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

Wanting it all, dedication, belief · 25 January 2010

Or, Faith in Faith Itself. Moment in conference yesterday:

An American guy in the back raises his hand high at the end of the Q&A. He’s agitated, passionate and confused.

-I want to know, how much am I supposed to sleep? …When do I sleep? ... How much do you sleep? Because I’m going back home and I want to know, how am I supposed to take my practice with me? Am I supposed to get up at 4 o’clock? Cos I live in New York, and you know, it’s hard to go to bed early…

-S chuckles. Yes, hard to go to bed early, especially in New York (smiles… he loves New York). Many distractions…. It is not easy. It takes dedication. What do you do?

-Me? Do? I’m a consultant. A financial consultant. (Audience sighs.)

-Aah. I take some tips from you later… (he laughs… then everyone else laughs)

-So how much do you sleep?

-(pausing, in what seems like reluctance to say) I am sleeping four hours. Sleep at nine, one o’clock I do my practice. Then teach… I almost don’t leave the house. Only difference is go upstairs, go downstairs. (laughter) At twelve o’clock I sleep for exactly one hour.

-How do you get energy for your family, teaching, practicing…?

-Read scriptures! Always study…

This is a paraphrase, and likely the ordering of sentiments is inaccurate.

Afterwards he expanded on this topic of dedication, and talked for a while about doubt. Doubt mostly serves to distract you from your practice and reduce your energy.

That is why you have to believe in what you do. If you do not believe the method will work, no matter what it is, it will not work.

                                    ……………                      

Been feeling that lately, a lot. I identify as a skeptic, cynic, and critical thinker. I would prefer to operate as if without a "hard core" belief system, theology, ideology, whatever: understanding the endeavor is niave, but at least trying to be so free.

But somewhere between Kirkegaard’s leap of faith and the dirty truth of the placebo effect, it did occur to me that I’d given myself to this practice despite myself.

The fact that this has been true for years—that my actions have outpaced my critical mind—is only now coming home to me. But so it is: practice two hours or more a day, outsource the dirty work (the gross physical structure) to a teacher, dive in to meditation, commit most other cognitive resources to professional things… then, not as much room left for compulsive questioning.

That’s not the same as subscribing to a belief, but now I realize I’m already living as if I’ve taken the leap of faith. It’s so weird. At this point I really don’t have a problem placing faith in faith itself.

In fact, I sense that doing so is a lot more effective than my default way of doing things—treating everything as an amusement, an experiment, or a piece of my worldly education.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution

Intimacy & Equanimity · 8 January 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Soft Focus · 6 October 2009

Funny, apart from the hippie reclamation project that is Venice’s Church at Ocean Park, last week in Santa Barbara was my first practice in an actual church.

Sunday morning I drove down the mesa at five in a cloud. The way the ocean is shaped up there, it presses close in to the land, and heavy mists cover the earth’s whole surface, land and sea, dense with the smell and feeling of both. Since, like the rest of the state, SB is not big on streetlights, a visitor could get lost in that morning fog. But when it burns off the whole town still feels blurred at the edges and soft lit, like Santa Barbara the soap opera, filmed in earth tones and pastels under a romantic 1980s filter.

The yoga center—bold and colonial—was originally a Methodist church, and for that it’s on the National Historic Register. But in the meantime it was a beauty salon and spa—for which I suppose all the luxury detailing, private recesses and lofts, discreet staircases, and curtained side-entries with good feng shui were installed. The old sanctuary, with its beautiful scarred floors—including a bizarre, repeating burn pattern in the shape of a small 8-pointed star, and skylights that must go 30 feet up—is bifurcated in to the ashtanga space and the hatha space.

I started early-early, in a darkness and silence that drives the brainwaves down in to theta, and pretty well blurs the boundary between waking and sleeping dreams. When the flow kids trickled in next door at eight, they playd new age spiritual music more gospel than kirtan. Long time sun, Ain’t gonna study war no more… melodies I recognize from the car stereos of kundalini junkies and the marketplace around Ammachi. Church music. At nine, the surviving neighborhood church rang its bells and the sound of it filtered in over everything else.

Four years ago, I decided to sanctify (i.e. secularize), for myself, the sanctuary where my dad preaches back home. It’s a huge dark echoey cavity, made to feel like the hull of a ship tossed upside-down and cracked across the top with a line of high windows to the enormous white Montana sky. I sort of associate it with the set of Goonies as seen by eight year old eyes. What I cared about then were simply its excellent floors—hard on the surface and soft underneath—sitting on an enormous diamond-shaped foundation poured down in to a slow bend in the creek and fortified with scalloped layers of rosy sandstone than my dad helped lay in when he was 22.

I walked in to the chapel that afternoon and I guess I lost consciousness from the weight of the trauma. God. What was I thinking? All I remember is that no practice happened, and for days after the belly and heart had no possibility of softening open.

But I feel a little bit confident that eventually I’ll be wrung out and awake enough to take advantage of those floors. Hell, they’re just floors.

Last time, I could not perceive the difference between the physical church, and my own pain tracers, and the big pet rock of resentment I like to lead around. It was just a solid knot of awful. And there was also the emotional piece: at ground zero, equanimity is a high stakes game. I means diving straight in to the philosophy and hilarity of the specific personal history I’m tempted to take so brutally to heart.

The old church is just an object sealed off in distant time and space: a hard, scary thing preserved from the meaning-decaying banalaties of actual life. If I regularly took meals inside, let my dog piss in its gardens, filed my nails on its sidewalk, gossiped in its foyer, took calls from the pews, all its sharp edges would get blurred. Not in to shadow I hope, but in to mist. For me now, mundane life seems to want to tease apart all that “meaningful” stuff into wispy bits—soften them up with everyday static of TV commercials, toenails, hairspray, throw-away lines and dead-end plots. Lived experience wants to fracture the narrative and let the characters grow silly and inconsistent. For now it feels like everyday routine is a force of purification, not of tranquilization.

And unlike the old drama queen, who was complexly, grindingly unconscious and loved to stay closed in certain small rooms of emotional hell, I want this too. Playing my fierce, edgy old drama straight—as if it’s still good theatre—has become so much kitsch. You know?

I want the soft filter of practical life to take the edges off my monuments, and decay building after building on my Personal Historic Register. Eventually, maybe no old monument will be so overwhelming that I can’t see its potential as a day spa.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

Compassion for Past Selves · 28 September 2009

Try it.

First and easiest: there are the justifications to be made for the old selves: “she did the best she could with what she had at the time.”

Sometimes the easy story is true. I use it when it’s impossible to give myself a break by any other method. It works like this: looking at dumb things I’ve believed (I cringe at old beliefs and ways of knowing, not so much old choices or actions), I note that I was just ignorant, or young, or in danger. Given what I knew and the resources at hand, I was doing my lamentable best.

But the thing is, if I really did screw up somewhere, it probably wasn’t because circumstances made me do it. It was more likely because I was willfully shallow, greedy, delusional, angry, irresponsible, whatever. Probably, I dug in my heels because it felt good and on a deep level I like(d?) it when the sort of projection-driven, sort of mindless, sort of instant gratification seeking part of me was running the show.

Maybe that’s just me.

Anyway. Giving the annoying past selves a break frees me up from living as if they are me.

It also denatures the outer hates a little bit. Try it: see what happens to issues with “certain kinds of people”: political conservatives, people with poor grammar, weirdo fundamentalists, dumb people, smart people, people with conventional ideas about gender and family, people with super unconventional ideas about the same, people who need a shower, crusaders of various sorts, lazy asses, shrews, overachievers, weaklings, jocks, the thin, the fat, people who are not self-aware at all, people who can’t sit still, Henry Kissinger, deadbeats, manipulators, narcissists, whatever.

Some of these characters actually do suck, in their way—bad behavior of others sometimes exists independent of my issues. We're in this thing together, and it may as well be acknowledged as soon as I can do so without getting the vrittis in a bundle.

Meanwhile there is addictive, awesome energy—a motivational drive—in taking personal offense at the existence of others because they recall past selves we wish we never were. But is it worth it? What’s the price of insanity?

I try to catch myself before I get all personally offended about shit.

For me, just like with lovingkindness practice, what works is to be systematic and dispassionate. It might sound strange to be so mechanical about disturbing emotions, but maybe it works because it simply overrides, immature emotional patterns. It bypasses the intense energy of the whole hate system. So, specifically, when somebody really sets me off, I cycle back through my own history and settle on a self that most resembles that person. Maybe that’s not the problem, but if it is, then I really try to re-inhabit that self, accept her on some level, and then recognize that she’s dead.

One annoying thing is that the pattern of attacking past selves is also subject to compassion. (Insert cartoon here. Compassion to Logical Analysis: “Whatever you can do, I can do meta.”)

In a way, getting worked up over who I have been is a way of taking responsibility. Personal history is a thick vector of data, and doing compassion on it is kind of potent because I know more about those selves than I do about Henry Kissinger and beatnicks. It gets me to deal with complexity.

Also, discomfort with past selves probably arises out of a deeper wish to grow up… it’s actually fascinating that the impulse to grow sometimes generates so much anger and lashing out. Why stifle that? There’s so much energy and creativity there… may as well use it in a way future selves won’t have to regret.

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Categories: evolution , integration , morality

Duck Dukkha, Sidewalk Jewels · 14 July 2009

Ok, I stopped making sense. Do-over.

Let me first write this like a sixth grader telling you about her summer vacation. Get the sentiments in the right places and the information that interests me in the center.

Last week was fascinating. I actually figured out what insight practice is, and that in the past, instead of implementing insight practices, I’ve used the slowed-down aspect of retreat to cruise in nondual anti-meditative states. Both are most wonderful. Nothing wrong with nondual surrender-mind. But since the insight thing is new, I’m a little flummoxed. This is my fourth trip to an insight meditation center (the visits to Zen and Vajrayana centers were sort of different, I suppose). Shouldn’t I have figured it out before? The practice is SO EASY and basic. Anyway, it’s all humbling but also thrilling.

On another note, the note I was attempting to make below, it seems like just straightup concentration is a great idea. It seems that the insight thing works now because I have done the concentration thing every day for two hours for five years. So I am also interested in the ways that all this concentration practice has changed me, and in why nobody wants to talk about this as an aspect of yoga practice, and why so many people aren’t even practicing it while they do their asanas.

Hello? Yogaschittivrittinirohada, eh? One-pointedness is so good! Are there a lot of people who do yoga the way I've been doing Vipassana... going to the center and paying the fees but never actually getting with the program?

That’s all.

Well also, because of Michael Jackson, there were big helicopters that made he zendo rattle and stacked my experience of sound and touch in an exciting way. And there were ducks. One of the ducks was white and couldn’t stop doing the shimmy; and I lay on the edge of the pond each afternoon watching its light ripple through the oak tree branches while the little guy had a sustained Daffy-level fit. It was as close to perfection as I’ve ever experienced, except for the terrible frustration of the poor duck. And: crucifixes everywhere, which I didn’t mind. That part was actually awesome: I’ll just admit it. I also didn’t mind the food, which I knew was horrible even though in my state of sensory sharpness it tasted delicious. Also, one night we never even went to bed and just sat there meditating for hours, and when the rest of us kids got up for coffee and chocolate and salami sandwiches, he just kept sitting there like a rock. The guy was gone. Completely disappeared to some other place, like Bodysnatchers. Next day he just went on teaching as usual. He’s 64. Technically.

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

Back to the topic of concentration, this time in conversational language. What I mean to suggest—and the idea is not new (CP pushed this for years)—is that Samadhi isn’t a “spiritual” or otherworldly state limited to demigods and freaky gurus. The development of one-pointed concentration is what yoga is actually designed to do; and once we pull that off consistently, amazing benefits begin to accrue. It’s ok to concentrate the mind. There’s nothing woo-woo or necessarily violent about it. Anyone can take in there.

Since it’s so beneficial, and since we’re hanging out doing some simple body movement anyway, why not go for it?

There is this wonderful stuff that happens when you learn to go in to deep concentration, and then just go there day after day after day. There is a dramatic increase in intelligence because your concentration ability and mental clarity bleed over in to the rest of your life. The positive emotion is pretty consistent as well; and according to the jnana techers it can and should be cultivated systematically.

I am not going to worry about mapping the old jnana terminology on to the new flow state terminology, or to engage in whatever enormous debates may exist around “samadhi,” but it seems that old jnana literature is what best describes the experience of people who do a deeply concentrated practice. And it has great instructions, whereas so far the literature on flow states (and its saccharine relative, the “positive psychology” literature) are all over the place.

From what I’m finding initially, it seems that the idea of jnanas was from the Theravada, but that systematic practice of concentration and absorbtion states became a “lost art” in the world of systematic deconstruction of the mind that is insight practice.

I’ve run across two teachers who have gone back to research and write about the old practices, and then taught them. One was Ayya Khema, who recovered them from bad translations of the Vissudi Maga that she mapped back on to her own experience. And there is is Shaila Catherine, who gave a 10 month silent retreat over to trying out the old descriptions of how to practice deep concentration and came back from it with something kind of profound to give. She’s unassuming and frumpy and female. Maybe this is why nobody is paying attention to the beautiful jewels she is shining up and leaving on the sidewalk.

But to me this sounds like a simple, clear agenda for how and why to concentrate.

I’ll drop some links in the comments section later, including an audio interview with one of Khema’s students and a google talk by Catherine.

:::EDIT::: Links added. The two podcasts are pretty inspiring. 

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Categories: evolution , science , spirituality

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

Sex, Pie & Parkour · 9 June 2009

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

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

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

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

Or parkour.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So go fly with him.

But I don’t have a body…

It doesn’t matter. Just fly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Practice notes, these days · 29 April 2009

Relaxing the jaw and tongue

Anna Wise found that even zen masters couldn’t take their beta waves down from active chit-chat mode until they relaxed their tongues. It seems that when the tongue is unrelaxed, the part of the brain that does discursive thought (i.e. spoken or unspoken speech) goes pretty nuts. However, zen master who relaxes tongue quiets mind.

The implication of this for rooms in which there is much verbal instruction (or in which students actually talk--I hear that happens sometims... odd...) are noted.

Relaxing the head

There are three different stretches that I can give to the muscles inside the head (or is it the optic nerve?) when I’m looking to the third eye. It just depends on how far out I gaze (even if the eyes are closed). There is one area within this range that, when I rest in in for a few seconds, causes the hip flexors to tingle and let go. Further supports this idea that there may be a jaw-hip connection.

Bodymaps

In the past I’ve thought that the kosha model of body “layers’ was tedious. Eastern philosophy is full of lists—at its worst it feels like arbitrary nominalism rather than illumination. But lately the gross-subtle-causal model of body layers seems too coarse. The kosha model divides subtle and causal into two sub-levels, in an interesting way. Recently Susan also reminded me that gross-subtle-causal is often seen as being crowned by turiya. And somewhere Ken Wilber reminded me that in the Tibetan imagination turiya is followed by a trans-personal “body” called turiyatita. Whatever Anyway, both five-layer models—the Indian and the Tibetan—now seems to be kind of useful for interpreting experience. Or locating it.

Manifestation

People keep asking me about what I want to manifest. You mean like The Secret? I could manifest a Ferrari? Awesome!

Riiight. Boring. Listening to Shinzen a while back, I loved his chuckled aside when he was discussing the clairvoyance and petty mind-control stuff that happens to people who meditate a lot in a certain way. There’s the spirituality of powers, he said, and the spirituality of liberation. Powers are fine. “But those are the—heh heh heh—lesser gods, shall we say.” 

My favorite metaphysically unstable feline puts it best: there is the spirituality of getting what you want. And the spirituality of wanting what you get. I guess I’m more interested in playing with the internal situation—what is wanted—than with the Ferrari situation—what is gotten. Maybe if The Secret worked for Lexus coupes rather than Ferraris...?

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

Go home take rest · 28 March 2009

More fragments from Narasimhan. They come in like traces of dream, which makes sense since I’m in a bit of a trance sitting there in the Anantha library.

And speaking of dreaming, he reminds me that there is this whole business in Patanjali about the import of the dreamstate and the pursuit of dreamless sleep as a kind of samadhi. N says: Samadhi without knowledge is sleep; Samadhi with knowledge is evolution.

Admittedly, that doesn’t make much sense to me intuitively.

We think of sleep as our relaxation time, but in yoga, this is in a sense a time to leave the body. You sleep on the left side to let the right side of the brain—the house of the imagination and creativity—have some space. Relaxation is a conscious endeavor, the way N talks about it, and the way savasana is taught… if it is taught… in ashtanga practice. When you exit savasana, and when you get up in the morning, you roll to the right because that puts the left side up and engages your rational mind. When you get up from savasana or from sleep, it is time to engage the world and use the rational mind.

N: sport, unlike yoga, is as likely to excite the mind as to relax it. What is the purpose of it? Sometimes in the west, athletic endeavors reveal a great, delusional absence of purpose. People are lost, so they go bungee-jumping. But yoga has a clear purpose.

And again, the purpose of asana is to work the nervous system—to purify it. This actually happens after asana, during Savasana. You consciously feel and relax the nadis. How do you know nadis exist, and that there are 72,000 of them? Well, it’s the best we know for now. It was a revelation—just like the old revelations about the structure of cells or the speed of light, which practitioners gained without the benefit of scientific instruments. The chakra system is different from the nadis—it’s a different map of similar territory. Research now on the multiple nerve-junctions throughout the body also finds there are about 72,000 such branching-points.

It is a wonder that for all the study and advancement of Indian society, basic technological developments never happened here. Not only were there no scientific measurement devices, but also no economic advances like mass production. It was in the west that the great curiosity about the external world and how to know and shape it was gained; and by the same token in India the best understanding of the mind—it’s structures and how to work with and reshape them—has been developed.

There was a long, light-hearted discussion of the idea of dharma, and how it’s as much a structure of freedom as a fate-given constraint or duty. If you recognize what is given and work within it, your mind is free from fear or doubt and you simply know how to act. It’s as simple as following the rules of the road: if you are outside of the law, you must always look over your shoulder, worry about being caught. Inside it, you know your way and can travel it freely.

When it comes to one’s relationship to practice, arrogance and fear are two sides of the same condition—insecurity. If one is secure in his practice, there is no need to defend it with arrogance. Often the superiority that practitioners express is not even related to the claim of one’s own prowess but rather the inferiority of the content of others’ practices. So one’s supposed superiority is not based on her own wisdom or skill but simply on the imagined existence of others who are said to be without skill. There is a kind of dependence on others to be inferior so that the insecure practitioner can feel less fear and more superiority.

Oh, and I remembered that the four kinds of student classification maps on to Krishna’s commentary in the Gita on the four kinds of “men” who pursue God. There must be commentary on this in a variety of places. The classification is a little bit interesting, but again, it’s transitory—intended to describe rather than create social structures. One may pass through each of these states and therefore require different kinds of practice or teaching as she changes, but all conditions, including the "lowest," are those of a person who is dedicated to learning.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

At the Anantha Research Foundation · 26 March 2009

So… some strong resonance coming in with this guy, MA Narasimhan. He opens up his office each day from 10-12, plucks in on bare feet in threadbare white cottons and a Brahmin string, and speaks expansively in response to whatever bumbling questions are offered. It makes no sense to morselize the experience because it’s about becoming immersed in an historical Indian perspective on the evolution of consciousness. But then, Narasimhan himself morselizes—from Freud to John Dewey to Joseph Campbell to his teacher Maharishi Maharesh—so here are a few pieces while I have them.

I will not write about the way that he reads my mind, or the way that he answers the question you meant to ask rather than the one you managed to blurt out, or the fact that my inveterate questions suddenly go to seed in that room because my mind sometimes feels so satisfied when he talks. But I will say that this person is a fine scholar—as learned as any great intellectual—whose feel is all heart. The first day he laughed and looked at me and said that the sociologists and the anthropologists will never really change the world because they are trying too hard, because they preach. But the gurus are the ones whose students really believe them—the ones, ironically, whose credibility goes deepest, who change their students most, and thus who make the most difference in the world. Without trying. Just by offering what is asked of them when it is needed.

Anyway, some stuff he’s mentioned in passing, sitting in lotus without leaning forward, lauging easily, gesturing with long thin fingers to enumerate this classification scheme or gesture toward that clarification.                            ……………………………………………………………...........….

There are four kinds of student, and for them four kinds of teacher. The first kind of student, the artharti, merely wants relief. They are desperate, looking for miracles and proof. Only for this kind of student are so-called miracles (about which he himself remains agnostic) useful. They simply grant relief to doubting, grasping minds. They also facilitate a new belief in the paranormal, which is useful for them later on when they become students of a more advanced type.

There is a constant split and re-split in yoga (and in religions) between the letter and the purport of the law. This is because it’s difficult to retain both the structure and the meaning of practice. In the traditions which hew to the letter of the law, eventually the life is lost. This happened, for example, in Christianity as it excluded mystics.

Siddhis are just a benchmark of your consciousness. They tell you where you are. Keep them a secret because if others learn of them, you will be drained by their need for them. There’s nothing necessarily gratifying in the paranormal—it is immature and often destructive to use the paranormal in this way. All of yoga can take place within the realm of normal consciousness.

Through practice and philosophical study you go from believing that the physical world is what is true and imagination/thought is all false, to believing the exact opposite. So in this way, philosophy is negative—like a photograph’s negative. Eventually in philosophy you never know what is true but it is all good anyway.

Don’t worry about going to a cave to find your meditation. They went to caves because they didn’t have air-conditioner or sound-proofing. It’s much easier now!

Don’t confuse Vedanta and Patanjali yoga. Both are covering the same territory, but from different directions. Vedanta doesn’t care about dharana-dhyana-samadhi because from the top looking down all states are disturbances. Vedanta is view; Patanjali yoga is the path. From the perspective of the latter, dharana-dhyana-samadhi are practical steps. (So nice to hear the notion of ascending and descending spirituality articulated in this way by an Indian philosopher. Patanjali yoga and Vedanta are not contradictory. Rather, they’re just very different perspectives on the same concerns.)

In the past, gurus did not accept students easily because they believed that once they entered into a relationship with a student, they were bound to them for as many lifetimes as it took for the student to progress. So if the student was lazy and fell away from practice, the teacher had to work with them to re-institute the practice again and again in subsequent incarnations. Now teachers do not fear this. Gurus’ work now is to be tour-guides.

A compassionate teacher knows when to tell a student to leave. When a student is not progressing because she is so attached, when she is not realizing her own self-responsibility, then she is stuck. To accept the student’s anger at being released is something that a good teacher can do. A selfish teacher will do the opposite—facilitate students’ neediness and attachment.

Traditionally, one needed a teacher for three services: to create a desire to evolve, to destroy obstactles of fear and doubt, and to sustain the student on the path. If you could find a teacher could be the creator, destroyer and sustainer all in one, it was great, although you could get each of these ingredients from different teachers. Now it’s not on this model. We don’t have a single teacher to fill every need. Instead of gurus there is only the passing state and role of gurudom.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , spirituality

Courtyard Containers · 20 March 2009

I’d have to be a poet to say anything suitable about this moment.

It is evening. The air is skin temperature and the light is dimming shades of perfect. I’m in a quiet garden sheltered between quiet buildings, though I suppose there is the life in the street making sound down the hill. The tropical plants climbing the walls, pressing out from the alcoves—banana, palm, bougainvillea and a dozen others a Californian can’t name—are quiet though. I sit at a soft-burnished old slate table alone, feeling sheltered by the shape of the huge green leaves and the way they bend in towards me, letting this comfort help bring me out of the uncanniness of this afternoon’s dreams.

How could a westerner become identified with this absurd foreigner's existence? Decide to stay here, build a life out of it? How to generate the will to turn the hyper-reflective repose of this subculture around in to something self-sustaining?

Maybe I can see it. Right now, yes. It’s like any old decision to expatriate, really. A combination of alienation and openness, laziness, gumption, liberalness but also lack of certain old bonds, an ability to create yourself from scratch.

Anyway, imagining in to the lifeworlds of those who have really gone native does overwhelm me, as do the depth and intensity of social life here. People throw themselves in to the bubble until they pierce its membrane and find themselves bouncing around inside. You almost can’t not do it this way.

It’s not easy to collect the recent days’ experience in to thoughts. And I don’t want to but think I should try, if for no other reason than to use the old practice of writing to get a little bit grounded. I’ve been on a fast train through some weird headspaces, plucking bits of good information on the way.

Am I an ethnographer or a retreatant? It is funny to be a person who always has to be both.

The experience is designed to trip you out. Too many resources, too many beautiful and open people, far too much privilege and time on your hands. Where else to go but in to self-involvement (coded as “self-study” since that’s  one of the yamas of course)? You can have any experience you want here: lose the self or go deep in to the self, if there is a difference. Choose anything from dissolution to devotion, if there is a difference.

Today was another intense stream of doing nothing, and will continue late in to the night if I bring myself to leave the house again. I slept in and almost missed led practice—should try to write it to you as a Mysore vignette because it was all so rich. Then coconuts, then breakfast with Eeyore and an amazing Russian businesswoman, then second breakfast at Tina’s with a billion people I’d never met before (except by browsing Facebook photos—always a weird prelude for community you’re apt to build eventually) but who all knew each other intimately, then some kind of intense bodywork followed by fresh squeezed watermelon juice, a walk down the hill, some shopping after a fight with the ATM (oddly, the only ATM in Gokulam is attached to the shala), then a much-needed shower and a freaky 2-hour crash.

Wayne, an old-timer here with roots in the same studio where I too came to this practice, was unlocking the pain in my knee. By force of “poverty,” I’ve got an un-needy body for an ashtangi. Tweaks and soreness always arise, but I don’t ask about them and rather just assume that they will pass. There doesn’t need to be an explanation or a fix. But sharp little pain inside the knee, right at the inner meniscus, is a different thing. I’d never felt such a thing, but the first two practices here something was not right. Strange, there was a knot in the Sartorius and a bunch of tension right over the lymph node, sending the torque from the padmas right in to the knee. The work helps me understand what other people go through, and how it’s key to work all the contortion from the center.

Anyway, after I collapsed in protective, reactive (but newly educated) laughter over the deep work in the leg, we rooted around the shoulders a bit. That’s when the hallucination came up. Yes, there it was, just waiting in my right armpit under the lymph node. A simple collection of sensations from a morning 12 years ago: an interior courtyard at the University of Costa Rica, my second or third day in the country. The emotions and sounds came in first, and strongly; and then there was what seemed like perfect visual recall—shocking since it’s so rare for me to think in pictures.

Later in the shower I realized that I am now in that place. Second or third day in a new country, finding comfort-containment in vine-covered courtyard, with traces of both excitement and stark-serious uncanniness—the Heideggerian uncanniness—playing at the edges.

I thought a little Shinzen would be edifying, so put him on the ipod and lay down to massage my feet. Next thing I knew the phone woke me, the caller telling me she’d been ringing all hour and where had I been. In the meantime it was like my body wasn’t mine at all. I was wrestling against the way it held me in sleep, and against the way it brought me out of the states Shinzen was describing. I was feeling death, the disintegration of my muscles on the bones, just wishing I could get back to what I meant to do in my life, see the people I love.

It was upsetting. Terrifying. An experience of a barrier I suspect will resurface if I take quieting the mind more seriously, and take Shinzen’s method all the way. I would submit that ashtanga can’t do this by itself. The best you can do is trip yourself out by mixing it up in Mecca, but that is a good thing too.

Is it true some people are ever-beset with the aloneness and latent existential terror of uncanniness—constantly taken hostage by this? The way to escape it, from what I can tell by watching, is to surround oneself with life and history and memory. Keep your context dense.

But a little radical decontextualization and aloneness are no problem for a person who feels at home in solitude and open spaces, so maybe uncanniness is harder for me to find. Oh but yes, here it is. Leave it to Mecca to get this out of me one way or another.

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

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

Security Camera · 22 February 2009

Practice with others, no teacher. What I'm doing.

I sense, again and again, that practice brings together three streams, known variously as:

Energy---Method---Community,

The Truth---The Way---The Life,

Buddha---Dharma---Sangha,

&c.

The first--some kind of God-energy, a sovereign Spirit--is what we map on to the person in the teacher or therapist role. Easily. But where do you source a sense of consciousness… a seer… the receptacle of all-knowing… when there is no teacher to fill the space?

Right now we are insourcing the seer. Going without a teacher is incredibly sweet, everyone tapping self-reliance they’d forgotten is there, strengthening it, and in the weaker moments keeping it together for the team if not oneself. Sometimes it’s easier to stay on target if you feel you’re doing it for the benefit of others. Some people who have less understanding of the practice don’t even show up to join us because there’s no teacher to care for them, and that’s actually a benfit to us.

Everything is stiller than ever. The energy is not even that of witness-cultivation (which you seen in the quieter practitioners in a sort of chatty room) so much as just being there and letting it be enough. Of dropping the flight away from it just being exactly like this, and finding joy in the thisness. Without a teacher but with high stakes conspiration and strong fidelity to a taken-for-granted method, the possibility of nondual states in practice seems much more obvious to me. This can be easy, with simple strong support.

Afterwards, the other day, I remembered the bitter existentialist line from Saramago…

How often have we shown ourselves as we really are, and yet we need not have bothered, there was no one there to notice...

Ah the resentment of the baby atheist, the anger of the lonely young post-Christian! Poor child, realizing your own end-in-yourself. We in the room are so over it.

That said, it never hurts to throw a security camera up in the rafters even when it’s not rolling tape. There’s some part of us together that turns on even to the imagined dialogue with some vaguely-felt seer in the machine. A dialogue that wants to collapse in to mutual participation, and does so more easily because the fact that the camera (or statue, or photograph) is lifeless is perfectly known and no kind of secret.

The hanging SKPJ on the wall and lighting the candles to Ganesha. So here we are surface-level atheists, post-projectionists; but there’s still an ongoing participation in that which cannot be discussed. And some part of experience that lights up even in deeper in theta state if the unspeakable is mirrored back in ritual. Let the ineffable try to take form as photo or statue or security camera—it’s always a lost cause but the incompleteness of trying still creates a resonance, makes us all a little stiller, sometimes even makes it feel that we’re held by something. In a suspension. Weirdly ambulant in time and space by the grace of whatever.

I had forgotten about that for some years, during bitter post-Christian teenagerdom and the activist and grad school years of seeing it all as just atoms and the void. It’s nice to recover the security blanket. Even if now it’s just a tiny thread not backed by anything at all, it still feels warm.

One of the least ritualist, most self-reliant, among us is Lily, a clockwork-methodical practitioner who has her "own interpretation of practice.” She has no interest in some larger subculture around ashtanga, in anything at all religious or philosophical, and no need to participate in owl-typical what’s-it-all-about inquiries. The other morning as we began and found SKPJ out of order she stamped a foot ruefully and said,

Listen I don’t care if it’s a pain in the ass to put it up I’ve got to have the damn picture. I can’t do it without the picture.

Brilliant. She cracked me up.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , spirituality

A Test · 14 February 2009

How Enlightened Are You? A Test

If you can live without caffeine or nicotine

If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains

If you can resist complaining

If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you any time

If you can take criticism and blame without resentment

If you can ignore friends' limited educations and never correct them

If you can treat the rich and poor alike

If you can face the world without lies or deceit

If you can conquer tension without medical help

If you can relax without liquor

If you can sleep without the aid of drugs

If you can have no prejudice against creed, color, religion, gender, sexual preference, or politics ——

then you have almost reached the same level of spiritual development as your dog.

*Via the incomparable Guruphiliac

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: evolution , spirituality

Viparita Chakrasana, &c. · 28 January 2009

John 5:8

And Jesus said, Arise, take up thy mat, and walk.

Luke 7:22

Then Jesus answering said unto them, Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard; how that the blind see, the lame walk… the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the gospel is preached.

Gautama Buddha

A man on his journey comes across a vast river. No boat goes to the other side, nor is there a bridge for crossing over. He then gathers grass, wood, branches and leaves to make a raft, and crosses the river with the help of the raft. After crossing safety, he leaves the raft at the shore and goes on his way. In just the same way, I have taught the Dhamma similar to a raft; it is for crossing over, not for getting hold of.

Ashtanga 3:2

And the ashtangis said, cast off thy crutches and practice. Hast ye so little faith in method? Doest thou fear the way so much thou wouldst flee thy breath and thy temple of the holy of holies, binding them in Hugger Mugger straps and beating them back with foam blocks? Doest thou love thy crutch more than thine body on the breath? More than the great river of I Am? The moment the crutch hast fulfilled its purpose, cast it down, that it take form of its master and slither back unto the rocks. O come ye and enter the church of flow.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Projection Junction, What's Your Function? · 19 January 2009

Here is a radical (or maybe just a grown-up?) theory of learning...

What if the big story of “lessons” to be learned in a practice room (or wherever) is: that the knowledge is always already ours for the taking? What if all the lessons are just freely available and free of charge? What if the learning you do is NOT the genius orchestration of some other (or “the universe”) pulling strings on your personal behalf? What if there is no cosmic babysitter, or even a technical babysitter?

What if the lessons learned were simply those you have identified out there in your environment when you were ready and, in a self-responsible fashion, finally took in to yourself? What if the unifying factor isn't another's omniscience but your intelligence?

I know it’s radical, this personal responsibility thing. I'm stating it in the extreme. But if you are at the other extreme then perhaps you need to be paying your teachers roughly $150 an hour to carry all your projections.

I hereby hail a new era of personal responsibility. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [47]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , self-deception , spirituality

Stages of Grief · 18 January 2009

I had wondered if I would feel the right way when I first lost someone close. Would the appropriate emotions arrive, or would I find some way of taking advantage of, or maybe running away from, the event?

For the first days after it happened, what I felt quietly was both my loss and his loss—of life at a young productive age, just two years into a deep rich vein of happiness. I began to dispense my debt of gratitude to this person who thought the world owed him nothing. I spoke in peace to his colleagues, to find out how much he meant to them… and to fill them in on the parts they never really understood. Where was he that sabbatical I worked in his office and spirited away the mail? No, not like the others on writing retreat in Provence or a Idyllwild… but in noble silence with Thic Nhat Hahn. I never thought I’d be the one to share his not-very-academic secret, but it was impossible to hide in response to inquiries about the joy and non-agenda-seeking of our one peaceful professor.

Breaking the news there was a Buddhist among us, I explained the thing about this Zen business is that you confront your own death up front. We scientists leave consciousness of mortality for the retirement years and instead ride ragged our unconscious fear of death in order to make ourselves write. (Probably best that way—makes for more science, less hand-wringing.) But if you’re Zen you stare down emptiness and loss and suffering until you move past the denial the fear and the sadness into a place of radical acceptance and peace. Academics buy in to stage models from Maslow, to Kubler-Ross, so this explanation worked. And it also served to explain my own equanimity.

So that was the first days. Acceptance. Strange to fast-forward straight to Stage 5 of the Kulber-Ross model of grieving, yes? There was both wisdom and bullshit in it, as there is in any flight toward peace and equanimity that denies the depth of the psyche or the reality of life in the world.

A couple of the skipped-over "stages" came right back in when I was able to manage them. Kind of a depression-anger-depression two-step. Anger was the most interesting and cathartic. I’d been practicing the primary series for a few days (3S is so joyful and strong—it would have been easy to do but also a pushing away emotions that I wanted to honor), attending to the weird moist heaviness in the sinuses and chest, when round about Mary C something shifted.

If an emotion is a somatic event, going radically into the body daily is a way to circulate those events and move them on out. But I never realized—not in years of Vipassana practice—how concrete and specific a strong emotion could be until that morning on the mat. Like a little clockwork click backwards down the supposed Kubler-Ross ladder, I twisted the chest free and felt the slow heaviness replaced with a hit of excitement and power. I moved through the next few asanas, made eye contact with the teacher, and initiated the march of tormentor-sages and grim reapers that is the beginning of 3S. I didn’t even realize the energy was angry until the ideation showed up. Suddenly I was rolling up my manduka and marching back to flog my friend Betty (not her real name). She was practicing owl-driste that day—a common bad habit that usually doesn’t phase me but that day felt so damn invasive and unsupportive and even vampirish. While I flogged her (in my mind) I also gave a clipped little lecture on WHAT YOGA IS and how if she didn’t muster some integrity and contain her energy she would degrade the practices of everyone else in the community.

Oh my god, hilarious. WHAT YOGA IS, right there. Betty and her nutty owl-driste practice kissed me on my way out and instead of taking her into the office to let her have it, I received her best intentions. I needed them, together with the support of everyone else in the room. Community is a strong discipline. Better to eat my sour words than let them become something lasting and terrible among us all.

But is it important to be so forgiving of inanimate stressors? At the Whole Foods 10 minutes later I parked next to a Harley-Davidson and wanted to maim or even kill it. Kill it with my Honda before it killed its rider. Would have been a mercy to its owner for me to beat that machine, punish it for the death it brings us too early and with too much violence.

The anger made me sleepless for two nights, but it must have passed because I came home from the funeral yesterday and slept for 14 hours.

The funeral was a blessing, even though I couldn't stand the smug condescending of the Zen friends toward the devout Catholic parents. I’ll spare a retelling of that, because it’s inappropriately hilarious and cannot be told without leveling the kind of perfect insults that my mentor taught me to let pass. I’ll only say that the Buddhist statements of faith stood out starkly against the Catholic gestalt in a way that made the family squirm and made me wish for an even more minimalist death-ritual. Why does a funeral have to be a time we all theorize about the meta-realm? Isn’t it in poor taste to choose death, of all times, to get philosophical? Isn’t death—so spare, non-negotiable and emotionally deep—so meaningful that we don’t really have to adorn it?

I don’t know. Maybe there is no such thing as simple ritual; and maybe we have to adorn our mechanisms of acceptance so they feel familiar and beautiful. It’s true that I needed something collective and solemn now; and it's true that the two poems sent from friends seemed more meaningful this week than ever (but only because they were good... though I also confess there were days this week when every previously-vapid pop song seemed to be about him). It's good to live in a poetry-filled world, where weeks are afforded for mourning and day-long rituals used to summon the best we can make of acceptance and closure. They don’t get that in Gaza or Baghdad. Rolling mortuary lawns and tearful hymns and unselfconscious group hugs are for the non-traumatized life. Recognizing my debt to this teacher I feel I must acknowledge the many peace-resources here and make the most of them, choose to be marked but not scarred by this, and pursue that choice into the body if that’s where it leads.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

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

Fetishizing Balance · 23 November 2008

I. Got the best anonymous text message today: “I got the prana aligned right out of me in this workshop.”

(If you achieve perfect alignment, will you go poof in samadhi?)

II. Last week I met a friend at CityBakery for pumpkin pie. She said she’s always experienced me as vata to the nth degree, but has seen a kapha side of me since I’ve been practicing third. Told me I’m much more grounded now. I was all excited, until I started wondering about my pitta.

(If a person constituted herself as exactly 1/3 in each dosha, would she trans-substantiate to a fourth post-dosha dimension?)

III. I’ve been thinking about a crazy activist campaign I participated in exactly 5 years ago, and the anarchist lawyer who befriended me during that time. He consistently scored dead center on all four scales of the Jungian Myers-Briggs personality test.

(If a person beats the Myers-Briggs, does his personality spontaneously evaporate?)

P.S. Hahahahahaa. As experienced people know, constant alignment-obsession is the method quasi-ashtangis at YogaFranchise use to run away from intimate experience of the self. Also, pumkin pie is probably all wrong for my “dosha.” And mister anarchist lawyer? Most slithery-skilled manipulator I’ve encountered. He always laughed too loud and too long, like a sit-com character with a screwball secret.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: evolution , social theory

Eschatology · 16 November 2008

The city’s on fire. This morning the sun was blood red coming up through the ash. There are two streams in the heavy air, pushed down from the mountains by Joan Didion’s Santa Anna winds (but montionless, eerie-still, outside my wall of windows).

First is is a smell like life—the fast-living oxidation of brush fire. Earthy with undertones of vetiver just like my brother’s French cologne. Our father, also a volunteer fire chief, taught us to love grassfire because the hard-scratched soil couldn’t work without its nitrogen, and love forestfire because that’s what it takes for pine cones to open (there’s a sermon on “refining fire” in which he burns open a pinion cone on the altar—god no wonder I’m doing what I do now).

But, second, there’s just death stench in the air. Homes converted to tarry gas. Grass burns white; forest fires are browned by treesap; but a house burns a horrible plume of black—shingles, paint, insulation, carpeting, appliances, overstuffed furniture, shoes, records, photographs.

We are fine here, eye of the hurricaine style—a mile south of the Getty, a mile east of the beach. But others are not fine. Twenty-six square miles ablaze, 800 homes down. Yesterday on the north end of the city 500 trailer homes went up: the fire chief unfurled a charred American flag and wept in a school gym, telling a evacuated thousand senior citizens the team had done everything they could to save their little hamlet. Usually when my dad calls to ask about fires, I’m just disappointed he cares more about nature’s reclamation of  hilltop mansions that never should have been built in the first place—I ask whether he’s read The Tortilla Curtain yet and change the subject to some less natural disaster.

But this time feels apocalyptic, I guess. I’ve been wearing my apocalypse goggles for months, it’s true—those years training as Armageddon lookout coming back around with every ATM out of service and every thoroughfare billboard painted white because there’s nothing to say now, and nothing to sell. Even art in this moment feel apocalyptically bad. We saw Synechdoche NY last night and wished we’d sold out instead for a quantum of narrative solace. As the Editor said, it's fine for an artist to misunderstand Borges or Baudrillard, but don’t make art demonstrating that ignorance. Abstract referencing is the "art" of unlived experience with a private school degree in lit crit: sophomoric in the extreme. In this case, an incoherent mixing of two conceptual schemas (parallel worlds and infinite regresses) insults the audience--referring to nothing as if winking to a knowingness shared only by "deep" people.

EDIT: The script is so vacant that I was tempted to interpret it as a meditation on emptiness and form: but nothing is not nothingness. Any ape can pelt signifiers at a canvas: what that yields here is neurosis and death, not emptiness and form. I emerged from the theatre awash in manufactured mysterey pumped up on the raw but dehumanized emotion of beautifully rendered little episodes. Over the hours, my irritation grew as I realized that conceptual art has the greatest possibilities but the lowst standards, and that a conceptual piece that seems to be fashionably Buddhist would shortchange me with half-baked nihilism.

Pretentiousness is one thing, but pretentiousness that trades on fake depth blows. Like the Santa Annas. Is this what America has to offer as high art? Dada existentialism? In the end it’s just Kaufman throwing at the screen whatever shit (literally) surfaces from his subconscious, flattering the audience that this shall spark “deep” recognitions about the nature of whatever. Letting the shadow wander on screen is genius when David Lynch does it. But Charlie K is no David Lynch. The film rings false, a small falseness amplified by self-satisfaction, enormous budget, and the adoration of confused reviewers. It's a movie about lit crit posing as a movie about experience. It feels like the end of art not because it's a final statement, but because it's really, really bad.

I do worry for a culture that praises this as its own high art and funds it to the nines. But... Kaufman isn’t really America’s idea of profound. He’s Los Angeles’ idea of profound. Or at least what's left of this town's Bush-Schwarzenegger era conceits, playing themselves out.

Today we burn. Down through the tar to the vetiver, I hope.

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

Leavings · 10 November 2008

I’ve been not writing here, letting the hourly blog-sized thoughts walk on by. They are like deer. I like them, with their immature spots and testing-the-waters uncertainty, but when they whisper off again they deposit a steaming little turd to remind me they were here.

I miss the Beartooth mountains. Because I did not make it home this summer, I’m that much more aware of how little time I spend in forests, distinguishing elk turd from deer in the trails up to the tundra. I shrug off the REI fleece geeks who think of backpacking as “fun,” in part because of the one-with-nature elitism the “outdoor adventure lifestyle” entails. And in part because in my experience backpacking is what you do when walking is the only mode of vacation transport you can afford. My dad was a wilderness guide before he started preaching, and doesn’t see much difference between the two vocations: he feels God is more accessible in the mountains than anywhere. It’s finally dawned on my how much my practice, in the beginning, was about finding wildernessy oneness in the city. About packing that aporia of powder days and starry campfire nights wherever I went—to the point where I now see as trite the peak experiences that cannot happen without external promts from actual mountain peaks.

But I don’t know. When I remember the delight and peace that rednecks get from nature, the part of my research that’s about environmentalism becomes metaphysically interesting. Yoga is metaphysically interesting on its face. No contest. But as this dimension surfaces in my research, taking analytical writing from turd-size to book-size makes more sense. Even if books feel so 20^th century and my idea of long-form now is a 60-minute podcast.

So yeah, it’s been a week of devotional music—Hildegaard and Arvo Part—and lying on the earth. I stayed until the end of practice yesterday, rather than slipping out early like the rabbit late for a very important date. Sundays form 8:30 until class ends at 8:45, to teacher issues the only spoken “do as I say” instruction of the week. The command: relax. Savasana is deeper when there’s an outer ego to conclude it and you can let go of the anticipation of bringing yourself out. At the very end we chant the closing prayer together, just minutes before my father gives his the closing benediction to his freaky congregation a time zone to the east and more than a thousand miles to the north.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord turn his face upon you and be gracious to you. May the light of the Lord shine upon you and grant you peace. Have a good week.

For now, in this new time, my intention on Sundays is to let myself hear that blessing filtered through the Sanskrit. And to receive it for what it’s worth.

A lot of people have experienced SOME kind of resolution of opposition the past week (predictably, I see this least among the academics: they want to experience this only on a rational level, only as an epochal improvement in the strategic tableaux). Take a duality any duality—whatever is the one that has hurt you most in days of Bush. For many, it’s a sense that Americans are exceptional oppressors: now it’s ok to embrace the scoundrels. For most, it’s the black-white hypocrisy that generations of fear and segregation have kept alive: now, the “all men are created equal” line rings more true. For others, it’s simply an end to internecine warfare in the Congress: now is a time to reason together. For me, I’ve had to look the sexist ignorant Frontier in the rimless-lensed eyes and recognize there is a place in this country—albeit a vanishingly small one—for that way of being. Palin-hate makes some sense because she’s trying to tell us how to be women (though the hate is paradoxical coming from those women who choose against history to re-institute patriarchy “by choice” under a man's name), but only if we actually need to defend ourselves against that. Suddenly the threat she poses to our selfhood is revealed as a vulnerable backwater joke—so why not let the backwater be? It works well for some, and those in transition, who still weirdly wish for a little patriarchy in their lives, should especially understand that.

Recognizing that Frontier ways of being will never again overpower me, and that those folks are still vital on their own terms, I’m suddenly a little more comfortable with the old forms of devotion that the Frontierspeople take for granted. Nature, music, and old prayers that never, ever felt real to me before now. I’ve had to block that out my whole life, and fight it in order to have a self. That has given me energy and self-willed critical intelligence. The urgent need to evolve away from that, the drive to transform, carried me many miles from the wilderess.

But now I wonder if I might be secure enough to be strengthened by the wilderness/Frontier in a different way. With a subversive inclusion into my cultural repertoire of the nature-worship, the old time gospel songs (god I think I might love that shit!), even the scriptures. The last are etched into my memory—I thought for years I’d succeeded in forgetting them but the yoga belies the accomplishment: the scriptures are buried there in rhythmic, otherworldly KJV verbatim, surfacing one by one as I push back the veil. I almost have no choice but to re-own it all, so thank god I feel like I live in a world where there’s much space for mutts and where contradiction is not really contradiction. It’s just fuel for movement, and paradox for stillness.

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Categories: evolution , integration , sound

Adventures in Organized Spirituality · 6 November 2008

I. Are you spiritual but not religious? Yes; No? By the way, what does this mean?

II. Have your feelings changed about the possibilities of mixing spirituality and associational life? Have the internal and shared experiences of recent days been spiritually transformative for you--in part because bound up in organized, institutional life?

IMAGE.

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Categories: evolution , social theory , spirituality

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

"Spirituality" · 16 October 2008

The first two years of my asana practice were about going ever deeper into the altered state that was the two hours on the mat. Adorning and becoming addicted to a dreamstate I understood as spirituality. Thus, this idea of a post-Christian spirituality, something based in bodily experience, suddenly became fascinating early in my practice.

The word spirituality is what I hung on my ecstasy and my dream. Seems pretty common. This spirituality is a refuge or escape from daily troubles, and it feels nice. Spirituality as “me time.” Spirit as the source of wish-fulfillment and the place for hopes-against-hope framed in angeli mudra. If you don’t get your fix at regular intervals, you feel off. Disoriented. Locked in a too-concrete reality and a too-concrete body.

I’ve rarely gone more than a day without trance in the last five years, so I don’t know how I would deal, now, with a life in solid beta state. Without time every day in altered states, I might actually lose my shit. But are altered states spiritual? Is writing-mind unspiritual? 

I look at this “spirituality” tag on this blog and realize I don’t have a good use for it right now. It is not a dreamstate, and it's also not the dream of wishes fulfilled. Time in altered states doesn’t by itself frame my moral life (though it's true that I do draw moral sentiments out of those states, in a lot of ways), nor does it make me feel that beta state is vulgar. The easier altered states are to access, and the more different forms the take, the less holy it all feels. And the less I experience my own consciousness as a mystery to toss in to the placeholder category of "spirit." Consciousness is a variable, but so are introversion, hunger, weather, relationship, whatever. Spirituality doesn't seem like a category I can use right now.

Unless... I'm using, in a way, around the idea of interconnection. My schtick in the sociology classroom is that everything is connected. It’s a hypothesis I urge students to test in their investigations of society and economy. But, mostly this is still a proposition, still something I can only see on network graphs, Facebook sidebars and accidentally meaningful collapses of the degrees of separation. If there’s something that induces wonderment in me, it is the possibilities for intersubjectivity among beings and immediate experiences of radical interdependence. I wonder if connection feels like spirituality because it is what is sometimes but not always true for me. It’s the new fever-dream.

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Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , spirituality

Not to belabor the point, · 4 October 2008

Some questions opened in the long comment thread on the previous post.

This is an interesting set of questions, because of the ways they’re NOT interesting. It’s an almost-annoying topic, because it asks for reflection on stuff that’s somehow fun to leave unseen. Also, there’s this sense in me that talking about masculine domination is “whiny.” Ha! Obviously that’s the patriarchy in me trying to talk back. Still, it is good to speak of this forthrightly, not with self-apology and periodical impulses to run away.

I'm not trying to smash patriarchy. I'm saying it's a big, dumb obstacle that misallocates energy.

So if there is energy that I could put in to self-understanding that instead I'm putting in to reproducing and justifying patriarchal relationships and organizations, it's just inefficient. Why not strip away a bit of the clunky, heavy, distracting outdated technology? 

Maybe I’m asking these questions prematurely. Maybe people aren’t ready to think about masculine domination as an historical pattern, and are also afraid that all this will lead to a deconstruction of the basic ideas of masculinity and feminitiy. It’s not like that at all.

Patriarchy is both a way of organizing human activity (hierarchies, exhales, achievement, dominance) and a way of organizing personal, interior lives. Anyway:

Why would masculine domination be a problem in practice--a practical problem? I’m thinking both principles (goal oriented-ness, performance mindset) and politics (who gets/has to take power, who pretends/has to pretend to be needy).

Can there be systematic practice and transmitted lineage (two super useful things!) without patriarchy? (Is the very idea of energetic lineage just a legitimation racket for patriarchy? Shit.)

Is the experience of surrender sometimes—as we experience it—about participating in male-dominance? Can surrender be something else?

How can you learn to get really intimate with your own experience when you’re taught in a patriarchal manner?

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Men rule. · 2 October 2008

Could there be any more tension today? In every overheard conversation on campus, a dozen facebook updates, to say nothing of the places online where I round up my news. We’re doing this mass anticipatory schadenfreude, eager for Sarah Palin bite it tonight. Even the Christians are ready for her to get fed to the lions like a good old-time martyr (not kidding—they love it too).

Tease it out: where is about anger that such an incompetent could be put up as a leader? And where is it about latent patriarchy in us? I’m not kidding.

I’ve been thinking about what I’d say to Biden. Basically: DON’T DO ANYTHING, JOE. There’s no soundbite, no smackdown no coup de grace you can issue that’s better than the self-undoings she can issue herself. You’re a cipher for patriarchy, man; just stand there and emit no personality. I don’t care that this is the high point of the noble work you’ve done all your life to get here. Just become nobody, bubble under all the “You, Sarah, are no Hillary Clinton” lines. If you must, emit subtle condescention. Don’t do anything so overtly fatherly that someone can point to it later—just stand there above her inadequacy and don’t do her the compliment of really speaking back to it.

Sometimes I scare myself. I didn't know my own inner sexist shadow was that long. But yes: the winning strategy is pure patriarchy. And we (or, rather, I) want to see this. We want to see how unassailable patriarchy really is. What's not to like about this vision of Sarah standing up against patriarchy and revealing she’s just a little girl from beauty contests?

Fine. Ok. I want her to expose McCain as a corrupt, condescending player—as a man who has no standards for or expectations of women. But it is pretty messed up that to the degree that Biden comes down off the patriarchial pedestal, her loss will diminish. If he actually speaks as a person, rather than standing there and representing male domination, she gets points. If he addresses her as an equal (taking a subject-to-subject stance), she sort of wins because she's garnered some legitimacy. Gut-wrenching illustration of just how much a background of daddy-power is in our politics.

A post-patriarchical strategy is this: nobody gets to rely only on implicit cultural biases about what men and women are supposed to be--the supposed strengths and weakness that patriarchy says follow from genitalia. Biden has to beat her one-to-one. They have to engage each other as subjects, not objects bearing cute little sets of limitations and entitlements.

That's actually a much harder debate for the Dems.

Speaking of standards for women and the limitations of patriarchy, what if there were two tendencies—two patterns in the way we do everything—that make it impossible for the culture of yoga to enable genuinely nondual practice?

What if one of those tendencies were patriarchy? How does patriarchy manifest in individual practice and in styles of practice? How does it keep people away from their own immediate experience? How does it get reproduced? How do women in particular fight against its finally ending? Why are the most patriarchy-addicted women I know yoga practitioners? How are we still addicted to it? How does patriarchy prevent real intimacy between men and women partners? What will it look like when it is gone?

Today for the second time a teacher I respect immensely—the second time a man, because for now it still has to be—told me that the next generation of spiritual—especially yoga—practice has to be led by women or we are fucked. Krishnamurthi said this too. Apparently they also see that subconscious patriarchy is totally in the way of yoga or intimacy with your own experience or intimacy with others.

P.S. I've heard that what I tossed up here this morning was confusing, so I added a few paragraphs. Maybe this makes more sense. I wasn't ranting so much as raising delicate questions in an exasperated way. There's a difference, see? Maybe...

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Categories: evolution

Today · 1 October 2008

Three years ago, I spoke with a wonderful financial historian about all this. She said: let us hope that the US declines gracefully from its place of supreme dominance. Hope it for everyone’s sake.

Well… this is horribly abrupt and traumatic, and it will still be a long time before our mundane, taken-for-granted reality catches up. This vacuum of political power laid on top of a vacuum of market organization is ok, in a sense, because on mental and interpersonal levels things are holding together. We go on reproducing social order through our habits of being, thank god. It’s actually kind of great… the microsocial strength that sustains a whole society amid two phenomenal macrosocial failures.

Barack Obama’s ability to hold back from full-scale demagoguery makes me love him more—those crying for him to show more power and leadership are so very old school. He’s already running the show in his way.

For me, I love to watch the practical nature of the sense-making we’re all doing now. Had the LHC created a black hole last month the physicist would have all looked at each other shaking their heads Oops, tapping around to find where exactly it went wrong. The present crises are in certain ways the same. The levels of technical understanding vary, but even for those who have seen this coming for years, there’s some kind of aporia.

For me, there’s so much going on it’s ridiculous. I’ve been getting my dearest remaining presuppositions undermined to hell, and beautifully, by Mark Whitwell in recent days, and ought to blog about it but feel maybe it’s just too much to lay on you. Also, with what time? There’s none. I’d leechblock everything to stay on target, but the world is too good. Some bits for today in case you missed them and for my own future reference:

George Soros on a better bailout.

Thomas Frank on blame.

V Good Mark Buchanan Op-Ed

Kathy G’s Palintology

Oh, also important: Mohair Gravy.

Happy October. I woke this morning on the other side of about three rabbit holes, and will definitely need some time for these known and unknown revolutions to remake my everydayness.

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

Reticulation and the world inside the world · 19 August 2008

I love to watch networks of humans create themselves and halfway-retreat, surge, drop whole nodules, regenerate. In web space the networks never die—the information down to the last errant comment-thread always remains out there, somewhere: the relationships forged and ebbed away, the self-discoveries through expression and through being witnessed in this way, the vast inconclusiveness but inexorably forward, expansive movement of it. There will be more human nodes in this web, more journals deployed in blog form, more relationships and conclusions and hiatuses and returns. Events that seem to divide are vicariances, separating species that then flourish along parallel trajectories on separate self-identified “continents” (“India” and “the West” in our ashtangosphere, these days)… though on the web a new pangea is possible at any moment.

The sheer amount of personal and collective data in every corner of the blogosphere is wonderful, stupefying, trivial, transcendent: boring as fuck and at the same time uniquely totalizing it its human digitization. No single brain could really ever see it all or understand its dynamics.

What excites and frustrates me is that even in the little corner of the blogosphere that is ours, most of the digitized relationships flow through hidden channers. There is the outside digital self, and the inside, that is, the email side of things. Sitting here in my in-box this morning, waiting for the time I let myself read them late tonight, are new missives from two most fascinating and very far-away quasi-strangers. People who know me in a sense, and who I know, in a sense. I feel awed by these little connections--by these interestingly personal, decontextualized but also sweetly (uniquely?) private, and all-over delightful sparks between would-be strangers.

Would it double the data to add the email-train of relationship formation to the map of the network? Triple it? Would it crash even the most capacious network analysis? Is the secret email web where the reticulation of the blogosphere really happens—in simple, private dyads?

I suspect so. Here’s something else in my blogger inbox, from a reader I adore in DC.

i had a dream about you last night that i had to tell you about, it was so weird!

i was having an "issue" and i can't remember what it was, but it caused me to have a little temper tantrum and i threw the coffee maker through a picture window (perhaps i hadn't yet had coffee and that was the problem?).  well, to cope with/ fix the problem i decided i had to go visit you in LA.  the next thing i knew i was in LA with you at your shala and you gave me up to karandavasana.  then we went for a hike in some crater lake type lake bed.  the water was recessed and there were all sorts of amazing skeletal remains. we were just hiking around looking at everything, when all of the sudden someone came running and shouting that we had to get out because the waters were rising and soon the way we came in would be covered with water.  i knew this was silly and i wasn't worried because i knew we would be able to get out no matter what.  and we did, and then i was back in the kitchen with the broken picture window and no coffee.

The dream side of the blogosphere… world inside the world. Is the understory always this good? I guess it must be. Imagining the secret notes exchanged between so many twosomes out there adds a layer of romance and intrigue, somehow. I'd love to peek (just a little) in your inboxes; I really would. 

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

There are different kinds of trees · 9 August 2008

A client is learning to trust himself—literally, he’s putting himself in situations that show him that he is already rooted and stable. Yesterday we began and ended a session with tree, using the shape of it as a measure of the body before and then after practice. He keeps having these moments of recognition in practice, and I realize that as much as I’m there for it I don’t exactly understand.

This morning I skipped dance because I wanted to keep my wits about me. In dance, I let my wits spin out at great distances, give all my energy away, play with boundaries of self until I’m exhausted. It takes an hour afterwards to click back over into writing mind and writing body. So today I rolled out the kitchen practice mat but brought my dance mind rather than ashtanga mind to the moment.

Oh my god. Ok. That was easy and hearteningly good; and shifting in to the mental-bodily state for some kind of ‘practice’ was shockingly automatic—maybe because it’s just what my organism expects to do when Saturday morning rolls around.

I don’t even remember what kitchen practice consisted of this morning, but at one point I decided to hang out on one leg and find out everything that is possible when that one variable is held constant. I thought of the student who had his tree realizations yesterday, and experimented with what it would take to find the limits of my own one-legged stability. Suprising how much is possible, how much stability is here.

And you know what? It’s all in the backbend principles. Grounding down through four corners of the feet, sucking the arches up a whole line of energy into the pelvic floor, slight inner rotation, microbend the knees, work the quadriceps and even the hamstrings strongly, steer the hips toward even. Do the backbends from the ground up and strongly, and crazy standing stability is coming. Treelike stability, even if you’re doing all manner of spontaneous branching with the other limbs.

It is good to set aside the container of fixed practice and play. The consciousness of this morning, in my challenging kitchen space where I am so used to the deepest requirements of focus, was so much in the body. Usually I’m focused on cultivating the deepest possible mental state, so the stipulated practice sequence is nothing more than a regular mantra for supporting that. Today was not in the mind but out of the mind. Ec-static. Expressive, moreso than contemplative. Really happy and satisfying, but absolutely not the same as a practiced mental state whose intention is one-pointedness. And I can only say that vis-à-vis experience of regular meditation practice and ashtanga.

So this morning also made me a little sad, considering what’s missing from the “wild art” practices that are primarily ecstatic and expressive (and also sad about the outright poverty of concocted American yogas that grasp for "happiness" and self-congratulation as a way to simulate ecstasy or run from pain). I move in order to make myself happy, it’s true. The energetic outcome is guaranteed. But with ashtanga I move in order to find out what I really feel—to observe rather than to create or express.

The common complaint that ashtanga is not fun is about this. It’s because the style is built for contemplation rather than for gratification. For me it incidentally delivers sort of indecent joy on a daily basis (sorry, it always happens to me--the trees do clap their hands even if they're made in contemplation), but the texture of that is interestingly different from the joy of dance.

I don’t know. There is much more to find here. The neurologists can hook electrodes up to my head and find out that the brain is doing totally different things in ashtanga and dance, but is that even interesting? The real researcher here is me, finding out how all these different mind-body states operate, how you get into them, how deep you can go, and what kind of consequences they have. My two practices are such a great contrast— two extremes on the control/spontaneity or contemplation/expression spectra. I’m so grateful that I can investigate both practices better through the contrast.

There we go with comparative logic again. Funny that comparative logic itself doesn’t operate in either ashtanga mind or dance mind, but here, in front of my computer, in discursive mind. Which is good for something too. Good for a lot, actually.

And for now that’s an additional question. Which mind-body practices and state-cultivations add depth, intensity, intelligence, cleanliness, speed and integrity to my everyday discursive mind?

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , science

Some notes on Mysore Style · 24 July 2008

I. Working a room. It helps to have waited tables for a long time. It helps to have great peripheral vision developed over years of sophisticated driste practice. Does a teacher understand that the first key is to coordinate, and intensify, the energies of the individuals? Or does she make the huge mistake of letting her energy pool in certain parts of the room, or—worse—periodically honing in on single students in a way that the rest of the room falls into darkness for several minutes? Driste—one pointedness, but the environing universe is still present and in motion. Teachers who don’t get this—and who can’t handle being service persons/facilitators—should do some time in the hospitality business.

Related: once I went to work at Amnesty International for a summer, taking three months of my waitressing job. Came back and tried to serve the same-sized sections on day one. DISASTER. Took many nights before I could play the table service video game again with any kind of skill.

Also: So can my working class service skills jump the hierarchy to working the rooms at the dozen giant cocktail parties I have to attend in Boston next week? Even though we’re talking rooms of very powerful, smart people who have things I—from my spot at the veeeery bottom of the hierarchy—want? Or will I let my energy pool in corners, stay occupied with those I know, fail to engage with the whole space? I actually hate this question (I never use that word). Working a room from the bottom, where you don’t have a prescribed service role but instead are doing self-promotion, requires a sense of entitlement or just another level of connected charisma I don’t possess. Bravado I can do, but essentially I hate the spotlight. It’s a question of whether I’ll decide to hone a high-brow version of my middle class skill. Such an annoying, creepy prospect, but if I can see table-waiting as just a video game…

Thoughts to develop some other time---

II. The dynamic between what you know what you’ve been taught, and the way this shows up in how you engage a student. And how this dynamic shapes the degree to which a teacher is able to teach an individual or teach a system.  

The first “teach” is a transitive infitinitive verb. The second is intransitive. Both have value. I am biased toward the first.

III. Holding a space, or owning a space. How this relates to a teacher’s feelings toward her own now-absent teacher. How teachers’ authoritarian vibe relates to her own projection process, specifically to whether she has followed this process to its resolution by recognizing that her teacher/therapist is a human.

What’s the teacher’s own relationship to authority? Has she seen her own teacher as such an authority figure that practicing without the teacher is still very mournful and makes her feel abandoned? (One way to tell that is if she tries too hard to fill the shoes of the departed authority: sometimes the heaviest-handed teachers are filled with nostalgia for the imagined heavy-hand of their teacher and trying to fake it in order to comfort themselves.) Often, put-on authority is rooted in sadness for the departed teacher, and for the fact that the young  teacher herself can no longer be observed as a good student and act out of submission and compliance. Lots of karma yoga in moving from compliant to first-person active.

IV. Ritual—what is it there for?

Between (a) mind-containing structure and (b) grasping for meaning…

in other words, (a) understood as arbitrary or (b) understood as magic.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory

Between ADD and OCD · 17 July 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            Or on second thought,

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

The one we settled on last time was just

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

But my favorite is still

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

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

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

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

Camelots · 8 July 2008

Ask not what your practice community can do for you… but what you can do for your practice community.

Rolling on toward Camelot as we are this summer, and with the ashtangi follow-the-energy vritti at its height, I just got to make the above suggestion.

Forget about consuming others’ energy. How much can you give?

There is an energy market in ashtanga. On a social network graph, I could map its shifts and pulses around the world and within key cities. The expansive tendency is to follow the energy, but involution requires putting down roots. Evolution, I have a feeling, begins with the first but shifts quickly to the second.

What’s it going to be? Changing your life at crucial times in hopes of shaktipat-grace, ok; but day-trading in the endless energy market…?

I love the practitioners who take a love the one you’re with approach to their home space. Everybody loves those practitioners, actually, so (in addition to being the most content) they end up receiving more energy than they lay down day after day.

That’s the funny thing. When you stop chasing the energy, you start being the source.

Yoga practice appears to be a pay-for-service kind of thing, but it’s really not. Sorry. You pay and you serve.

(And gain the world in the meantime.)

         <<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Incidentally… will Camelot-the-Sequel be routed? Why are Warren Christopher and James Baker (not exactly someone outside the blood-for-oil winners’ circle) moving now to limit the executive’s powers to take the country to war? I will not mention the crazy internet predictions false flag events at the DNC or the fact that my beautiful grandmother lives blocks from this year’s convention center. But I don’t trust the trans-national blood-for-oil conspiracy for anything and if James Baker of all people is worried, we and Iran should be too.

         <<<<<>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Also incidentally, the Angels and Demons people are still crawling all over this place.

Super-dreamy: the quad, now slanted over in the best golden light of evening with its grass all vibratory and the rocks of Royce aglow, is scaffolded in giant spotlights. A tall dweeby guy with big hair is lurching around the outlook in the distance, pausing, hands-on-hips, to interact with someone behind a camera 10 feet away. Periodically, someone runs after the tall guy with what appears to be hairspray, as if the hair weren’t already well fortified.

They should have cast anyone else. Ed Norton, Ed Harris, Willem Dafoe (she wishes). Give the nerds a better face, with less air in the head and more fire in the belly. Clear-minded intensity (Obama, JFK, King Arthur, source-yogis present and past) can be dreamy too.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society

Cheez-it® · 25 June 2008

Last friday I walked into the living room and I smelled Nabisco. What?

He wouldn’t do this. Not Nabisco, flagship of American obesity and mindless addiction? Not this level of anti-wellbeing and all-out trash in our home?

I opened a few cupboards and file drawers, looked behind the sofa. The smell of deep-fried salty cardboard, refined flour, congealed corn syrup burnt into dessicated brown bubbles and marketed as “food” was unmistakeable. I tipped over the guitar amp behind the chair and there it was: a large box of Cheez-it® crackers.

A "food" with a registered trademark. A "food" comprising 26 ingredients, among them partially hydrogenated soybean oil and something identified as TBHQ. A substance brought into my house for the purposes of ingestion.

Ok then. It’s either me or him.

Sometimes this contrarian imp comes out—the imp that’s curious just how much shit the practice can neutralize. The imp who’s angry at parents (not mine, bless them thank god) and a culture that teach children to find comfort in “food” with trademarks, and who wants with spite-tainted curiosity to take it on myself. The imp who thinks she can neutralize all shit.

I reached in and took a monkey-fist full, sat down on the floor like a primate and crunched. Cheez-it, for all that oil and salt, tasted exactly like cardboard. Did nothing for me, not even an insulin rush (thanks to the spinach and cauliflower on which it landed). Tasting and feeling nothing, I took several more monkey-fistfuls before returning the Cheez-it® to its hiding place, knowing I’d soon be in more trouble with the Editor than he was with me. Can’t I leave anything a secret? Can’t even the space inside his guitar amp be free from my ideas about clean living?

The next morning the solstice hit and I made 108 sun salutations in the most peaceful quiet home studio in Venice. As I raised my arms for number 20, a severe wave of nausea drew me down.

Gawd. I have to do 88 more of these? Maybe I can get through one more before my first trip to the bathroom. Nice of them to install this beautiful bathroom right off their studio, though. I really hope I don’t throw up.

On salutation 21, a bead of sweat formed on my brow. And all I noticed for the next two salutations was the droplet gaining volume and momentum as it ran up and down my nose. On the 24^th, I waited in ardha uttanasana while it rolled to the tip of my nose and flicked it like a frog, rose up quickly, and checked in with the nausea. Gone.

Did I neutralize Cheez-it®? Conquer and assimilate?

Would the anti-human evil of Cheez-it® in my body have even been observable were it not for the practice?

I will write more about food in the next post, about what I actually eat even though I sense that this is not even useful or interesting to anyone because eating is as much play as it is science. Or, at least, should be.

For now here is one idea that might useful across the board.

If you want to begin to hear your body correctly, put the screws to your workout.

If you are having trouble tapping in to good intuitions about how to eat, honestly: ramp it the hell up.

From what I have seen, straight cardio won’t do it. From what I have seen, in order to clarify the messages, and increase their urgency, you want to start making your body build finetuned strength, balance and nervous-system endurance. If you tell it that it has to build smart muscles, excellent proprioception, all kinds of new balance and movement skills: under those conditions, the body will demand what it needs to do that efficiently. It will respond to the trauma of a dramatic increase in exercise by getting smarter.

I say this because, time and again, I see new practitioners realize that they have been doing something wrong with their diet. Of course they are: they live in a Nabisco world. Astanga is the most they have ever asked of their bodies, so it’s no wonder new practitioners try every kind of new eating regime in response to all the new feelings.

You always have the option of making an intellectual decision to nourish yourself “right,” based on nutritionists’ research. But this shortcuts old habits while putting the new ones up to a higher authority.  

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Also Apollos · 23 June 2008

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, Archaic Torso of Apollo

translated by Stephen Mitchell

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Categories: evolution , having a body

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

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

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

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

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

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

Culture of “working on myself.”

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

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

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

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

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

Also…

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

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

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

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

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

Empiricism · 29 May 2008

 

La inspiración es lanzarse a ser, sí,

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

Volver al Ser.

 

Inspiration is to throw oneself into being, yes,

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

To return to Being.

 

El arco y la lira

The Bow and the Lyre

 

-Octavio Paz, 1956

-(0 translation mine 0)

 

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration

Mercury is Always in Retrograde · 27 May 2008

Am I going to have a car accident now because Mercury is in retrograde? Am I safe from car accidents the rest of the time because Mercury is direct? Shall I initiate nothing for the next month because the planets are more powerful than the clarity of my vision? Shall we all just sit around and wait, hoping not to awake the sleeping astral giant of calamity? Will June 2008 be not worth living due to something as insanely shallow as a little misfortune, even if it does come? Are fortune and luck what we are living for anyway--elaborately constructing our lives so as to catch the planetary winds at just the precisely perfect moment so everything will be ok?

Stop it right now everybody. Come on. Can we please look life directly in the eyes again here?

Chaos is always present. We don’t get to draw tidy boundaries around it and pretend the rest of life operates according to some magical order. A lot of times there is no control, and everything is chaotic, and there is no god or law or element organizing everything and making things happen for a reason.

We are so afraid of admitting that there is chaos, and become greedy for explanations. But chaos is always out there, just beyond the edge of our imperfect explanations. Even when Mercury is not in retrograde! Myths and archetypes just give an operating framework within the chaos. 

Which is all good. I love that. I saw Indiana Jones on Monday and take rueful energy from its image of disheveled scholarly heroism—a hero who winkingly apologizes for his own cornball sincerity even as he smashes power hungry commies (and capitalists, this time) in the face, chases away the demons of unreason, glorifies fieldwork (!) as the real route to knowledge of the world, and (especially) bears witness to magical-realist secrets that the scientific framework can never incorporate. Indy’s a real fucker, but he’s also perfect. How do I even know what kind of scholar I am without that image? Would I have even thought to research culture as an object, wear khakis and live in the tropics, or button up for the ivory tower without that image?

Astrology—the idea that I’m a Scorpio/Aries in a productive cycle at the height of my powers—is the same. There’s a lot of energy in that archetype and myth, even if there is no literal “truth” in it at all. Experience is the only thing I have, the only thing that I can honestly say is true. I like having some structure, but the control it gives is a game.

Archetypes and myths are interpretive. Not explanatory. They create meaning and outline possibilities for action in an uncertain world. They are not the reason that things happen.  I am (sometimes). Other times there’s no reason to be found at all.

Scary. :)

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

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

SLIV: Scylla and Charybdis · 25 May 2008

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

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

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

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

Letting go is: deferential; humble, intuitive.

Training is: intense, expert, intentional.

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

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

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

Still More PDA · 22 May 2008

Its feels almost too late to write about EPB. I am through the figuring-it-out phase during which new sensations stand out against an empty background of non-experience, in which the mind works through things because the body lacks the knowledge.

Tacit knowledge has sort of taken over.

If I were capable of teaching this posture—which would take years of empathetic work with others and a stronger visual sensibility than the one I’ve got—I would be less locked in to tacit knowledge and more able to describe it in bodies besides my own. That is an aamazing skill (the two people who have offered me the best verbal instruction do not have bodies like mine—one is a male vinyasa teacher maybe twice my weight)—one I’m not given naturally and have not cultivated at any depth.

Anyway.

I said earlier that initially EPB starts as a hybrid with galavasana, with the bent-leg calf listing to center like a rudder, and then you gradually bring it into alignment with the arms in the sagittal plane.

That is the slow road and I can say that the first little way of it is easy if you already practice galavasana. I ended up taking the fast road and finding it more interesting in ways I’ll try to explain.

The fast road requires a big strong teacher whose kinesthetic intelligence, knowledge of ashtanga and attention to your practice are ridiculously keen. How likely is it to find skill and teacherly service like that? Pretty much impossible, which is why the slower road is all good.

In my case, for a couple of weeks, I had someone create a base for my upper arm and gently guide the knee to a place where it could stay, parallel to the same arm, without wobbling free. So I rested part of my bodyweight on that base--two stacked fists--while I found the point of balance and, gradually, learned that this posture is more about balance than strength. Once you’re in, the force between the knee and the tricep is the fulcrum, and if you bend the arms it’s actually easier to hold (once you’re actually up) than galavasana. To begin, it was fine for me to bring the knee sort of close to the elbow, though now each day I inch it closer and closer to the armpit.

With the earlier method, I was concentrating on straightening the back leg, lighting up the quad to counterbalance the weight of the head. Now I don’t even know what is happening in the leg, but I’m definitely not concentrating on making it straight or heavy. When the calf is in line with the arm, it feels like it’s only a balance around the strong knee-arm fulcrum. More precarious than effortful. I keep the elbows bent and each day play with moving the knee closer to the armpit.

Once I’m up, it’s easy. I play with bending bent knee even more sharply, finding out what that does not only to the rectus abdominus but to the hollow spaces below it. I think they call that uddiyana bandha. Alternatively, it works to play with the pelvic floor rather than the stuff around the diaphragm, but for right now I actually feel like the roots are a bit relaxed.

Which is funny, because now that I’m working a little deeper in to the series (practicing four of what I have been told are seven arm balances—if there’s more than this, do not tell me because I benefit from not knowing what is next) I am finally—after a year and a half—starting to feel grounded. For the first year I hoped for big stiff guys to practice near me, and finished practice feeling relatively spacey. The shift away from those more ethereal feelings makes me wonder if at this point I’m using the pelvic floor more than I realize… or if the brute physical force of all this lifting is turning me into a more solid kind of creature. For now.

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

SLIII: time to be small · 10 May 2008

Friday night I lay under the bath and listened to the echoes in the pipes and the footfalls in the outside corridors. Resonant under the hot eucalyptus water I was asking to seep into my trapezius and left levator scapula. I was out late and all excitable on Thursday night, and after I finally went to bed the left l-s, which has been touchy all week, cramped so hard it woke me in pain. Weird and so awkward, and it’s slow to release no matter who puts their hands on it or how quietly I ask it to let go. 

Notes to self: Fifteen months ago I shifted my atlas on the axis jumping into a bad tripod, and the sub-occipital ache and loss of cervical rotation the following week made me become protective of alignment in the neck. In finishing, I rarely put my head to the floor in sirsasana, and in the tripods of third I take most of the weight in my shoulders and hands. Great for cervical alignment, but oven time this overdistribution of work into the levator scapulae, traps and even the scalenes has grown a little harsh. A teacher asked me to step into forearm balances rather than jumping, I realized that in doing so I reverted back—in a good way—to using the base rather than the neck for support (makes sense: when I practiced by stepping up was back before I’d developed this intense mode of l-s/trap/scalene work). At this point I will learn to work inversions more from pure balance than weighting the base with so much contraction. I ask students what they need their traps for in standing postures as a kind of inquiry-based release mechanism; and it’s time to ask myself why I need them in arm balances. Meantime, the poor battered l-s is pulling my medicine ball head back and to the left in the stupidest way, causing an enormous energy drain, awkward lane changes, shameless neckrub solicitation, and a little Advil habit.

Under the water listening to the pipe symphony, and with my ear to the floor at the Masonic Temple listening to the dance of the accelerated culture, I feel small. Brian May, the queen guitarist who became an astrophysicist, was on the radio talking about the sublimity of contemplating his own smallness—how much more awesome to think on the stars above than himself as a star on a stage. I will bury myself in the bath; go to the weekend's parties without thinking so much about it; and see old art with our brilliant visiting friend Indiana that- belongs- in- a- museum Jones. Let the guitar lines from Interpol’s song play in the back of my mind day after day. Who says Angelenos are afraid to merge? I am looking for opportunities to feel small, because it is beautiful. Besides, there may be limits to the old strategy of breathing in to the muscle and asking it to release… oddly I feel that this time leaving the body might be a better release strategy than burrowing back inside.

Links: Brian May interview, NYT on building new habits.

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

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

Saturday XLVII: Complicated · 28 March 2008

Doing some kitchen-practice lately. Friday nice and simple, while the Editor sat at his desk in the adjacent room and, well, edited. His focus is amazing now—locked in, supersmart, mind on target.

On the new year I threw away my anger at the discipline—for its locked-up blindfolded inability to make good on its promises to my friends. But even from the perspective of gratitude, I’m still more realized on a mat than at a screen. It’s so clear when we practice this way—him with the words, me with the body. Each in our element, and sharing a certain clear-mindedness even if the elements are different.

As for my own scholarly-element. Practice sets a high goddam standard. What do you do?

My earlier work was quantitative: statistical modeling. Clean data, nice punchlines. The stuff I’m doing now is a mucky interpretive bunch of historical whatever. More information, not so much of the beautiful clarity.

This reminds me: emotions can be complicated. Holding more than one strong emotion—holding it in your body—about some idea, or action, or person. It’s better than feeling nothing, but what comes up is this impulse to cancel out enough of the conflicting emotion so that there can be a single, uncomplicated pillar of “I’m right.” I am, but also strive to be, a simple girl who knows her own mind and acts on it without sabotage or doubt. Reduce the noise between inner sensation and outer expression.

But.... There’s a lot of emotional complexity in my life now: many-sided subjects and people. Can I deal with that with soft eyes and some peripheral vision, and cope with the many-sidedness of things? I love clarity and minimalism inside and out, but sometimes I have to up and admit that I am complicated and even moreso is the world. What I’m doing here is more than solving for X.

Links:

● An ashtangi has been freelancing (see bottom left). Tova…?

● Do you have a cool walk? Laban movement analysis figures that out.

● NYT: Yes, running can make you high. Duh.

● Scientific American: Careful, Meditation can make you kind.

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

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

Saturday XXXXVI: Easy · 21 March 2008

Jenna walked in to my life on Wednesday in the form of a strong tiny manduka-bearing woman in the 5:45 am dark below my balcony. Wow that was easy. Practice was relatively internal for us both, but we both noticed a few times that our vinyasas tended to sync and our pacing was more or less the same. Not such a surprise. She is graceful and awesome even on a lactose hangover.

Nice when you don’t have to build context or set stages in order to see each other. I’m not sure if it’s her openness; or having shared the same corner of the blogosphere for a year; or just the sense that things that we both have learned in the recent years of practice show up in parallel tracks.  

Specifically: the crazy shit and the joy that comes from doing the ashtanga practice, going through the period when you’re coming to terms with the strength of what it does to you, and learning not to identify with that or with “being a yogi.” So nice to talk with someone who has dealt with the transformation and decided that gratitude, relationships, and letting life please you still matter. And that these things are easy!

Same kind of weekend as usual here, which means really good, though in addition to the SS/ ashtanga/ dissertation frame, RE is taking me for my first-ever manicure—something she’s been scheming for months.  

Anna, who knows nailpolish shades like she knows California contract law, suggests “East Hampton Cottage” or “Dune Road.” Ok.

Also, the neighborhood rental shop—the Video Store Named Desire—finally ordered for us the new Criterion Collection re-release of Alex Cox’ badass political film, Walker. It’s sitting on the DVD player right now, waiting. He filmed it in Nicaragua during the Reagan-funded civil war, loaded it with anachronisms, and cast Ed Harris as the grey-eyed man of destiny. Exciting.

No links today, but the levitating man is the dancer Sascha Radetsky. No strings or photoshop there: he is just falling nonchalantly.

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

Saturday XXXXV: Chaos on the Lockdown · 15 March 2008

I listened to Elvis on Friday on the drive through Veteran’s territory. The 405/Wilshire intersection slices the VA into squares like four corners in the desert: Federal Building/ Hospital/ Residences/ Cemetery. The passage through it each morning is slow: we sit in our cars checking each other out. So much makeup being applied, texts being typed, and me in silence with my bottle of hemp protein and third series fix.

I usually don’t get verbal until at least 10 am, but this week I’ve been trying to turn the words on earlier for dissertationly purposes. I despise the telephone, but even rang up a parent or a friend a couple of these past mornings to prime the system. Friday was a slow news day and I wasn’t brash enough to fire up my aging Razr, so I put on Elvis.  

GOODMORNINGLOSANGELES!!! Looking out over the wartime headstones in the cemetery, sitting in traffic, listening to Jailhouse Rock. The song always makes me think of the utter bound bliss of my asylum-based childhood—chaos on the lockdown. The mind likes to be bound! Don’t you forget it. That’s part of why we reign ourselves in with conventions, and (on another level) why meditation-mantra is so much easier than spacious awareness.

But do the boundaries we set up decay? I think about the kids dancing the goddam jitterbug to Elvis, and the unpredictable chaos of the dance I’ll make today with the wolf children at the Masons’ hall. What it used to take to make a film just 50 years ago (the rigid structure of Hollywood’s golden age soothes me), and how many of those rules are just elastic today. Of the yoga icons in this town who proclaim the ashtanga system finally cramped their creativity and they had to deconstruct it, make something new.

Genres divide. Is that the way it always is?

I am always the first to know when a solution has expired. I give credit to new ideas and welcome new perspectives to a fault. Mentors hate this because it’s no way to build a career; and friends who haven’t known me long enough take it as a mark of poor character. But it is this “openness” just the hungry ghost of the genre-divider in me?

Why don’t I do this with my practice—doubt it, decompose it, reduce it to chaos?

The mind likes to be bound.

Links:

● Intriguing. Limbs of Yoga, phase one of eight. Look in to the wheel. He’s watching you all and giving you this message. 

● Problematic. Aren’t Oprah watchers already doing nothing? Tolle’s great, but “live in the now; drop your problems” is a message the consumer-debt crowd has already appropriated....

● Accurate. Journal Issue researching bloggers is free til April. I like the piece on bridge bloggers, and always take note of Cass Sunstein’s well-tempered jaundice about this revolution we’re making with the internet. 

● All too human. Man thinks he can fly, gets off on his edge. Somewhere between awe-inspiring and just stupid.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

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

Breadcrumbs · 4 March 2008

I’m not saying anything.

Just dropping breadcrumbs. Which will soon decay but helped feed me because a few years ago I ate them at the right time.

Evolution of consciousness, glibly, could look something like this...

Humans love to go in to altered states of consciousness, but we interpret those experiences in dramatically different ways depending on the lifeworld we inhabit.

The blue meme is the middling stage of personal development in which one interprets an altered state of consciousness (be it waking/gross, dreaming/subtle, sleeping/causal or nondual) as confirming the singularity of her own path.

Most people here would dial in around green or turquoise on the spiral hierarchy, so would tend to reify altered states in ways that aren't so fundamentalist as the blue meme. 

From Wilber, Pragmatic History of Consciousness: “[S]omebody at, say, the blue stage of development can have an altered state or peak experience of a subtle state—say… of interior Luminosity—but the person will tend to interpret that experience through the mental apparatus that has actually developed in his or her own case. In this example, the person will interpret the spiritual experience in terms of the blue meme, in which case we would see something like the fundamentalist's 'reborn' experience: this person feels, with utter certainty, that Jesus has come to him personally, and that nobody can be saved unless they accept Christ as their personal savior."

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Categories: evolution , morality

Starvation, Contortion, Self-Regulation · 29 February 2008

I almost broke my policy on comment non-deletion. There was something I said among friends—among ashtangis—a while ago, and later it caught the attention of another group of people and raised a bit of looky-loo, clicky-click. Oh yeah, it’s the internet. More than just your friends.

The comment had to do with the practice of intense calorie restriction, and what other people's "research" shows to be negative effects on sociability, energy and mind. As with ashtanga, some people have given their own bodies to this research, so we can know in physical detail how it works. But with both of these radical programmes (one of which is fun, one of which sounds to me like torture) :), I wonder if practitioners ourselves should be the only reporters of our research… or if feedback from the world would help to balance our self-reported results.

I commented along these lines because I was thinking of the simple but deep Being in the World chapter of Desikachar—a piece of writing I take as a praise for householder yoga along a middle path and a call to engage deeply in relationships as—among other things—a way to gain “objective” information about oneself.

With ashtanga, very strange desires are born—for lightness and flexibility of body—and images the world deems gut-wrenching become, to us, iconographic. We are only humans—we want to be the most and the best on the dimension we travel—and in the context of ashtanga this can lead to self-harm quite easily.

Starvation or contortion: choose your poison.

At the beginning, the striver-impulse is to look at others’ edges and seek to internalize them. This is such an easy way to avoid working from inside, and maybe to get hurt.

So we listen to the world when it tells us we are being crazy. Say, with the not necessarily bad ashtangi tendency to undereat. One becomes aggressive, hard, and one-track-minded for lack of food… or lacks the energy to keep up in conversation much less on a hike: we might not be able to see this directly but we can see it reflected through the eyes of others. Helps define the edge.

But that is an internal process. To dispel my personal regret about making any comment about a practice, CR, in which I do not even engage because I love eating and need a good lot of daily carbs to do intellectual work, I want to say that I’m sorry. I do have some objective data here, but no subjective data. Sociology tells me the former are enough; my gut tells me they are not. I overstepped.

There is such a fine line for me between honestly reflecting back to others what I see and actually reaching to participate in their self-regulation. Who the bejezus am I? Just another data point for you. Not your ultimate witness, not your judge. Screw me! :) I want to trust others to do their personal practice with honesty and grace, not intrude upon them. What's the use intruding?

All of this is about playing our own edges. This is what I do—consummately, compulsively; lovingly, excessively. It’s how some of us move and grow. Edges are scandalous and rarely pretty. The only way to work there for any length of time is if you can regulate yourself. I am remembering that for most people who are mindful self-researchers of this sort, they instinctively know themselves better than I ever can.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Control, Spokes, Scandalon, Obnoxious, Blog · 26 February 2008

Said to me in a ladies room: "I found your blog and would have never guessed you were such a tweaker! Look at that! You and your random expletives! If you were a man, I'd totally date you. You're a crazy girl."

The other night I re-read something written in my private journal back in December. For those who grok the tweak. Here.

ooO........................................V..........................................Ooo 

I wonder if I could pull it off—some sort of practice of writing- from- behind- the- veil.

I say and I say and I say that I’m going to use the owlspace to write less analytically. And then it’s back to conclusions and punchlines and figuring-it-out mind. One trick monkey. Always got to narrow it right down to a sharp little point.

Mmmm. But one-pointedness is for non-thinking. Not for thinking!

My teacher, these past months, he spoke to me in free- association. We’d freewheel for hours and see where it went. It’s perfect for me, the unstructured structure. Conversation is only fun, really, with those open to tangents and awake enough to hold open eight topical lines… and, in the end, speak together their spoked connections. Simultaneous limbs….

Is there a subconscious, unconscious, darkside, whatever? Just look at the modernism of that notion—the old school dualism. Yet… anymore I am sold. Because what else are dreams, and the place lost details go, and the lines of poems or films or scripture that lodge a little while in the mind? Where do superstitions and space aliens live?

With the Jungians I think of a shadow, though not to say it’s all dark as in devious. More like dark as in harder to see.

Freewriting can get you there sometimes. If you don’t get all anal and weird about your process (as science has trained me, so intensely, to be).

Wm Gibson—who writes from his subconscious with some genius—said something about his first chapters, which tend to be opaque and aesthetically not-quite-right. First chapters are a kind of gate he finds himself setting out at the start. The little obstacle helps him find his readers--and encourages people who shouldn't actually be reading to put him back on the shelf.

How obnoxious of him.

Nice!!!!!

Does all of that make sense? I wonder how long I could continue in the back seat without freaking out and taking control back from the Blog. (The scientists would not approve of all this...)

Blog is in control.
Blob is in control.
Glob is in control.
"God" is in control.

As if.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , power of suggestion

Ahead of Myself · 25 February 2008

Someone new and kindred in New York wrote to me, about the whole “becoming the disease in order to cure it” theme I worked over last week—both with the third series grit and with the drug withdrawal. He’d been reading a forgotten one of UG’s books on the subway, and ran across this:

Because will implies conflict, struggle, the contradiction: I am this and I must be that. And to become that, I must exercise will. We are asking if there is not a different way of acting altogether, without will?

Nice to know Krishnamurti asked the same question, given his ultimate teaching is to remove brute force from practice—and to transcend discipline (which it is said that I have in spades). Thanks for writing, J.

As for me, I’m not satisfied with my thoughts about the will. Not satisfied with my thoughts! (Laughing.)

And it dawns on me that I’m not going to find intellectual satisfaction about this topic, because this particular road is not one you travel by way of analysis.

I’m trying to telegraph a kind of understanding that I don’t have. Getting ahead of myself.

I’ve always used writing as a way to get to the nub of things, to become clean and conclusive. I really had to write in that mode for the first year of this writing practice just in order to get myself talking, but the past two months I’m finally letting go—a bit—of the narrative, analytical modality. Eased up on the drive for intellectual satisfaction, just to see if it makes things interesting… and if lightens up the habits in me.

What it’s revealing lately—and I think you will agree—is that the stream of my consciousness is fucking dense. I’m letting that happen—letting the blog be less well written and far less accessible—because it feels like good process. Interesting to see so many of you staying around for this. Who knows, even as the signs seem to indicate travail is coming—poetry may not be far away.

Which is not to say I get to rewrite the dissertation in free verse.

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , 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

Will as a Puppy · 17 February 2008

Third series home practice. Funny joke. Yeah, me in the kitchen standing on one leg with the other behind my head. Don’t miss a beat as the fridge clicks on, the phone rings, and the neighbor harumphs out on the balcony to holler the squirrels in for breakfast.

My kitchen-floor practice is growing little by little (Shambhala Sun calls it kitchen sink enlightenment, the practice that is done without constant community and teachers, but I am talking about my literal kitchen floor). I usually begin with the first half of primary. The surrendering series of forward bends, the series I’ve done over a thousand times, to the point that it does me more than me it. It’s all easier after I let that old lover, the first series, draw me down. I finally let go of the little distractions, the hanging-out, the laziness and the doubt.

But third series is not about the practice doing me. It’s not something to which I surrender. It’s something I do.

I’ve been floating this idea that you don’t home-practice the third series. It’s too ridiculous a practice. Built for exhibitionism, for godsakes. Who am I kidding that I’ll muster that kind of power of my own day after day in the kitchen? (V. joked that I should finally get a puppy, to keep me honest.)

Tried out the theory on my teacher the other day. No dice. And no excuses.

Third series is the will. It develops the will.

What? Will is for two year olds, I thought. Will is my first complete sentence (hollering): “Do it self, Mommy!” Will is leaving Montana, leaving a religion, leaving rural culture and leaving the quasi-peasant class. It's achieving shit. It’s everything I’ve softened in my personality as intuition and feeling and what feels like a deeper nature have come in.  

I’m supposed to go back? I left something behind back there in my adolescence? Something I need?

Maybe. Certain things are a struggle now. Staying present for everything, not just the things I like. Finishing the goddam dissertation, which is enormous (and which I extend in order to stay in the place that I love and because the job market is shit). Practicing third series alone in my kitchen, for godsakes. If I was still a willful one, I could muscle this stuff.

But is there a kind of will that just squashes the distraction and the difficulty, a kind of will that is less effortful? Can you harness gravity somehow as this insane discipline teaches you (supposedly) to fly? Can you have a willfullness whose character feels less like Do it Self, Mommy and more like a good puppy (ok, maybe a bull terrier or something) watching the play of consciousness?

I have no idea. But it’s been said, and not by me, that the time on the plateau is over for now. That it is time for building. I just hope I can do what is given to me without getting tough again, without narrowing myself down, and with a sense of humor.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

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

Holy Climaxes · 13 February 2008

Some threads I want to tie together before they go away. It being Valentine's Day reminds me, I suppose.

The joke about a well-hung God (comment 7). The moment of relief in the Violent Femme’s angry serenade. The moment King David really saw God (in Bathsheba).

And before all that, this wonderful thing from John Donne.

                                     Holy Sonnet XIV

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Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

I Don't Want To Be A Goat, Nope · 11 February 2008

I want to think I churned down through another layer of sediment of my unconscious today, and that’s why I hit a whole oily-black vein of VBS songs. (VBS: that’s vacation bible school, for you non-initiates.)

I don’t want to be a phairisee, I don’t want to be a phairisee…

‘Cos the phairisees aren’t fair, ya’ see….

How many of these tics/ vrittis/ scary buried memories are left? I think we’re back to about 1982 at this point and I haven't glimpsed any of the fire and brimstone that must await down in the denser layers. It's going to take more than foot behind the head tricks once it's time to call in the diamond tip.

Ha ha! Scary scary scary. Really.

I just want to be a sheep, baaa, I just want to be a sheep, baaa

I just want to be a sheep, baaa.

This too shall pass. Meh.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXX: Family Jewels · 8 February 2008

Battered re-re-recycled box arriving in the department on Thursday: a stash of antique family jewelry, nestled inside the delicate old wool blanket I requested from the homestead (without disclosing I will use it for meditation practice, having wrapped up to read inside it as a girl).

Sweet mom. She loves her shit, but she lets it go so easy. She’d almost thank us for breaking priceless thises and thats when we were ruddy little nakeds running around the house in winter.

And what will I do with these (unfortunately unbreakable) preciouses I’ll never wear? Thank god I’m not responsible for the giant diamonds or the furniture or the china. Oppressive preciouses.

She comes from middling Denver beer barons but halfway abandoned that family history, and for good reason. The once thriving clan up and sank mid-century like a big tragic cruise ship in a drunken sea of skitzophrenia and suicides, its fragments parceled into lifeboats that drifted in all directions. I’ve re-forged some of the lost connections in adulthood, even as its physical detritus drifts in to my life here and there.

The waves of objects from some lost fantasy family are psychically heavy, but do make me feel slightly less alien in a working-class rural conservative clan that regards me with suspicion. I have the scrappy little physique of my dad’s Irish mongrels, but the increasingly angular aspect of the Bavarian brewmistresses in their old daguerrotypes. The best of both worlds, in some ways, now that it’s more or less clear my personality isn't going to split like the skitzophrenics' do in the early 20s.

Oh, wait.

Right.

It’s been three weeks since I posted on a Saturday, and links are stacked up. You know, Pema Chodron went on Ophrah; the TM yogi died; the aliens in Stephenesville just got more and more exciting. Also, an insightful teacher finally made the connection between fundamentalist yoga and the larger political moment (!), and CP kept the conversation going. And a lot of other stuff. But in lieu of links today I’m going to empty the cache and give you headlines from my life.

● Actually, despite the confusion, the “true” new moon was Thursday. How do I know? Because that’s the day the migraine hit. This is what I get for messing with my hormones. Lame.

● Wednesday I finally went in for the cheaper, more absorbable spirulina. The powder, rathen than the compacted little tablets. OH MY GOD! Why didn’t someone warn me? The color and consistency are sludge, and the taste…. God, if anything can inure me to pure unadulterated spirulina, it’ll be the next two months it takes me to get through the one pound jar of it. Curses! 

● No. I am not on Facebook. No!

● And yes, working for the ivory tower is still a tragedy. Two friends did get jobs, but on balance the market is busy crushing souls. Why do we humans do this—create these viscious markets?

● Yes there will be some kind of ashtangi gathering next week as things come to a close. Do send me your email if you’d like to be invited.

● Sunday I am finally making the first of many meetings with Anna from New York! The first agenda items is scratching the muffins. If you don’t know what that means, lucky you.

● With all these weekday outdoor breakfasts in the yoga idyll that is my life, my hair has turned a horrific strawberry blond. This might call for an intervention.

● People out there are actually running the google search: “Yoga three years suck your own dick.” Lots of people. I wouldn’t put that in print but they’re coming here anyway. Sorry, guys.

● Boys with sledgehammers are wailing on the pink concrete walls of my apartment building. Having a great dusty old time of it, day after day. Either the owner is replacing the plumbing or someone is pretty mad at him.

●The restlessness index climbed back into the double digits this week. Forecast cloudy.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Present Absence · 6 February 2008

Monday in practice, not seeing it coming, I went to a place I didn’t know I could go. Funny, that first experience of it. I went in to slight holy shit-mind for a second: the mind that says Oh this is a threshold. This is something.

When I came out of it (the holy-shit mind and the posture) the teacher was standing there. Not feeding back anything. Not approval, smirkingness, or it's- about- time- you- went- there; just a being there for it. 

--That was a no brainer.

--Exactly. 

Walking off.

A friend—I will call her Jedi Riverdance—said this looked like analyst-analysand in a traditional psychotherapy relationship. A truly processed analyst doesn’t take up space or cut the stream of consciousness by inserting much reaction. If they’re good, they tend not to privilege one moment over the other—there’s juice to be found as much in the mundane as in the apparent climaxes. If they’re good, they know exactly when to respond and otherwise they just sit, actively, and hold the space.

After I listened to Jedi Riverdance (trying just to listen and get her, without half-hearing as I jumped to telegraph a response), I thought of the monks at Deer Park. Their unnerving “mindful listening” thing. Active, but not re-active. Just being there to receive what another is saying, hoping their present absence of word or body language will open up more possibility for the speaker to go deeper into what she’s capable of saying.

A lot of times, that kind of being-there for people—without much obvious feedback—just freaks us out. We want cues to know how we are doing, and do not understand the highly cultivated, chilled-out silence of a mature teacher who is saying Go on, I’m good with whatever comes next. Just go on.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

Superbowl and Seven Veils · 3 February 2008

In 1990, Esquire Magazine excerpted Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs an All—the story of a girl named Salome dancing the Seven Veils in a  bar during Superbowl. While half the crowd looked past her to the game, and the other half learned beautiful things about the layers of deceit and distraction with which they veil their own perceptions.

Back in 1990, I was reading for the sex, not the moral. Salome stands mysterious before her repressed but randy New York audience of bankers and bartenders, and the first veil she drops is the one that should be the last.

I was in the seventh grade, and still someone who cared about commercial sporting events. But one Sunday after church I sat up in the living room with the Esquire tucked between the pages of something more benign and discovered the smallest possibilities for transgressive writing, transgressive thinking. Transgressive acting. That first veil dropped before I even knew what was happening.

O god o god o god! I can't believe I am reading this! O GOD! Can he write that? This magazine is so great! I could get in so much trouble for this. But I can't stop!

Shit, is anybody going to come up the drive and catch me reading this? Will they know from the look in my face that it’s not Brio Magazine? Crap this is dangerous.

How an issue of Esquire made it past the threshhold of my folks’ house—where “secular music” was prohibited and I was not allowed a subscription to Newsweek because it was “too liberal—is another story, and a funny one. So is the story of how I actually learned popular music those first decades—buying up all the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” sheet music at the piano store in town. The Beatles and Elton John, even Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘n’ Roses: all available in sheet music, and me playing the piano since I was six. The shot of recognition the very first time I heard Stairway to Heaven played on CD in my college dorm was so deep: oh, that’s the mood they used to sing the lines “it makes me wonder”…. I had it right all the time, just reading from the page.

Anyway, how lucky to sneak Tom Robbins’ Salome past the gates. In the story, she’s not the evil murdering Salome (who dances for the severed head of John the Baptist) from the Bible’s version of the story. If I remember at all she is awkwardly tender and wants nothing less than liberation for those who would objectify her. As she competes with the Super Bowl and wins, she uses her body (and Robbins’ words) to say this:

The veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion

separate us from that which is imperative

to our understanding of our evolutionary journey,

shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

Words · 25 January 2008

 

Words to memorize

Words hypnotize

Words make my mouth exercise

Words all fail the magic prize

 

Nothin' I can say when I'm in your thighs

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [47]
Categories: evolution

Give a girl the technology for bliss, she turns it into a hair-shirt · 24 January 2008

Does using your practice as a scalpel for perfectionism prevent you from knowing that you are already perfect? Well, of course it does. Everyone knows this. Stupid perfectionism.

But in the same way, is using your practice as a tool for awakening so much self-flagellation? Does it actually prevent us from realizing we are already awake?

If we see practice as a tool for getting someplace instead of a way of being awake, maybe we become attached to the tool. Attached to this idea of working out some noble process.

And we become identified with our history--everything I’ve been through, all the dedication I’ve shown, all the openings I’ve experienced! You should have seen my hamstrings that first year, I’m telling you. Like the vipassana practitioner who wants you to know she’s been at it faithfully for twenty years! To console herself about the fact that all that has really deepened in that time is her awareness of her own suffering.

I’m not saying I can vaporize my unconscious by dint of will. It’s active whenever I go in to the world, so I may as well process that shit out the best I can. Many Integralists say you have to repair the ego before you can transcend it. These people say we do have shadows raging behind our eyes… but also that this does not prevent us from experiencing higher states of consciousness from time to time. You nondualists won’t like this contradiction, but that’s just because you’ve gone to sleep again and are busy wallowing in distinctions.

The possibility that even if we are already perfect the second we shake ourselves awake, we still have issues.

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Categories: evolution , integration , self-deception , 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

Saturday XXXIX: 2012 is the New 1999 · 18 January 2008

Little apocalypses here this week. Which is good, since 2008 as I knew it was not going according to plan.

Now, I can’t stop listening to Prince’s end-of-the-world songs. I love the bat-out-of-hell sound effects. Was this stuff written during his Jehova’s Witness period, or is it full-on devil music? Party like it’s 1999 = death for rebirth. In other words, more of the Tower theme… but this time I’m cool with it.

It’s not the world per se that will end: it is our view of the world.

It’s been said apocalypse returns to fashion every two decades, which might explain why 2012 is the new 1999. That sounds about right. But it may come even sooner if what I’m hearing about visitors in Texas is the case. On which more later.

Apocalypse brings to the surface a lot of mythic scared-shitless dread that got deposited in my mind 'round about 1982. This is the annoying thing about a practice that pushes back the curtain between the conscious and unconscious: now I’m running in to all this Biblical stuff. Gads! Horribly, there's so much early memorization that's still buried, just where I put it at 18. This week, 1 Corinthians 13 shored up in the yoga archipelago. Saint Paul was always the blowhard apostle, but this one is a gorgeous passage.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Anyway. Esoterica on Saturday morning, and then a lot of dissertating in addition to a dusty grey drive to Covina. And maybe I’ll have time to see There Will be Blood at the Westwood Crest. I hear it is sufficiently apocalyptic. Links I'm thinking of:

● Ok since we are talking about the Bible, here is Robert Alter (whose beautiful translation of the Pentateuch my father did not appreciate as a Christmas gift a few years ago) on his new translation of the Psalms. Really nice interview, especially because it’s with the beautiful Michael Silverblatt. Alter is so subversive! Also, he’s a damn poet. If you're really in, see too this week's review of the work in the LRB.

● Tova, we never got back around to talking about your dream. I had an insane one the other night and it took the aforementioned devil music to get it out of my head before practice. Here’s something from an Integral blogger who takes reductionist views of dreaming and adds a dimension of interpretive possibilities for people who are actually know something about their own minds (because they have a meditation practice or whatever). No need to black-box this stuff like the behaviorists do if you have the tools to explore it.

● Ok, this is the only good politics I’ve seen in months, and it’s actually just art. George Saunders: genius and author the Braindead Megaphone (hilarious). This is a seven-minute reading of his piece “Manifesto,” a press release from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction (PRKA). Just listen.

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Categories: evolution , social theory

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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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

The Shadow of Moroni, Part III · 9 January 2008

Ok, let's wrap up this series before we all get thirsty.

I started with the yoga the year after I stopped with the alcohol. And then when my first arresting ashtanga transformation occurred another year after that, a lot of ascetic tendencies got locked in. Stuff I’d put in my body, sensory stimuli I’d tolerate, the rougher-edged personalities among friends: the threshold of what I wanted in my world got pushed far, far back by the nadi shodana.

That’s another story, you know. You do this practice and at some transformation point your nervous system might get touchy and it might change your bearing on the world. It’s not easy for you or your loved ones; but revolution is like that. I’m not judging what was my process because I don’t regret it and I wouldn’t take it back. But I am experimenting with it now—seeing how much room I have for play in this permanent, radical revolution.

I imagine that if I had not quit drinking before the nadi shodana wave hit, I’d have done it then. For me personally—and that is all I can assess—I doubt that deepening a second series practice and initiating pranayama and meditation practices would have been possible at all if I had not existed in a simple, fairly non-toxic, environment. It just took too much inner focus and environmental support to build up those practices. Seriously: I think that without a certain level of monasticism, I would not have had the clarity or intensity I needed to set some foundations. Yes that is a bold statement to make about what is also supposed to be a practical, daily kind of yoga for the householding set. But there it is.

And also: it is easier now. The world does not feel like it might take me out of my practice the way it might have—would have—when practice was new and I lacked the force of habit. But practice can get so precious and isolated from the world, and I want to blur the boundaries between it and everything else. Get less monastic, not more.

Thus, contra monasticism: salmon in November. And like I keep trying to get around to describing: on the solstice I finally drank.

It tasted nice. Pinot noir is something I can sort of appreciate like the artisans and merchants who are closest to its roots. L and I worked in a Willamette Valley vintner’s restaurant throughout college, took some seminars and tours, and drank a great deal of what the rich valley silt had to offer up. Even a half-decent pinot to me feels nourishing; and a decent one feels like art.

As I wrote earlier, my body didn’t ask for wine the past five years at all; and in fact my first several attempts to drink failed by force of habit. New Years 2007: big disappointment. The Editor's 30th: foiled again.

Though suddenly when I opened up to alcohol again, it again became so easy to want. Now once I’ve had a drink, the greed for another is—suddenly—very strong. Maybe this is a small scale experience of falling off the wagon, though I don’t pretend to understand the intensity of chemical torture and dependency a severe alcoholic would experience. In any case, for me, “mindful drinking” (check on Choygam Trumpa for infamous interestingness) is going to be difficult if not bullshit.

Here's the experience. As soon as the buzz starts—which is now almost immediately—I want to use the sauce to go deeper into non-control. I actually don’t know how much of this is my immaturity—I have not grown past my 14-year-old relationship to alcohol—and how much might be chemical reaction. It feels more ornery than chemical. There is just a petulant fascination with moving quickly toward that point where the lights go out.

God. I don’t know how many people experience the process I’m describing. Yes: it is troubling. But—no kidding—I don’t know if it is entirely different from my desire to let go in practice.

Isn’t that odd? The edge here is not just attraction and not just repulsion: it’s a strong desire for loss. Not transformation so much. Just loss.

Greeeat. Well, coming off the solstice, a decent number of badly-selected wines greased down my holiday with the in-laws quite nicely (though seriously: it was reassuring to see that even under conditions of extreme desire and a handful of empties I won't waste myself on White Zin), and then I sat on the plane home feeling the greed for not one but three drinks. An obese man with a coalmine-quality cough and cracked grey thumb callouses a centimeter thick sat next to me and happily (sweetly) drank two little whiskey bottles straight. Yes, there I am. I let that grasping drain out of me as we flew back down the coast, and haven't gone in to it again.

I am wondering if "drinking practice" may be more trouble than it is worth unless I recognize on the level of my body that I’m no longer a confused kid in a cornfield, and that one more drink is not one of the ways--so far as I can tell--to the void.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

The Shadow of Moroni, Part II · 8 January 2008

…Continued from 6 January.

I went to a kegger in a barn down by the Yellowstone River, hosted by an eyelashy senior on the wrestling team. The first hour of the night comes back—the fluorescent light, the black Columbia I was wearing, the Miller in the keg, telling the host to ask my friend M to the prom. What I don’t remember but know is true is that it was freezing; I was driving an 8-cylinder Impala home on backcountry roads, needing to make a hard midnight curfew. Luckily my parents were asleep by 11ish on Saturdays, because they’d be up early to set up church service. Saturdays, I’d just have to wake them for an instant from their door and not undergo any breath-inspections.

If I can conjure one or two sensory inputs and the feeling-memory of the people with me in a certain past moment, I’m pretty able to bring back a full moving picture of the surrounding event in my mind. But I know I was blacked out that freezing night driving home, because there is NOTHING to recall. I was rushed, trashed, and driving Niebauer Road across a series of little bridges that would have been sheeted in black ice.

Just another rural teenage casualty, found in the ditch when the sun came up, after Dad spent the night crisscrossing the county in his pickup.

Recovering on my sofa that morning ten years later, realizing this had happened, I wanted to throw up all over again. God how selfish, and lucky, I'd been.

I stopped drinking after that. Not as a punishment—I don’t hold things against myself even if I should. But because I viscerally couldn’t swallow a drink anymore after all that. For a year, for another year, for still another after that. The revulsion set a new habit.

I don’t know why I changed so suddenly. It’s difficult to say exactly what was going on with that.

I can say, though, that I had an analytical—and not appetitive or visceral—reason for finally drinking again three weeks ago. It’s not that I was “listening to my body.” It’s that I was challenging my body. Anymore, my deepest tendency is toward asceticism—I dream of cave retreats, not wild parties—and that is just too weird in the context of my life. For the sake of being honest to the era and social worlds in which I live, I want to tinker with the prohibition a little.

Many friends use the ashtanga practice to work with want or desire—with examining attractions to stimuli, experiences, things. Because it actually leads you inside yourself, ashtanga is a beautiful method for becoming intimate with your own self-sufficiencies and subverting every tendency to grasp for things outside. I get that from practice too.

But if anything my basic impulse is to pull away from the world rather than to grasp: more repulsion than attraction. The world is heavy! It is complicated! It is full of lame ideas and deception and stupidity and creepy egomania and bad fashion. Left to my own devices—as my beautiful quiet year alone in 2005 proved—I will rejoice in monasticism, minimalism, and quiet. God yes! Give me solitude or the company of just one intimate, and some elegant, silent routine.

Ashtanga brings this monkishness out of me, but I hesitate to use the practice to deepen the urge to withdraw to the beautiful void. In truth: I have things to do in the world for now. My life is in the world. My loves are in the world as well.

And alcohol represents a part of the world I would parcel off and sell to the infidels.

How boring, that impulse. 

So nix that and bring me a drink. Suddenly things become a little more complicated…

(Incidententally, does a part of you feel this is a stupid topic of conversation? Why is that? Because drinking is wrong? Because not drinking is stupid? Or because it's all just excessively reflective? In any case, more in a bit.)

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Categories: evolution , having a body , integration

The Shadow of Moroni, Part I · 6 January 2008

The other night I exited the 10 Freeway at Overland and drove north all the way to Wilshire under the shadow of Moroni. I considered the prophet’s anger.

Overland goes from thoroughfare to commercial zone to quiet residential, with the gilded Moroni on a spire, on a huge square pedestal many stories up and gleaming in floodlights, just staring you down the whole way, as you approach from the bottom of his long slow hill. I felt pretty well shaken by his gaze from up there on the Los Angeles Mormon temple: retribution for the horrible little gift I left there at the temple gates one night in 2003.

Get away from Moroni! Seriously, you might want to stop reading now.

What I left at the gates, there at the perfect perpendicular intersection of Wilshire and Overland at the bottom of the Temple Hill, was—not that I remember the leaving it—a little pile of vomit.

Worse—so much worse: I left the exact same gift a half mile west, at the gates of an even more tragic institution. The Los Angeles VA Hospital. The reason you should have stopped reading is you don’t want to know… that the VA never cleaned it up and neither did I. I drove Ohio back and forth to school for a week, like a dog that returns and returns and returns, as the little alcohol-laced pile sat there and rotted.

So horrible, to disgrace the maimed like that. Who wouldn’t stop in her tracks after that?

I had blacked out an hour before the vomit vandalism, late at a party celebrating a dear friend’s joining the Bristol professorate. We started with a rich pinot and went on to good whiskey, but what killed me was the Transylvanian plum wine brought by a Serbian who is obsessed with saving people from themselves. Is that what Sasha was doing with me out by the pool—making me face myself down, down the neck of a bottle—right before I started revealing departmental secrets to the little crowd? Is that—a self-reflection—what I was gazing into well into morning as The Editor held my hair in the bathroom?

As if I remember. Learning all I had revealed and disgraced was a good shake the next morning, because usually the blackouts didn’t end in overshare or sickness like that. But blackouts were common.

I was a good enough drinker—having begun at 14 at cornfield keggers in a state where there is nothing else to do outside the back seat of a car—that I could ingest large amounts and appear to be in control physically and conversationally. In college the philosophy boys liked that I could drink them under the table. But the truth was that my memory would usually go blank by midnight. My friends were numerous and true, so the blacking out was, when we reckoned it out the next morning, regarded as amusing if not a little sweet.

I had a way of drinking in high school that was as immature as any Montana teenager’s; and my college way of drinking was not much different except that it was luckily more rare because I worked late most weekends. By the time I was 22, I still had the free-for-all, go-for-drunk relationship to alcohol that you would expect to see in a teen using it aggressively to celebrate--to create--her freedom.

The morning after Moroni, lying destroyed on the sofa, I tried to remember how many blacked-out nights there had really been over the years. I tried to look at the compulsion that took me to that place over and over again. The edge where I took advantage of the loss of inhibition not to feel a buzz… but to drive on for more and more.

It was sort of horrible going through that stuff I had never examined; and then I ran into the memory—or non-memory—of leaving a kegger one night the winter I was 15….

(More in a day or two.)

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Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

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

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

Little Shift, for Pancake-Flip · 19 December 2007

A few years back, I started asking how-questions.

I was initially trained in statistical and formal modeling—ways of asking and answering why-questions predicated on a world constructed out of “things” also known as variables. Think Freakonomics: elegant pat-answers to elegant why-questions. Beautiful, but trite. The just-so stories of my formal training were appealing, but the non-recognition that they were analytical houses of cards collided head-on with my background in Continental philosophy. Because of all those dead Germans, I wanted more attention to the humanly-constructed nature of the realities at hand. And to the endlessly tactile, experienced, immediacies of the WORLD. Phenomenology, baby.

How-questions are messy and they pay less, but the process of answering them is more involving and the provisionality of their answers seems more honest. I like the idea of letting the data, or simply the world, discipline my big ideas. So it is: now I do ethnography and interview-based research far more than large surveys and statistical models. Even though it’s the models that get the phone calls: the world loves tight explanations. Close description, hesitant generalization: much less sciency and much less useful in our facts-you-can-use forward tilt existence.

Anyway, as I looked back the other day on the first year of writing in this space, I saw a hilarious predominance of why-questioning. God, do I know how to write 500 words without making an argument? What am I, Maureen Dowd-meets-Yoga Journal?

Well, hrmmm. To a degree I’ve been nicely trained that words are tools for putting together just-so stories; and this effects the structure of my thought down to the way I engage with ashtanga yoga and our weird modern cultures of transformation and quests for the sublime. Very 21^st century American of me. But the thing is, I have plenty of (equally western) resources for doing thick description and grubby worldfulness and how-questioning. And this year I’d like to light them up a little bit more, work closer to the ground, and grasp a little less for arguments and explanations.

More of the how, less of the why. As the big shift comes in on us (do you feel it? do you? our pancake’s just about cooked, you know), we will see what happens, and how interesting my boring can get.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , science , social theory

Yoga Sin Ropas · 16 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed: You’re serious.

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

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

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

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

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

Ed: Uh huh. Naked. Yoga.

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

Ed: “Check out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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Gurus & Good Old Boys · 27 November 2007

Let me say at the beginning that I feel you might want to disregard this if you do not want to be put off.

Well ok. Here you are.

Sometimes a new reader will mistake me for a man, and send an email that’s a bit mis-pitched. I like that.

Is it because I don’t dissimulate? (Though really: there’s feminine “maybe” and “I feel” backpedaling all over my prose, in a good honest way. And I am always soft… unless someone gets overly declarative.) The excessive analyticalness? Am I… turgid? Actually I suspect it’s just the odd references to music or books that are not for women.

What business does a female have with Norman Mailer, Ian Curtis, Bob Dylan, Henry Miller, (and for godsakes this masculine legacy of yoga practice)?

Apropo off all this: A friend sent a train of thought past me the other day, a train she didn’t intend for us to condense into an argument or a statement about the way things are: When do good old boys and gurus get conflated? Is full-on hero worship ever a useful part of practice?

But as I was saying. Some recent man-art mentioned here: Bob Dylan biopic. Henry Miller Library. Norman Mailer obits. Yeah, all of that is some serious hero worship. Good old boys erecting gurus. And at the same time defining lineages--who gets to claim them and who gets left out. All examples of appreciation that's really more like appropriation.

The Dylan movie is a total drag in this regard. I know you were trying, Todd Haines, but you failed. I walked out thinking: every editorial decision was made with “What Would Bob Think?” on your mind. Even your effort to smuggle in a woman’s subjectivity to the heart of the work can’t save you from the hypermasculinity that guru-erection entails. I walked out saying: Bob is for me, but this is not for me.

That's because, for example, Haines cannot resist re-appropriating the collective male in-joke that is Martin Scorcese’s interviews with Joan Baez. Joan, who mothered and made Bob and then got left in the dirt the second he was a little larger than she, said some unfortunately weepy and submissive things to Scorcese, who then edited and amped them to make Bob look like a big, ladykilling hero. Haines seizes it and re-makes a fictional version: that Bob, what a cock. Women artists fall before him, swooning “He was so much better at expressing my thoughts than me.”

I walked out of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, feeling I'd just witnessed the same kind of man-on-man hagiography. Miller is for me, but I can do without the creepy little hipster-clerks who want to own him. Voyeurism is bad enough, but voyerism post-mortem? The library’s centerpiece is a bookstore that in addition to offering Miller’s works, showcases all the things that appreciators decided “go” with his lineage. The beats, the transcendentalists. (And oh, the Russian masters. Easy, guys.) No women. No women authors.

I get it. Miller’s all about transcendent, male self-discovery. The appreciator-curators’ erotica selection, set alongside the Sexus trilogy? Not Anais Nin’s short stories—which were enough to make me blush and cover when I first read them on a public bus traversing rural Taiwan (though other passengers wouldn’t exactly be able to read over my shoulder)—but the creepy, not-really-sexy Marquis de Sade. Wouldn’t want to let the girls in.

Let me go on. All the appreciations of Norman Mailer, that violent, condescending hack? Yeah, brilliant guy I want in my personal canon. But please, let us not perfunctorily praise great men without an eye to who they held down. Follow my link of two weeks ago and check it out: that’s all he really is, and he is all of that. Most memorials glossed this in erecting uncomplicated “greatness.”

Anyway. This is one place that gurus and good old boys flow together: in the appreciation cults. In how memorializations create in-groups, and who you put in those groups, and in what you leave out.

Beta boys, god love you. You started out Say Anything but died derivative in High Fidelity: you wanted the brainy strong girl when you were fresh and ballsy, but ended up fantasizing for a fan.

Why not love it when women find their voices? You won't stop knowing who you are if girls get in with the gurus too. Or even if we become them.

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory

Commodification and Pushback--Subcultures and Scenes · 26 November 2007

Bear with me here.

I’m back from utopia, where subcultures still hide in the hills and cityfolk come around looking for a piece of the enlightened ones, the creators, the real libertarians. Big Sur. You can feel the almost-serene pushback—a quiet self-preservation—from the people who get it as the San Franciscans in beemers come around for fine fine food and flickr-ready views. My guy Henry Miller (whose get-a-piece-of-me memorial library does its best to discourage women from inheriting him, what with all their sick, tired, parasitic man-on-man hagiography) has wonderful things to say about utopian subcultures and how terribly real they can get, but here is someone else who has interesting thoughts about NorCal enclaves. Wm Gibson via Warmhunting, from 2003.

You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?

Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?

Well, utopians, bohemians, and ex-pats at heart: can we really get off the grid now? Has Gibson finally lost the pulse—failed to see that now subcultures engage in SELF-commodification (start a record label, trend-set in your own community, get yourself one way or another “on the magazine” as my brother the artist of information systems likes to say). Or are there still subcultures that are a refuge? Is ashtanga a place for self-production or, as the Miltonian might have it, for a kind of self-consumption? Is the market at our door?

Well, god knows plenty want to be ashtangis. Thanks, Gwyneth. But the funny thing is that once most people get on the mat they’ll never hack it. Boredom will get you if weakness doesn’t get you first.

So increasingly I swim in a soup of commodities and images and attitudes “inspired by” this practice. So what. It’s tacky, but do I have to buy in… and let my subculture be sold back to me as Gibson says?

One thing that’s coming up in the dissertation is that, as I see it, commodification in cultural fields is always partial. Yes, it is a pernicious devil of a tendency, but with apologies to my Uncle Karl there is always pushback. Not in a latent revolution: in the now. Yes the market gets the hell into our home lives and our relationships both to our families and to the land—there is always an economic side to these things. But at the same time, there is reclamation. Stillness, even.

There is the possibility of not re-buying—and not merely producing—ourselves. And I don’t think I have to go to some remote enclave place to get that. If I can show up and practice sincerely, finding community among the dedicated ones in a room full of all kinds of intentions and inside an entity leading the world in yoga commodification, as I did this morning, then there is definitely a self-contained-ness, and a power of non-grasping, that this practice generates. So interesting to practice contentment and stillness in a world that wants to package those qualities into things and sell them back to you as magazines and t-shirts. So interesting to see that there is a little bitty subculture that's not moved by it, sitting right there at the center.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Inverted, Again · 20 November 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey suckers—made you look.

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

Saturday 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

The Sign of Liotta · 12 November 2007

A star is like an omen. Like an albino cow trundling through the herd, it marks a moment. Gives you an excuse to stop and say: what does it mean?

Usually, nothing. Sissy Spacek in Axe, Sally Field in the lobby of a Beverly Hills oral surgeon, Adrien Grenier driving west on Santa Monica Boulevard in a Prius. You’re tasteful about it, let them be as much at home in this town as you, let it lend an extra touch of the surreal to your life here.

Sometimes I’ll make something of it, though. Like when Yancy and I passed James Brown standing outside the Petit Four on Sunset. I’d just visited the grad department it UCLA to check things out, even though I’d sworn I’d never live here. James Brown was wearing an iridescent green suit so intense that Yancy picked him out a block away. Green means yes.

What does it mean when you brush past Ray Liotta as you secret your first salmon steak in five years away from the meat counter at the Westwood Whole Foods? I instantly had images of mobsters and ruthless slaughter. Of reducing your friends to ground chuck on account of a foul mood.

And of meat hooks, yes. We had a meat hook for some reason suspended above the factory floor at the Bristol Bay fishhouse where I drove forklift and tweaked the roe from piles of dead salmon throughout the summer of 1997. The only two times I ate salmon that summer, and maybe the first times ever, were when the cocky Japanese owner brought a prize king steak over for the factory foreman. Who I was seeing. Each time, he took me up to the office with a batch of fresh wasabi and we ate the king raw. The second time he said, “I’d like to hang you up by that meat hook out on the floor and skin you.”

What? I have fallen for a horrible psycho killer?

But I guess that is something Ray Liotta – Mister “It would be nice to do a movie where I didn't have to choke the girl to get her”—would say too.

Me and my salmon exited stage right, me wondering if this meant I was about to get a big testosterone infusion or turn into a mobster or start seeing people as sides of beef.

As it turned out, none of the above. Dinner was quiet, simple, and nice. It tasted good and I experienced no cognitive dissonance at all. The next morning, the strangely intense dairy cravings that had been with me for a week were gone. In their place was a rock in my gut.

My body just did not know what to do with it. Saturday was heavy and fatigued, and if you must know I finally went and rested (what one does in the rest room) around three. Sort of. Practice on Sunday was heavy. I weaseled through a bad nakrasana (always the bellweather) when nobody was looking. Oh well. Salmon experiment inconclusive.

Then just now I googled Ray Liotta to check on his size, which the other night I noticed was hilariously small (not that being small is funny or anything). Either he’s bribed the IMDB or he really is six foot and has a shorter, fake Ray—the one I saw at the meat counter—impersonating him out and about in Los Angeles. (The guy at the checkout saw him too: it’s not just that I was protein-deprived.)

Was it a faux celebrity sighting?

Well, what does that mean?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: evolution , having a body

Last Enchilada on LaBrea, or, How Might I Eat Flesh? · 8 November 2007

Tonight someone whose view of me matters a lot asked, and not for the first time, that I please eat six ounces of salmon.

If there’s a window when I could do that and savor it, I’m in it right now. I’ve built a great deal of muscle very quickly, am feeling the sudden chill of Los Angeles’ version of "winter," and ate a pint of yogurt in the past three days. (Usually I find dairy a little gross.) On Monday and Tuesday, I ate swiss cheese, and not a small amount. Instead of making me ill, it tasted amazing and made me feel strong.

“Hide it from yourself! Put it in a salad slathered with vegenaise!” This was my dear lady’s soft-sell.

But no. I think that if it happens I want to be ritual about it. Like, maybe to a corny degree.

I haven’t ingested red meat in 13 years. I didn’t even notice that I was suddenly being liberated from beef, when I drove away from the Ranch where my folks have two freezers for animal parts out in the garage and put flesh on the table twice a day. When I was small, my dad and a friend would go out to the herd which grazed out our back window, choose a cow, and then butcher it up together and split the food. Friends who had even less money would live much of the year on venison, mooseburgers, and duck. I never questioned meat before I left, but the day I had other socially-acceptable options, I quit.

Chicken and fish stayed around longer. But five years ago after a dinner I regretted at my adviser’s house, I stopped accepting them even when served by loved ones. That choice was much more difficult to make, but I felt to shitty to do anything else after that last heavy enchilada on the Miracle Mile.

I do not have an ideology of vegetarianism. None. I don’t refrain for ethical reasons; and for cultural reasons it would be much easier if I did not refrain.

This is not about an idea. I don’t even need to moralize because my viscera get to run the show on this one. We are talking about a strong physical revulsion, one that’s probably grown stronger as the habit of non-partaking reinforces itself.

Ok. Great. But I’m clearly craving animal protein for the first time in more than a decade. That might be significant. And I’m being asked by others to take some. And hell. It is a new moon.

I don’t know how to go about this. And I’m not completely committed to doing it. On the level of my mouth, the whole prospect still feels disgusting. But my mouth might be lying. I don’t know.

I don’t want advice on whether I should or I shouldn’t. That is my decision and what I am working out.

But I would love to know if anyone out there has broken a long term of vegetarianism because your body seemed to want it. (I am less interested in people who have flipped back and forth for reasons of social influence or general dietary experimentalism, which of course I see all the time).

How did you do it? What was it like? What were your emotions about the experience? Were you thankful you did it? Will you do it again?

Thanks sincerely to anyone who can help as I try to sort my intuitions from my reflex mentality on this one.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [40]
Categories: evolution , having a body

Moon Drag · 7 November 2007

In other, olden times there were only phantoms. In the beginning, that is. If there ever was a beginning….

Who lived here first? Troglodytes perhaps. The Indian came late. Very late.

Though young, geologically speaking, the land has a hoary look. From the ocean depths there issued strange formations, contours unique and seductive. As if the Titans of the deep had labored for aeons to shape and mold the earth. Even millennia ago the great land birds were startled by the abrupt aspect of these risen shapes.

There are no ruins or relics to speak of. No history worth recounting. What was not speaks more eloquently than what was.

Here the redwood made its last stand.

At dawn its majesty is almost painful to behold. That same prehistoric look. The look of always. Nature smiling at herself in the mirror of eternity….

Were there once two moons? Why not? There are mountains that have lost their scalps, streams that boil under the high snows. Now and then the earth rumbles, to level a city or open a new vein of gold.

At night the boulevard is studded with ruby eyes.

And what is there to match a faun as it leaps the void? Toward eventime, when nothing speaks, when the mysterious hush descends, envelops all, says all.

Hunter, put down your gun! It is not the slain which accuse you, but the silence, the emptiness. You blaspheme.

I see the one who dreamed it all as he rides beneath the stars. Silently he enters the forest. Each twig, each fallen leaf, a world beyond all knowing. Through the ragged foliage the splintered light scatters gems of fancy; huge heads emerge, the remains of stolen giants.

''My horse! My land! My kingdom!' The babble of idiots.

Moving with the night, horse and rider inhale deep draughts of pine, of camphor, of eucalyptus. Peace spreads its naked wings.

Was it ever meant to be otherwise?...

And ever the sea recedes. Moon drag. To the west, new land, new figures of earth. Dreamers, outlaws, forerunners. Advancing towad the other world of long ago and far away, the world of yesterday and tomorrow. The world within the world.

From what realm of light were we shadows who darken the earth spawned?

-Henry Miller, Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: evolution

My Two Curves · 5 November 2007

Curiosity : New Learning :: Nostalgia : Repetition

So it has been a long time since I advanced in the series. And people are starting to suggest it’s time I take on the next pose.

Nono noono nonoooooonononooo.

And sell myself out of one of my few remaining chances to participate in a ritual ashtanga moment? Chances are that I’ll add a posture another ten or at most twenty times in the next twenty or thirty years. Learning a posture is this obvious, almost comically obvious, moment of imitation shaktipat built in to the practice at intervals; and in my old age I’m coming to see it as a very sweet thing.

In a practice that is all about intense personal experience, that hinges on meaningful relationships of student and teacher (including where the student takes the method itself to be her teacher), advancing to the next pose is this no-duh moment of live transmission. It’s a mini-enactment of the whole method.

I did not always care about that at all. When the learning curve on the physical level was steeper, I had more curiosity for what was next and at the same time longed for challenges. But the curiosity has leveled off as the physical work becomes less about new openings and new powers and more about refinement. There’s a ton of work left before I’ll master my practice such as it is (hello, mayurasana), but it is quieter work than it used do be.

As I show up every day to repeat--and try to refine--what I know, my nostalgia for the method is a rising trend. It's pretty weird.

I don’t think the word for my condition is “reverence” or “submission.” It’s not that I’m afraid or feel wrong about giving myself a pose. It’s that the longer I spend in this practice the more I feel the strength and sweetness of its master, SKPJ, and the way he’s personalized the method by transmitting it individually to so many. I don’t have any pretention to a personal relationship with the man and don’t regret this, but do have an increasing gratitude for the whole tradition. For me it’s not that learning from a teacher is “correct”: it’s that it is awfully sweet. And because much of my practice during my life will be without someone steeped in the subculture, I’m pooling my nostalgia around the obvious symbolic touchstones.

So! There I go shrouding power in foofy cultural nonsense in order to legitimate a hierarchy. That is actually a great counter-argument to everything I'm feeling. There exists the following criticism of the ashtanga method: that teachers become old-school hoarders of the crucial knowledge. That they dole it out in ways that increase their own authority and students’ practical dependence and emotional subservience. I take the point. I’ve not been subject to this kind of thing, though I am sure it happens. But the possibility of a messy dynamic is what I accept for the benefits of not having to administrate the program myself. For someone like me who lacks the kinesthetic brilliance to practice spontaneously in a way that is both quiet and challenges physical boundaries, administration is annoying mindstuff. It’s a gift when someone will do that pain-in-the-ass thinking and planning and fussing for me. This is why I see teaching so much more as service than as control.

I suppose this knowledge-hoarding criticism is most valid to those who see ashtanga as a set of postures rather than as a living tradition. If it’s just postures, then the method should be Do What Thou Wilt When Thou Wilt.

But it’s not a set of postures. It’s an entire subculture. Subculture without postures is tourism; postures without subculture is pilates. Or something like that.

Ashtanga’s a subculture the same as punk rock or skateboarding. And while I used to experience it with a vigorous curiosity, now I feel more like a sentimental old girl who thinks that for all its neuroses and pathologies, the more traditional ways are meaningful enough that I’d like to re-enact them the same way I do any other received tradition.

Maybe this is just what happens to you when you do the same exact thing day after day for too many years. You fall weirdly in love with all of it.

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

Saturday XXX · 3 November 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

●New issue of Veneer is out. 

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , science , sound , spirituality

Bait and Switch Yoga · 29 October 2007

Wow. Which yoga-consumer group sold my mailing address to “Yoga Pura” of Phoenix, Arizona?

They want me to come to their teacher training, a “journey of a lifetime,” after I have asked myself the following questions.  

Am I fearlessly committed to living happy now?

Do I want to understand—really, really understand—the mysteries underlying yoga and all great spiritual traditions?

Oh yeah. Happiness, and real, real understanding. That’s my bag, allright. But Phoenix is some distance from LA. Could I do this training by correspondence? Probably, because it turns out that Yoga is ANYTHING I want it to be. Check this ad copy, you poor, unenlightened readers.

Yoga is not about stretching. Yoga is not about meditation. In fact, contrary to what you may have heard, yoga is not even about yoga. And while it may be true that yoga involves all of these, it’s [sic] real potency and value lies [sic] in its ability to create something much greater: the transformation of your life. Yoga is about living your life to the fullest…. It’s about joy in the workplace and love in the home. Yoga is about the fulfillment of your life’s purpose with a… fulfillment previously unimagined [sic]. At Yoga Pura we’re unlocking the real secrets of the ancient science of yoga to help people do just that. More than a simple course in yoga postures… the Teacher Training… will immerse you in your own personal voyage of self-discovery and awakening—transforming you into a mature spiritual guide able to help others do the very same thing.

Classic yoga bait-and-switch advertising here. Not just “happiness,” “fulfillment,” and “real understanding” but the wisdom and knowledge to be others’ “spiritual guide.” Right. Right up until you get about a month into some kind of practice and realize how clueless, monkey-minded, and how not qualified to be another’s authority, you really are.

To me, this Yoga Pura type of thing is more painful than blatant yoga materialism that promises fashionable pastimes and a nice ass. Because this is yoga as candy apple “happiness” that represents a quick escape from the life you presumably want to change. Since there’s nice enough intention here, these corny promises make it easier to forget that yoga is just a practice and not an express ticket to some other self.

Nothing in this ad is about establishing a personal practice and using that as the field for transformation and understanding. Rather it feels more like they’re selling me into yoga charm school where I will learn to think like Tony Robbins and walk like Christy Turlington and speak melodically like Rodney Yee so I can go out and reproduce more of this brand of self-help/actualization. My new consulting gig: Insideowl Lifecoaching!

Well, bother. If it is this simple, what am I doing taking the toll road?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [20]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

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 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [22]
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

Earthly Forces, Living Lightly · 3 September 2007

Oh it’s hot down the central valley, and just flat and bright and heavy as I drive back in to LA. (Beneath a banner in the East Bay: “Stop Driving the War.” Good goddam call, I concede.) Six hours on four cylinders and Eno & Fripp 1975 (graduating from MfA), and into this weird scorched world where gravity is a serious force. I'm thinking of the molten magnet inside the planet.

That’s a transition allright. Konk me upside the head with an iron skillet off the stove.

But not in a bad way. Heh.

The hidden Marin valley of the past week was something else: smelling like wet sage in the morning and burnt sage in the afternoon, with deer outside my window to wake me for practice, wild turkeys as big as me (but not as goodlooking, I thought when I was thinking), tiny little lizards splayed out fearlessly in the 6 pm warming hour. The sky at night was darker than I’ve seen in too long, and after I stopped needing much sleep (talking takes much out of me in a normal day), being out with such large stars and the droning crickets was pretty close to opposite of midday LA in a heatwave.

The Editor rented Fierce Grace and we fired up the AC and closed all the shades and caught up after a week without tickles. The film together with something DZ(M) said reminded me of this.

We can see that there are ways of inhabiting our roles without making quite so much of them. It’s really not necessary to take out lives quite so personally. “The man [sic] who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions,” Krishna says, “sees how some forces work upon other forces, and he becomes not their slave.” Your body, your mind, your personality – that’s all just part of nature, it’s all just lawful stuff happening. Why are you getting so uptight about it? Let it be harmonious with its lawful manifestation, and don’t struggle against it so hard. Live your life more lightly, more impersonally; don’t get so caught, so trapped in your melodrama.

Ram Dass, Living the Bhagavad Gita (p. 63)

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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

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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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

Monads · 17 July 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday XVIII · 7 July 2007

Visitations from my past, lately. From C, with whom I re-walked the sweaty bloody steps of the Vietnam War, and who later would cook me Sechuan on Fridays before I'd go to wait tables…, who has somehow been reborn as a lover of the downtrodden (sorry man: it shows), and who now is telling me what it’s like to be a professor of history. Also, from A, who wants me to understand and help quell the ragged old part of our history she’s reliving.

And: I’ve been thinking about my old highschool boyfriend T, driving with my lights on like he does as a superstitious tribute to his L-4. His was crushed in a smalltown icy-road auto accident when he was a kid, and after he re-learned to stand up he reclaimed locomotion with a vengeance. Street-racer, yes; but also one of the best and longest-suffering skaters who lives: even at 30 (last week) with a couple of advanced degrees and a dayjob wearing scrubs. I’m driving with my lights on—taking up his L-4 protection ritual—because it turns out my own L-4 has been a prime culprit of the past three months of back drama. Superstitious owl.

With said vertebra docked back in her bay, I too am re-learning to stand up… from a backbend. First time as history, second time as farce—for Louis Bonaparte, the Bush Dynasty, and me.

But bumping up into old loves and new-old experiences is more than comedy. This re-learning, and the re-calling, fills me with grateful excitement for the specifity of our lives. (Even when it’s Sisyphean—even then.) And I think this is a bit of why I write, to telegraph across these distances... between this present reality and all our alternate possible selves.

Annnnnyway…. I’m not much for reading this Saturday, given the persistence of the dissertation data crisis—about which my main adviser was the usual rocksolid champion when I finally broke it to her in email-chat at six this morning. Yes ma’am: I’ll pilot this one through, but thank you for having my back.

But a few links.

? Start here for a nostalgia trip. PF doesn’t sing so good live, but I like the way he opens this rendition of Summertime Rolls and I like him without his shirt on.

? A whole chapter of Coetzee’s 2008 novel, Diary of a Bad Year, is excerpted in the new NYRB. Haven’t read it yet, but even at his most obnoxious he’s a writer who very much gets to me.

? Haruki Murakami writes a wonderful thing about how, for him, jazz precedes prose. "There aren't any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words."

? O god, so I heard a rumor that the Dalai Lama and Little George were born on the same day. Think of it.

? Talk about nostalgia for my early years. I loved this short NYT video on rodeo boys. Wherein we learn that “It’s not a sport unless somebody can die in it.” There you go, doubters: astanga yoga is not a sport. And yet…

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

Fifteen for Thirty · 2 July 2007

Conspiracy theorist self: Holidays are power-written histories on the palimpsest of social memory—“Christmas” to cover for the solstice and “Easter” for the equinox, “Thanksgiving” to cover for smallpox, and “Memorial Day” for Mayday since the latter is so awfully dangerous.

Practical self: Ease up already. None of these “meanings” is inherent. Commemorate what you will.

The specifics of this life and the commitments I make with it take up most of my days. Given a break in the action, well, I’m going to create my own ritual out of it any way that I can. So I mourn this lifetaking warmaking entity and the red it’s spilt in the soil, even as I see I’m part of the red in its veins. There’s nothing for me to add to the national symbolic moment, which is pitch-perfect: GWB taking sweet old Pootie-poot for rides in daddy’s blue and white speedboat, pardoning the highest of criminals while they tool around the summer waters.

So that’s already perfect without me. I’ll make this day about a historical memory less symbolic and abstract—not of a country, but of one small coming-of-age inside it. For me, the Fourth is the watermark of every given summer, the arbitrary date I use to mark off the year in the little bedpost of this individual human history. Here’s the arc of the last 15 of 30, so I’ll have them for my own archives.

1992: Estes Park vicinity, Colorado. I make Grandpa mad when I use the campground bathroom to curl my hair. Waste of time and electricity! The six of us eat tacos in our little egg-shaped fiberglass Scamper. Off to fireworks in Granby.

1993: Colorado Springs, top of Fillmore Hill. Mom asks me to go up alone to watch the fireworks, and gives a desperate lecture against my Mormon boyfriend, TB. Then we are quiet. She doesn’t ask if I am drinking (TB is president of SADD—and the fact that this keeps me from driving drunk while my skills are at their least developed is a blessing she’ll never know, outweighing the Mormon tincture that will always be on my soul). For once in the face of efforts to control my sexuality, I don’t talk back. Because she is desperate, and there is something different in her voice. She knows her control is running out. I’m no longer oppositional, taking her guidelines as a point of departure. Rather, I’m turning independent; and this is boundless and awful. That night together is quiet and still and full of misunderstanding, as we sit on the hill where my dad used to dig up arrowheads as a boy.

1994: Laurel, MT, with J. Sit in her old red Subaru wagon, in which I used to lift up the gearshift-cover and watch the road go by beneath, and drink. Best place to watch the show is from the edge of the cemetery atop the hill outside of town. It’s close enough to hear the drunken emcee on the PA system out on the high school baseball field, announcing which local business donated each individual pyrotechnic. For the finale, financed by Exxon (whose local refinery is the most polluting in the country, because MT has effectively no environmental regulations), they blare Born in the USA and everyone in town sings their hearts out.

1995: Laurel, MT, this time with TL. Same spot on the cemetery. Same emcee. Twenty feet away, the QB and one of the super-athletic farmboys are parked in a Ford F-350, drinking and repeatedly playing “What’s Going On?” by 4 Non Blondes. TL (my second straightedge boyfriend) in his mail-order skate shoes and oversize clothes from the back pages of Thrasher, and his tricked-out Civic that nobody in town understands, grits his teeth and wants to hit them. If they only knew how ripped he is under all those strange clothes.

1996: Laurel, MT, now with G and R, right before I leave for Costa Rica. Again the cemetery. This year, singing the finale, I think I finally know what kind of song Born in the USA really is.

1997: Dillingham, AK. Skinnydipping with the fish-house crew in some warm shallow lake that goes for miles into the moraine. Then I stay up all night with TM, the swarthy auto-didact cold-storage foreman who would hold the ground until Editor had other ideas. The Pozos family (migrants from Guadalajara to Umatilla, and the heart of the fish-house operation) set off fireworks when the sun dips below the horizon for 30 minutes around 3 am. “How ‘bout them fireworks?”

1998: Washington, DC. The National Mall with M and a crowd of her Pakistani intellectual friends. We lie out under the obelisk with thousands of other interns. Metro back home to Falls Church is as packed as any third-world transit I’ve ever ridden. O, humanity!

1999: Portland and the Valley. Go to the party at the Rummel House, then met L on the Portland waterfront for fireworks. Sleep a bit in S’s empty apartment, then drive my Hyundai the 17 hours back to MT before boarding an airplane with a year’s-supply of malaria pills. Between Tri-Cities and Ritzville, Ray Suarez is doing a special episode of TOTN, on the history of the Hot Dog. When it finally fades to static, I think about how much I am going to miss Ray when I leave the country, and drive across the Hanford-radiated high desert writing out the utopia where my beloved Ray gets elected President of the United States. Later that year, they’d make him anchor of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Take what you can get.

2000: Just back from the tropics and staying with inlaws-to-be in the stunningly tacky, yet rich, consumeropolis of Beaverton. Drink good Willamette Valley wine in their jacuzzi adjacent the neighborhood park, listening to adolescent boys with firecrackers out in the cul-de-sac.

2001: Bellingham with A, K and R. Lie out in the grass in some idyllic park in the hills above a lake. Everyone speaking Spanish. Then to a party at a waterfront house in Bellingham—mom and pop professors are out of town. See the fireworks rising above Anacortes on the drive back home to Seattle.

2002: Granada, Espana. Perfect echo of ‘98, there in the seat of a previous empire. Walk all over the Albacyn, and watch a huge red sun set over the mountains to the northwest. Read about Ferdinand and Isabella, eating peaches and pears.

2003: K, G, R, and I walk all over the LA Marina looking for our friends. Pre-cellphone days. Set up on the beach south of the canals and picnic among the crowds anyway. Head full of sand after lying back to watch the show.

2004: Koreatown Rooftop. Ten or twelve stories up for a “white trash” event whose Evite title is “They Hate Our Freedom.” We celebrate accordingly with wine coolers (Coors would be going too far) amazing vegan beans ‘n’ franks, and my not-so-vegan (but artistic) flag Jell-o. Later I feel like a jerk for satirizing the Born in the USA scene with a bunch of people who graduated from Amherst and Smith. Talk about anemic hipster cynicism. The fireworks panorama—from Compton on the south to the Hollywood Hills on the north, the Marina on the west to Echo Park on the east… and more importantly from half the rooftops in Koreatown—makes up for it.

2005: Hungover from the Marina mixup and “They Hate Our Freedom,” R and I leave town ISO something rootsier. Picnic according to habit in the park above Ventura, and then stumble on the last bits of the annual 4^th of July Ventura Street Fair downtown. Pledge to return.

2006: Just off a week of noble silence at Spirit Rock, I stay four days in somebody’s beautiful house on Portrero Hill. Their office is mine for the writing as long as they’re off in Chicago; and after the joy and peace of retreat I’m not ready to leave the Bay. On the morning of the 4^th, I ease off the ambient soundtrack and let Dangermouse take me to practice downtown, then spend the day alternately writing and walking the dead streets of Portrero, to listen to the hollers of the World Cup watchers waft out from the row-houses. The only flags are those of the soccer teams in the running, and not so much as a bottle rocket flies through the dead-quiet, post-game night.

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

Saturday XVI · 23 June 2007

On the edge of a breakthrough here; and it’s a sensitive time. My spine’s been talking back to me all week—a long last protest before she submits to something like alignment after embracing chaos for 10 weeks. Just stand up from my deskchair, and the accordion plays. I love it. My vertebrae aren’t quick to sublax, so after they went haywire in April in response to the sudden back-tension, they’ve been equally unwilling to marshal back to their quarters. So this is good; and someone in a backroom in my head is singing “Like a Virgin.” Time to re-learn some things.

Hello, backbends. Bring some endorphins with you when you come. Gawd can I use them. And goodbye entropy… for now.

But yeah, it is a sensitive time. And for the sake of the change, and the fact that the reopening does feel risky, I’m going to hold the scene constant right now. So I’m holding off on practice this weekend in Encinitas, and taking on the LA Film Festival as consolation.

Internet-diversions from this morning.

? First, last Sunday’s story on Chinese goldfarmers—the workhorses in multiplayer online games who labor for virtual money then arrange in-game exchanges to deliver it to RL rich players who then reimburse for RL cash. I’ve been waiting for The Magazine to write this story, because it is obsessed with social ambiguities: and what’s good about this story is its ambiguities. It delivers complications to every existing theory of choices within markets, virtual economies, work/play, and the metaphysics of online identity. There IS a world inside the world, in this sense: and the boundaries between the two are incomplete. Such a good story of our time.

? This is a frightening (and inspiring) commentary on UCLA research on students who say universities are failing to offer them the moral (and spiritual) development they feel they need. The article makes contradictory generalizations about the values university education promotes; and among my many responses, first is that all education is value-laden—even if the values it transmits are for rationalist objectivity and the scientific method of inquiry (or, alternatively, post-rationalism). Academics know this: and are moralistic about the craft—because (until we discover Bourdieu) we think we have to choose sides in the interpretation- versus- explanation battle. So, many academics to chunk off anything that looks like “morality/spirituality” within the world and ourselves—hermetically seal it off as unimportant subjective nonsense, and leave it to languish. Until one day we look at those childish beliefs, realize they're just a collection of old superstitions, and chuck them altogether.

Anyway, the article says that students turn to conservative religion, especially Christianity (which is happening at alarming rates all over the country) because professors refuse to offer moral or spiritual information. 

Maybe if my students had more classes whose motivating question was “How should we live?” or “What is the good life?” let alone studies of mindfulness and peace, they wouldn’t overwhelmingly report that their central educational goal is to learn to make as much money as possible. To be crude: the generation is out of joint, but it appears to know it.

? Pankaj Mishra’s (background) review in NYRB of Martha Nussbaum’s new book on India. Great short history on recent Hindu nationalism, and of social pressures brought by the WTO and other trade reforms and sudden economic change.

Not much discussion of Nussbaum, except for (1) on her point that the ruling party makes a “surreal” mixture of pro-corporate politics and promotion of crazy violence and (2) her Gandhian thesis that “the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality.”

In the final section, Mishra discusses the “culture of capitalism that thrives on ceaselessly promoting and multiplying desire,” and the selective ways in which India’s conversion to a consumer society is working with, and against, these tides of political violence.

? And, a trailer for an interesting little film. Parkour meets West LA.

? Human Tetris.

 

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Five for the Archive, Part IV · 21 June 2007

Finally...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five for the Archive, Part II · 18 June 2007

Following up on last Thursday’s #1 and #2, here is #3 of 5.

3. The addiction. How/why did you get hooked?

Just as the class up at Sunset Canyon concluded, I settled oh-so-compliantly with the insurance company of the driver who had nearly killed me. Receiving a large check changed several things for me, given my history: peasant-class people do no do yoga in this town, but I had already moved out of that zone culturally and now was also leaving it in an economic sense. I stashed much of the settlement in the market (likewise life-changing, considering my family view the owning of capital as sinful and the stock market as a bellweather for the apocalypse), bought a car (the first new car in the family, also viewed as transgressive), and listened to my partner when he said I should spend something on my own healthcare, given that the big check was a marker of the near-death to which I’d been subjected. I shrugged away the argument that I was entitled to something “for me,” but still followed my charismatic teacher to (cue horns) YogaWorks Beverly Hills, and took her 7:30 am class M-W-F for the summer.

The teacher started noticing me around August, but didn’t remember I’d been at the UCLA class the previous spring (“But I always remember the strong people! No way you were in that class!”) Apparently my body was changing, though I don’t even remember. I was showing up because I liked my teacher’s rhythm and playfulness. She had the ability simultaneously to make time both stand still and fly past. Class was an oasis. I also had a sense that if I kept going, the ill cognitive-emotional effects of that old wreck would dissipate and bring my sharp old analytical faculty back to roost in my pointy little head.

Oh yeah: I remember arguing many pinot nights on the balcony that practice made me smarter.

But that was mostly an excuse I made to my dense little clan of artists and academics for my frequent disappearing acts. I may have had to move up in the world to afford it, but my inner circle looked far, far down in the habit. They were beginning to suspect me. Not only was yoga manifestly narcicisstic—with the insufferable magazine covers in the Whole Foods line—it was unbearably corny. Did somebody say namaste?

As my tastes for alcohol, late nights, heavy food, loud avant rock, and intense intellectual banter diminished, my old garde both felt insulted and resented losing those pieces of me. My sweetheart started showing up at parties and shows without me, and quiet concerns arose. Years later, now that the adjustments for this new, jealous lover (i.e. astanga) have been made, my habits are viewed with irritation and pity.

For every one person who says my consistency is an inspiration, there are five who tell my partner they are sorry about what’s happened to me. The greatest misunderstanding is the popular story: after I got hit by the car, everything changed. I saw my own mortality—it is said, behind my back—and this changed me from an intense, complex and strong go-getter into someone who is less, who is weak, who is annoyingly like a hermit. What a pitiful story this is. But when a good friend’s fire seems to disappear, what else can you think?

The intensity hasn’t disappeared, you know. Just been redirected, in a way that ain’t so fun at parties.

That first summer of my practice, when I was still arguing it was all for the mental payouts, in truth I was showing up for my teacher because I just loved being there. I could drop right in to practice, focus and breathe: the simplicity of it was so beautiful.

The Beverly Hills scene was odd—so many sparkly-white leisure people and invisible brown ones cleaning up behind, the stupid dogs trained to be babies rather than cainines, valet parking in the city garage, Larry King cruising through in a Lincoln without stopping at the lights—but the studio itself was intimate and peaceful… an easy place to become a regular. At some point, I started taking a Tuesday-Thursday, and then a Sunday, class…. 

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

Saturday XV · 16 June 2007

Time’s out of joint today. Sat vipassana at a new center, where they have begun a cycle of daylong retreats. Very normal Buddhists, these people: so normal, the director’s packing the exact same degree from the exact same department where I am currently doing my thing.

It’s good to sit with people: when keeping your awareness together promises so much less fun that writing another story in your head (yes, narrative is where I live), you keep it together anyway for the sake of the group. Maybe all they’re doing anyway is deeply focused porn-visualization (which they tell me gets more vivid the longer you practice), but you tell yourself the energy would be different if they were cheating on you like that. And so you more or less keep it together.

Keeping your awareness together is so much to ask; and it is so little. Just this minute, take a half-step out of yourself and quiet one more level down. Not the next minute. The next minute you can get right back on the Circle of Willis express train if that's what you have to do. You can catch it any time.

Anyway, the little gong gongs and you realize an hour or two have passed and the GTD Saturday to-do list squaks at you:

What, you think you're the damn leisure class?

The world is happening. Get back in it.

So whatever. I’ve got revisions of an old paper to face up to tonight, after a walk with the Editor. A glance at the always-within-reach GTD blackbook says the summer lineup is a whole string of non-self-respecting Saturday nights like this one. Rock on: for some reason, this is a window in the week when writing’s easy—vipassana or no vipassana. So I’ll take it wherever I can make it work.

By the way, I met V. yesterday (right name for an international woman of astanga intrigue). She’s great, as some will soon know, with a quick chortle and light sigh, and the best British-Spanish accented English ever. We spent a few hours, with a stroll through the city’s Spanish-colonial founding spot: once a well and a Franciscan mission, now trinket stalls and burrito restaurants. Trinkets and burritos: welcome to California. 

No links today, since I took my desultory internet-head to the cushion and now straight down the work well.

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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

Metaphysical Car Wreck · 5 June 2007

Online community: live and lurk. I’ve lurked in the astanga online forum throughout the three years of my practice. It’s rich with information on how the practice of astanga yoga hashes and heals a person, and how these highly (but sometimes partially) processed people relate. Tracing back the impulses, I tend to click over when one of the following questions comes to mind.

  Either:

O god! This practice creates me destroys me. Owns me frees me. And makes me an alien for sure. Who can understand this?

  Or:

 Who are these aliens?

Some people go to the forum because they’re fascinated by the body as a geometrical thing, and want to discuss it like a house under retrofitting. Or they go for directions to RL islands of astanga. Or for philosophical banter. But whatever gets us there, participants both learn about and forge astanga culture. But oddly: most of us just watch, and let a small brave few do the making.

It’s an explicit zone in a practice that is mostly wordless— unspeakable even— and in the limit, ineffable. By contrast, communication in a Mysore room is made up of: intuition (the boundaries of the subtle body, once you find it, aren’t solid); and of history-revealing sweat smells (watch out: we become sommeliers of sweat); and of the not-so-subtle self-expression/ self-betrayal that emerges within the outlines of the choreography. A Mysore room is a huge store of community information, especially as the habit refines practitioners to transparency; but all that is offstage to your experience, peripheral to your driste—and it leaves out any information about how astangis behave when we’re not in, well, church.

So the online forum is a back porch walled in silent flies. Last week, responding to a troublemaker, I flew into the zapper. Something between stupidly taking his bait and sincerely trying to put something suggestive, oblique and understated—and thereby less directly reactive—into the stew.

On a single 337-post-long thread that lasted half a year, a non-astangi troll looked for something like love (attention) through a craven bid for community punishment (strict parents, eh?), and did a brilliant job of getting it. In drawing astangi ire, he gave us the perfect chance to see ourselves if we wanted. The last thing an astangi desires to be is angry and ignorant, and because he was every shade of both angry (bitter, fearful, raw, hurt, passive) and ignorant (willful, accidental, bigoted), he offered the full set of goods to mirror any one of us. And he was a hard worker: carefully responsive to each comment, never letting the thread go cold, consistent/believable in his tone.

Much of the conversation I saw (which was only a fraction of that insane number of posts) was just boxing around the ears, but at times it got good and raw. A few participated, but amazingly, dozens or maybe even hundreds watched. And questioned themselves for it. “It’s like a metaphysical car wreck,” one interjected. “I just can’t look away.”

Many said that the discussion was litter—community garbage that should just be deleted. Ultimately, yesterday, contributors decided to preserve the thread in a marginal location where it won’t generate any more heat. In the meantime, some said things they finally regretted—things that compromised their self-images in some way—and as the conversation died, they asked the moderator to erase those old comments or went back themselves to sanitize/edit them.

Yes; a lot of words and energy were wasted in this drawn-out altercation, but more than any other on the board it answers my question of who, as a community, we are. Insofar as you know a country by the way it treats its weakest members (o “illegal” residents), these 17 pages of acrimony are a rare arrow pointing to our dark side.

How could a virtual Diogenes generate so much heat among us? What was he doing right? And are we going to pretend that wasn’t really us getting worked up?

The claims that this conversation was meaningless noise, repeated calls to banish the troll for not being one of us, and especially the post-hoc editing call to mind the perennial problem of introspective practice and the repressed sides of the personality: you can’t reflect on the parts of yourself that you refuse to admit are in you. 

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. So if it’s a refuge, is it from the world or from the parts of ourselves that we’ve disowned the same way we disown the troll?

I don’t think any amount of meditation can answer that. But for now, sleep. Part II tomorrow.

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XII · 19 May 2007

Multitasking is such sweet solace.

Stupid solace, more like. I’ve got a 178-page .pdf and piles of forms from the university’s Institutional Review Board; and they are slowly eating my Saturday amid water-breaks and internet interludes. I’m an impatient foot-stamper in the face of bureaucracy, too immature or maybe just unable to muster the methodical resignation of the institutionally productive. I should just buck up another five hours and dispense with this task, but that would be criminally workish and there’s there’s only so much more sitting here I can do before secreting to the beach.

The diversions I shouldn’t have even considered today:

? Wiccans. Suggesting we question the secret lives of tax collectors. Closet nature-worshippers?

? Manufacturing belief, in Salon. Evolutionary biologist and fringe member of the Dawkinsian atheism-from-above (i.e. academia) project Lewis Wolpert comes on as much more satyr than sage here. In a nice way. His excellent argument is completely Lockean and happens to be unproveable (though he claims to dislike philosophers), so it’s obnoxious that he spends the second half of the interview dismissing things he knows nothing about on the allegation that concrete “evidence” is lacking. So his ego gets away with him. Strange.

? It’s not that I love The Yes Men just for infiltrating corporate meetings in a giant penis suit. It's that I love that they are pitch-perfect in isolating and talking back to the ideology of the free market. Here they are in a recent article, widely published.

The problem is that [the freemarket] is a force against which a few concerned citizens becoming vegetarians, planting trees in the Amazon, or riding bicycles are no match at all. And despite the almost psychotically sunny predictions of corporate seers like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, the global free market doesn't want much besides profits and growth—its own survival comes in a very distant third.

? Speaking of intellectual crushes. I had a thing for Jerry Fodor for a decade, until meeting him in person. I’m getting it back, with each new essay he writes. He makes the hardest questions about the nature of consciousness look easy, including in this week’s short review for the LRB.

? This video is great, although it uncritically limits the field of political morality to “liberal” and “conservative.” Also, considering that in the era of YouTube "seven minutes is the new War and Peace," the beginning is slow. It’s social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discussing the roots of moral and aesthetic judgments at the New Yorker conference week before last. At the end he compares liberal and conservative to Siva and Visnu (sorry, Brahma): an unintentional illustration of the trouble with any attempt to simplify moral viewpoints onto a single left-right dimension. 

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Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

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 XI · 12 May 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Going Through Something" · 10 May 2007

“So I’m going through something with my back…”

This is what we say in yoga. Not: “I’m injured.”

What does this language hide; and in what ways is it more true than using the language of injury?”

For months I’ve been keeping notes on the subject of injury and astanga yoga, and noting the variations in experienced teachers' takes on the subject. [Since many in the second generation of teachers in the SKPJ lineage are online, the web catalogues some of this variation, e.g. Anne Finstad (scroll to 8.26.06), Steve Dwelley, and Matthew Sweeney (see #3, "Easy Practice").]

I’m not ready to write about this topic, but wanted to archive for posterity the wise comments of an adored mentor of mine (at least until he clicks over here and asks me, in his modesty, to take these down). Below are outtakes from our exchange today. His third paragraph from the bottom is like a well-polished stone— burnished with experience, and one you’ll take home from tonight’s walk while you toss others you’ve picked up back into the sea.
…………………………………………………………………………….
IO: …Meh. It goes, but whatever is happening in my back has been... interesting. As mentioned on the blog, I took five whole days off Mysore practice and instead practiced in the afternoons in my kitchen. It was an experiment and gave me the chance to tailor. I got a better understanding of what's holding in my back (and how it keeps changing) but it's not like it made it all clear up….

Anyway, I seem to be inhabiting a whole different body for the past month--a delicate one. This thing is definitely maturing me, but some days I could care less about maturity if it meant I could have my kapotasana endorphins back.
…………………………………………………………………………..
CZ: Sounds like you're in the territory that yoga was 'invented' to get you through.  Mumbo-jumbo aside, look around you and you'll see that you have plenty of company.

Rejoice. You're in juicy territory. A place with an easily identifiable obstacle. 
…………………………………………………………………………...

IO: This is an amazing email. Good luck with your crazy workday and thank you.

P.S. Are you saying that I'm only just now glimpsing what the practice is all about? That this is the name of the game? God help me I want to go back to my twenties and flow class!
…………………………………………………………………………….
CZ: Oops. Sorry it's too late to go back:)  Don't you just love this quote?

"You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.   < Morpheus"

Yep, it's too late (lol) you took the red pill so start working on your super powers :)
……………………………………………………………………………..
IO: (Phhhhhhttt….)
……………………………………………………………………………..
CZ: It's the old "press on or back off" fork in the road that you've come to. I could recount volumes about the advice I've heard and been given, but I'm afraid it will all sound like yoga mumbo-jumbo or new-age drivel. But here is some of it anyway:

For the first six months of Ashtanga Yoga, my hamstrings were in agony and I could hardly walk. I remember thinking "if I had to run for my life, I'd sit down and give up." My hamstrings were screaming all hours of the day. I met C and asked him if this pain was 'good' and he told me something like "I can't tell you because I'm not in your body. Maybe you're a wimp and just complaining or maybe you have an incredible tolerance for pain. Either way only you can know for sure."

There was another student that started practicing at the same time. His knees often bothered him and he asked M about it and talked of his knees often. In the end he concluded "it's like the stock market, everyone has an opinion but no one knows for sure." And yet another teacher told me when Supta Kurmasana was wreaking havoc on me "it might hurt for a week, it might hurt for ten years, who knows?"

Working with asana is a two-way dialogue with your body. You ask your body to open and to be strong and the body speaks back. When you ask in the right way and listen carefully, the body opens and floats into arm balances. Pain is the body shouting to get your attention. Stress your knee and the body shouts back "HEY BACK OFF THIS IS THE WRONG DIRECTION, OPEN YOUR HIPS YOU IDIOT!!". But it also hurts to remove a band-aid after a cut has healed. "OK DO IT QUICK AND GET IT OVER WITH!" The former is 'back off' and the latter is 'press on.' It takes discrimination to know which is which.

Pain visits ashtangis often. I've heard that Guruji often doesn't back off and says "opening, very good" even when students hobble around in pain. But I think Guruji is highly adept at knowing whether a limitation is real or imagined. And when a student is ready for more.

It seems that the Ashtanga series are progressively more difficult (or impossible), and designed to take every student to their threshold sooner or later. There you develop the discrimination to know whether to press on or back off. Because only you know for sure.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception , spirituality

Conversion Story, Part II · 8 May 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion Story, Part I · 3 May 2007

Why do you practice astanga yoga? What brought you to the practice?*

I practice because: how could I not? If I hatch a reasoned explanation, I might just lie to justify the sacrifices I’ve made and the quirks I’ve taken on as I have habituated to the yoga. Astanga is a weird and jealous lover, quite the wallflower at parties: making our relationship out to be rational cheats her of her brilliant lunacy.

I found astanga by accident—a literal one, involving a car and a concussion. And I stayed because its culture made sense: the no-bullshit intensity and sublime understatement of Patthabi Jois’ personality, the habitual interiority of the technique, its grounding in a philosophical lineage (and adaptability to the nondualism that resonates with me best), and the sacramental gratitude built into its gestures and ritual patterns.

I can say I love the danger of practice—the way it puts my most precious self-harming habits and safest inner caves in peril. I love the pleasure and joy of it—the way it sets my energetic rhythms and releases some addictive elixir of endorphins and breath onto the platform it sets for awakening. And I love its refuge—the way it builds some peace and honesty into days that otherwise might get far too dramatic. Post hoc, these are reasons to love practice, but I don’t know that they get me to the mat.

The best I can say for why I show up is: I’m a curious little nerd. Astanga gives my body to me as a terrain of exploration, and I am both grounded by the fact that it sets me a peaceful meditation schedule, and curious about the shifting nature of this ground.

I’m emphatically not a creature of habit, but rather one who tends to impatience and nomadism. The impatience, manifesting as a boredom with repetition and a desire to collect experiences, is the most consistent demon in my relationships with self and lovedones and work and the world. My curiosity can be a distracting, greedy kind of energy. But in practice, I turn it inward, and suddenly it is luminous. This is a place I can be active and exploratory without killing receptivity and repose. I don’t get on the mat with the expectation of philosophical or existential payoffs, but because it distills a problematic tendency into a little pinlight that seems to be taking me somewhere, even if it is just to a place where novelty has lost its allure and deterioration is the real name of the game. I’ve piled up a lot of scrapmetal out in the garage in the search for truth, but this inquiry feels genuine because there’s just not much to it. (Little more than a strip of Manduka PVC, if you know what I mean, on the trash heap every 3 years or so.)

Growing up evangelical, in the blood-red, poor-white backcountry of a redstate, and a preacher’s kid at that, I learned the value of conversion stories. But unfortunately, force-fed a belief system with my baby food, I grew up with the conundrum of having never been evil and thus never rescued by Jesus from the maw of vice. We’d do evangelism workshops to practice sharing “testimonies” as a conversion tactic, and I’d feel like half a person. For a preacher’s kid, the classic temptation is to give yourself a dark period, a Christian rumspringa, of drugs and sex and rock music, and then let Jesus bring you back from the dead in time to settle down to a life of ministry. No matter how far away you get on this prodigal venture—even if you’re a leftist, anti-racist, gender-equality-loving, environmentalist, non-patriotic, secular humanist intellectual, who lives in the DEN OF VICE (Los Angeles, California)—there’s always the question of whether you’ll give up the way of the goat and return to the fold.

I have returned, allright. My conversion story to astanga practice is not all that interesting: car hit me/ I hit yoga mat/ life reconfigured down to the roots. But the story that best answers the question of why I practice is the one about how I found my body. I think I’ll write out a version of that story in the next few posts.

*These questions originated here. 

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

Confession of a Mastercleanser · 18 April 2007

Quiz. List your associations for the Master Cleanse:

Hippies. Socially “acceptable” eating disorders. Freaky online support groups for how to subsist—up to 60 days!—on Grade B Maple Syrup and lemons. Trauma to the insides. Persons afflicted with OCD. The “tongue coat.” Analysis of bowel movements.

Let’s stop right there. That’s enough reason to be shy.

Fasting, cleansing, and de-toxing have always struck me as pseudoscientific self-torture programmes, for people who have a big gulf between what food they want with their senses and what they want with their intellects. They were a creepy external self-control structure that traumatizes the body, though what we should really be doing is eating well all the time, without the drama of weird habit-cycles.

That write-off came from experience. In 2000, I moved to Seattle after a year in Managua. My new naturopath, a professor of Chinese medicine, was horrified by the crop of giardia, and “aomebas,” and the tapeworm, in my gut. He supervised an herbal and dietary de-tox that killed the parasites and took out my functional intestines along with them. I learned a lot about nutrition and my body through the process, but it took the digestive system months to recover. I concluded that it was better to choose to love eating what the body said it loved, as a regular thing, and get over inherited baggage about food as a reward or a transgression. (Over the years, I slowly learned to hear and be kinder to that body, which I had never really noticed before the trauma.)

But. That might be a privileged, oversimple, conclusion. Sometimes life does close in on the body and the space we have to dialogue with it. There was some bad drama that went down here last October, and a dissertation defense in December, and three crazy months of yoga training that ended last month. As I’ve mentioned in this space, in the pause and the end of that long exhale, I inclined toward a renewal ritual. Then I got a deep tissue massage, and the therapist let me have it. Quite the worked-out, open set of systems you’ve got there, so what in the hell are you doing to your kidneys?! Why not let them serve you instead of torturing them?

Mmm. Could it be the trailmix habit? There’s also the matter of the espresso and the coffee shop bagel tendency. Maybe this is what happens when you’re sad for two months, and then don’t cook for three. All while avoiding campus to work in cafes. So it goes, sometimes; but the therapist wasn’t shy. He pointed me to a tableau of re-set buttons and lobbied for the herbal method.

I re-did the research, figuring it was outdated from 2000. But what I chose was the no-frills, old-school, hippie ass approach—because it’s cheap and simple (I want a method that restores energy, not takes it), and because the research sample size is huge: thousands of people have done this thing and written out the effects.

I went to the Co-op grocery, found Grade B Maple Syrup on an April-long sale (confirmation that a covert-MC crowd is lurking), and got through the line without a checker hollering out about a Mastercleanser on register 2. And in the past 11 days, I mostly got away with the secret, except for ducking AP’s claim that I’m looking strangely good, and ducking out of a buffet line at a wedding (bad form, that: wedding cake’s important). But this is confessional week; and besides, I broke the fast this morning with an orange juice toasted to another’s coffee.

It’s been mostly uninteresting, interestingly. The MC fora online are full of insanity and trauma, which I guess happens when you go cold turkey on caffeine, meat, wheat, cheese and cigarettes all at once. And they’re full of glow, of the same excited souls 8 on, who see god in the form of a clean stool and a temporary freedom from their cravings and self-afflicting senses of hamburger-entitlement. Most people loose a ton of weight (I lost none), get tired (I did astanga and work as normal), and finish with incredible infusions of empowerment and vitality (um, whatever). Apart from those who are clearly using the MC as training wheels for an eating disorder, they’re completely inspiring.

In my case, it’s just been quiet. No trauma, no victory. But a holiday for the digestive system; a break from shopping and food preparation and asking myself if I’m hungry. Now that I’m edging back in to eating (orange juice today, tomorrow a little vegetable broth), I think I’ll reflect more on why this has been, and the ways in which I really did experience the fast as a ritual renewal. Lent for the semi-hindoo set.

While the quiet of the past 10 days was so nice, I expect this liminal time will be more intense and give me more content on which to reflect. The fast is easy: defined, simple, rigid. But leaving it peacefully, and understanding what the body has to say about it, and what she actually wants, might be hard.

Today, I mauled a bowl of warm steelcut oats with cinnamon and apples and walnuts, experiencing it in every way except for swallowing. Dear GAWD thank you for warm mushy cinnamon foods. And for life, and a body, and for things that grow, and for the workers who bring them. Om Shanti. Amen.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , spirituality

The Emotional Lives of Yogis? · 2 April 2007

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

Saturday VII · 25 March 2007

? Guns and Yoga, in the NYT. It does take a Burbank day in the life to bring the together phrases "namaste" and "lock and load." 

I was the only guy in the yoga class…. they know they had a rifle-eyed street panther in their midst? .... Like the legless, armless silhouette I shot at earlier that day, I had holes of self-loathing blasted out of me. My Corpse Pose must’ve looked eerily authentic…. All these thoughts whizzed through my head like tracer bullets as I lay there, in the evening gloom of the studio, with a dozen moms breathing mom-breaths around me. I floated out of my body. I hovered over Burbank. I was one with my target, and my target was bliss. Namaste. Lock and load. 

It's gross to get off on the idea of shooting anybody, there being a war on. But looking for meaning in Burbank, the author might have limited starting points. And he writes pretty good.

? NYT science article on the argument that morality’s rooted in our biology, and that four behaviors—empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking—are the basis of sociality. This evolutionary perspective is a bad bad threat to the last 200 years of social theory, which assumes that social life is a product of human creativity and institutions. I’m deeply bought into this legacy, but sometimes the evolutionary stuff is sexy. For example:

Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are….” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But… natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people… with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.
 

? Segment of This American Life, the  AV version. How does the moving image enhance this word-dependent narrative about… the moving image? Not enough to make me learn how to turn on my television. Or sit still for the rest of the show.

(Michael Leunig sounds like an old crabapple talking about television and relationship, but I have to admit it’s about that simple to me as well. No need for social theory on this one.)

? Smart review in the TLS of Mick Mann’s ethnic cleansing book, in which Mann argues that it is not African or Balkan nations but democratic countries that are responsible for “the most successful cleansing the world may have ever seen.” His examples: the US, which saw an 80% drop in its Native American population, and Australia, where 90% of Aborigenes died, in both cases mostly during the 1800s and early 1900s. No shit. This recollection suddenly puts these rich “white” nations’ liberal, missionary zeal in serious question.

? Am ambivalent about Susan Sontag, but not about Jenny Diski, who reviews a new Sontag collection and an Annie Liebowitz photo book in the LRB. The second half, on the photographs, is great.

A new S quotation:

I am often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonise over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’ Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue. For instance: ‘Be serious.’ By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

And an old one:

I like to feel dumb. It’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

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

Yoga is Dangerous. Part I. · 23 March 2007

I’ve felt bad about having nothing to say this week, apart from a couple of small-hearted posts from the sidelines—rather than the thick of—existence. MK suggests my brittleness relates to my nightstand companion Nicholas Mosely, who “who exists only to make a few failed writers feel superior, while boring the living shit out of the rest of us who are supposed to like him despite his lack of humor or prose sense or, frankly, any of the materials of good fiction other than intelligence, attentiveness, and erudition.”

Thank you, MK. I thought it was just the tiny pointsize making my brow furrow. My painful 18-year inculcation into the protestant ethic (a.k.a. "childhood") brought the mandate to finish every book I begin. (This develops character.) Whatever. As if we have time for that. Forlorn for some old friend with a giant heart, I had breakfast with Whitehead. God yes. It doesn’t have to be fiction to feel like it comes from the world-soul.

Anyway, my usual bit of owl-earmarked energy has been diverted this week to an email conversation with Janice Gates, author of this peacefully dangerous book, about her comments on the huge E-Sutra mailing list. We are talking about gender and authority in western yoga communities. We're ranging from:

? sexual energy in the classroom, to

? basic Psych 101 concepts like transference and projection (and why everybody should know them), to

? certain taboos on acknowledging men’s dominance, to

? finding a teacher who does the work of seeing her own conditioning and chooses equality rather than hierarchy-reproduction in subtle interactions and big life matters.

And more. It’s all rich and damn revolutionary. I’m challenged to open some of this up here, but I also don’t know that I have found the best tone of voice to use. It’s hard enough to look at/ listen to oneself in photographs or voice recordings, but this kind of reflection can destabilize our ideas about “reality” and threaten deep parts of our identities. I have so much regard and affection for my readers that the idea of making anyone uncomfortable makes me uncomfortable.

But this is what the practice of yoga (and, conveniently, sociology) IS. It is a philosophy of liberation, not an “I’m ok—You’re ok” self-help modality for accepting our limitations. Self-awareness is dangerous. Choosing and realizing new habits of being is hard.

So here. Get her book. If you linked to it above, did a voice in your ear argue that this looks a little trivial? If the subjects were luminaries of another gender, would the book be more serious?

Ok. Good answer. Let's read the book anyway.

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

Welcome the Tormentor-Sage · 5 March 2007

New wrench in the flow this morning. Unexpecting, I was instructed to stand on one leg with the foot of the other behind my head, press the palms together and look up. I long since went native on astanga yoga, so this doesn’t actually horrify me.

Still, that the posture’s called Durvasasana—for an ugly brahman blight and the worst houseguest in subcontinental history—is right unsettling. It’s like having your soccer coach name her secret strategy the “evil mother-in-law play” or “IRS audit play.”

Patthabi Jois’ first series of yoga postures is literally-named: pose to the east, to the west, head-to-knee, bound angle, upward angle, and so on. It is all science and supplication. In the second series, you play charades to make yourself into animals—heron, camel, firefly—then pass through a gate and make the sacred cow on the other side. The third turns out to be something between dirge and carnival ritual, a succession of tormentor-sages en route, it’s said, to the defying of gravity.

I’ve never been one to think of yoga postures as symbols—they don’t need to point beyond themselves to bear meaning. My position has been that there’s enough immediacy of being in Janu Sirsasana C that it’s a bit lame to reach beyond for an added poetry of meaning, as for example does Donna Farhi (2000:133): “Like the symbol of a spiral…, the spiritual journey is one in which the destination is reached when we return to the self…. These postures represent just such a return” (emphasis mine).

No, ma’am. Janu Sirsasana’s a gut-probing, hamstring-rending, toe-cranking surrender of the head to the leg. Let it be that. No need for theory. “Representation” and “symbolizing” create doubles, manufacturing extra culture where immediate experience should be sufficient.

Yet making nice with the extreme shapes in third every morning is re-shaping my drop-the-theory thing. I have to respect a posture named for an irascible god, and at the same time let it revive the poetry and the humor of what we do. For a while I’ve shrugged off my original motive to practice, which was a supersimple love for the immediate wholeness of experience in a Mysore room, rather than any prospective “yogic” inquiry into the nature of mind and being. But my origins may not have been so shallow: maybe I’m just new, but it’s hard to imagine getting any rewards from Durvasa other than (as he finally did for Krishna and Rukmini when he concluded his torturous visit) a release. 

Moments in this series can be bizarre, aggressive, and poetically unbeautiful. These postures need not point outside themselves to some “symbol.” However, inviting the history, the characters, and the stories in to the practice brings an awesome, particular texture.

This makes me think that when yoga can be as much about 1) intense inhabitation of the present moment as an end in itself as it is about 2) devotion to a progressing method-path-inquiry, then there’s not such a need to parse it between theory versus practice, or science versus art.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , 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

Body Sociology · 31 January 2007

This morning between mysore practice and the rest of my life, I sat in and observed a good old vinyasa yoga class led by a young teacher—someone whose gift for setting the tone of a room is no small thing. It’s good education to watch 90 minutes of ineffability, I reason. (Like watching those few remaining profs who learned to teach when lectures were considered art, before intellectuals rationalized away their gentility and became instead professionals and experts.)

This teacher doesn’t even know that his vibe is all art and easiness and cool—I suppose since he doesn’t know what it’s like not to be around himself. It’s refreshing when you don’t have to surf the gap between a teacher’s (or anyone’s) manufactured/intended way of being and the vibe they actually give off to a room. (The first time I watched him teach, I lost mental track of part of it because I kept participating… slipping into a shallow meditation. Contrary to a meditator’s project of guiding awareness away from thinking, I struggled to stay analytical.) 

Four late arrivals to the class—visitors from New York—turned out to be dancers from the Stephen Petronio Company. (Just the other day, someone bought me tickets to their very show!)

They were startling humans, in their consciously artful movement, and their subtler, less intentional ways of occupying space. The latter, a kind of somatic idiolect they shared in common, was probably just an artifact of their intense company life. (Be a while with people who hold, and express, themselves a certain way, and your movement will come into similar shapes and rhythms.) 

We had an astanga moment in class, when they requested demonstration of transitional motions for picking up your body on your hands and swinging it up and behind to a handstand or pushup. Strangely, the dancers, who must be beyond the beyond in what bodies will do, loved this and found it mystifying. One said: “Now can you please articulate that???” (With the body, yes; with language, not so well.) 

Alhough a motion I consider natural is bizarre to them, I feel like there’s an increasing affinity between what I do and what they—as distinctly “modern” dancers—do. (Yoga’s not dance. This is not confusing.)

In the past, dancers have done pilates, weights and god knows what outside of rehearsal in order to sharpen themselves. But to fill in the gaps, all these these dancing women do is go to flow class. That's it. I know nothing about dance (they told me this means I’ll be their favorite kind of audience… apparently their work is best appreciated on an unrefined palate? Or without expectations? ). But, in my ignorance of the art, I wonder if choreographers will draw more for vinyasa bodies than for ballet bodies in the future. Moreover, as everybody's modern body hexis takes shape, how much will the stereotypes of vinyasa movement move seep in to convention? 

We already know about the lead-with-the-chest thing, dear god. I can see a dancers’ epidemic of snapped anterior intercostals and crazy cervical curvatures, and the rest of us with chests so chronically “open hearted” that we nearly go chipping our shoulderblades on one another. More happily, whereas ballet needs pilates to perfect forms like the Charlie chaplin foot position, which can set my whole sacrum on edge, if Iyengar stardards travel far enough that stance will become as rare as the I-can’t-breathe abdomen-suck of the tight ass Reagan years (for which step aerobics was the perfect expression).

I’m not sure what it will take to float our heads back over our shoulders, from the neck-punishing cro-magnon thrust that the PC has wrought and that I'm stuck in at this second. Apple "Inc." should spend some time on that one.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body

Prolegomena to any future manifesto · 25 January 2007

I. Matthew K says he didn’t see this coming. Me neither. I’m blogging because slow deductive academia is giving me a cramp and because Charles J told me to do it while I while I was entering a suggestion-receptive state. (That is, in the 15 minute brain-wave stretch we learn to do on ourselves before astanga practice.) 

II. ANYWAY, more later on faith in academia and the hooey of hermetic seals, mentioned earlier. The Dawkins posse have rallied at the edges this year in the most brilliant way. It’s a belief-purge!! I love that they’re screaming at us to get serious, root out superstition, and take verificationism to the limit. And: they are delusional. But that’s another day. I still take their point that skizoid belief systems are common and problematic.

III. Attempts at cleverness after yoga practice:            

A----So, what kind of sociologist are you?

B----((Lost for words))

A----That is… are you a Durkheimean, or a Marxist?          

B----(((Mental images of fuzzy Marx peering over my shoulder))) A nondualist! 

Yeah. It’s just as easy to keep the practice in an airtight container. “Me time” for achievers. But what when it eventually turns fom a consolation for daily life into its baseline? Then you might want the easy way out – cultivating alienation from the day job, or quitting it, because you can’t feel “authentic” doing it anymore.  Whatever.

IV. There’s also the possibility of pushing back into intellectual life, and the empiricist limits its placed around mind, consciousness, morality and evolution. The edgy ones are doing that in a way that’s loaded to shoot up kind of a lot of previously serviceable theory—looking at things like evolving value systems, the social nature of selfhood, and…mind. This is the time for revolutions in everybody’s working assumptions on the nature of consciousness and self, for practitioners of both inner and outerworldly research. Daniel Kahneman gets it. The Dalai Lama gets it. So do you, friends, if you’ll suspend the hipsterism with me for a second. 

Science is more a disposition than a methodology.  “Research,” as much as it’s inspired by speculation and intuition, is the bracketing of (1) faith and of (2) authority.  Research is investigating, first hand albeit aided and undergirded by traditions, what is the case. Do you really want to leave that work, in any realm, to somebody else? 

So before you yell at me to please go back to talking about the nature of American Empire, class divisions and social boundaries, and the subversiveness of the journalism profession, let me say that I’m doing all that while having bought in to the woo woo. Which, at its best, has a way of burning off the bullshit, because if we’re just reliving dead inquiries (while consuming the same culture over and over), there are simply more important, revolutionary, inquiries to join. 

So, what about: consciousness (yours and, um, transpersonal); evolving value systems; the proposition that everything is connected; the social nature of self; the push and pull of experimental faith and, its near-enemy, self-deception (?). 

If I can make a leap across the lacuna the rest of this journal seeks to fill in, all this is why I’m thinking about... consumerism. I submit that consumerism, a pervasive habit of being now, is a mode self expression through affectation of cultural objects, contributing to both self-commodification and group-creation with others of like taste. With consuming being so dear to self-creation, it’s not shocking to see some moves to make it “ethical." To feel better about ourselves when the label says sweatshop free. Yet... maybe, for all its great logistical limits and its self-congratulation, this new, aestheticized social value forges new connections between humans, and actually changes not only our minds but our future. What's the relationship of social networks and personal identity/value, and the implications of such a relationship for, well, social structure?

On which more later. For now, let me note that for the love of Karl, changes in consciousness are, oddly, a subject I’m not quite welcome to discuss up in the tower when we sit around in our empiricist caps. That’s ok, because for the moment I’d rather work some thoughts out here, in everyday language that doesn’t have to wait four years to get published on some journal that 30 people will read, sitting defensively at their desks.

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