person: 1. Can the individual body hack it? 2. What about the individual psyche? 3. What are the shared cultural limitations and implications? 4. Is it possible and good within whatever social organization?

One, about the body (the exterior of the individual), sounds like a conditional yes. As V said, body type matters, and there are a lot of factors this comprises.

Question two, about the psyche is maybe more interesting. This practice is so intense! It forces a person into even more intimate contact with weird parts of her psyche and forces her to either make peace with them or “vomit them out” in service of an obsession. Sonya mentioned she’d seen people do this practice and be warped, sadly, into selfish jerks; Holden’s heard these rumors of the 3S programme leading to the vomiting of shadow elements… anyone else have a worst case scenario on a psycho-emotional dimension? Maybe Gopi Krishna isn’t so out of bounds after all. :)

Is all this just myth and mystification? The only generalization I’m comfortable making is that even the most neurotic, selfish 3S practitioners—the ones who maybe have been internally disfigured, though that is for their teachers, hopefully, to see—know their own minds very well. Better than most. The common allegation that advanced ashtanga creates bipolarism intrigues me: have these so-called ashtanga victims been unmasked by a truth-telling process or simply traumatized by their own poorly-chosen practice/teacher?

Maybe I should be open—later—about what that process has been like for me. For several kind of complicated reasons. I’m amusing the shit out of myself lately, moving through paradoxes of obsession/dedication, shadows/love. Something old Mr. MW has given me recently, in his deconstruction of my practice, is the criticism that ashtanga is hopelessly, blindly obsessive. To the point of generating collective body dysmorphia and chemical addiction. Rather than pissing me off or making me want to reject his teaching, this criticism endeared me to him and freed me to see the insanity in what we do. I’m not on a mission to prove him wrong, but I would like to circumscribe the cases in which he’s right and chart a way through this tradition that acknowledges the depth and truth of my own experience.

The third point of view, about what is shared but subjective, is I think what has made this conversation so tense. When it comes to beliefs about womanhood and what is socially appropriate, we carry feelings that seem so personal but are the more powerful because they’re culturally received and because we see them reflected in others. There is a pressure to reproduce the shared ideas… or a pugnacious urge to subvert them. Mircea Eliade wrote beautifully if perhaps unreliably about yoga as a deconditioning process—both of an individual’s hangups and of his [sic] cultural baggage.

People in this particular orbit seem to agree that a powerful, quasi-traditional, shamanic, contortionist breathing and meditation practice—while uniquely absurd in our context—creates women in a good way. Maybe even a very good way. The openness, independence, groundedness, self-awareness, bravery and strength of this programme may conflict with old school ideas about weak, soft, receptive feminity that "belongs in the home" because men's responsibility and because the owned female body should not be seen. But the residual tension of the last few generations’ problematic ideas about womanhood are part of what makes this practice vital. It is a very good challenge: to see what was good, beautiful and true in the old female archetype and carry that forward without being caught up in reactivity (as if we ever de-condition ourselves of culture altogether). The new culture that this practice creates around femininity—is there a degree of liberation in it? I would say, very often, this is so.

The fourth perspective is social context. Ashtanga is almost a hopelessly Brahmin activity—in the west as well as the east. Its first 1.5 generations were also hopelessly patriarchal and light-complected, as at least a good number of readers agree.

But yoga, once it becomes a lifestyle, manifests this counter-trend of quasi-freeloading authorized and certified teachers unencumbered by material things, who justify their bohemianism (sweetly, if deconstructably) with a glance to the cell-phone saddhus of the east. This is hippie-renunciant-ism, and insofar as this kind of yoga garlands the enormously privileged subculture of ashtanga, it keeps things interesting and a little more honest. There are, as a result, two cultures within ashtanga itself—the diamond-studded gold-chained householders with professional degrees and property, and the people who have given everything to the practice, and ironically carry on their lithe bodies a special contortionism-capital (kapotal, it's been called) to which the propertied folks pay respect. (The coming global slowdown will, I think, bring these two strands within ashtanga closer together….)

But I’m getting distracted. I think the social-structural perspective on women doing advanced practice has to consider both social class (for what women is this feasible, energetically, if they also have modern social responsibilities?) and this notion of staying fecund for the tribe. Can the social organization of the world we’re living in cope with women doing this shit—on a practical level? Does the change in women’s work, and potential for authority, and capacity for élan actually benefit us all when women start emerging as practical masters of psychological, physical or even spiritual practice? Do we need women taking it to the edge? Yeah, I think so. Actually, maybe this is the best argument for women who have the time, opportunity, and a certain physicality and the mental stability to take it to that level if they’re so inclined. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it is funny to take a ridiculously elitist practice and reveal—over the course of just one generation—that being a woman, and being poor, actually can increase the likelihood of at least physical “mastery.” Is that trivial? I don’t think so.

Here’s my shoulders and me, looking at myself, against the background of Butterfield 8 Liz Taylor as a sacrificial, transitional woman under some man's objectifying gaze. (Admittedly, I am grateful enough for what she represents to pin her up in my bathroom.) Things change—a few decades is a long time when cultural and cellular exchange becomes as highly entropic as it is now. Apologies if my navel is TMI for you—that’s just your boundaries talking, pre-entropy. :)

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality

Crim, Again · 20 June 2008

A client offered keys. She lives in Venice and the home studio is a silent wooden nest for my 108-beaded Saturday solstice mala. It ain’t Stonehenge, but the space sure is pretty.

I feel like a hippie, having you know I have a thing for the solstice, but I promise my enthusiasm for the longest day of the year long predates the yoga. Yonder up the 49th parallel in the land of my birth (Big Sky Country, Montana), there’ll be no more than 5 hours of shuteye, with the long days pulling the sweetcorn up knee high by the Fourth of July. Or more like chest-high these days, thank you Monsanto. Glad I no longer live in the flightpath of either cropdusters or testflight B2 bombers, thanks.

Here in godless LA we get a close to 7 hours of darkness tonight, but I’m still sun-stoned and loving the light. Did I mention the Editor tends to have business in South American archives? Winters in Buenos Aires or Porto Alegre… would I be an unbalanced person if I double-dipped the longest day and ducked out of the yule?

For now, everybody in town is having a party this weekend and I actually feel like doing something about it. Some dancing, party or two, breakfast with and old friend. Tonight, Billy Wilder and backrubs. 

By the way, can somebody tip me to fast new summer music (electronic, hip hop, dub, bachatta, rock?) before I start taking the new Bonnie Prince Billy all seriously or succumb to these nagging memories of Jane’s Addiction, Danzig or (further back) the Beach Boys?

I’ll come down out of this feeling eventually. I do keep meaning to write about food and feet behind the head. Those thoughts have got to go somewhere.

Completely random Saturday links:

*Laksmi is normal, 8limbs and all.

*Fun with gender. Nagging isn’t female, it’s just what you do if you’re the less powerful one in the relationship. Excellent use of comparative- sociological method.

*I stopped reading the NYT and the smartmags. Which sucks. But this is what ABD looks like.

* Via Julian Walker's good blog, Andrew Harvey talking about how huge the shadow really is and how much it's in the body. I haven't listened yet, but will probably get to it during the usual Sunday night kale-washing ritual.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

Music For Airports, II · 7 June 2008

I held off from saying what I needed to say about dance for the earlier post to make sense. I did not clarify that I was talking about the kind of dance you do like nobody’s watching. The kind that maybe you do drunk at weddings, in dark bars, and definitely in unadvertised meetings of openminded healers in deconsecrated churches and temples in Santa Monica.

I don’t write about this because even if I can dance like nobody’s watching, I can’t write about dance like nobody’s watching. The truth is I’ve been dancing free-form every Saturday since October. It’s SO revealing. About modern spirituality (whatever that might be), about embodied practice, about the boundaries of self, about what’re the point and the possibilities of contemplation. About how groups form and how people really communicate. There’s just a whole anthropology of this little supercreative edge of culture waiting to happen. It's also in some ways old as it is new, like Susan said in the last comment.

This morning when I arrived in the huge old temple space, they were playing Music for Airports and for the few minutes before I stopped thinking about outside things I remembered the drive across the Golden Gate from Marin two years ago, after a first Vipassana retreat. That is music for breaking a long silence, in my experience. The theory of the Five Rhythms is that one of the tempos of life is stillness… this also makes MfA a good place to begin.

A woman was weeping in the corner and my friend Fred, a psychotherapist in his mid-60s, was holding her hand like a brother. Nobody was at all uncomfortable or self-conscious about her emotions; and nobody tried to resolve them too quickly. For the first 30 minutes the still tones of MfA would come up over and over under much faster music and some people would notice and slow way down. Me I felt good to mix in the associations I have for that music with more chaotic, high-energy kinds of experience. To find the Music for Airports when everyone around you is knocking on the door of the big kuckoo. As corny as that sounds. Both rhythems are just techniques for letting go.

I think I’ll stop trying to talk about any of this now.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

Punhunter Chronicles I: Punface · 30 May 2008

 

The Editor: … Yes, you’ll want to have a look at that article and see the notes from the regular fries as well.

(0v0): Uh?

The Editor: (innocent shrug) You know.

(0v0): (suspicious sideways glance) Regular fries?

The Editor: Common ‘taters. Commentators? 

(0v0): (vision of Mr. Potatohead with reporter’s notebook and hat) No! That is not ok! Take it back!

The Editor: (runs from the room with an evil cackle)

………………………………………………………

From: The Editor
To: (0v0)
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:45 AM
Subject: facehunter being snooty in DF

http://facehunter.blogspot.com/

 

From: (0v0)
To: The Editor
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 10:49 AM
Subject: Re: facehunter being snooty in DF

this is a very good website. 

however, it is not my dissertation.

also, it is not your dissertation. 

is facehunter like a hybrid of poemface and punhunter?

punface?

………………………………………………………..

A Syllogism:

The Editor loves puns.

I love the Editor.

Therefore,

              I still despise puns.

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: esoteric shit

Retrograde, Schmetrograde · 26 May 2008

I propose the following: believe beliefs that are useful and uplifting, that keep you transforming and creating and happy.  

Drop the rest of the beliefs. Minimal belief systems are most elegant.

From Autobiography of a Yogi, Chapter 16, “Outwitting the Stars”

Astrology is the study of man's [sic] response to planetary stimuli. The stars have no conscious benevolence or animosity; they merely send forth positive and negative radiations. Of themselves, these do not help or harm humanity….

The message boldly blazoned across the heavens at the moment of birth is not meant to emphasize fate—the result of past good and evil—but to arouse man's [sic…& seq.] will to escape from his universal thralldom. What he has done, he can undo. None other than himself was the instigator of the causes of whatever effects are now prevalent in his life. He can overcome any limitation, because he created it by his own actions in the first place, and because he has spiritual resources which are not subject to planetary pressure.

Superstitious awe of astrology makes one an automaton, slavishly dependent on mechanical guidance. The wise man defeats his planets—which is to say, his past—by transferring his allegiance from the creation to the Creator. The more he realizes his unity with Spirit, the less he can be dominated by matter. The soul is ever-free; it is deathless because birthless. It cannot be regimented by stars.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , science , spirituality

Micro-Emotions · 4 May 2008

The first time I got three or four days in to a Vipassana retreat and the dominant fluctuations of the mind had died away, I realized that on a micro-cognitive level I tend to live a few seconds in the future. If I’m doing any kind of activity at all, I prefigure it mentally before I do it. Pour the tea before I pour the tea, chew before I chew, pee before I pee.

That first retreat, this made me so frustrated. Why can’t I just drop the planning and be an open slate of perception? 

Now I’m less bothered by it, or at least ok that this is how it works to do things like drink tea or take a pee while in a deep state of concentration. Measured from the outside, this is how action works—it’s horribly modernist and non-Bourdieuian to say, but there is a flicker in the mind before you move, most of the time. It’s practical. If I may be so bold, the way cognition itself works is not necessarily “suffering” or “not living in the present.”

I had a beloved friend who ran off and became a nun, and in the second year of her practice her teachers decided to undo her mind. They attacked her categories of understanding—causation, time, space—in an effort to get her to a constant state of non-duality.

Works if you live in a cave.

Except for my wonderful friend: she was not only deconstruction her own cognition process but also doing a lot of administrative work to earn her keep in the monestary. Having her practical notions of causation, time, space and (key) relationships with others broken down without exactly knowing why she was being told to do this to herself resulted—no shit—in deep anxiety and suffering. It also resulted in her pulling out of relationships because the way that intersubjectivity undermined the deconstruction project felt like a spiritual threat. No! Fuck your categories! All that is real is my own mind and we can never get through to each other! You’re not even real!

It’s a wonder that after this intense heartbreak—of watching someone self-induce solipsism and drain the power off her uncommonly wonderful and deep intersubjective abilities—I still chose to pursue meditation practice at all.

Anyway, all this by way of a little defense. It’s true that I am extremely curious by nature, and pursue experience regardless of emotional valence—regardless of whether it will be “unpleasant” or “traumatic” or “luxurious” or “happy” or what. My optimism—and lack of patience for neurosis (neurosis being “a bias toward experiencing negative emotions”)—are marked and somewhat annoying traits. I want to be alive. Working the edge is more important than being comfortable. Non-curiosity and sloth are what bore me the most: and their deepest source, often, is fear of future suffering.

When I tell you that I dread the future in part because the present is so perfectly and beautifully realized, I’m describing a micro-emotional state. When it comes to reflecting on and choosing my emotions, of course this is not my situation! Of course, insofar as I choose, my disposition toward the future is gratitude for the opportunities and years that await, and great curiosity about what experiences they contain.

But on a micro level, one that’s really only possible to observe right after practice when I’m still in a deep state of concentration, there is this new emotion of micro-dread.

It’s more a particular than a universal emotion, and I think I’m sane for feeling it. The economy is fucked; the sociology job market is extremely bad; and most places are less wonderful to live in that the place I live in now. I’m not talking about neurotic fear of the future or existential angst: I am saying that even though I’m in my usual state of equanimity-tempered optimism, I’m able to observe that there is this negative micro-emotion creating some feedback.

Get real, ok? Some possible futures are better than others. Some situations do afford deeper, more interesting experiences. On some level: every possible future is not the same. I can create a life that encompasses more or less self-realization, creative work, loving interactions with others, and usefulness in the world. And hell yes it is scary to be at a precipice

If you don’t see that these questions are active for me on a micro-level, you don’t know me. And insofar as I know myself, it’s ok to experience what this is doing to me—for the time being—in the subtlest way.

If change is either desired or possible, isn’t it better to work from the tiniest little root rather than casting about like some crazy lost person—making massive changes in search of you know not what? Contemplation shows me parts of myself that feel out of character. It’s ok. Just because it undermines my own idea of my personality, at least it is interesting.

And impermanent. Heh.

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Categories: esoteric shit , self-deception , spirituality

Who are the virgins? · 29 April 2008

This post follows up on questions about my reference in Monday’s post.

Like I said, the virgins keep coming back. But it’s a good haunting now. Nothing sinister.

When I was small, they were phantoms of doom. The original story, from Matthew 25, is that they were ten. Five were wise, kept their lamps trimmed and burning like in the gorgeous old spiritual that turned into a blues song: Blind Wille Johnson version, Billy Childish version.

(The way the idea of waiting for the judgement plays in to the writing of this song I do not know, but the minor chords and the keening that come through the blues version—if not the dry, domesticated hymn I sang as a kid—make me imagine it was first sung in the fields of Dixie… pointing to a whole new, and better, idea of apocalypse. The tiiime is draaawing niiiigh….)

Unlike the wise virgins, the foolish five let their lamps go out. When a “bridegroom” comes to them he takes the wise five, marries them, and takes them behind the door. But he says to the others, who had let their flames go out: Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

Or more specifically: go to hell. So the straight interpretation of the story is obvious. Watch out because the judgement day is coming and if you don’t keep working out your salvation with fear and trembling you won’t get to have sex with Jesus like you know you want to. (Jesus is always having sex with the church in the gospels, and the clean interpretation of this is that it represents spiritual union of God and his community on earth). Given all this sex, maybe the judgement day version actually isn’t cut and dried like the mainstream church would have it...

In any case, all I care about anymore is the lamps and the flames they keep. Flame is “spirit,” whatever that is, all over the world all over time.

For example, staying with the Judeo-Christian tradition, here’s something wonderful from a book I do not like (Proverbs 20:17 KJV):  

The spirit of a man (sic) is the candle of the Lord. Searching all the inward parts of the belly.

...The fire inside?

...Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

...Stay awake. 

That’s all it means.

I never thought of this simpler, more beautiful understanding of the virgins until I encountered Tolle talking about waiting as a kind if being present. It’s somewhere around page 60 of The Power of Now (which, please, is not the most amazing spiritual manifesto by a loooooooooong shot, but is interesting and a kind if inspiring so far as it goes). The satirical imp Tolle writes that the lamp’s flame is merely awareness in wait for the bridegroom of enlightenment.

Even that is more interpretation than I need, though. 

The spirit is the candle of the “Lord…” Searching all the inward parts of the belly?

“Spirit” isn’t something “out there” though when I think of the lamps now… it’s just awareness. Which is just the spark that is here if I bother to tend it. So there's not much of a story hanging on to the little flame image anymore, even if the virgins keep coming back by association.

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

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually, yes. And no.

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

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

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

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

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

Downshifting · 21 April 2008

Time stops in Ojai when the moon is full. I took my laptop and forgot to open it, my cell and was heedless of it. Early yesterday I looked at a clock and saw it was 3, shocked by the horrible existence of time, and reset my ticker to come home. Too relaxed to plan the coming day, or to regret the weekend’s complete unproductiveness. That depth of relaxation is amazing outside of time, and for now only available under that condition.

I’m reminded of a letter I wrote to my uncle and aunt when I was 19 and outside the US for the first significant duration. “The 18-year-old knots are falling out of my kidneys….” I’ve been embarrassed by that because it so exposes my motives for studying in Costa Rica: crass escapism. I projected all my fantasies about “freedom” and “finding myself” on to a country (of all things) because 876 miles away from my folks had not been enough to make them leave me alone. That is some serious imperialist escapism. But hey, I grew up a little that year, became somewhat less the ignorant and unconsciously superior American, and in the process realized that I had something like low back tension.

Anyway... why is it still true that I require a literal shift in time and place in order to relax fully? 

I’ve conditioned myself to downshift to a specific mental state for practice. So many resources for this—all the internal practices and external rituals which surround ashtanga and make it not only familiar but juicy. Plus, I tend to collect arbitrary environmental cues that remind me about my mind and slow it way down. This is all another conversation.

It is pretty great to be able to hypnotize yourself more or less automatically. But while getting in to surya state is relatively easy,  I'm less equipped for dialing down even deeper to let it all go. Lying there this morning I used an oblique strategy to relax the jaw: Body, I said, relax the teeth.

Brilliant. Who knew that tracing the boundary between the root of the eye teeth and the palate could knock you out? So here is one deep relaxation practice, ok. But I wonder if I could go there on another day, when time and the practicalities of productive life are closer at hand. And I'm not sure that I should, given I need and want to live intensely out here on the academic dancefloor and don't fool myself that this is possible in anything near delta state. Unless I can teach myself to shift in and out with a clean automaticity. Mmmm...

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

Saturday XLIX: Inner Dark · 11 April 2008

A secret reader sent the owls. How much does this delight me? Thank you. They brew a good daily sencha, too.

Also exciting: the Black Keys new record is hot! Yes. Even without headphones, I respond well to the rhythm and attitude of the Akron blues. It is even helping me get my mind off of Jack.

You know I have been madly devoted to Jack for the right reasons all along. But these smug, preachy-ponderous, oh-so-disaffected lyrics on the recent Raconteurs record. What are you saying, my Pasty Prince? I just wonder if you’ve been this way all along but I haven’t seen it. I’ve been blinded by your piano riffs and your swaggering hips.

As usual, the The One Who Will Not Be Named guides my listening. The OWWNBN threads my drive time with new sounds and, measuredly, fleshes out my understanding of the history in delicious ways. I am Potter Stewart—I know it when I hear it—to his Aristotle—types, kinds, classes: he sees all the patterns and shares as much as I can take of what he knows. Which isn’t that large a fraction, given my limitations.

I am mostly done with consuming culture, but only beginning to appreciate sound. This is big. Music is a big deal.

Anyway… I am the editor this weekend. I freelanced a lot of research and editing the first years of grad school, and still read final drafts for a scholar in Beijing and one in Tel Aviv. Today it’s the Jewish historian, who works on FDRs generous aid and asylum for children of the Holocaust and contrasts this with his refusal to do anything about simultaneous lynchings in the South. God that’s a hard side of FDR to see.

You might know, if you're close, last year I had a lot of dark weekends. Dark, I tell you. The different relationship to time on those days, the non- practicing on Saturdays, the dissertation-induced neuroses that threaten every PhD candidate… maybe these were part of what put me into disconsolate, angsty negativity. Because there are emotional-intellectual sources of that suffering, but also practical sources. What is different a year later, when weekends are perfect? Without trying, I’ve habituated some really nice routines—the esoteric stuff I’m hesitant to mention, plus concerted long sleeps. That's just about regulating my energy. But too, there’s this sense that the present era, which I love so much, might end soon. How could Saturdays and Sundays ever be so good without these specific routines, these specific people, this one place? Without my own life now? If these weekends were mine forever, and this little sadness for its eventual end were not in me, I am not sure I’d be quite so happy.

Links? Still doing this? Just three.

● Soros on what we’re in for. He predicted this in a book a decade ago, but says the conditions are even riper this time. And he’s more than a financial writer—his perspective is historical and sees the whole economy, not just the credit crunch. (Review.)

●This isn't The Road (phew), but it's what I'm finally taking from my nightstand-pile and reading this weekend.

● By the way, I keep forgetting to introduce you to Eliza. Eliza is a therapist-bot. I will leave it to you to sort out the implications.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

More Lists · 26 March 2008

Some possible marks of a developed subtle body
(everyday life version)

● The arches of the feet are sweet little tensegrity sculptures.

● When she walks or stands, the pelvis tends toward neutral. 

● When he speaks, the voice comes either from the pit of the belly (like Patthabi Jois) or resonantly from deep inside the head (like Richard Freeman).

● There is a self-possession of her sexual energy: she is not repressed and not rabid. She knows her power, and its limitations. 

● Nice posture: his bearing is both grounded and light because the body is anchored from the center.

● She is not a mouth breather.

● The body may register or transmit a variety of emotions in a visible way.

● He uses the breath to change gears mentally, to self-soothe, to play with and release emotion, to get sleepy, to wake up, to govern his sexuality, to establish rapport with others and to communicate. 

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

It's 6 A.M.: Do you know where your bandhas are? · 24 March 2008

Ways to wake up your uddiyana bandha before practice:

1. Nauli kriya
2. Ahem----
3. Forward fold on pointe; fingertips to floor; bend the knees; straighten; light up the arches of the feet all the way to the pit of the belly.
4. Sing something wicked, bluesy, bassy and/or loud. The way Jack White inflects the word hips in the third line of The Denial Twist will take you there, for example. Don't hold back.  

 

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

Acrostics · 17 March 2008

B elief
I s
B lasphemy
L ovingly
E ncoded

C rossing
O ver
I nto
T he
U nderworld
S afely

These are from Daniel Higgs’ 2007 book, Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot. No wonder this Cd/Book drives reviewers to eloquence. Here’s his label, Thrilljockey: Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience.

As any proper druid with Wikipedia knows, in Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, aka the World Tree, connects the nine cosmological worlds…. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.

                      ……………………………

Anyway, the implication is that you’re implicated, like a caustic acrostic spelling out your name. I wrote one for Vanessa, and one for CP. Maybe some more to come...

E verything
A fter
S econdseries
Y oga 

K osmic
A narchy
R arely
M akes
A mends

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Categories: esoteric shit , sound

Saturday XXXXIV: Joy · 8 March 2008

Brother is here now. You don’t even want to know the amazingness of him.

And you will not. He is too fast for internet documentation, and too handsome to be photographed. Also, too good for words.

Thus we are nonverbal. Always have been.

For now I function in eyebrow gestures, pinches, sighs, and single-word exclamations.

You should see the Editor, mister structured-thought man, starving for someone to utter a complete sentence.

Headlines:

● Still having trouble viewing this blog? It's a software issue: i.e., the site purposely doesn't function in that browser. Free firefox.

● The spirulina powder I mentioned two weeks ago: nope. My disgust only increases. It’s BAD. Does this mean I need to do spirulina practice? Did I transcend self-punishing Evangelical Protestantism for nothing? NO! Check it out: I’ve got a fresh $25 jar of this magic that I will happily give you if you live in LA and can hack the powder. Email me.

● Siddhis postcast! Ok, only listen to this if you understand it’s not serious. Great overview of different traditions’ orientations to magick. But overall, X-box is probably better than siddhis.

● Ok, what is serious is this. I’m not even giving you a warning. Read the 5-point manifesto, and the profiles. This is real.

● Daniel Goleman, the emotional intelligence guy, talks about childhood shit and transcending it though reflection and relationships with people who are good to you. Short, revolutionary message. [Via.] “Research absolutely demonstrates that if you take the time to make sense of what happened to you, then you can free yourself up to develop your own sense of security inside of you.”

● CP’s podcast on how to talk about yoga with normal people. First: do not tell them you dedicated a practice to them. Especially if they know you practice in the living room in your underwear.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Breadcrumbs from the Owl of Minerva · 6 March 2008

Are some people deeper than others? More highly conscious?

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

Um. Sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adventures in Concept Formation: The Will, Part II · 21 February 2008

Headache yesterday. I got all dramatic about it too, after it made me throw up and gave me the chills. So wrapped-up in it, in contrast to the big one last August on Vipassana retreat, when I could just drain some of the ownership and anger off the sensation and watch it go in on my brain. Best meditation fireworks ever, that migraine (not that I go chasing spooks, but it’s nice to get transported unexpectedly).

Not this time. Yesterday, it just made me mad. Today, my actual brain was cavernous, damp and hollow like your sinuses after you get caught in the undertow for one too many revolutions. As I continue to recover now, it’s nice to have things slowed down a bit—takes some of the reactive, reaching edge off the usual spitfire. 

Punchdrunk; hanged woman; post-traumatic aporia. Good time for adventures in concept formation. So, as I was saying: The Will?

This section can bring a certain hardness for some women,  

--he said to me this morning, after he laid down the dreaded EPB and I shrugged and haltingly, gracelessly took it up. 

Hardness? My traps are mangled enough already. Let’s go back to stretching. I’m better at the surrender thing.

Monday night, the dispatch from the ashtanga field office came in—Patrick calling in with emergency concept-formation guidance. Get over the spectacle of defiance that poses as will, he said. That’s only a shadow of “will surging up from the full body of the earth,” the whole creative force in bloom that the angsty teenager cannot even fathom.  

Ok. Wow. Yes. Moving forward, I’d jettison not only the petty "strong willed children" but for that matter Nietzsche and his miserabilist twin Schopenhauer. But maybe not so fast with wonderful, lovey old Fred. Here’s on hardness and will and creative energy, from Also Sprach Zarathustra:

“Why so hard?!” said the charcoal one day to the diamond. “Are we then not near relatives?”

Why so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you… Why so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?

And if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day— conquer with me? And if your hardness will not glance and cut and chip to pieces, how can ye one day—create with me? For the creators are hard.

And blessedness must it seem to you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax—blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass…This new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: BECOME HARD!

Honestly, this is just about as appealing to me right now as EPB:  i.e., not appealing at all. But why not?

It’s only obnoxious if I’m still conceiving will as adolescent, instead of as the cosmic backgrounding of Svatmarama and the yogis—the will that is beyond rationality (which Schopenhauer understood beautifully), which is contained within surrender; the will that gathers up and holds your surrender so it doesn’t dissipate into nothing but rather is directed…, and contained…, and ultimately quieted.

Nietzsche tried to talk about this a century ago, and people misunderstand him now as some egoic fascist. But I feel strongly that he was only trying to articulate the energy that, it seems, killed him, because he harnessed it without quite understanding its gestalt. Even though he’s so close here with the diamond and charcoal: creativity that is receptive, will that is beyond personality. If his western mind lost the reigns of the will some days (even though on others the will he described was so far beyond his own personal action), I’ve little chance for doing any better, for now.

I have no will to become hard. But the whole thing about this yoga stuff is that it blurs the location and ontology of the “I”—of the doer of all this very specific crazy shit. Will? Hell, I am too inside and given over to this thing to stop. So if outwardly for a little while it brings creativity and strength and even hardness to the fore, what can I do?

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

Saturday XXXXI: Love Among the Ruins · 15 February 2008

Solidarity is not a product of time: it’s a product of shared transformation. Religious people know this, and summer camp directors and fraternity presidents, and the higher-ups in a good social movement. There’s a paper I’m not writing (because you don’t expose your friends like that) on how leftist social movements generate passion and unity by creating risky scenarios in which members undergo a collective trauma. But it’s beautifully surprising to see solidarity generated—and quickly—not in a situation where the group is doing ecstatic ritual, or political protest, or overt initiation rites… but instead just getting together each day for introspection. But it happens—you don’t mean to, but you do bond with your fellow travelers on a Vipassana retreat. Mysore practice is a little sketchier—different start times, more chances to dislike others and less opportunity, perhaps, to bond. But what I have seen these past weeks and months—it is collective effervence of a rarefied… but also a practical everyday… sort. And its sweetness has increased as the time grew short. I bet that, now that it is done and the distillation continues in memory, and the water drains out of this fruit we’ve been harvesting, its little pulp will get even more sweet. I’m not a sentimental girl, not so much (though is that changing?); but I feel like it’s ok to build up a memory like this to strengthen your practice as it goes forward, for a time. And that these students will return to the dried-up fruit of our memories when we need to, to eat some of the preserves and hopefully take strength from them.

Also. We watched the saddest movie on Valentine’s and then I slept on the sofa because the Editor’s new cold was at the height of communicability. Sad Editor. The movie is not supposed to be sad because it’s full of postmodern distraction devices and features an insincere, dislikable protagonist. But the Editor is so sophisticated that such devices don’t throw him off and he still gets moved by the most difficult things. He's post-jaded. That’s the problem after you deconstruct everything except for your heart: EVERYTHING might just transport you.

That’s the thing, I guess. 

Ok. Headlines. This blog is trying to get a little more personal, so some of these are, again, from my life.

● I blogged something about all the sociology papers I’m not writing during my time here at Anonymous Corporate Studio—papers with titles like Appropriating a Lineage: Classification Struggle and Karma in Marketing Someone Else’s Guru (a Bourdieuian analysis); and When Hierarchy Breaks Down: the Unmaking of Social Status and Discrimination in a Contemplative Community. But then I was a good owl and I did not post that entry.

● Obama links for internet-heads. Otherwise they won’t really be funny. One. Two.

● The higher being Dharma Mittra (who has a superstitious side, you could say) has a newsletter I don’t normally read. But today the first paragraph is this: “The cosmic wheel is sending rampant changes to all. Chances are you are experiencing or contemplating massive shifts in your personal world. Embrace the movement and flow with the forces of nature to your new destination.” Ok then. So maybe I’ll read it.

● Saw Deena Metzger speak this week at a memorial for Anais Nin. Deena’s like the Topangafied Ana Forrest of the diary-writers Anais so inspired. Imagining their life—in Silverlake, during the most myopic and materialist American moment thus far, breaking rules and living by their art, creating new forms and wild unexpected friendships—this transported me. The social values that are sold to us are soul-crushing! Wake the fuck up! What about personal experience, community, art, life of the heart and life of the mind? Forget your car payment. Stop buying shit. Whole worlds in this city live by creation and connection. They were post-materialist 50 years ago… why aren’t we post-materialist now?

● Oh, and I just want to say that Anna is dear and sweet and softer the closer she gets. She is bringing big gutsy changes to her world and it was kind of amazing to have her breeze through my life not once but twice this week. Thank you, Anna.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , spirituality

Eeyore's Dream · 21 January 2008

Singers and dancers and running backs work it for a living, but ashtangis would make it a mystery.

It is hydraulic-pneumatic. It switches on and off. It exists in the world. 

It is the flopping fish in a wise man’s throat, and the Boschian flowers that sprout from his down-dog when the coccyx does the thing that brings delight.

It is the source of earthly bliss? (Is it more than earthly?) 

Some teachers will tell you it is the source of delusion! The maker of unconscious dead dreams. A temptress, perhaps?

It’s wound up in snake lore, for sure.

What is it?

...................................................................... 

Oddly today ESJ sent this:

The mind is like a serpent, forgetting all its unsteadiness by hearing the nada, it does not run away anywhere.

Hathayogapradipika 96

          ....................................................................                      

P.S. For those who have written to say that reading this journal makes you crazy: Well, writing it makes me sane. What do you do?

It's really not that weird. And if I open the text by force, it’ll become an energy drain for me instead of an energy release. You know how that works.

Don’t get me wrong: it is only hyperactivity and good intentions. No truth-claims! Nothing serious. And nothing suspicious except for other people's secrets. (Lauging.)

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

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the taste in water,

O Kaunteya;

I am the radiance

Of the moon an the sun, 

The sacred utterance

In all the Vedas,

The sound in space,

The prowess in humans.

-Vr 7.8

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.

I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.

Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.

Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.

Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.

● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.

● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.

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RIP, Sweet Voyeuse · 3 January 2008

So I am back on the pranayama. I let it go exactly a year ago because I had enough else to do. I initiated a 200-hour teacher training and, the same day, began practicing with a teacher who would bring a subtle deep attention, and another shade of tapas entirely, to the ashtanga.

I figured I had all the practice I could do without draining too much energy off the research project. Also: pranayama is scary. Good thing to avoid.

I only practice the first, second and last of the sixfold ashtanga sequence. The other three are beyond my security clearance, thankfully. Returning to my notes on ratios and reps over the lunch hour, I ran across this passage from Laura Huxley in an old notebook. I’ve been thinking of her the past two weeks since she died. Sounds like she was bright and wonderful, like she is below, all century long.

The passage is a little demented/fermented—one of the chewy fragments which Journey of Awakening, Ram Dass’ initial book on meditation, comprises. And it is accordingly sweet.

Voyage in peace, old girl.

It is easier for me to tell you about non-meditation than about meditation. I sit or walk looking at myself non-meditating—absorbed in dramas and melodramas, heart-gripping tragedies, loneliness, shabbiness, delights. As from another planet I look at them, through a telescope. Then there is a little space between me and my all-pervasive feelings. Nevertheless, I still feel I am my feelings, as well as whatever it is that elicits them, plus a third entity looking at the drama of separation between subject and object. Is that the Eternal Triangle? After a short while of looking at the show I take off to a more distant planet and with a more power telescope I look at myself diligently looking at myself. Surely this self-fascination is not meditation. I get up and do something pleasant, useful or beautiful.

Then once again the voyeuse, I go back to peering at my consciousness. It is garbage! Garbage!? The word inspires me because I use my kitchen garbage aesthetically and usefully… (to make compost). What about applying the same principle to the content of my consciousness? I decide to recycle every bit of it into a thought of goodwill for anyone or anything which presents itself.

It becomes a fun game to look at a thought-feeling and convert it into a blessing for the subject of the thought-feeling. Even science agrees now that “thoughts are things.” Surely if random thoughts are consciously converted into a message of goodwill, only something worthwhile can result….

I understand that meditation is to be undertaken in purity of intention and not for results. If viewed as a utilitarian project like the one I propose, then meditation becomes but another, although higher, achievement of that ego about which so many seem to be worried. The garbage recycling game, then, is not meditation because it is ambitious and it has goals and results: the improvement of relationships, ambience, digestion, wrinkles, etc. It is not meditation but by playing it lightly and constantly, and if “as luck would have it that God is on our side,” it could happen (why not?) that one day garbage, recycling, thought, thinker, devils, blessings—all of it becomes one, all separation vanishing in a moment.

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

Saturday XXXVI: Koans and Syncretism · 28 December 2007

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

Wait. Don’t answer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Longest Night · 21 December 2007

People who rely on the sun: take a minute with me here. I’ve been waiting for this day for weeks, as every year. Thank god the days begin to lengthen again tomorrow.

What a difference the margins make, even though the sun is still mostly with us even now. Those couple of hours off each end of the day by the time the solstice arrives make the light feel so sweet when it is here. Thus I’m celebrating. This is my holiday, right here. 

I feel, despite myself, that my Christmas belongs to others this year. I am still learning to be at peace and, even, happy amid a certain self-sustaining ecosystem of injury and lack and complaint. Unless I’m on the Zócalo or Piazza San M. (as in recent Christmases), it becomes so easy to go to sleep round about the Yule. Holidays prime uncomfortable memories and evoke roles I want to have left behind. In the family zone, my relationships to people and to time become dull. I wrestle why-questions with myself: why would I even want to be conscious? Why struggle to stay awake, really be there for it? Why not just resign... forget myself? Mmmm, and resolve it's because losing consciousness is too easy. Because resigning is an insult to these goodhearted people. Because staying awake is an opportunity.

I will do my best.

But in any case, this is the holiday. This here. This!

Thanks, sun. Thanks, life on planet Earth. 

I was thinking of staying up ‘til dawn with some pagans from my SS, but you who so disapprove of the company I’ve been keeping will be happy to know another idea is coming on. The Editor, who I never see lately, practices half primary on Friday evenings. (Actually he practices fourth series followed by a session of yogic flying, but when I am there he practices primary because you’re not supposed to yogic fly around people like me—the unenlightened.)

I’m thinking of going along tonight but doing a yoga mala or half-mala. Fifty-four for the 365 sounds about right, and maybe the other half in the morning: on the other side.

Don't forget, loves. Feliz solsticio.

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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , spirituality

Saturday XXXV: SFOWL · 14 December 2007

The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the interstices. Good god the world is interesting.

Meanwhile, moonlighting ashtanga. Too much to tell. Except that AYSF is a dream and so’s Eeyore. Links from the past week:

● Thursday the 13^th: planes, trans and automobiles hugging the westcoast, business travelers’ noses in the Style Section with this article big and eyecatching on the cover. Thanks, New York Times. Presidential politics be damned, in some dimensions we the people really are living in the Al Gore era. I came within one degree of separation from the great gomer twice this week. Getting Americans to face the connection between their consumption and climate change: governments aren’t making this happen. Grassroots movements and marketmakers are. Which is why Gore is better as a pissed off subaltern insurgent who has faced his worst fear—losing—and moved on. And why this dissertation is on regulation from below.

● End of the year lists. Blame the internet and blame the accelerated culture: the lists are everywhere. Rex has the metalist here. The only one that really rewards me, now the third year going, is the Guardian writers’ individual favorites for the year. I always find one or two treasures in here, especially because it’s blind to genre and publication date and so not just a list about “keeping up” with the world. Delightfully, though, the man who has kept the tiny pleasure-readerly flame alive for me the past five years—with the occasional pitch-perfect tip—is now an official listmaker as well: I give you Matthew Korfhage’s holiday ménage-a-trois (readers here know MK as the Daily Miltonian). And apparently I also need to read this, this, and this.

● Oh! Deeper into geekiness: a podcast about scholar-practitioners. This is just nice: a meditator-professor discusses hyper-objectivity in religious studies, the peculiarly American tendency to divorce study from practice, and the possibilities for “contemplative educitaion.” For her, it was Chogyam Trumka who “ripped out the division” between study and practice. Some words from the talk:

If we only practice meditation we become stupid meditators, and if we only study we become arrogant scholars…. If you don’t have some kind of wisdom [e.g., reading of historical texts] dawning in your practice, then there’s a sense of “what is the point?” But if you bring some light [from study] into the practice… the thing that I hear over and over again from my longtime practitioner-students is that they feel completely re-energized.

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

More Shiva · 12 December 2007

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

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

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

                Alain Danielou, L’Erotisme divinise p. 42

 

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Both And · 10 December 2007

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will and Surrender 101 · 9 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yoga Is Dangerous IV: Christianity · 2 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday XXXIII: Tohu Vabohu · 30 November 2007

Him: How was practice this morning?
Me (matter of fact): The best of my entire life.
Him (blasé): That’s what you said yesterday.
Me: (shrug)
Him: And the day before that.

But actually, SS Saturday is quickly becoming the best of all. Yeah. Luxury, joy and beauty. I know there are those of you who do not approve. But excuse me: I live an extremely orderly life. Did you notice? O-R-D-E-R-L-Y L-I-F-E. Grant me my study in spontaneity.

Just so you don’t think me all sunshine, let me say that I am horrified that it is nigh on December. I am talking dark, existential, dread-laden horror. Time is satan. Dark and fleeting. Nothing happens, and then you’re old. You feel like the past is more real than today, the present is happening without even pausing to let you realize it and the future is going to crush you. Kill you slow and grind you to dust. It’s going to rush in and steal what you think you have as soon as it possibly can.

You feel like time is some human invention gone horribly wrong and all it has to offer you is darkness and dread. At least this is how you feel if you are me. I wonder if this is a basic existential condition… or a dissertation condition?

The only way to leaven it is to love what is. Love it like crazy because the dread makes you love. Sometimes looking into the existential maw, embracing the void, is the shortest route to living in the now. Lightly. XO

Links:

● Naked Indian bodies, manual labor, molten metal, and one terrible colonial product supply chain. I hesitate to link to Shakti Industries, because this stuff is just asking you to get off and there should be a question of why this is so aesthetically absorbing. But it’s a good story, and the slideshow will definitely make you respond.

● So, Sally Kempton. Dive-bombing the Esquire readership with feminist manifestoes in her 20s, dressing down a young Hefner on TV, and generally being smart smart smart and sexy in New York in the days of the new left. Then she accidentally has a peak experience in her living room or something. Shit. Meets Muktananda, goes east, disappears for a long time. Comes back integral and starts talking. Not about turning away from leftism, but about expanding it so it’ll actually work. Here she is in conversation with Ken Wilber about the oldschool hostility to any kind of interiority (even psychoanalysis) as somehow inimical to social change, about problems in the Dawkins-Hitchens agenda, about philosophical maturations that need to happen in order for the left to get itself out of its little old box. And with hints (in my interpretation) toward a spirituality that’s concrete—that’s not just about occasional altered states, but is practical and daily and not split off as woo-woo. (More.) 

● The wonderful thing Morgan Spurlock is doing has pretty well made the rounds by now. This is even nicer: Christians themselves calling out the greedy affluence, the grasping, and the nauseating amount of crap that will weigh down my own holiday this year in the heart of WWJB land. If you haven’t seen rich suburban American Christians, there’s a level of obsessive consumption disorder you’ll never understand. Lucky.

● You know the science writer Natalie Angier? Nice. Here she is elaborating two answers to the question: Why do we make art? There’s the sex answer—individuals create things to display what they have to offer genetically and to garner attention (this kind of evolutionary reduction is in these days... yawn)—and the communal answer. She loves the latter enough to put it beautifully. I like the hue this gives to the auteur-focused conversations we had here this week.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Saturday XXXII: Stop Owl Commodification · 16 November 2007

I found the ecstatic grassroots movement I've been imagining. Uh oh. But I’m not going to tell you about it. Except to say it involves a secret society and does not involve naked yoga.

Returned to morning practice this week, which included Thursday contortions next to an intriguing New York ashtangi poet met through this medium. Somewhere between post-practice Fred Segal and Real Food Daily brunch, I realized I'd been charmed. Sometimes RL is so much better.

I have to admit morning practice and the rhythms it creates for me are what I love best, even though I have adored the evenings this fall. I’ve done six weeks of all 5:00 practices, milking the habituated morning energy spike for dissertationly purposes. Gradually over the weeks this has shifted my energy eveningward, and the mornings have slowed. The experiment has showed me so much about my choices in energy-distribution: between relationships, work and practice. About practicing to give energy to my life rather than letting practice be the main event. I’ll try to write more about this before it is gone.

● I am kind of excited about the little movie about bob dylan this week.

● Speaking of sentimental wonders: a re-realease of songs a decade old at the RJM Digital Archive. He never used to talk to me back in the days when he was making these recordings. I was generally pissed off and what people called "intense" while he was ethereal and lovey. Tendencies which have tempered on both sides. But one December afternoon after my shift at the library desk I passed him under the pine trees and asked for a cassette. Listened throughout the Christmas break, out there driving a Dodge truck on icy Montana roads. Up to the ski area for days alone on Red Lodge Mountain, and down to the bars in town for nights with my old nemesis—the only other one of us rural kids who escaped, albeit in her case to a worser fate. That’s where these songs go for me.

● What else? Well, here is some trouble. Some good discussion earlier in the week. If you come around, you better listen at least as sharply as you soapbox. We are so done with recycled opinions and 2004-era rants.

● Oh, and whoever sold my address to Yoga Pura also gave it to Anthropologie, whose catalog just arrived.

I tolerated it this summer when the outer hipstosphere switched from swallows to owls as their cute-but-disturbing bird of choice (ho hum). But now there are owl candles, an owl purse and (yes, Tova) an owl apron in the Anthro catolog. I mention this by way of saying to those of you who might be tempted: I don’t actually like owls. Please no owl things for the holidays. (Unless it's something really good, you know.) Otherwise, STOP OWL COMMODIFICATION.

That’s enough linking. I don’t care what else was being said in the world this week.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

This is What Democracy Looks Like · 26 October 2007

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

Elitist.

Welcome to information age, Sir.

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

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

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

Nice try.

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

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

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

Hello. 

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

-Richard Rohr 

Let a hundred flowers bloom.              

-Richard Rorty

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

Saturday XXVIII · 21 October 2007

Night before last I dreamed Alastair Crowley was watching the Editor and me from a second-floor window across the street while we played with sea creatures in turquoise tidepools. Crowley was wearing a billowy black cape and trying to look scary, hunched over like the grim reaper. Poser.

In the dream, I told the Editor, “Alastair Crowley’s up in that window, watching us!” And he replied, “Don’t tell me that—I’ll have dreams about him!”

Guess Halloween is coming. I just ran across a poem I wrote on Halloween a decade ago. Very dark. I remember writing it in my head while on a run along the train tracks after class, before an evening of waiting tables and before getting smashed in an old downtown Victorian overrun by us disaffected Philosophy majors. That is what happens when 20-year-olds read Sartre and write poetry. Good thing I stopped.

Rachel and I are seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company tonight. God. Being a little sharper on  X-men than on Chekov, I actually got the tickets out of excitement to see Magneto on stage, thinking “The Seagull” must be some obscure thing by the Bard. But no, it is Chekov. Only Rachel could help me understand that this play is no drama but just a wicked, wicked joke.

I’m going to do some Kundalini this morning and then secret down to the beach with the in-line skates that mysteriously showed up in the campus mailroom with my name on them. The departmental staff made me open the package immediately ('cos last time I received a non-Amazon box, it was cookies). That was embarrassing. By this token, I’ll understand if you want to disassociate from me when you learn I partake in either Kundalini or inline skating. Though you should probably lighten up and do some kriyas.

By the way. After much deliberation, it is Big Sur for Thanksgiving. It appears I’ll be stranded between equidistant (and I do mean distant) yoga in Mountain View and Santa Barbara, but correct me if I’m wrong. Any recommendations for what to do (the baths at 2 a.m., maybe, or afternoon snack at the Post Ranch?) and what to read (Henry Miller?) are welcomed.

Saturday links.

? Speaking of deliveries and of autumnal feelings, this record came in the mail for the Editor the other day. Beautiful. Nonsensical. So nice. Listen to the sample track embedded in the linked review. For the rest, though, send Bon Iver (this is a self-release and it sounds like he’s stuck up in a cabin in Wisconsin) some dollars. Right after you go back and pay Radiohead for that download you forgot to settle up the other day, weasels.

? Here is a clip from the recent Mindfulness and Psychotherapy conference at UCLA. Thich Nhat Hahn opens and then Jack Kornfield speaks about Burma. This related short interview—on warrior traditions in various faiths and the possibilities for activism rooted in Buddhism—is more provocative. “It’s one thing to be calm in a peaceful mountain monastery, and quite another to act calmly on a festering street corner in East L.A.”

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

Eaten By Ants · 17 October 2007

Tonight, during Prasarita D, I had an urge more intense and crazy than anything I’ve ever experienced on the mat. It struck, and filled me with restlessness all the way to the brink of giggles. I pictured myself following through on the urge and had to scurry out of the room to stop myself.

It’s that I wanted to walk over to a fellow student, swipe his cheat-sheet up off the floor, and take a bite out of it. Then I wanted to chew it thoughtfully, look him meaningfully in the eyes, and say something like:

“Better hurry up and learn this sequence, because I’m taking a bite out of this paper every day ‘til it’s gone.”

The man is named M and I find him inspiring as hell. Of course we’ve never spoken, but I have overheard his amazing story. Something about a life of hardscrabble business dealings and incredible stress, interrupted early this year by a violent attack that left him barely more than dead. And now he’s starting a second life—one that includes yoga every afternoon. His body, covered in new scars, looks like it’s been through decades of hard, blue-collar life. He comes in when I’m towards the end of the standing postures and sets up next to me. He hums at first, which is great. Often he smells of a cigar, which doesn’t bother me because I'm too charmed by the guy. Other days, there is a vague nacho aroma. He has a bath towel and a basic blue mat that is usually rumpled, but that in the past two weeks he’s been lining up carefully parallel to our mahogany floorboards. Nice to see a little ashtanga analness taking root.

This is someone for whom you would want to make every exception in the world. He is still figuring out who he is this time around; he is visibly filled with gratitude and consistent in his practice; perhaps, too, he's still a little disoriented from the trauma. I figure you let the guy have his cheat-sheet, even for months if that is what feels right to him.

When I scurried from the room to stop myself from eating his paper, the teacher and my friend J were on the other side of the door. I was so freaked out and disoriented by the impulse and its strength that it showed on my face. When they asked what was wrong I wasn’t sufficiently ahead of myself to say anything but the truth.

I am usually reserved and methodical, so the little drama probably came off strange.

J nodded. I know exactly how that can be, when you get those urges. His paper must be yummy. The teacher took it all as a sign that I crave more starch in my diet and made me promise to eat root vegetables for dinner. Yes, ok: ketchari with potatoes and chickpeas.

I nodded at them both, flummoxed, and went back to practice. It was clear to me that the root urge was to play the teacher with M, not to eat, but I didn’t take the time to explain. Especially because it's not an unproblematic urge.

When I thought it through again after practice, I realized the joke my mind had been playing. There’s an old story SKPJ tells, about going to some library with his guru Krishnamacharya, and finding there the true ashtanga sequence written down on banana leaves by sages of old.

And where are the precious documents now? When asked this, SKPJ says they have been eaten by ants. And so: lost to the mists of time.

It appears that what I wanted in that moment was to do M the favor of being his ant.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body

Saturday XXVII · 12 October 2007

Minimalism, recently.

I’d say avant, but that would be obnoxious.

AF moved into a sleek LeCorbusier this week. I keep accidentally imagining myself there. But the flights to Chas de G are just stupid, and I’m supposed to be doing what DJ (the dissertation journal) says.

Reading My Paris as consolation (check it, U).

With Gui Boratto.

Eating Red Delicious. Which taste like something for once. 

Bad moon day on Wednesday. Moon days piss me off. I’ve been trying not to mention that.

Meanwhile, the secret planche is starting to show (phase one; oooooh Tristan—what you trying to do here? But thanks; and the bboy is something else). Take note if you are a 14-year-old boy or a female ashtangi. Related: I am showing a new interest in pressing up to handstand. Elusive. But it turns out I can hold an inverted L all day. Useless.

Also related: return of the desire to tattoo the arches of my feet. I know, I know. Guess it’s the collective unconscious talking. Sort of loudly.

Incidentally, there is no collective unconscious. Been ridiculing Jung’s bad metaphysics in the evenings. Can’t be helped, considering the October occult reading taking place in the Owl House.

However: I will be nesting alone in Eagle Rock this week while a dear friend plays CMJ. It is a writing retreat. Raising the question: to schlep to Santa Monica for practice, or moonlight closer to the temporary digs. Jury’s out.

And obviously, yes. There is a disturbance in the  force. I mean the collective unconscious.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

Fall · 7 October 2007

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

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

Anyway. It is fall.

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

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

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

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

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

Inverted · 1 October 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on this as I realize what is going on.

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

Ornette · 27 September 2007

Ok. Holy Shit.

It was decided that I should be edified. By a sort of direct experience of free jazz, which in its recorded form can make me irritable. Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo and three bassists played here, the premiere of Sound Grammar; and I figured that twenty years from now when I get around to appreciating free jazz, I’d be glad I’d seen it.

Seriously, it was amazing. What do you say? Ornette walks on stage looking like a brittle old stick in the shape of an upside-down saxophone, head permanently bowed and hands clasped. Iridescent turquoise suit and big white shoes. He is 77 and I hear he passed out onstage at a festival over the summer. The only thing he said all night was at the start, telling us to follow the note, but that the note would be the beating of our own hearts instead of the sound they were playing.

Corny. Except I think this is the best way to describe what happened next. Ornette took up his alto saxophone and undid all the dark thoughts I’d been thinking about old age since seeing my diminished grandmother week before last. The intensity, mastery, emotional clarity. And sweat. He actually is genius, not the sentimental shadow of past genius.

I was exhausted afterwards.

After our friends had gone, the Editor tried to explain something about the unplayed rhythm in the music, the irregular pulse along each 16^th or 32^nd note or something. I looked up and said I wished I had the concepts to appreciate it on that level, but I just didn’t perceive a pattern.

—Yes you did. You were moving to it.—

—Oh.—

—I  thought you wouldn’t like it but after you started moving I realized you’d think it was the same as yoga.—

Whatever that means.

Here is Ornette in the NYT last year:

The music he likes is simply defined: anything...  that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea.”… Mr. Coleman draws you into the chicken- and- egg questions that he’s asking himself…. Many of them are about what happens when you put a name on something, or when you learn some codified knowledge. Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any construct of thought.

Links: Free Jazz, Ornette’s Permanent Revolution, Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXV · 22 September 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday links, for the first time in a while:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn’t want it to end.

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

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

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

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

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

Sharpen Your Nerves · 4 September 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s from the notebook:

“There are turkeys! Large!”

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

“Ghee. God we’re weird.”

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

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

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

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

The Slacker Meditates: Some High Points · 27 August 2007

                                DAY 1: STATIC

Candy saaaaays…

I haven’t had a sexual fantasy today. Which can’t be healthy...

I’m gonna watch the bluebirds flyyy… ovah mah shouldah 

Who else in here is having a sexual fantasy? Maybe if I can find them out…

What do you think I’d seeeee?

If aliens bombed the White House, would the retreat directors tell us?

If I could…

I knew the Velvet Underground was a mistake this morning.

Walk a-wa-y from me…?

             DAY 2: DOUBTING THE METHOD, RATIONALIZATION, MIND-GAMES

Isn’t this being the witness thing a little jayvee? Why cultivate dualism?

I’m not sure about yesterday's sublimation of sexual energy strategy. Isn’t that more for the Vajrayana set? And Kornfield did give that lecture about not mixing methods…. 

If a sexual fantasy spontaneously arises in my field of awareness, isn’t meditating on it a form of Vipassana?

How many days until my awareness goes transpersonal? Maybe I can work some telepathy.

If the TM people think they can meditate together to bring world peace, could we raise the vibrational energy for regime change?

This is all so dualistic. It’s wallowing. I want realization. Screw practice. This just reinforces smallmind. What’s the sutra? With swift effort become wise… And that Kornfield line: “It’s not that we’re too greedy… It’s that we’re not greedy enough.”

This is boring. If my brainwaves don’t drop down tomorrow, I’m done. Why don’t they teach us lucid dreaming or something halfway interesting as long as we’re going to sit here all week?

What am I doing on the slow train? Maybe the diamond vehicle…. Maybe zen…

              DAY 3: OBSESSION WITH IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT

But the slow train is scenic! I’d forgotten. God this is good.

…And lunch will be even better…

Whose shoes are those?

Was that 30 minutes of dead air? Existence is beautiful. Emptiness is beautiful.

Are there really not any sexy people? Really?

They have heirloom tomatoes down in the kitchen. Tomatoes…

How many hours until asana practice? Maybe I will start earlier tomorrow. Sun salutations…. Ekam inhale… Dwe exhale…. Shit. The instructor just took the look on my face for a sexual fantasy…

Ok, I’m wasting time. I don’t have all millennium here. Let it go, let it go already….

That dead spot in my trapezius hasn’t gotten any smaller since last year.

Ekam…. Dwe…. Ekam… Dwe… Sat… Nam… Sat… Nam… that’s more like it already… Nam…

I think I have to go to the bathroom, but that might be more drama than I can handle.

I feel happy. Happy happy happy. Pardon me while I exploit his emotion. Get lost, witness.

If I’m going to reset my alarm before bed, I better rehearse that a few times in my head first. It’ll be the big event of the night… I’m already looking forward to it.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , self-deception , sound , spirituality

The Guru's Segway · 26 August 2007

Sitting in the MOMA café two Fridays ago, thinking about Helvetica, when the yoga people call. I’d left voicemail at the Dharma Mittra center days earlier, asking if they’d take a west coast irregular at the long Saturday night intensive. Thought I’d received the silent no, and meantime had made plans to be at the Puck Building (interestingly enough) on Saturday night, for a reception that would collect my favorite score of sociologists.

Mmmm. Priority conflict. For about two seconds. I clearly enunciated all my credit card information to the caller, confident the hipsters at the next table were less smart than they looked.

Next night, old men on the street in Gramercy Park were doing approachable old-man things, but rather than ask for directions I trailed a giant purposeful yogi a half-block north, moving quickly. Very many good tattoos fresh enough to refer to this phase of his life rather than (like mine) one previous, but both earplugs and dreads so large that he’d been working on them awhile. He was warriorish, and suggested I was in for a break from Santa Monica diamonds and matched Lululemon. He took the stairs two at a time, which I couldn’t follow without making a racket. And besides, I stopped at the first landing to check out the guru’s segway.

Then climbed in to a long thin room full of summer evening light and vegetarian sweat. People were politely staking claims, tucking glasses and cell phones into a bookcase full of Danskos.

Mister Plugs and I were early, but the last two of maybe 40 to arrive. I was glad for that, setting up at the back of the room where’s there’s a solid floor, rather on the front 2/3 that is covered with faded rose shag that could be as old as me. Right above my mat, 15 feet up, was a disco ball in an angular skylight. Ad-hoc feng shi.

To the right (beyond a tattooed over-50 man who had a strong war-veteran-ness about him and who would make repeated comments about my hamstrings as we worked toward yoga nidrassana) was an altar featuring Jesus, Aurobindo, Yogananda, and I think Hanuman. (Nidrassana-man would feel far less lecherous hours later, when the whole thing deteriorated into an ecstatic-chanting, posture-striking mess of bodies.) I only tend to care about altars if they contain a candle I can use to balance. But this altar interested me because it brought parts of my neglected heart together: never has the Jesus-Yogananda association been so clear. This would be the first time that my old relationship with the Jewish carpenter would seem at all relevant to my yoga practice.

The large window out over the street was crowded with more of this hindoo-hippie detritus of what Dharma Mittra (Dharma? Mittra?) later said was his forty years in this space—during which his first segway, and before that 14 bicycles, have disappeared from that stoop on the stairs. (All of this karmic payback for horses, and perhaps one elephant, he stole in past lives. He is glad to give up segways to settle his score.) In the window, plants only a mother would love, glass ornaments of rainbows, dusty candles, and a giant metal OM looking down oven the intersection at 23^rd and 3^rd.

We crowded in on the pink shag, looking up at him and up at the OM, and made the intonation for a very long time. Across the street a young man pulled off a tie (on a Saturday?) and dress shirt, and I thought of Edward Norton in Fight Club. Did this young capital- lackey know what he was getting in to when he rented the place? We OMed and OMed. I thought about the cardsculpture stacks of citrus fruits at the stand down below, wondered if we were creating a comedy streetscene by dislodging them.

Then, drawing in a little closer, I started to see the people around me: 30s, professional, uptight, white. Possessing triceps. I fit right in.

This was not what Mister Plugs had led me to expect. No surprise it would take this group a while to open up to the ecstatic yogachurch Dharma Mittra wanted to conjure.

But here it is paragraph ten and I haven’t even set eyes on the man’s face yet. We haven’t even taken the first sun salutation (or the second, in which he’d nonchalantly instruct us to take pincha from downward dog). 

Looks like I am recounting this at the pace to which I have to slow down in order to remember it, now that it’s more than two weeks past. I’ll try to speed this thing up and offer a proper workshop review. Later.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , sound

Pirates of the Air · 23 August 2007

If you’re going to be exacting, be exacting about the breath.

Fourth day of Mysore with Petri the Pirate. He doesn’t teach to poses so much as to the breath—although he finally busted my cheating supta urdvha pada today, for the split second I drop the toe as I roll past the elbow (locking my eyes, whispering “You have to DECIDE! The toe is YOURS. Decide every day. You WILL NOT DROP IT”), and when I took my own ankles in a backbend, “Tomorrow you do yourself, without me holding.” Here’s to the power of suggestion. Phhhhhhhhhhhht. But anyway, most of what we’re doing is exacting my vinyasas. Basically, this involves adding an extra exhale in a few places, and attempting to inhale-UP! out of most postures.

In theory, the extra breaths should make practice easier, but as it is, knowing he’s listening far more than watching, I’ve placed my attention even more on the breath than usual this week. I love practicing this way, and with this kind of awareness from a teacher. But somehow in this process I’ve lost a sliver of inhale, shortened it to match the exhale (whereas usually I'm a hair long on the inhale), so over the course of a 140-minute practice I slowly edge into the red. Some inhale-retention might be due later.

Half an hour after rolling out of rest, and my wrists are still atremble on the banks of my keyboard. Breath superslow, deep and greedy.

I have consumed an unbelievable 64 oz of water in the past 40 minutes (how is this even possible?), and am finally, as a result, feeling grounded. In savasana I practiced a bit of yoga nidra where the body becomes heavy, drawn into the ground like a block of lead, and then becomes light, weightless, air. Hearing Jasmine Riddle, from a secret hippie-magick cassette I found in the obscurest of university archives (and is now, eyebrow-raisingly, a regular line on my far-from-private library record) as she warps soundwaves with her warbling chant of “heavy heavy, light light.”

What’s with that about conquering gravity in the third series? I’m a long long way from such things, measuring by my urdvha kukkutasanas, but today there is such an spacey lightness that I’m not going to get a whit done until I refind the earth. Matthew Sweeney noted in a podcast recently that astangis tend to overemphasize lightness, I suppose to the point that we of the subculture becomes rootless and unsteady.

I just downed another 10 oz of lemonwater.

I think I’ll read a stack of book reviews before I try to do anything semi-important with my brain this morning. Tomorrow, primary series, close to the ground and counterbalanced with great inhalations.

That’s enough vinyasa talk for this owl.

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

Saturday XXII · 19 August 2007

I’m just getting reaccustomed to the Southern California light. Anything more than a week away, and I wind up in Los Angeles-loving homecoming mode for days upon return. New York is perfect, though. I spoke a couple of times at the ASA conference, and it was not too disastrous. I’m trying to find a way to deal with speaking and teaching now that my bs bravado, which used to win prizes for impromptu speaking, has deserted me. I’m still pretty wobbly and adrenaline-wracked on stage, but I think it’s because I’m trying to communicate rather than perform. So I’m trying to to be patient instead of horrified by my own amateruity. In all, ASA has a way of reinvesting me in its world. I had an almost-four hour dinner with a big deal professor I’d never met before, and sort of fell for her. In the third hour, Tim Robbins walked through and when I bolted upright in response to a second’s eye contact (wow) she shrugged and told me to go back to what I’d been saying.

I practiced many times, and it was good. Met briefly the light and nympho genius boodiba, who gave me homework to improve my UKK-B, but repeatedly missed REW due to my gravitation away from (absent) Eddie’s and toward G and the excellent showers at YS. G introduced himself by criticizing my backwards supta vajrasana (I do it crim some days to ease the torqued lumbar), then put his hands on my sacrum and moved it brilliantly. That’s hours of bodywork I’ve been putting off, I thought. Worth the trip in itself.

Saturday afternoon, I skipped the conference’s key social event, where I’d only raise suspicion with my sobriety and meatlessness, and did a supposedly 3-hour workshop with Dharma Mittra that stretched past 9 pm. I think the experience deserves a review in this space, when I get a chance to recollect it.

Yesterday was our 7-year anniversary. He offered Encinitas, but I was still in LA reintegration space. Before dessert at some French café, we went to The Majestic for a terrible swords and sandals epic which I thoroughly enjoyed (the whole genre is so wrong, and I love it).

Then he finally showed me to the beautiful secret cemetery, hidden among highrises and accessible only through a long unmarked drive that appears to enter a parking structure, where various celebrities have plots waiting. Ray Bradbury, The Fonz, etc. For all my sincerity about it, I have to grant there is something kitchy about a secret garden whose entrance is marked by the sentrylike individual mausoleum of Armand Hammer. There are real-live dead celebrities there too. Billy Wilder’s headstone says “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.” Someone had left fresh flowers for Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. The undead Jack Lemmon’s stone is engraved only with “in”—I suppose because it’s morbid to inscribe the “Rest” and “Peace” until the time comes.

Weekend links now.

? MIA’s record is officially out on Tuesday. Good to see some uncynical attention this time. Screw Pitchfork. Christgau’s review: “The eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam M.I.A. has constructed is an art music whose concept recalls the Clash.” Also, South Asia-o-philes will appreciate her Jimmy images.

? China tells the living Buddhas of Tibet they must obtain permission to reincarnate! “The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid.” Read this article.

? The new Wm. Gibson book is pretty good, although for the hawkeye humor of his prose—he nails lines with the shrugging precision that Mr. Miyagi nails boards—it felt a bit thin. Still, while Gibson’s surfaces leave me cold, I increasingly feel in love with his subconscious. Here he is talking about process in Salon, and here’s a tribute website to Spook Country that goes a little far.

? More UCLA work on mirror neurons, this time their role in successful advertising. Crazy.

? Really good article by Jaron Lanier, whose idea of spirituality is “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions,” on the Dawkins project. He writes:

It isn’t disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way.... A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs…. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God…. Because people are afraid to die, they sometimes find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. Take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

To have and to hold · 7 August 2007

This will be the last post in the sacrum cycle. Things are getting dangerous around here and I'm putting the lid on it before the enlightenment police and their awakening-is-for-hippies sidekicks find us out.

Meantime... I’m toying with the idea of a small interview project with very long-term practitioners. I’d like to ask them to talk about the specific injuries or other pain they’ve experienced as advanced practitoners, the healing or change this brought, and the way such experiences over time have shaped their relationships with the practice.

It would be asking a lot. These can be seen as intimate questions. Writing this out, I realized that I had more to say than expected… and yet that the topic in my case is not terribly complex or elusive. Injury is worth de-mystifying, and de-mythifying, even if ultimately it’s beneficial to treat it philosophically as well.

Sometimes it’s easier not to put these things into words, and to let them go when they conclude as if they happened to another body. But insofar as the practice is the teacher, pain and injury are one mechanism of learning. So, asking a few insightful old-timers to mark off some of their experience in words might help others, and add to an understanding of how this system can work. *If anyone reading would benefit from a project like this, your feedback is very welcome.

I imagine that the way pain and injury shape your relationship to practice depends heavily on your personality and the nature of the injury, so not every old-timer's experience would resonate with every student.

I don’t know. With my modest experience, I can say that astanga practice has been often different in the presence of pain. For the past months, it’s been about inner "research" both physical and psycho-emotional, rather than the ecstatic, touching-the-infinite experiences that made me an addict. Pain has a way of taking up my attention, and I think that it’s a good idea to allow it do just that when it’s here.

Over time, this has changed my relationship to the practice more than I can say. I don’t think it’s made me more committed, but revealed that the habit was already set at the level of taken- for- grantedness and I’m as likely to quit this morning ritual as I am to give up brushing my teeth.

That said, when the tapas are low, practice puts me less “in touch with how I’ve been treating myself” lately (in Joel Kramer’s words). Practice becomes more a refuge than an inspiration to live the rest of the day at the ashtanga standard of clarity and openness.

I’m fine with it being a refuge for a while. For months, even doing third series, I’ve experienced this as a restorative practice. I’m not sure how to explain this, but here is a comparison. My partner has done some uncharacteristic “looking out for me” this summer: learning to receive a bit of nurturing from both sources has been interesting and good. And not easy.

Most of the time, practice teaches me that life is easy. This is what I love in the astanga disposition—lightness without flightiness, quietude without clenching, sincerity without seriousness—and I’ve been lucky to find teachers who don’t need to be either disciplinarians or care-takers. Thank god. But lately practice has shown me that life is difficult sometimes, and this doesn’t make me want to break up with astanga.

Struggle was here. It tapers off. The relationship goes on.

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

Body Awareness: What is it good for? · 6 August 2007

When I was 20 and drinking my way across Costa Rica (thankfully, a small country) a swivel-hipped Latin guy tried for weeks to teach me Salsa and Meringue. I would have been embarrassed at my failure to learn had I thought dance was even slightly important or interesting. At the time, the way he moved neither impressed me nor turned me on.

Until my mid-20s, the details that interested me were ideas. Body parts didn’t fit in the jar that was my brain, so I didn’t care about them. I had never studied dance or martial arts, never did any kind of formal athletics post junior high basketball (unless a scrappy upstart college lacrosse team counts—though we were primarily a drinking club), and I certainly never worked with a coach or personal trainer for anything. I do regret missing out for so long.

I would not say that astanga yoga got me interested in the body right away. But… over time, a detailed awareness of the body is pretty well guaranteed if you do this practice, which is silent and internally focused. You get sensitive to the details of how you move in space, of where tension circulates and coalesces, and of how different muscles, ligaments and bones relate to one another. Eventually, it gets a little weird. Like you know from the way your shoulder moves that your T-12 is out, or you notice way too acutely that the orange you ate at 3 pm on Tuesday brings a sort of acidity and watery-ness to your G-I tract that’s still present on Wednesday morning, or you get so you can dialogue with your uterus in this very useful way. Also, you might start to notice and play with your breath, throwing the voluntary/involuntary switch every chance you get and realizing how much all your thoughts and emotions are hinged to simple respiration.

There’s an argument to be made that the body functions on involuntary mode to free your awareness up to do higher-order operations. And that yoga pushes the mind back into the realms we’ve consigned to “automatic”—not just physical functions, but mental and emotion reactions as well. There’s an argument to be made (I’ll be arguing against it in public later this week, likely) that this sort of “mindfulness” is the simply province of capitalism’s leisure people—a preoccupation of those who have no occupation left. These arguments see the “attention market” as a zero-sum arena, in which we have to make choices about which capacities (and relationships) deserve our energy and attention, and which do not. While I’m always interested in a good critique, I would say that this assumption is mistaken. While yoga definitely involves sacrifices of time and energy, mindful awareness of the body seems to increase my energy and capacity to pay attention on various levels of experience simultaneously. Just because I am unusually aware of my body doesn’t mean, necessarily, that I’m less aware of my world… or that my sense of the world becomes limited to that which my body can articulate.

For me, the more interesting argument against body awareness is that may increase a person’s suffering in the presence of pain. As discussed here over the past weekend, most people would not know the difference if their sacrum were shifted, as mine is. But the fact that I feel this change both during and out of practice has at times led me to identify as someone with an injury. I feel pain in my sacrum because I investigate and amplify all sensation in my pelvis in order to map it with my senses. I wish for change, get irritated, and suffer.

Have I become neurotic or just more aware? This is what I wondered when I started meditating in a way that made subconscious emotional and thought streams semi-visible. The question has come up for me again this summer, with respect to body awareness in the presence of pain.

Ultimately, I don’t buy the second argument against body awareness any more than the first. While awareness of pain might distress me from time to time, that’s because I’m relatively immature. The longer it stays around, the more nonchalant I become about it, and the more days of practice I have in which I can be aware of pain (or better: sharp sensation) and still have moments of transcendence. I don’t know how that works or why, but it seems like a big deal. It seems like this is about equanimity on a concrete, practical level.

None of this says what intense body awareness is actually good for, I guess because that’s simple. It’s wondrous and inspiring. I never knew what I was missing. And it’s really not that elusive. There’s really no good reason to live in the dark.

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

Holy Bones, Part III · 3 August 2007

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

    (Interpretive interlude courtesy a teacher-friend.)

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

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

      (Interpretive interlude courtesy wikipedia)

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

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

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

     (Insert your preferred interpretive interlude here.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday XX · 28 July 2007

Today I caught an early kundalini yoga class in time to get to the beach before the heat. I’ve been a little sour lately, if you haven’t had the misfortune of a direct taste; and I carried a seed of skepticism into class although I like the teacher very much.

Now really, if you need hocus-pocus to spark that energy, you are wasting your time.

Yeah. So the class was great. We did a bunch of stupid-looking kriyas that lonely, naked Indian men in caves probably made up out boredom and dementia. Most of these tricks involved holding awkward shapes and performing a loud, rapid “bellows breath” from the belly. Then we took savasana, which was the deepest and most deathly peaceful I’ve experienced in ages. Then we chanted something about how the universe and its creative force are awe-inspiring and wonderful.

I’ve taken enough random yoga to be able to let go into the weirdness, so got into this easily enough. These practices are about playing with energy (presuming you know how to find it in the first place, which might be a large presumption). It’s just about the subtle body: tension, force, lightness, breath, and the way that your relationship to gravity changes when you find certain deeper muscles and colonize them from the involuntary into the voluntary sphere. Subtle body isn’t mystery: it’s just one level less obvious than asana contortionism. I loved that the class was all play, whereas my experience of asana practice is equal parts energy creation, expenditure, and release.

There’s power in the breath, and the way it edges up against and creates tension in the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, and the muscles of the throat. Sometimes I forget.

Tomorrow the living guru of astanga yoga turns 92 and the Mysore rooms will be empty. To build on theme of letting go into looking stupid, I’m seriously considering renting in-line skates and hitting the paved beachwalk first thing tomorrow morning. (Let’s not argue about this: we all know that rollerblading is lame.) I think I can be confident that most people I know will sleep in, and I’ll be relatively anonymous in my awkwardness. Vande gurunam.

Not so much on the linking this Saturday. Just a few from earlier in the week.

? You likely already saw this, along with the Filipino prisoners dancing Thriller, but: the rural farmlife version of Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Funny. Will Oldham’s open-hip gyrations confirm what I’ve been saying since his last visit to LA: the guy is doing some yoga.

? The NYT’s quaint American Road Trip series visits the Shambala Mountain Center and gets way too moony for good journalism. By page two, the entire “news article” genre has deteriorated into formless, depressive goo. Kind of endearing.

? Joseph LeDoux does an interview in Salon about the key processes that underlie consciousness, how the brain regulates emotions, and the relationship of music and memory.

[E]ven if we solved the problem of consciousness we wouldn't understand how our brains make us who we are.… [M]otives like the desire to succeed or to obtain power are not simple reflections of consciousness. Dick Cheney probably thinks he's a good guy.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , science , sound

Holy Bones, Part I · 24 July 2007

Monday a teacher knelt by my mat and told me that nobody understands.

I felt so understood.

This teacher has worked with thousands of practitioners over the decades, so if he says the shift in my skeleton is something nobody understands, that’s something.

“You can’t even talk about it because nobody understands, I know,” he said, kneeling there. Then he told me that out there somewhere, an old friend is doing advanced practice on a shifted sacrum same as me, and after a year of holding out, his has just suddenly self- corrected. His friend says, “I don’t understand it. It’s just getting better.”

So, that makes three in the community of understanding the non-understanding of the shifted sacrum.

I haven’t had much to say here or anywhere the past four months that this complex has been upon me, but now that the demon in my low back has diminished from a self-replicating beast to one single, cowering little shit, I realize the time to write about this experience is growing short. I hope.

So for the next few posts I’ll write about this a bit, in an effort to reclaim the sacrum from the realm of the unknowable. In case it’s helpful to anyone, I’ll torture out of myself some documentation of the physical (for some reason, discussing my own physical practice bores me very much). But, apart from my suspicions about the first and second chakras, which I am not going to discuss, most of my reflections due to this injury have to do with the uses and misuses of body awareness, and the possibility of finding bliss in the presence of pain.

Of all the parts of the skeleton, it’s easiest to spiritualize the sacrum. The holy bone, the house of the serpent, the primitive remnant of a tail, or the super-evolved pyramid-tip of the plumb line that roots the spine. And I won’t say I haven’t experienced this injury as a kind of stitch in the spirit as much as a pain in the ass. But ashtangis easily get carried away spiritualizing our injuries—looking for stories to explain them, looking for blame-takers, seeking “the” solution. And the limited sense that one never quite knows what she thinks about something until she can put it in words, I suppose it’s useful to write about this topic even though part of me would prefer to let it all pass into vague remembering… at least until a new turn of the bone brought it all rushing back another 5 or 15 years from now. Maybe, too, this will be useful to someone else out there in the community of the non-understanding of the understanding of the shifted sacrum.

It is hazardous to think of the body as a self-correcting system. The body dies, after all. And yet damn if it isn’t also the vehicle for discovery and for bliss and for awakening; and I’ll be damned if when treated with indulgent, loving patience it doesn’t self-correct. Humans create our own pain very often, but we are also healing ourselves all the time. It may be what we do best.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

New Machines for Expired Ideas · 11 July 2007

I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.

And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation.

Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain... or "causes" of the brain's effects on the meditator (clearly, the research designers are confusing themselves). FMRI takes very cool pictures of parts of the brain lighting up. But that’s it. It’s cartographic--and primitive, in a sense. But since it’s new, it’s spawned literature on the “effects” of meditation—something forward-thinking neuroscientists have cared about since the Dalai Lama started talking to them 25 years ago and some innovative philosophers, economists and brain scientists set up the Mind and Life Institute.

Ok, that’s great. The new UCLA study I’m reading is typical. The scan shows that certain neurons light up when people “experience” negative emotions (produced by looking at other faces embodying negative emotions—I'm not even going to unpack the weird assumptions loaded into this research design), and that the brain’s emotion center calms down when a subject identifies and takes a distance from these represented emotions. According to one of the authors, “These findings… suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood....”

So ok, hold up.

First, the tautology problem. What’s the cause and what’s the effect here? They have essentially “discovered” that distancing yourself from bad moods… distances you from bad moods. The effect and the cause are the same. No wonder their findings are statistically significant.

Just because some neurons are involved does not make the neurons the “cause” of this whole process. They’re just part of the process—albeit the only part the researchers can quite recognize as real (and thus the one they identify as a “cause”).

The only reason the researchers think that the first phenom of mindfully identifying and detaching from an emotion is separate from the second phenom of the lights going dim in the emotion center is that they are crazy old dualists who believe thought is an gauzy ghost separate from the material “reality” of the brain. They imagine their finding is an instance of intention causing action… though any meditator could tell them that emotional experience and intention are inter-twined and mutually reinforcing. Sure, the meditator says: You can change your thoughts, but only after discovering how your thoughts are already changing you. One does not simply cause the other. And ultimately, thoughts themselves and the thinker’s immediate experience are not separate.

I wonder: if these scientists knew their own minds better from the inside, would the create more subtle, accurate concepts?

Second, and this is what irritates me, the main scientific excitement over this research stems from the assumption that experiential phenomena are only “real” if they have a measureable physical manifestation. Materialism 101. But thoughts and intentions are also real (I wouldn’t say they’re “things,” like The Secret says, but anyway). You can’t take pictures of intentions with FMRI machines, but on a practical, everyday, human basis, pretending thoughts aren’t real is some wicked reductionism. And that’s the thing: mind, subjectivity, interiority, thought—all these beautiful inner phenomena—do not reduce to neurons firing. Taking my cues from Bourdieu the master-synthesizer, I’d submit that the subjective (mind) and the objective (brain) sides of this picture are mutually constitutive and equally real. It’s just that you can’t take FMRI pictures of inner states per se.

The leading edge of western, and if I may, global, culture is rushing toward holistic understandings of mind-body. This shows up in social science’s sensitivity to embodiment, in athletes’ dedication to mental training, in the eastern-western culture of yoga, in the synthetic social theory that theorists of both mind and society are patching together, and in the dissipation (in certain cultural strata) of all kinds of mind-body practice.

Neuroscientists want to be a part of the revolution, as I’m seeing especially on the west coast—at places like the the UC Davis Shamatha Project, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Since they’ve got the biggest budgets and the shiniest tools, they’re likely to get an audience in defining the 21^st century mind-body, but right now all they’re doing with it is advancing a new version of thought/brain dualism. This isn’t the same as reducing mind to brain, but it could easily go back in that direction.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Five for the Archive, Part III · 19 June 2007

Number 4 of 5 in the series…

4. The history. Describe the development of your practice and history with teachers since then.

It got so my Sunday class was Led First Series Astanga. I took it for months but never learned the series. That would have required thinking, and I didn’t want to clutter up my meditative headspace with that kind of memorization. And, I was kinesthetically stupid (and still am, relatively).

Although my main teacher told me to learn to think with my body, I thought that was a special ability she must have learned as a dancer—an ability I simply didn’t have.

Then in March or April of 2004, YogaWorks cancelled the Sunday Led class. But there was something special about that particular sequence—god knows what I saw in it. But since I wanted it in my life, the cancellation meant it was time to go deeper—and become more a producer than a consumer of asana practice. On Tuesdays and Thursdays that quarter I had mid-mornings free, so skipped campus between 10 and 12:30 and sped down the residential streets alongside the country club to Beverly Hills for the erstwhile Sunday-teacher’s Mysore class.

Over the coming 2.5 years this teacher and another would baptize me with awesome fire and then with ice, and four others, after, with love and respect and space. All six were products of the specific school of astanga that Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller built. Some of these students have tried to disown their first formations a bit, but both SKPJ and Maty-Chuck’s teachings are in me, directly through them. I only made it to Maty’s room a few times—the way the girls there acted brought up all my high school-outsider insecurities and it was not a sufficiently inward-focused place for me to hit and remain in something like theta state. If Maty and Chuck had not been mostly before my time, I would have found my teacher in Chuck, whose early-morning room (to recount my few visits just before he departed) was still and dim and totally electric.

As it is, for 2.5 years I learned from them and from their teacher, through the six students who became my teachers. I am grateful beyond words for each of them, in individual ways. Three have quietly watched me have a very hard year—two knowing the story and visiting this space, the other not—and they have held the ground open for me in a way most well-meaning friends could never know how to do. These people, inexplicably, show a kind of dedication to my practice—to practice itself. It is that they’re teachers, and all softened by years of this method. My experience would not be the same—would be nothing like what it is—without their ring of fire on the outskirts of this daily séance. Strong, steady mentor-friends. Thank you.

These six together took me through second. Then last summer Rolf came to town and taught me the first three pranayamas. Damn if that didn’t rewrite the whole equation forwards and backwards. Drat blether fret. Bother!

And then there’s my present teacher, who plans out the crude details of the thing so I do not have to trouble, who connects me directly to the master-student SKPJ, and whose holding of the ground resonates out in waves from our small room such that your awareness hits an air pocket and dives down fast as you walk up on the place. This is the model of teacher as Leah-Luke in the Deathstar trash compactor (why weren’t they doing Vira II?), or the wise child with the finger in the dike, or the shtirasukha serpent resting strongly on the elephant’s back. The teacher sets the ground, and we show up and rain down sweat and tears and, yes, a little blood. It’s a mutual creation, this addictive scene. Not that I would have expected something this good when I’m already here in the land of astanga plenty, but so it is. This era hasn’t been easy, but it is rich.

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

Metaphysical Car Wreck, Part II · 7 June 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having Objects, Having a Body · 29 May 2007

So on Friday, Chris and I edged out of a nighttime reception at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and made up the escalator for the South and Southeast Asian galleries. Chris is the best companion for this kind of thing, since strapped with the most serious antiquities fetish I’ve ever witnessed, and because his talk is sharp and attentive and wryly clever. An historian, he’s writing a book on the half-forgotten American plunderer who “discovered” Macchu Picchu and packed off its riches to Yale University. In this age of crocodile tears for colonial sins (Harvard, the Getty, the South), Yale alone knows better than to undo the secrets of its own primitive accumulation, and so sits on its Peruvian treasures with the excuse that it paid for them back in the day. Interesting questions: patrimony and who owns it, the price of culture, the justice of market exchanges between such unequal parties. All this achatter in my consciousness, ascending on the escalator...

…and then we step into the museum-dim that is supposed to hood your perception—curate and domesticate it—and make modern whatever primitive, realer-than-real THING it pretends to offer for our dithering, sentimental edification…

And there’s Siva, four feet tall in sandstone and under those soft supposedly-harmless lights, surely more gorgeous than the first day he was carved. The THING pulls the plug on our banter. Something like nirodhah happens for the duration of a gulp.

O, goddam. Screw curation. That belongs in a museum, my foot.

And screw modernism, for the moment. Smarmy Singer-Sargeant, lame lame Monet: all this stuff intended to look good on the walls of the well-heeled, or in the postmodern cases simply unable to resist their own domestication, despite “subversive” intentions.

How often is it that a thing hits you cold like that? Maybe it’s just that Siva is stalking me now—tomorrow, for the first time in two months, I’ll face up to his terrible aspect, Bhairvasana, and the others—but even if I were safe from Siva, I think this chunk of sandstone would undo me a little. I think the yoga makes me receptive to, even credulous in, what the thing might have to say. For the superficiality of my engagement with the Indian myths (and superficial is all it will ever be), their effect is still interesting—and potent. “Art” doesn’t often know how to go to that place even when we want it to: it’s just there to comment on something, or to be appreciated, or to suggest the brilliance of its “creator,” or—let’s face it—to occupy space. Seriously: claiming to “get” most contemporary art is like claiming to “get” the emptiest passages of Derrida. And the whole stupid anthropology of museumification doesn’t exactly facilitate transformational aesthetic experiences: professional mothballers don’t exactly move from their guts.

Or… maybe I’m jaded, and a good dose of the ancient is my only hope.

I’d think so, but a strange thing actually happened last week between myself and an overt-avant mass of plastic and cardboard at the Brentwood Getty. A gimmicky, pandering installation piece, which left my brother the postmodern artist unmoved, made me want to cry. (Albeit not actually cry: maybe the best that contempo art can do is make us want to feel—itself a mediated response.)

This THING, Tim Hawkinson’s Uberorgan, is so damn wonderful. You walk inside it half-knowing, because it’s suspended in the atrium-now-peritoneum of the hilltop building—where glass and perfect Greek marble reflect and re-reflect the clarified white smog to encase you in unreal, heavenly brightness. In the midst of this, the billowing white plastic bellows of the Uberorgan are just one more strange membrane. But you stand under it, on the marble floor, and its shapes start to seem sensible—you see a giant white liver, an opaque stomach, and a heart. You’re so interested that when the Chuck E. Cheese factor kicks in, suddenly transforming the bodily “organs” into an organ, instead of getting caught in the pun, you yourself are transformed by it. The organ is bellowing, making an ultra-bass kind of whalesong that shouldn’t be possible for air pushed through giant plastic bags fitted with awkward cardboard pipes. The sound makes you be in the membrane, observe the functioning of the organ/organs like a living, digesting thing. It incorporates you, digests you a little. When the music stops, you’re like the idiot in a game of musical chairs, standing under the billows with a stupid wonderment that, like all postmodern experience, turns into an writeoff when you lower your head and make eye contact with all the others who, at the same moment as you, are getting and shrugging off the joke.

So the Uberorgan trivializes itself at the end of the day, but if you are in Los Angeles before September, you must experience it. If you liked Innerspace, you’ll love the Uberorgan.

Anyway, in these cases, there wasn’t much difference in my delight between a dead-serious god statue and a deadpan plastic organ. Odd, really.

I think the common passion here (if passion is a “capacity to be moved,” as the other ancients would have it) is the having-a-body practice: the yoga, for all its tendencies to strip down and dust off my inner and outer life, is shaping my experience of having-a-world. And the art that clearly speaks to the way I have-a-world somehow points to the physical practice—either its evocative history or its more literal inner pleasures.

CJ’s return to Sartre this week reminds me of his associate Merleau-Ponty’s every-other-page refrain: I have objects because I have a body. That may miss quite a bit, considering that M-P’s idea of “body” was purely physical and there’s plenty about a body that’s subtle and energetic too. But there is something to be said for objects that go for the viscera: if a thing cannot go to that place—pity. If it can, I’m ready to call it art.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

Yoga Is Dangerous, Part II · 16 May 2007

A friend just took a group of welllll-off college students, most residents of the OC and pre-law majors, to visit a tiny downtown non-profit—a support center for undocumented workers. It was the first time many of these students had talked to an immigrant worker as a real person, even if such people inivisibly do most of their food preparation and house and grounds work at home. (People in the US who eat food, wear clothes, or live ‘neath rooves are every one of us dependent on deeply vulnerable immigrants’ low-paid work to make our own lives comfortable, in case that wasn’t quiiiite apparent.)

Visiting the workers’ center wasn’t revolutionary, but it gave these students a little bit of new data in case they ever want to imagine themselves into workers’ shoes and see them as hypothetical equals. Doesn’t it take some ability to go there emotionally—and some practice doing so—in order to have the heart quiver at the suffering of another? And doesn’t this kind of thing put one’s own social situation in perspective in a crucial way?

It got me thinking: many of these students are second-generation immigrants, with parents who have worked tirelessly to give them every kind of privilege. To live beautiful lives: in which most of the daily struggle to eat and find shelter and safety is edited out or made to appear easy. I always like the people who make things look easy. And many of my energies are, no kidding, dedicated to living a beautiful life. But I wonder if it’s at all beneficial to live with so little interpersonal contact on an (at-least hypothetically) equal level with people of other skin colors, or genders, or class, or national origin. I feel bad for these 20-year-olds, in that they’re just starting to learn how specific is their personal, comfortable experience of the world. They are at a loss to empathize with people who are not like themselves and, perhaps worse, don’t even know themselves enough to see that all the attributes they take to be their identities are quite accidental.

Mircea Eliade writes in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom that yoga is revolutionary because it is a deconditioning project. For centuries (albeit not from the edge of time), practitioners have sought to undo not only their psychological but their social and cultural patterns and presuppositions. In Pantanjali’s straightforward, no-bullshit schema, this is an arduous and “backbreaking” practice of quieting the monkeyness of the monkeymind.

“Now, this problem of the “conditioning” of man (sic) (and its corollary, rather neglected in the West: his “deconditioning”) constitutes the central problem of Indian thought…. With a rigor unknown elsewhere, India has applied itself to analyzing the various conditionings of the human being….. [I]t has done so… in order to learn how far the conditioned zones of the human being extend and to see if anything else exists beyond these conditionings…. [The sages] found that man’s psychological, social, cultural, and religious conditionings were comparatively easy to delimit and hence to master; the great obstacles to the ascetic and contemplative life arose form the activity of the unconscious.

[F]or India, knowledge of the systems of “conditioning” could not be an end in itself: it was not knowing them that mattered, but mastering them; if the contents of the unconscious were worked upon, it was in order to “burn” them…. (p. xvi: it pains me to quote so little of this wonderful book)

As mentioned earlier, yoga is dangerous. Undoing social and cultural conditionings may have been easy for sages, but look around and see how difficult it is for us. We are pickled in culture from the outside in: it’s coercive, it’s loud, it’s ubiquitous because internalized—consumerism, sex, bodyimage, race, status, prestige, power, and more consumerism. What does it take to crack our social identities, especially considering our love for reinforcing them by associating with similar people, in safe spaces, and taking our political-economic, gendered, racialized reality for granted?

In keeping with the Yoga is Dangerous theme, and understanding that Westerners are in a particularly remedial situation, I’d say this takes not less life-in-the-world, but more. The only semi-successful attempts at social deconditioning I’ve ever seen result from loosening up the edges of your own perspective. Culture is rooted in pre-judice and so is our sense of normalcy: beginning to undo it takes a cessation not of mere mental tics, but of consuming, accumulating prestige, victimhood complexes, out-group suspicions, and egomaniacal getting ahead of "the rest," at least long enough to see past our situated selves and see the world a little bit more as it is.

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

Saturday IX · 22 April 2007

So, some links for this weekend after all.

? Now you're telling me the Antichrist is a terrorist? That’s Guatemala’s excuse for canceling his birthday party.

? California deserts, an epically charismatic Peruvian, Powell library shamanism, pseudo-ethnography, suppression at the NYT, the politics at UC Press, and the whole trouble with anthropology. And all this before Carlos Castaneda turns into a creeeeepy religionmaker (with all the cult criteria: the sex, the suicide, the funny haircuts).

? Neuro-linguistic programming creative Philip Farber gives an interview about his understanding of the technology, and the old days with Milton Erickson.

? Jack Kornfield says that contemplative practice is radical, because it clears the ground for changing the world. (That’s the Spirit Rock center in the background.)

? Beware, dirty yoga men.

? NG recently sent me the best and most accurate version ever of the “Screw Leviticus” argument (for those who actually know people who use the Bible to condemn gay people). Those Humanists of Utah are fighting the good fight. An excerpt:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

? Clips from Yoga, Inc.

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The Emotional Lives of Yogis? · 2 April 2007

AUGUST 2010 NOTICE. ATTENTION YOGAWORKS TEACHER TRAINING PARTICIPANTS. YOU, LIKE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SUCKERS BEFORE YOU (MYSELF AMONG THEM), HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THIS WORTHLESS ESSAY QUESTION. YOUR TEACHERS HAVE SEEN MANY ANSWERS PLAGIARIZED FROM THE ESSAY BELOW.

BUT PLEASE, DON'T HESITATE TO USE MY IDEAS. AS YOU MAY AGREE, THE PHILOSOPHICAL VACANCY AND PRACTICAL IDIOCY OF THE QUESTION IS A PIECE WITH THE QUALITIES OF YOUR PRESENT "TEACHER," THE YOGAWORKS CORPORATION. AS A TEACHER, THE CORPORATION IS AS IMPOVERISHED IN YOGA AS IT IS RICH IN FEES. LET'S NOT MISTAKE THIS EXPENSIVE TRAINING AS PREPARATION TO TEACH YOGA. IT IS NOT AN INITIATION IN TO A LIFE PRACTICE. IT IS NOT A TRANSMISSION OF METHOD. IT IS NOT A REQUEST FROM A MENTOR WHO KNOWS YOU THAT YOU TAKE THE ENORMOUS STEP FROM LONG-TIME PRACTICE IN TO TEACHING.

Here’s a little more essay-writing as I bring this winter’s teacher training class to a close. I don’t know if it’s my ancient history as a forensics nerd or just living in three non-overlapping value zones (yoga, sociology, Christian fundamentalism) that makes me question any question in the process of answering it. But so it is. Not that critical thinking doesn't belong in every zone....

How do the kleshas and the gunas effect your asana practice?

In yoga philosophy, kleshas are mental obstacles to enlightenment — specifically ignorance, egotism, attraction, aversion and clinging to life. Gunas are thee qualities of our prakriti—ignorance, passion and goodness—one for each of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

Yoga philosophy provides many lists such as the kleshas, and also frequently divides up the world into three essences. These are wonderful interpretive tools, especially for one living in India while practicing Hinduism and ayurveda. However, because I do not intuitively understand the samkya system of purusa and prakriti (or the tantric Siva-Shakti), and how it integrates the theory of karma, my understanding of the kleshas and gunas is still superficial. The gunas, especially, and the kleshas of “wrong understanding” and “ego” seem particularly subtle.

Though I need to study samkya philosophy to develop a practical understanding of these concepts, this does not mean that my yoga practice itself cannot inform me about my inner states. While wonderful tools, kleshas and gunas are not causal agents which actually “effect” anything. My mind loves to grasp after categories, to substitute a map for the territory and thus pretend to know the whole terrain. Thus, for me, categorizing my experience according to these new concepts, while it will be terrifically interesting, might do more to substantiate the categories themselves, as if they are exhaustive of the mind’s possibilities, than it will to show me what is in my mind. If I imagined these concepts as causal agents which create “effects,” I would be mistaking abstractions for reality, or treating as real that which is transitory. And, working with a definitional, non-integrated understanding of the concepts might lead me to confuse myself, rather than know myself better. Ultimately in practice I am hoping to attenuate conceptual, discursive thought rather than increase it.

Still, if kleshas roughly categorize destructive mental tics and gunas an approach to psychosomatic dispositions, my asana practice is subject to both. It has been almost three years since I began a daily astanga practice and so found myself meditating on the body. After the first year, curious about the nature of consciousness, I began exploring different forms of meditation. Last year, breath meditation inspired a pranayama practice. So far, these three practices illuminate one another: the resistance I experience in meditation—where discursive thought and deep emotions frequently cut in—and pranayama—where a physical-mental-emotional fear of death arises in kumbhaka—both highlight that my asana practice is relatively open and quiet. Asana practice supports the more difficult practices, even as the latter teach me to breathe rhythmically and sense my mind downshifting in asana.

In the first six months of astanga practice, remembering the sequence of postures and disciplining my body into their shapes required my best concentration. This was the yoga—linking the mind and the body. Once I had attained the basic union that resulted from settling the physical practice into my body so I no longer had to rehearse movement mentally or pause to query some isolated part of my mind, I was able to practice what TKV Desikachar describes as dharana in asana. In the beginning, nobody told me that thoughts or emotions were supposed to “come up” during asana practice, and my journals indicate that I experienced practice as a quiet, physically pleasurable “zoning in” as I dropped into meditation. (I am thankful that no one mentioned mindstuff to me in the beginning: had I gone searching for kleshas, I am sure I could have created habitual stumbling-blocks to fulfill that search.)

While I would like to have more to say about emotions that “come up,” or the way asana helps me manage distraction or energetic fluctuations, I have very little. Beautiful generalizations by writers like Joel Kramer and Stephen Cope resonate with me somewhat, but they say too much. I rarely experience a deep or intense emotion in asana, and find that even on the most heavy days initiating practice resets my psychosomatic disposition to the best clarity I can manage on that particular day. That quality of clarity is always a little different, but dissecting it too much leads me to grasp at false explanations.

Before I had been practicing a full year, I underwent what I can only describe as reordering of my nervous system that manifested as a kind of spiritual crisis. The peace, joy and equanimity I’d begun to find gave way to loss of patience with the world. Intense sound, food, light, or emotional expression made me shudder, and I withdrew from most relationships even as I became more intellectually acute and physically vivacious. It is not that I decisively rejected the world, but that I became hypersensitive to stimuli and craved quiet stillness in myself and my environment at all times. I wanted life to imitate meditation. During these months, I felt that practice was more real than the world. Rather than being in the world and letting it show me to myself, I wanted to renounce the world because it interfered with my preferred state of consciousness.

It took nearly six months for me to tiptoe out of that place, and initiate a much more messy practice of life as some kind of yoga. For the past year, I have sought to blur the boundary between asana practice—which is still a refuge—and daily life. Asana practice itself is still pretty simple and largely the same every day. As Kramer says, morning practice does put you deeply in touch with how you treated yourself the previous day. Yet I find that seeking explanation for every little internal variation is a fast track to self-confusion. The mind wants explanation for everything, but on a deeper level my nature is to love, and to die. I hesitate to analyze how these ever-present processes of love and death interact with my sleep, my emotions, my food, water, light, recovery time, proximity of my mother-in-law, and endless other variables to render certain experiences on the mat. Practice is a gift, not a performance. I hesitate to rank it.

Whatever my experience on the mat, practice does set a high standard for the rest of my life. I oscillate between using that standard as a measure of my daily inadequacy (as mental tics and psychosomatic modifications overtake me completely) and seeing it as an inspiration for what clarity, love and insight a holistic practice might bring in time.

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Saturday IV · 3 March 2007

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

Saturday III · 25 February 2007

Saturday morning is coming around late and abbreviated this weekend, but there are some photographs and some writers worth noting tonight. Almost didn’t get to this at all, as we’ve been without hot water for days… and I just spent 2 hours making a bath by betting the speed of my teapot against the slow trickle of my tub drain. End result: keeping with the luxury-in-contrast theme, 30 minutes in 4 inches of steamy saltwater. I wouldn’t have done it for school tomorrow or for the increasingly stringy-haired neighbors, but it was worth it for the psoas after the weekend of a hundred forward bends. 

 

Anyway: I’m excited about the young Daniel Alarcón. He’ll be talking in Los Feliz next week. Subversive radio stations, unnamed Latin American countries, universal tragedy of civil war. These tug pretty deep for a few in this orbit, yes? 

Good Magazine is awfully neoliberal and not hip. Similar to, respectively, the New Yorker and Ira Glass. However, this week Good writes on both, and nicely. 

NYTM lavishes Jeff Wall on the occasion of his opening at the MOMA. Do look at the slideshow.

Some readers were intrigued to rediscover the breath last week. I love this. Since you have asked for more, until we sit down together and do what a teacher of mine calls “polish ourselves” with pranayamas, here is my recommendation for a congenial, non-disciplinary, useful introduction. Anything else I’d note would land in the “esoteric shit” rather than the “verging on self help” category. But this CD is real nice. Hie and aquire it from your public library. 

Early adopters, go upload your photo already. (Not that I have either.) But tag me if you want an invite. 

 

Finally, he's no James, but Michael Wood writes pretty good. Before I turn to this excitement, his LRB essay on Richard Powers will be edifying if irksome company on Wednesday's flight up the coast. For Chris, I note it.

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

Neurolinguistic Programming and Siva's Terrible Aspect · 5 February 2007

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s 90 minutes of ineffability, that is, from observing T’s good old vinyasa yoga class. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, here is what he said: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.” 

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose gorgeous 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night put my date in near-ecstasy, though it was a little emotionally overwrought for me) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-help genre. Though I hear it has its charms.)  

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side. Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50. A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself. It shows me to a minor place, in a sense, but a good and joyous one.  

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural.This is because the teacher, my teacher for the season, deeply understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near beta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.  

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship. This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office. 

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows. 

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