Make your own psychotherapist · 9 July 2010

Or, Lucy and the Eye with Rhinestones.

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

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

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

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

                                          FLYER:

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

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

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

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

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

            HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN PSYCHOTHERAPIST:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now phase two is easy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When 50 minutes are finished, stop.

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Capsules · 27 June 2010

Hello, basement. The twitter stream for “tornado Ann Arbor” is pissed, with half the town sitting at the bottom of our basement steps tapping smartphones on a sweltering weekend afternoon. It’s the third alarm this month. Feels like the local tornado scout has an itchy siren finger.

This is a weird way to live: always on the edge of spontaneous retreat to the basement—a 10 x 20 foot dirt cell lit by four naked bulbs. I always fancied the idea of prison –an opportunity to simplify and focus, make something out of nothing. Just pushups and poetry, becoming a number. But somehow, without a place to pee and given my alternate plan (to skate all the way to Ypsilanti on the smooth curving path that banks the Huron), the practice of radical acceptance got gummed up. Stupid tornado.

Fussiness. Noun. A habit of foraging for negative stimuli. A closing of the gap between stimulus and response. Cultivated reactivity.

I’ve actually been fussy since Friday. But, you know, I have a lot of atmospheric and astral justifications for this attitude. I’m currently inside a whole Russian Doll of bad mood excuse capsules: high pressure storm system, full moon, eclipse, grand cross.

Funny how one must become increasingly gullible—or sensitive?—to attribute causal power to each successive layer of the surroundings. Personally, my subscrption stops at the moon. From barometer to telescope, I’ll allow that I’m affected by storm systems and—recent years—by lunar cycles. But come on. My theory of action-at-a-distance stops at eclipses and downright scoffs at the planet Mars.

Eclipses and Mars do things insofar as we organize culture so that they do things. I’m not really playing those meaning games even though you could use my experience (or any other) to confirm them. Sorry. Positivist language games are circular like that.

Anyway. When you click with someone, it’s because the two of you share a metaphysical envelope. The beauty is that this epimestological comraderie is something you just sense--it’s all gut, no analysis. People’s deep structures sound each other out though jokes and smalltalk, movements of the face and body, clothes and rhythm.

The secret code I scan for is a light cynicism filtered through mystic love and expressed in multiple disciplines with impeccable grammar. Major shifts in my own identity have to do with a devaluing of this secret code—a recognition that even those few who have it are not more “my people” than the “others.” The erstwhile others being, for example, new age hippies (whose metaphysical envelope is huge, rotted-out, and nearly threadbare—a bum’s blanket) and positivists (whose envelope is barely there, like skin-colored lingerie).

And yet, even though I see through my own secret code, there are about five people who put me at ease in this special way, because they occupy the exact same credulity-space that I do. What’s WEIRD is that these are the only people who enjoy it when I get pissed off. My hostile self amuses them and is my best chance for earning their love. I don’t know why… maybe because my irratibility affirms that the envelope still has an edge. They like that we can share one shelter… or one cell.

Where am I going with this? I dunno. Fussiness, layers of belief, language games, being stuck in the basement waiting for the devil’s index finger to pass over the tops of our trees.

Here’s why I’m seeing the envelopes. It’s the psychoanalysis.

Therapy doesn’t work unless you background its assumptions—if only for that hour on the couch. For very good reason, when I was younger I violently hated those assumptions and the labels they rendered. But now that I’ve provisionally, curiously accepted this language game, I’m finding therapy to be one of the most revealing, difficult processes to undergo. I really want to write about it: both the method and the things it reveals are fascinating. And because the central dynamic is the uncovering of major patterns hidden in plain sight, the process is self-softening and sometimes outright funny. Insofar as I can open up to it, therapy appeals to my basic aesthetic: a fascination with that which is hidden, with the highest reverence for that which is explicitly left implicit. (Such as the values and the faith and the sense of unity across individuality that would make this work worthwhile in the first place….)

I also want to write about therapy because we are all so crazy. In particular, the more we rely on the yoga on to tranquilize ourselves, the more we get locked in our projections. The further we get from society and work and family life, the less feedback we get. But vrittis are different from samskaras. Just because we can calm the former doesn’t mean the latter release… in fact, in a way I feel that the patterns in my psyche have solidified because I spend so much time free from them when my mind is quiet. It’s kind of a setup for what they call spiritual bypassing.

The problem with writing about therapy is that it feels like a violation of my relationship with the therapist, Owl Whisperer. This person is really gifted, setting such a tone of spontaneity and non-reactivity that my talking stops its story-telling and just opens up. The usual irritations of being prompted and seen are softened because Owl Whisperer is mostly androgynous, ageless, disinterested but extremely attentive, and very, very well practiced. We take tangents with confidence that consistency is a limitation, push as often as possible with things I almost can’t bear to hear, and get quiet when we hit an air pocket.

How can someone be direct, even confrontational, and merciless on BS while at the same time holding a space of uncompromising acceptance, compassion and support? This is the kind of results-driven flow that makes sense to a yoga practitioner, but it’s not the same as the yoga. At all. Really, these language games have almost nothing in common because they address vastly different aspects of a human. (Admittedly, though, it kind of doesn't matter that their causal envelopes don't overlap.) The only way to hybridize them, to my eyes, is to apply both processes to the same subject and see how she makes practical use of the mix.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: arbitrage , having a body , integration , science

Fuel · 28 May 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Poem problems · 2 May 2010

Last Friday I drank some wine and took the iPod to the arboretum. Malbec and Morrissey: a florid pairing. Overstated. Lewd. Attention-needy. I used them to dull my senses—keep the birdsongs out of my ears and make the mind spacey enough that I wouldn’t get all emotional about the lilt of the magnolia petals and the little sprouting dogwood flowers. Anything to stem the desire to talk about plants in figurative language. (Images of straight jackets. Hip ones, that Morrisey would approve.)

Aesthetically speaking, a part of me despises American transcendentalism, and nature writing, and meditations on the seasons. And I’m supposed to feel all displaced here—that’s been the expectation. But it’s getting so I need little escape devices to stay cool—intravenous infusions of outsider attitude. I’m reminded of the mantras I used to recite when I’d get too caught up in the lifeworlds of my ethnographic fieldwork, when I’ start to go native: participant observation, participant observation, participant observation.

Nevertheless… absorption is happening. For all it is not, Michigan wins. Uncertainty and alienation have gotten so boring that there’s nothing left to do but allow contentment to happen as a kind of natural state—and not just in a honeymoonish way, but in a sane one.

Saturday, eight days from my last walk in the Arb, the leaves were large enough that they change the whole look and feel of the air. It rained hard—summer rain—as a crowd the size of the whole damn town packed in to the stadium for commencement, and the Editor and I stood on the back porch in our bath robes and bare feet. He mentioned our summers in DC, and our bodies remembered that heavy green, mulchy musk. Funny to be in a place where the air is both heavy and fresh (three is no atmosphere in Southern California, in a way that keeps moods light and shallow).

A huge robin hopped through the mint leaves in the yard, chasing a squirrel, and then I went to the farmers’ market, where the destruction was its worst. Flower explosions, barricades of artisanal cuteness, psy-ops in the form of free-sampled tender greens and smiles from old ladies with thick worker-hands. They’d pry your mouth open with those hands if you got too close; force-feed you some scones. In the melee, a military helicopter swooped over, and instead of ducking for cover, the natives threw up their hands and cheered it. Obama en route to the hippodrome.

Anyway, I have found that my contingent sense of sanity needs time-containers even more than it needs grounding in some immediate place. I’d be lost without practice, and probably without the digital devices I use to create routine. For now, I’ve found a few quiet, long-practicing friends. We conspire a couple of times a week, and the other four I practice in my shala at home.

Other important rhythms, new ones, include: sitting, cycling, and pooping.

Meditation every morning. Thirty minutes. Not jhana practice (the happy absorption stuff that I’ve been doing since July) but straightforward Vipassana – intense, fast-paced Shinzenian noting. I’ll do it until the next retreat, and then evaluate. So far, three weeks in to the change, there is a new sense of confidence and stability. I have no idea why the most destabilizing, self-annihilating practice would generate such joy and ease—and this might change tomorrow. But for now, it feels like deconstructing my subjectivity is mellowing out my passionate search or meaning in the world. Who knew that would feed good?

Cycling. I went to spin class with Tim, and loved the way it made my heart work and generated new closeness with L, who is sitting out this summer’s bike racing season for a course of chemo. Somehow I’ve found myself back on the bikes, riding hard two or three times a week, connecting with these fierce athletes who happen to be gen-x and female. What an alluring, powerful generation (or, rather, market segment): hardworking, clear-minded, independent women with extremely refined skills in some obscure sport, with lives of their own, without the buy-in to the messages about consumption, traditional nuclear-family images of success, or the desperation to marry some poor sucker. Explicitly not waiting for someone to come take care of them. They’re different from the “You go, girl!” world of girlfriend groups who have problems with men, do lunch, and tell each other they’re beautiful. Rather, the biking women have men as well as women among their best friends, write books, and date who they want: it’s like The Golden Notebook after a few generations of good therapy. Their discipline and openness kicks my ass, too: my practice has emphasized receptivity and grace in a way that makes me quiet in their presence. These women are savage, sharp and lovely. Full of integrity. They need a better meaning-maker than Nike—the brand of sweatshop labor and sexually creepy heroes. I wonder what would speak to their spirits.

I don’t know. But about pooping. We are talking three times a day. Every day. It’s so good that all of a sudden I’m kind of interested in cultivating radical gut efficiency.

It’s true that organ cleansing can be a neurotic activity used to advance eating disorders, and that at times it may be some kind of attack one’s feelings of impurity and guilt. I will grant that the body works best if you just eat and drink in moderation, and listen to your environment. But after months of dosas and chai, and after a few enthusiastic recommendations, I did send away to Venice for Dr. Schulze’s miracle bowel cleanse.

I read his instructional booklet, in which he grouses about all the “trendy” cleanses out there (trendy cleanses? talk about a cool kids complex), asks himself a string of insane, ill-punctuated rhetorical questions, and brags that his cleans is much more “hardcore” than all the others, which may not get you anything more “than a few good farts.”

Wary of doing anything “hardcore in the pooping realm, I took half the herb dosage he recommended, and stayed on the cleanse for half as long. There was some annoying heaviness in the gut from ingesting dirt and weeds, but three weeks later I’ve settled in to new, responsive digestion. Now tell me, can your sphincter shift on the fly? Can you poo at will within 30 minutes of each meal? Ok… maybe this is not a good marketing tack.

The herbal approach to bowel cleansing is top-down, in contrast to the bottom-up method, which is rather… mechanical. I’ve participated in the device-driven method, thanks to an LA client who gifted me with a course of treatment at a Beverly Hills colonic salon (yes, salon), right on Rodeo Drive. It’s fine, but seems more a spot treatment than an overall wellness thing. What I’m impressed by here is the assimilative-evacuative rhythm that is possible. The karmic symmetry of letting go as often as you take in, the direct connection of what is eaten with what is wasted. Ah! There’s so much to say about it, really. I need to cut myself off. Talk about unwanted poetry!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [28]
Categories: having a body , integration

Vortices of Mysore, Birds of Mysore · 13 March 2010

It’s no time for public speaking. I’ve been heatwise sleep-deprived, high-viscosity twisted, surrounded by subtly tripping nadi shodanites, and focused so deep in the breath rhythm that the breath itself has begun to disintegrate.

Pretty good for a so-called rabbit hole. But when it comes to speaking, people keep inspiring me so much in a way that makes me want to write a bit, so maybe some free-association here. That’s the way table conversation (or, best-case scenario—at Jannakes, Three Sisters or Sandhya’s—floor conversation) goes in Mysore, after all. I’ll just see what comes up for a few paragraphs now.

That reminds me. Saffron lassi today at Three Sisters. Not really a lassi. More like a soft frozen waylay on the brutally steamy journey to nirvana. A direct path teaching: why do all your silly practice when you—or at least your saffron lassi—are always already enlightened? She brought it to me in a bowl with two spoons and it cost a whopping two dollars and sixty-four cents. Watch me fly my sorry old duck on that nectar, dear god. Could happen.

Someone—an otherwise hyper-critical Brit—just said: “Subtler shades of India (and one) come out, don't they? Mmmmm rather than woo-hoo.” But someone else—a south European old-timer—said: “A third month in India should be banned. The third month is when you start to believe this is real. We should be forced to go home after two.”

So, people. The going rate for fast-track mutual resonance is one itinerant ashtangi per hundred. Not actually very high. But: Hello, we met today, and now you have my number. Behavior reserved for professional conferences, SXSW, rush week, and Mysore March. There’s a rhythm to this too: Ann Arbor’s atomized coffee shop efficiency and its single family dwellings adumbrate a quiet cycle coming. So for now I’m slacking not only on sleep but on the huge amount of alone time I usually think I need.

A few weeks ago, first met someone who’s in to gutsy real estate investments that ground a life on the road, intelligent backbends, and power spots. Like, vortices. Does Mysore have a vortex? This could explain the Southern Star lawn, the coconut stand, the outer lobby of the shala at six on a weekday morning? Naaaah. A certain cave up Chamundi Hill yes – that outcropping is the Seventh Most Holy Hill in Southern India, after all. (The official signage is specific!) Still, we may as well install a webcam in the other aforementioned locations.

Thursday at the pool, I was approached by people who have just arrived here from New York, Wisconsin, Florida and… Ann Arbor. People so sweet that I was left kind of euphoric and charmed the whole day, and that’s why I figured I may as well blog this trip out. Hey American Mid West!! So weird to learn that you are out there and so open and curious. We will make things happen there in tornado country.

But admittedly It gives me the chills to meet without warning a person who reads here. So much of the unconscious leaks in to an online identity—all this relational and self-conceptual stuff the writer can’t even see but which is painfully obvious to certain others. I pack (0v0) with shadows, use it to work out difficult questions and voice irritations A is not clear enough to discuss in person.

So when I meet some person who reads, the first impulse is to run away. Or, more accurately, offer him or her the opportunity to run away. It’s shiverish. Uncanny. You know things about me that I don’t know. The way your yoga teacher knows things about you.

Is this phase of practice pushing back more of the veil, between the conscious and the unconscious? Yes, it feels so. I’m using fewer physical postures and way slower breath—making these tools go further and last longer because I want to stay in that room as long as possible. I’m losing the breath at times, but not the way a beginning meditator runs off after fantasy and has to return to the concentration practice again and again. Rather, if the breath mediates between gross and subtle, it feels just as likely now that I’ll get lost not in the former but in the latter. Sounds like a distraction, but maybe not. It feels like an exploration made possible by the energy and focus of the intense nerve-cleansing others who surround me. And by the vortex of that room.

Hmmm... who knows. I feel like I need to be near water as often as possible to keep my dreamlife deep and interesting (I know this makes no sense – but does any of this post make sense?). So it’s time now to take the scooter to the lake with a couple of Portuguese. There is a new kind of bird there these past weeks—irridescent purple and blue. Huge feet that balance on marsh grasses, so they actually walk on water. I marveled over the white mini-pterodactyls when they arrived in February. Ancient creatures. But the new arrivals look like birds of the future. No wonder they fly in the same time as the ashtangis from middle America and southern Europe.

Oh yeah, the scooter. Leave it to a child of the american West to equate wheels with freedom, but really I just needed to get back on the horse, in the shape of the most perfect and beautiful little red bike in Gokulam. My first riding incident took place a month ago, when my first yoga teacher lent me her Activa and I ran it straight in to a table of dining friends. You know that thing that happens when you confuse the accelerator with the brake? I don’t have the pontillist Sedarisian malice it would take to do the story justice, but there are now a couple of flickr photos of the aftermath. My first teacher –and now scooter teacher—was the only one in the group to shrug it off and tell me I’d figure it out soon enough. So when I extended the ticket I figured it was time.

The perfect little machine costs $9 and one or two mini humiliations a week. If you pro-rate postures by week, karandava’s about the same. An owl-duck would be a good mutation. We’ll see what evolves.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , integration

Mandala manduka · 15 January 2010

There is a breeze this afternoon, and high clouds. Kids chasing their dog in the park, men turning off the engines of their motorbikes to coast the last blocks down the Gokulam hills to their homes. Yesterday was the new year, and today the threshholds are still painted in the bright mandala tessellations the women made yesterday morning – using the colored chalk you always see in photos of Devaraj market. The lazy velvet cows, too, are still covered in dye, all their white spots made yellow. This afternoon I encountered a brown one, whose coat was too dark to color, but whose horns—two little crescent moons curved to point at each other in front of his eyes—had been painted celestine blue.

It’s also the day of the solar eclipse – something I’ve heard both locals and ashtangis use as an excuse for strange behavior—as well as the moon. I’m a little stunned to realize it’s the new moon—that a certain cycle is over. The last new moon I spent on the far end of the west. Slept in, caught a vinyasa flow class in Venice, took a walk along the Pacific, and went to my favorite raw food restaurant for a burger made of marinated vegetables pressed between slabs of dried onion. Packed up the car to leave the next morning for Ashtanga Across America, an eastbound roadtrip of nine states and nearly 3,000 miles, depositing us—my brother and me—finally in the frozen north. Then settling in to Michigan, holidays, work. Then a day in Paris, followed by three spacey, joyous days in Mysore – time I’d describe as blessed if that were a word I could use.

William Gibson says that souls get left behind a while, and take their own time to re-integrate with bodies after a long trip. I’d say my soul was still far out west, making its way east, if soul were a word I could use.

This morning in bed, I read a heterodox article in a neuroscience journal, arguing that consciousness arises not only from the brain but also from culture and one’s environment. Then the first pages of The Razor’s Edge, Maugham arguing in 1944 that environment largely determined character.

Not sure where that leaves me, for the moment. I have not slept much at all this week– am still flighty, disjointed, and a bit lost. I may have re-subscribed to the local gossip feed by way of adding the coconut stand and certain cafés to my ambit, but still feel out of touch with the surroundings. Maybe some good nights’ sleep and more long walks will do it.

Did a long, slow practice this morning in my apartment – more an auto-bodywork session than anything outwardly resembling yoga. My body is both open and very achey. This has never happened before; I thought the two conditions were not supposed to coincide. Like stagflation. From the outside, everything is flowing. But as I practice, it feels like the stiffest day ever. Since the bend is already there, I’m not sure what to do to disperse the ache. Maybe nothing. Maybe let it ache. It is, at least, interesting to remember in body the days when I felt like this most of the time.

Took a walk this morning, too, down unfamiliar back streets of Gokulam, up and down its hills, out to the edges of town. Two consecutive days off mean the ashtanga crew all wash their mats and hang them, alongside a towel, out windows and over balconies. Who know such-and-such a building had a student apartment upstairs? And is that tiny place a residence?  Purple or blue mats, and rugs in every color, hanging out like flags to announce expatriate residence and yogi leisure. Most buildings in the neighborhood boast either a mandala or a collection of mats, but a few on our street have both – a mandala in the street and a manduka flying from the apartment above.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: astanga yoga , integration

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Signs of Bikram Yoga Dependency · 31 December 2009

-You start to think of your morning ashtanga programme as your “cooling” practice.

-You see idiosyncracies in the script—exhortations to lock out the knee so hard it bends backwards, specifications of an upturned palm with “Imagine the hand is full of money, so much money,” grammatical errors such as “pull more harder” and the dropping of articles—as carrying vital historical context. (Phase two: the idiosyncracies point to hidden meanings. They are esoteric.)

-You believe the teacher when she says that the postures should only be done in correct order if one is to receive all of the health benefits.

-Working your edge starts to mean seeing how big a lunch you can eat and still hit the 6:30 class without throwing up.

-You experience feelings of great tenderness toward first-timers, hoping they will be welcomed with the same words the desk clerk used to greet you on day one: Welcome to the torture chamber of love.

-You get increasingly excited about new ways to get very fucking cold: leaving the mat in the car so it’s half frozen when you roll it out in the room, eating snow after practice, freezing your water bottle. (There’s luxury in such contrast. But don’t worry: otherwise Bikram torture is bhoga-free.)

-The smell stops bothering you. Really.

-Other people dripping sweat on your mat begins to feel like friendly energy-exchange.

-You experience Stockholm syndrome-like trust and comraderie feelings toward teachers, even though they speak in monologue, don’t touch you, display no facial expressions, and say the same thing over and over and over like broken 1980s pull-toys.

-A bikini seems like a totally normal thing to wear for yoga. In fact…

-You devise a SYSTEM. The SYSTEM codifies the minimal number of strokes of the snow shovel, layers of clothing, and runs of the washing machine required to get your fix every day.  You become a sleek yoga machine, slithering unencumbered and without advance planning through the freezing night and the piles of snow. In to for your fix and out again as if this all makes some kind of sense. Once this level of rationalization sets in, the behavior is likely to continue unless there is an intervention.

:::::::: If symptoms manifest swiftly and intensely, residential care in an approved institution may be required. Optimally, the subject shall be sent directly to the KPJAY Institute of Mysore, India, and attended to by Saraswathi and Sharath, the greatest physicians in the land. A minimum stay of two months is strongly recommended.::::::::

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [20]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , integration

Locals · 28 December 2009

Went out Saturday night with four junior professors—good looking, well dressed and profusely published. I like Humanities people: they’re well read and spoken, hyper-reflective, pleasantly cynical, and know how to choose books and order wine.

Funny – I guess if interpretation is your stock in trade, you’re likely to take your own emotions hyper seriously. Interpretation is just moodiness with good syntax, so woes are raw material. Topics of conversation last night, over a startlingly good dinner at EvE (OvO’s A2HQ) and three bottles of red, included: treatments for seasonal affective disorder, uncontrollable addictions to Zappos.com, how the last push of finishing the dissertation turned them in to monsters, getting psychoanalyzed, adding Pema Chodron to the nightstand along with one’s preferred great literature, the importance of keeping an apartment in Chicago or New York, how there is nobody to have sex with in Ann Arbor. Dark! But also: absolutely real problems.

My favorite is a poet and former Silicon Valley programmer who does self-deprecation with such methodical lightness it’s like he’s crocheting conversation. He makes poems by randomly reconstituting the sections of distress line phonecalls that his DVR software can’t recognize. And also J, Sartre as Gen X-er, a beautifully spoken professor whose expansive catalogue of the reasons academics are more miserable than civilians is nearly complete, based on experience. I suspect he’s taken up smoking just so he can stand outdoors and freeze, his thin, uninsulated frame cutting sharp and tragically fashionable against the 14-hour night. The rest of us are sexless downy puffballs, but J is fighting the good fight in the name of New York City, Brooks Brothers and the MLA. Having sold out immediately for puffiness, I hope his REI resistance is still holding steady when I return from India in March.

Woke up with a light hangover and the feeling in my belly of a fine, rich dinner that hadn’t even begun until 9. Excellent. The night-before preparations for my first Bikram class were in place. Doesn’t seem right to go in to that atmosphere without something potent to burn off. I’ve been canvassing Ann Arbor yoga, just to get a sense of what’s here and in hopes of meeting one or two new kindred spirits. Also, I know that if I start hermitlike here, I may dig in my heels and self-isolate, imagining my practice to be all precious and inviolate. Not that everybody would do this—I’ve just seen myself reflected in those who do. For me, there’s a sneaky depression that comes with that kind self isolation—once it arrives, it’s so subtle I can’t detect it—and it’s this that I especially care to preempt. Once I feel more grounded here, doing only self practice will make more sense.

The carpet at the Bikram studio smelled sweet like the rotting trash in a tropical country’s dump, and the heat cooked me to the bones. This is what I have taken for granted: temperatures and humidity high enough to induce decay and warm my fast-twitch, flightly little core. No wonder new practitioners feel cleansed: the heat does a lot of work on the body as one makes lightly strenuous, very safe shapes. I have been looking for an good sauna in town, but this is a sauna in which I get to do stretches! A nice resource. Afterwards, I soldiered back out in to the cold, my core so superheated and skin so full of moisture that 20 minutes later I was walking naked on the icy wood floor at home, without even a shiver.

Do you know what it’s like when your organs get cold and can’t warm up for weeks? Not if you’re a pitta. Not if you live in California. I was so dry and cold to the core that I didn’t drip a drop of sweat until we got well in to the floor series. Even now, re-chilled, I see that a layer of dread has been stripped away—the dread that began the month in 1998 I spent sleeping in snow caves and frost-biting the right toes. All week, those toes have tended to go deathly white, even when wrapped in layers of wool. The dread is that I’ll never really be warm again. I could have cured it at the YMCA sauna two blocks from our house, but Bikram got me first. Thank you for your brass balls and the fortitude to bring them to Ann Arbor, Mr. Choudry. Somehow they have fortified me too.

Bikram is wonderfully hot, but I also appreciate its democracy and impersonality. Every age and body type in the room—very insipring; and they don’t even say on the schedule who is teaching each class because it’s not supposed to matter. Everyday practitioners of all ages hang out before and after class in tiny pieces of clothing – no shame, but also no pride. Nobody is sculpted or tanned, anyway. And maybe after all that mirror-staring, having a body isn’t quite as big of a deal. I think of ashtanga as a strong container, but—with the damn mirrors, and the goddamn heat, and the talking so incessant you often want to scream—Bikram is even stronger. No escape in that room.

The hot yoga doesn’t light up most of the physical and mental wires that ashtanga engages. It’s a gross level practice, in that sense. The work isn’t deep enough to wring out the internal organs; and the “dialogue” keeps me from dropping in below a certain blip-rate mentally. But… nobody said it was a particularly contemplative practice, or a transformative one. Most people seem to do it because it’s an awesome de-tox, as compared to most ashtangis, who—if they become lifers—usually stay with the practice to cultivate equanimity. Bikram is a hilarious mirror… for ashtanga and all the other yogas. Nobody could mistake this for being a woo-woo spiritual zone; and there is no space for divas or superheroes.

So... there is this area of my headspace that seems to be reserved for locals. Suddenly these—J the brilliant, tragic Zappos maven, Amanda the intriguingly monotonous reciter of the Bikram script—are the characters populating it. I hope they remain so amusing and easy to be with. Likely more kindred community will arrive eventually, but who knows. Disconsolate academics and Bikram junkies aren’t really so strange.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: integration

Gone · 14 December 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception

Sloe Gin Vritti · 5 December 2009

Separation from god, separation from Los Angeles. Same difference.

I’ve been looking at the pithy definitions of depression. Spinoza called it a recognition of the ego’s loss of power. Most of the mystics after him called it alienation from the divine. Your shrink calls it a treatable chemical malfunction. Your teacher says it's an opportunity for personal damn development. For me it’s so mechanical and such a mind-altering substance that, after two weeks, I’m done denying it.

I suspect the low-grade migraine is some kind of reaction to the way I’ve been deleting lesser indicators from my organism. Humid sinuses, heavy chest, repeating thoughts of very bad things, desire to eat carbs, sleepiness: scram. We don’t serve your type around here. But then, I actually had to throw up yesterday, in the middle of the primary series. Apparently sadness wants suffrage: it will rise up to make my manic operating system recognize it.

Why can’t I just deconstruct this inefficient emotion? Isn’t emotion fleeting – gone the moment you try to pin it down? I don’t know. This is different. It keeps hanging around, and is all mixed up with despairing stories and ways of thinking.

I wonder if I may as well capitulate to a full experience of sadness. The spring of my senior year in high school, right before I left rural Montana never to be the same again, I started going down to the basement every day at 3:30 and sleeping until 7:00 the next morning. I said I felt fine, but a prescription (which I never took) was written. Maybe the impending separation from home really did bother me.

So, I’m sad. The giveaway is that my sinuses are all—how to put it—humid. Weeks of a kind of high pressure storm system in the head and chest. Threatening rain, never delivering. I don’t really want to stand up straight. At home, the little kittens won’t leave me alone. One is purring vigorously in to my chest right now, and the other is actually curled up on the pile of exams at my feet. They probably know things science does not, about distress phermones and cuddle interventions.

So that’s the most obvious physical stuff. I’m also bizarrely attuned to the lachrymose. I catch myself zoning out in search mode, scanning experience for reasons to feel sad.

The first place I rest is on is the person in my life who has died, the fact that everyone I love will die, and the relationships with the living that I’ve fucked up. Separation! This is sadness. What about those four avatars—the stalker, the shit-stirrer, the bully and the universal hater—I’ve blocked from this space in the last three years? What usually seems good damn sense resurfaces as tragedy and personal failing.

So I keep all that separation in the back of my awareness, perhaps because it makes sense of the sadness and gives it a place to rest and reproduce itself. These sad thoughts are very difficult to disentangle from the heaviness in the body; and I don't know which comes first.

More consciously, I get in to this loop of punch-drunk despair about the nature of humanity. Damn if we’re not all selfish jerks. Ninety five per cent of the people I know are uncommonly compassionate, in to service and good books and being kind to their parents. But there are a very few among those I care for very much, and give to however I can, who at the same time genuinely don’t give a shit about me. Naturally, I only give a shit about their not giving a shit when I’m sad. I start suspecting that all humans are just free agents, sucking each other’s energy, empty of care, driving madly forward on the twin engines of superiority and neediness. I think about mean girls, and the venom that comes up there; and compassionless boys who view everyone as a tool. How can the people who keep me close because they need me not be here now? Are they all Dick Cheney? Why do I love Dick Cheney? I should just hide with the kittens.

It’s actually funny. Sadness is a whole channel of thought and feeling, memories, fantasies: the separation channel. Now that I’m finally willing to admit I’m sad, and that this isn’t just some fast little vritti that’s gone the second I touch it, I can sort of reason myself out of the more self-indulgent aspects of despair—the pathos I’ve been circulating around the back of my mind.

Quieting down that frequency does take the edge off the sadness, but… it’s still sad now. Separation is really painful. Loss of relationship, loss of intimacy with an environment and rhythms and wonderful people that are my home. Writing that, a tremor starts at the tip of my nose and rushes right up in to the tear ducts, down over the cheeks and in to the shoulders and chest. You know? The whole face wants to fall. And the kitten just stirred, turned the bubbles back on, and pressed her little heart in to my belly. We’ll see how long it feels this way. And if leaving my second home will be anything like leaving the first, which turned in to something unimaginably good.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [28]
Categories: having a body , integration , self-deception

Epicureans & One-Technique Freaks · 23 November 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , integration

Feedback · 8 November 2009

Where are the feedback loops? Relationship…. It is all relationship.

The system that talks back to me most isn’t the muscular—that’s stretched and strengthened in to silence for now; and it’s not the bones—those haven’t begun to deteriorate yet. The breath says a lot, as does the attraction/revulsion index; but these days the talkative loop is the immune system. She’s been working full time, doing it on at most six hours’ sleep, asking for little but adequate hydration, daily practice, and please no Halloween candy.

There’s a little bit of static in the air, and when I’m near it, the immune system adjusts without apologies: heart rate elevates, breath moves higher in the chest and thins out, glands in the neck and armpits stiffen. But actually the first thing I notice is a tingling in the tops of the hands and the skin of the forearms: the same molecules that agitate when I’ve spiked the blood sugar. The boundary of the skin where it meets the air becomes wavy, like in teleportation: the message is to become very still until things, as they say, regroup. Owl, you’ve got to get yourself together! I stop everything like an animal in the woods, stay still as long as it takes (usually minutes, sometimes hours), carry on.

This is what seems to help most: awareness of how the immune system feels about its environment, recognition that the air itself is nothing to fear no matter what, acceptance that the system will do the best she can and the rest is for nature to decide.

Still, some epic quiet is nice. You know that radiating thing that plant-green does when you hit it with gold in the afternoon—the way it begins to break up in the light? It is happening in this garden, on a deck, in a small creek-valley, under giant sycamores. Nothing else is moving except for a squirrel way up and my fingertips here on the mac. It’s Ojai, the arid mountain-forest ten miles inside Ventura.

The air is the exact temperature of my skin: closing my eyes, I cannot find the edge between the two. A weekend of this—five hour dinners and ten hour sleeps—and the immune system is stoked for another week.

I wonder: would a life of this make me slothly? Equal peace but half the sleep (and none of the dinner): that’s meditation retreat. Is this retreat quite so feedback-rich as straight sitting… or is at a rest from feedback? It’s a little bit the same.

Anyway. I have been entranced, increasingly, with (or by) the rhythms of having a life. It’s so arbitrary that there should be night and day, fall and winter, cold season, years, breathing patterns that change over the day and over a life, human digestive systems and energy rhythms, eyes that have to blink, growing seasons, mulching seasons, all of it. I think it’s because I’m watching my heartbeat, first responder on the organizational immunity team.  You can’t have (or do) existence on this planet without so much tempo: it’s happening when nothing happens, even. And we build it in to everything we make, language’s songs, the structure of thought and art and commerce, this guest house with its ins and outs and its solid wall of watery glass blocks and curve of its staircase and ceiling. The turn in the freeway that I leaned in to on the way up the mountain, and that will fling me forward on the way down. It’s all a reflection of half-hidden movement that makes all of this exist. I hate to say it because I feel like Alex Grey meets Ram Dass, but it’s how things feel.

I don’t know what the rules are, but the biophysics of being on this planet are what they rae, inside of my organism and out. Maybe this is the system that is talking back to me most. The rhythms of the rock.

The stiller I get the more everything trills and vibrates, stronger like the forcefield of my immunity, faster like the gold off these leaves. It’s a little like guitar feedback, folding itself in to indecipherable white. And beautifully.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: integration , sound

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: evolution , integration , morality

Trinities · 13 August 2009

I am discovering the most beautiful coincidence.

Breath-Bandha-Drste = Talk-Feel-Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God it’s a beautiful system. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , sound

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

More Equations · 28 June 2009

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , morality

Equation #1 · 25 June 2009

1 = 1

A = A

Inhale = Exhale

How many ways and times has this formula been offered to me? Sometimes as if it’s a secret-in-plain-view, only known to the half-dozen true flying lizards of Mysore; sometimes as if it’s the most boring ever baby pranayama; sometimes overheard from my own mouth instructing the first samasthithi of a private.

This morning everything was d-e-n-s-e, far more than usual. Weird. Is this what 60 will feel like? A few minutes in, I went inner-schizoid and hosted a full-blown dialogue:

So, J, if you were alone right now, would you make it even a surya further?

No. I would fucking bail. [Sorry, just playing back the tape.]

What if this actually were a kitchen-practice? What is the same? Is it fair to draw the juice for your entire work-out from these others… to consciously use them while pretending to be riding your own discipline oh-so-sincerely?

Ok, so I will put myself in the kitchen right now. Draw a practice up out of its dusty linoleum. Shala = kitchen. So west, so east. Same same same.

Fine then yes, here we are in the kitchen. Making it not different from the shala.

It doesn’t mean don’t be strengthened by the group in the abstract. Just don’t suck these four people’s milkshake. Gurglegurglegurgle. It’s not yours and you don’t need it anyway.

It was a useful little trip: practice was extraordinary. Albeit a little weird because I kept seeing that linoleum and remembering I need to swiff. But extraordinary because air-cushioned.

What makes shala practice = kitchen practice on a dense Thursday is one key. That key is not: pushing, churning it out on a performative, exhale-driven autopilot. It is valuing the inhalation as an equal.

Counting it. Literally. (Why is the default to count the exhale or the little space thereafter?) Today I bracketed the exhale—it knows how to do its thing—letting the inhale come to balance. Instead of dying out on the floor as the others in the room inhaled for me. If in doubt today, I inhaled even more.

It is so easy when I allow myself to know this, something that others have tried to give me but I become too unconscious to do when I get tired. Ridiculously easy.

Oxygen. Who knew?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , integration

Lizard brain, world soul · 13 June 2009

Dance this morning was up in Hollywood, an intimate den of a place with a soft, forgiving floor and blue-grey light filtering in through the wall of windows. June gloom. The only time you really feel the ocean in the air here, the only season with the ambient drama people in the rest of the world know as weather. The air is wet and salty, and you feel it cool on your face. I love the contrast of this season, the way everyone is a little socked in, like the sky.

In Hollywood, you enter the den-space from a hidden back door, and once inside it feels like an urban fortress—like the Hollyhock House up near Griffith Park, or the Getty, or the highrise apartments in the Westwood financial district. Yet in this studio, the windows look right down on one of the seediest stretches of Pico Blvd. Today the rain was coming in sparse glops, knocking the purple jacaranda blossoms in to the street. I had the feeling of cozy mischief, like I was a child building pillow-forts up on the top of a bunkbed, looking down and out, snuggling together with other little wild ones.

What is the distance between lizard brain and the world soul? About two inches from cerebellum to pineal gland, I guess: from primate wildness to knowing, mass intersubjectivity. Does it make a difference that we come to this with the intent for exploration and play, rather than for orgiastic escape?

Usually it only makes sense to dance in other people’s sacred spaces, not in random performance studios like we did today. We meet at the Masonic lodge or at a de-sanctified church in Venice. It’s not like every other religious transition in recent millennia, in which the new faith comes in and builds its temples right on top of the previous holy site. A lot of these dancers are explict about being “the next spirituality”—the integral cutting edge of ecstasy or whatever—but in one way this innovation is different from every other religious succession. Rather than new colonizers building atop the old, they are just renters—of both meeting spaces and symbols. Building some transcendence out of what they’ve got, and leaving it behind a few hours later.

I am learning from this. That it is possible to take the ecstasy on the road. I’ve been realizing how strongly the taste for transcendence stays with me—everything hangs together better, and knows how to move, when there are regular altered states. Preferably every day. Church used to do that, then it was travel and danger, then it was practice. And now I realize why I'm less understanding of people who don't engage practice in that way... people who use it to check in with a stream of frustration or lack or trauma or play or performance or healthy competition instead of the churchy stuff. I’m not sure this is a problem for anyone—some addictions or habits-of-being are good or at least kind of necessary for a time.

But the variations between my subjective experience of dance, yoga, sitting are no longer confusing--a lot of the same stuff is going on in each because the underlying experiencer (whatever she is) is sort of constant. I'm slowly learning to hold the ecstasy more lightly, allowing that sitting or dancing or yoga not just be self-service entrancement. This has been a hard letting-go, something a teacher might have instructed years ago if I had been open then to that sort of teaching. But then, ashtanga wasn't that kind of practice. We are still stuck studiously pretending that it's not about the mind or spirit or whatever, that the only relevant instruction is about how to get beautiful and (most importantly) correct vinyasas. 

Saturday links-

- Great article (http://tinyurl.com/nfhapo) on the excuses we make for people who seem spiritually insightful but are ethical wack-jobs. Raising the question: if your root relationships are a joke, what kind of practice is that? The argument is that teachers who don’t “do” everyday morality and only play with transcendence are dualist tools. Seems like, given the cop-out discourse of “that’s her projection, not my mistake,” and (more often heard in women) “oh, nothing is really wrong, the situation just triggered my own issues,” it's good to have tools for taking responsibility, and for holding so-called authorities accountable.

- A practice (www.focusing.org) that merges Wittgenstein and Heidegger with the contemplative side of Christianity to produce a series of habits of just looking in to the body to find what's going on. This is what others would call centering prayer, or still others mindfulness, or I would call getting in to the central channel. I can’t believe these people exist and are doing sort of the same thing I do but with a discourse that merges my professional worldview (phenomenology) and good old Judeo-Christian ways of talking. Who should I colonize with it first—the Chirstians or the academics? Oh yeah, neither. It doesn’t work like that now.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [22]
Categories: having a body , integration , morality

How to lose your edge · 5 June 2009

The landlady came to me with a simple request.  Structurally, she is in power. Relationally, I am.  Her hesitation, dissimulation, apologies… her waiting for me to define the situation…  My first thought was: Nice to see I’m in control here! I didn’t even have to try!

She’s only just met me but has the idea that she is responsible for pleasing me. I guess it’s all those years of being a hardass. I was never a manipulator, one who instantly sends out the heat-seeking probe in to another’s psyche, looking for the weak spots. Rather I was just vaguely put off by the world, living in my own visionary bubble of “getting it”—a bubble in to which only a vfew elect would be permitted after having demonstrated their depth.

The landlady owns property and is extracting my rent purely on the basis of an arbitrary class advantage. Bourgeois swine! There is no productive relationship here… only the fiction that this place is “hers” and therefore I owe her for occupying it.

The first impulse is to respond to her solicitude the way that she expects. This is her script we’re acting out. She’s creating difficulty for herself by fearing me; and because she’s opened the door for me to act powerful, it’s natural to follow all the mental-emotional cues. Comply by dominating: be nearly silent, give no positive emotion, withhold information, act displeased. Over the years, she will learn to feel grateful for the slightest kindness from me. She will give me more and more subtle power, in the form of ego strokes and breaks on the recycling bill.

Pretty much my MO in any relationship in which my critique of capitalism comes in to play. Union activist-meets-kundalini gulag. It’s the least we landless masses can do to even the playing field.

But… I’ve been seeing how many interactions feature some unconscious layer of emotional blackmail. Not just the class warfare. Pretty much whenever a alpha is present, she sucks others’ energy, plays up their weaknesses, makes situations all about her own gratification. Are big alphas dominant and charismatic; or are they more like parasites? When someone comes around and defines the situation, is that power... or is it ultimately weakness?

I decided to take a risk with the landlady: I’m being easy. I’m acting as if we are equals on an emotional plane, rather than enemies on an economic one. Not being stupid about it, but also not interacting with trace aggression or emotional/material greed.

I admire people who live well because they are smart, who do not expend energy in tasteless ways or hoard it in tacky ones. These are the people who don’t have to make their way in the world by selling anything, by opportunism, or by being politicians.

They remind me of the old ethic Work smarter, not harder. These people tend to be ultra-clear about what makes meaning in life, and have zero interest in spending time and money in other ways. Nobody thinks to wonder what they’re doing right or try to keep up with them, because these people don’t bother to display their emotional and material wealth to others. They just live well: privately, kindly, and with great taste.

I’m not there. But I’m getting in to a practice of assuming a level of equality with everyone in my life. Doubts about their integrity? Questioning their intelligence? Wondering if they are going to annoy me? OK, fuss budget. Assume equality. By the same token, why assume anothers’ superiority? Why treat them as if their pleasure matters more than one’s own? Why assume we have less to offer? On the contrary, one could just assume equality on the level of personhood, no matter the differences in skill and social position.

So much time in my mind is spent on relationships. What else to humans even think about? Physics? Comic books? Outer space? Mostly, we think about each other. That is why what I set out as an aspirational disposition—assume equality—has turned in to a goddamn practice. Thought by thought. It’s ok though. The hardass racket had gotten dull.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [44]
Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory

Pathologies of Los Angeles · 29 May 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

Mysticism Kitsch · 25 May 2009

My favorite motto for the practice is still this one:

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

Might be just me, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science

Space · 19 April 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration , science

Inverted World · 12 April 2009

(Post Heavily Revised. My mind seems to be in transit...)

He is risen!

He is risen indeed!

For less Christian call-and-response, there was some kirtan in Santa Monica last night, but despite my claims to have conquered jet lag (perhaps with the help of my new titanium wrist band or a 22-hour tarry in London that softened me up for the second flight), I passed out early and missed it. Oh well, probably best to feel some Judeo-Christian mind today. It’s the biggest holiday of the year for my family, after all: I felt my dad issuing that old greeting to the congregation at the same 9:00 moment that I sat down for breakfast with the yogis after practice. Just before, I held extra breaths in mukta hasta sirsa C, imagining myself to be not the Tarot’s hanged man but Saint Peter himself, and called that good enough. (Actually, turns out I’m only 20% Peter but 90% Jude.)

Hanged man is about right,  though: still feeling a little spacey here. Maybe it’s that my ability to sleep at roughly appropriate times belies the still-inverted circadian rhythms; or it’s the daytime lucid dreaming techniques I’m putting in to practice (no results yet…); or it’s hangover from the intense dreamlife that bleeds in to wakefulness in Mysore. Ask anyone: your subconscious turns Technicolor and barrels straight at you night if not day in that place. I cannot explain this, but find it both revealing and relaxing.

Relaxing because, for now, whatever pulls me out of the super-beta front of my head, back in to peripheral vision, back into dream consciousness… this is what begins to dissolve the tension that is most interesting. The knots along the upper inside of the jawbone, in the eye sockets, temples, roots of the teeth, center of the forehead. Habitual flexion in the tongue. Funny, this is where the yoga thing began—a neurosurgeon saying “take responsibility” for releasing the post-car-accident tension in a jammed TMJ. A Thai massage therapist two weeks ago said: Your body is free from the neck down.... The chakras in the head are another thing.

Why, yes.

I received much this month for a girl who just went off to pay her respects and get a little perspective. Strength in practice, a sense of history, rational explanations for some aspects of traditional practice that have long disturbed me (don’t tell me rationality isn’t important: it’s key), first hand experiences that fill me with gratitude for the institution and the greater practices of yoga to which it leads, and the inspiration of beautiful people who have kept this as a practice long after the asana-learning was exhausted. But, maybe it all becomes even more juicy after asana gets boring. Mysore is a good place to peel off to the next layer or two of the onion.

When I started writing about this practice years ago, the only thing that annoyed me more than chatty Yogaworks formalism was the identity crisis of colleagues who left that school for eight weeks in Mecca… and came back with hennaed hands and bindi’d brows, having gone in for the decoys of currently correct vinyasa and the perfectly imitated chant as if those were static aspects of some fundamentally “perfect” system. I never did write about Post Mysore Syndrome; and it’s probably too late now since it no longer pisses me off.

Looking around, it seems that, no matter who you are, there is some senti-mental and energetic effect of even a brief period in that zone. Post Mysore Effect is: really nice, strong energy and focus... especially apparent in an uptick in tapas during practice or teaching. I don't know anyone who hasn't come back with a strong hit of something still in his system, as well as a nostalgic sweetness of regard for even the most absurd, uncomfortable memoris. PME turns to PMS, though,when it has to be reactive. When it rejects one's original life and self and practice as somehow inauthentic and dirty. This is the result of the traveler believing the energy hit and the nice memories are her possssion or souvenir, that others are a threat to continued identification with the experience, and that anything except for the (itself weirldy manufactured) experience of Mysore is corrupt.

Some signs that someones PME has turned to PMS:

● Talking in broken English. E.g., telling a student, “Five breathings” or “you do;” or dismissing class with “go home take rest” even when students just TOOK rest (which you don’t get to do after led class at the KPJAYI, thus the command).

● ALSO: A bizarre new wardrobe, involving the weirdest pants, and bright flowing silks everywhere, and—yes—bindis. Exclusine consumption of  Indian food. Defensiveness of the institution, even for things that should not be defended. Decoration of practice with various displays of Mysore-ness. Refusals and rejections of all sorts. Metonymy of India and Mysore, e.g., “I’m going to India," to mean actually "I'm going to Gokulam." Starting  most sentences with, "Well in Mysore, they...."

● Rarely (worst case scenario): conversion in to a Sharath-head. Sharath-heads exhibit (1) a groupie mentality filtered through a pseudo-religious “he’s my guru” justification scheme, combined with (2) misattribution of a level of realization that he would never pretend is the case and that isn’t necessary for him to be a good teacher.

Causes: 

Lack of contentment with everyday life at home. Lack of previous travel experience, especially experience in poor countries. Desire to impress others or feel superior. Mistaking new worldly sophistication with some kind of spiritual progress. And in general:  just identifying with the experience.

Cures:

More experience. More practice. Compassion from people at home. Rarely, a talking-to from someone who's been through it.

Benign indicators of PME that has not escalated to PME:

● Resolutions of self. These may seem to be born of a delusional mindset but actually seem to be pretty stable. There is something to be said for taking a long time away from your old patterns and for getting really relaxed.

● Missing terribly the experience and the friends made there. Yes, it’s a college dormitory level of sociality, but it can be very good quality sociality with extraordinarily sweet people. There’s nothing delusional about loving this even if it’s highly manufactured and impossible to reproduce back home.

● Increase in respect/ decrease in cynicism for the institution. When you see that it is just a family business run on a skeleton staff, suddenly the humility and the grandeur of the enterprise come forth. Of course crazy edicts are issued to manage the spoiled hoards and of course instruction is variable and enormously expensive. Westerners are breaking down the gates, even more crazily expecting the family to be our geniuses or even gods. We did this—we imagined it and created a whole Mysore world out of it. The KPJAYI is just giving us—so generously—an anchor for us to go on creating this oddly wonderful experience.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , integration

It has been said... · 5 April 2009

Practice not changing: students forgetting.

Everything is god.

Lokhasamasthasukhinobhavantu.

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

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

First Things · 18 March 2009

Night without qualities, every aspect so suave it feels empty. It is that good, a thick futon in a clean sanctuary of a 2^nd floor room, tiny warm breeze, bugless except for the fearful slow mantis daring me not to brush her from the sheets, pitch dark night after I blew out the Monte Cristo candelabra, and a toilet that trickles like a 90s zen serenity fountain.

The only mild disturbance a bit of evening traffic, more horn-sounds than engine bluster; even here in the Brentwood of Mysore there’s a honk if you’re sentient policy on the road, with most trucks blazing cartoon avatars on their lowhanging, testicular back axles and “PLEASE HONK” across a back metal bumper.

It’s 3 am now. I slept five hours thank god, though at first I didn’t know if that was going to work out. My solar plexus was pulsing as if a spaceballs alien would burst forth from my gut and when I twitched the hands lying on the crests of my hips would fly off and snap the mattress to jolt me back abuzz.

Poor taste to go manic in Mecca, though. I dialed it down with limited skill I guess the yoga has given… I’d rather sleep more and be calmer than I am now, but am getting there. The last real manic episode was a week long, three years ago, and the penultimate lasted 10 days, three years before that. No sleeping, complete loss of appetite, spitfire wits, blurring of the boundaries of self, and overwhelming, inspecific feelings of love that move both inward and outward. The chemicals that make this happen… I appreciate them and there’s nothing false about the being they make me in to, any more than other personalities are false. And nurture’s involved since I create the baseline for these experiences myself, by steadily reinforcing the gratitude-gestalt. Still, not here. Too easy to go native inside the Mysore bubble; too easy to attribute it to the not-quite-contact high—some PJ shakti cocktail—in a way that keeps me from feeling what’s really going on here energetically.

Thank god it’s at least late in the season—the parties and hookups are on the ebb and those who are here are not quite so eager to start new relationships because they’re re-entering their home’s mental space. There were still a lot of introductions yesterday though, though maybe self-protectively, or maybe just because I was delirious, I don’t remember a single new name. Not one.

Arriving around 8, driven by a man named Ramesh beneath the gorgeous stories-high aqueduct that has no end or beginning and looks to me like a concrete interpretation of the Seattle monorail, I landed and then spent the day circling inside Gokulam in an enlarging spiral out from the center stage of the coconut stand and the slightly less interesting but still bustling main intersection it overlooks.

Ramesh the driver, by the way, waited outside the airport with all the other sign-bearing drivers. His sign was block-lettered in my name and the name of my guest house, and my brother was right: I have always wanted to be one of those people with their own sign. But it’s just a nostalgic imperial style-cue here: Ramesh knew me on sight since he’d image-searched me on the drive in. But he was determined to establish a hierarchy: wouldn't sit with me for coffee or call me anything but Ma'am, scolded me for trying to carry my own bags, made me fill in a questionnaire that confirmed he had not harassed me sexually or asked me for money. Astutely service-class (a modern subaltern proletariat--talk about latent power). That quick, determined professionalism may quickly eclipse the lingering dominion of my dollars, Irish visage and SoCal English. Me the dissolute envoy from a declining empire, him the quick smart economic-subversive with a plan.

The airport is new this year and the land around smells like Montanan industrial agriculture and is staked off with telecommunications and YOUR AD HERE billboards like giant croquet hoops. I did finally begin to lose my mind those last four hours of driving with Ramesh. The sun came up on my lucidity’s retreat. We’ll see how many new sunups are required for some kind of recalibration.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: integration , markets-networks-society

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [22]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , morality , science , social theory , sound , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

For V. · 2 December 2008

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

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

Distracted yet?

Ok, see ya.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [29]
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: evolution , integration , sound

Suicide Newscycle · 25 September 2008

I keep wondering what David Foster Wallace would say. With the collapse of the (financial) system and all. Each day is more accursedly interesting, pushes what I thought was the the solid envelope of social dis/order. The boundary between believability and unbelievability is moving. In a sense I am meditating on that boundary, like other times I practice at the edge of mind and body, and still others hypnotize by finding the space that is the meeting of the eyelids or the place the skin meets the air around it.

The question is: how do we believe the unbelievable as it goes down? How do we update the definition of the situation? The movement between belief and disbelief is, I have to admit, partly projection. I’m under hilarious stress at work—stress that feels epic. I see the dread in Nancy Pelosi’s eyes and think I understand.

Really, I wish DFW were here and could see all this, the same way I wish Hildegaard could listen to The Photographer through my ears or Mark Twain could look out of airplane windows from behind my eyes. DFW’s been dead two weeks now and the eulogizing’s done and forgotten. The first long obits appeared within hours (prepared in advance by those reading the signs? I have to wonder) and were bumped down within a day. This is what clickability does. Slashes mourning periods right down to the blip-length of “news.” But I love the way that some people resisted that or even pushed back in to it, turned the internet into an historical repository of memory and place for a new level of shared loss. The comments on the LA Times obit are better to me than any flowers at a grave.

I remember somewhere DFW wrote that Wittgenstein was the most terrifying writer of his century, but also so inspiring because the philosopher concluded that solipsism was for the weak. Did DFW really say that? Maybe I’ve made it up. Because it seems ridiculous—for an autistic genius between the wars, of course solipsism was a problem. For DFW? No, empathy was the problem. Lobsters and all. The few obits I saw wanted to understand DFW’s suicide as the conclusion to some sort of philosophical problem. You know, make it all analytical and conclusive and hold the man to account for his mistaken computations of the problem at hand.

Isn’t this all a bit high-minded, making it a philosophical problem? Sadness and loneliness are universal if stronger in some—the sharing of that sadness at ad-hoc monuments that would be postmodern jokes if they weren’t so deep and human is what we do despite technology (and other forces) that want to slice us thin. Community is as much the default state as isolation and “self ownership.” If there was any narrative that DFW’s deep natural sadness affixed to for me, it was the tragedies of connectedness as much as of isolation. He had a way of making me meditate on that boundary—individuation and community—better than my own discipline, which is supposed to be rooted in just that synthesis. He is behind my eyes now whether he likes it or not. He’d probably think this historization and borglike absorption of his perspective to be imperial and somehow mistaken, but this is what you get for dying, David.

Commencement.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [26]
Categories: integration , markets-networks-society , morality

Coordinate Language · 21 September 2008

Or, the post where my blog explodes.

Ok, so step right up. Choose a mantra, any mantra. I don’t care if it’s the sensation of the breath going past the tip of the nose, or some word in whatever language repeated and repeated, or counting as high as you can go before you lose track, or the secret gibberish for which you paid the TM society an ungodly sum, or the feel of your sitbones grounding down into the earth. It’s all exactly the same. This is meditation 101. Shamatha practice.

When you have trained your mind a long while, so there’s some strength and consistency to the practice (like training the body—it works the same… you do first series 1,000 days to settle your shit down), then maybe you do meditation 102 and relax the hold on the mantra. Spacious awareness can get so beautifully empty in part because it doesn’t care what it’s of: when content comes in, it may be "physical," like the ache between the shoulderblades or the cramp arising in the hip flexor; or "mental," like infernal line of a Steve Miller song or the strip of all-too-real memory that arises from out of nowhere. Sounds, emotions, feelings—at this level of concentration and sophistication—are just contents of awareness. In a practical sense, there's no difference between what’s physical or mental.

So ok. New illustration. Do you remember last year when the NYT ran the Op-Ed on the neuroscience of meditation? At first, all the Buddhist geeks were soooo excited—mainstreaming of practice and all that—but later they realized what was wrong with the article. It was scienceist. It did the same as all neuroscience since Descartes, which is reduce the mind to the brain (legend is Descartes said the cries of the dogs he vivisected were automatic blips, not subjective pain). It was explaining the experience of meditation in terms of neural hard-wiring, as if all mental conditions can be controlled once we know the exact brain process that produced them. Meditators said: Stop, reductionists! Mind is not physical! Mind is mental! Understandably, meditators (me included) get irritated when scientists reduce the mind to the body.

Well, that’s science. It wants physical explanations. Not mystical, ethereal “causes,” but rather causal mechanisms. De-mystifying apparently automatic relationships… even in the age of quantum. What do you think CERN is about, after all? Finer levels of physical data.

But then there is this other, equally reductionist tendency there on the other side of science. Reductio-ad-woo-woo. This is the Obama pranayamites, the make-your-own-reality mental recessionistas, and the yoga teachers who think the only reason your foot won’t go behind your head is you have some “emotion” stuck in your hip. Since this kind of anti-physical reductionism is more common in the owl realm, that’s why I wrote about it instead of anti-mental reductionism.

I also wrote about it because woowoo-ism is the metaphysics of the privileged. “The markets will sort themselves out” is what you say when whether you’ll freeze this winter isn’t really in doubt. “The Indian untouchables have such a sense of serenity and spiritual transcendencence about them” is what you say when you’re totally ignorant of the fact that passivity is the trance you fall in to when you are beaten down by physical life: it is only in the poorest countries where the stray dogs become too apathetic to chase you in the streets. “You just need to surrender your fear,” is what you say to your students when you never had to experience hamstring separating from bone on your way to paschi-ma. There is lovely truth in all these statements (and I do love the Obama pranayama), but they are also forms of mystification—efforts to hide from oneself the physics of class, national and embodied privilege. The rich, the American and the flexible: we want to think that the difficulties of others are all in their minds. The woo-woo side of reductionism can be incredibly elitist and uncompassionate.

Anyway. The woo-woo/physicalist cultural rift here is holographic of the mind/body rift that pervades everyday talk. And this is what I’m really trying to discuss. Some reader asked why I resort to dualist language to describe practice, as if there is a difference between body and mind. The idea here is that any talk that opposes mind and body instantiates a separation that is untrue, shaping experience into unnessary oppositions.

Well… I would say there is a difference, and there isn’t. Some sensations arise in the mind. Some arise in the body. These are fields of consciousness (or of reality); but they don’t have to be opposite. In everyday experience and in scientist-vrs-spiritualist culture wars we sometimes act as if there is a difference. But both reductionisms are self-limiting hack metaphysics. Everything is god; nothing is god; god is everything, nothing, whatever; one, many, emptiness, form, whatever whatever whatever. To live at all honestly we have to have a practical substrate that doesn’t make us hold absurd positions about the primacy of either physical or mental reality. 1-800-Integrate.

So I talk about the mind, I talk about the body, I talk about the interpenetration of the two fields. Is this dualist? A reification that locks me into binary experience of the world? It can be, yes.

But...! That assumption is not necessarily contained in language that speaks of mind and body, physical and woo-woo. Is North/South/East/West dualist? Mind/Body is coordinate language misapplied as metaphysical language.

Now, I might have to blow up the blog. You are not supposed to blog about metaphysics. It’s like blogging about your bowel movements—a kind of practical tedium that debases the form and makes your readers never feel quite normal about you again.

Oh well. You win for getting to the end of this discussion. Or I win for tricking you all the way through. Or maybe everyone can win all the time and this does not have to mean that there are losers.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

Mental Recession · 17 September 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good avaita: the economy is fucked backwards and forwards!

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

House Like a Lotus · 6 August 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , integration

The Logos and the Tao · 26 July 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , science , 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. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [53]
Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

The Anusarian and the Ashtangi · 14 July 2008

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

……………………………………………………………….

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

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

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

……………………………………………………………...

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

……………………………………………………………..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…………………………………………………………………

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

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

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

Maybe I'll try to write about this later.

…………………………………………………………….……..

DALE: Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…………………………………………………………………

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [34]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , integration

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)

 

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration

Cutting through Digital Anonymity · 6 May 2008

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society

A small bridge · 5 May 2008

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

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

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

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

I am back in her hands, for now.

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

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

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

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

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...

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion

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.

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

Language Games · 17 March 2008

Every woman is a poet when she is in love.

Plato said that. But I translated it if you knowatimean.
 

Wittgenstein said that. But I paraphrased it because this is no time for exactitude.

It is time for wordplay. I am thinking of tongue-twisters, limericks, haiku, acrostics, palindromes, alliterations and old favorite lines. Whatever words stick in the head.

At times I have kept lists of the words I love best, and as of today I am beginning again. I don't even know, what words do I love now...:

        antediluvian, blithely, concord, daft

Hated words is more difficult, but for sure:

        blowhard, dumpy, moist, secrete

The list will need to be organic to my life. It's more a know 'em when you see 'em kind of thing, for me. But it's good to start with a seed list.

What are the words you love or despise?

Later this week: acrostics, the six-word autobiography, I don't know what else.

Yoga not serious. Poetry serious.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: integration , sound

NIN · 13 March 2008

 

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

and they must be brought into connection with action.

They must be woven together.

 

-Anaïs Nin

 

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

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: arbitrage , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXXI: Love Among the Ruins · 15 February 2008

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

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

That’s the thing, I guess. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [27]
Categories: evolution , integration , self-deception , spirituality

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
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.)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [20]
Categories: evolution , having a body , integration

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Yoga Sin Ropas · 16 December 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed: You’re serious.

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

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

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

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

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

Ed: Uh huh. Naked. Yoga.

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

Ed: “Check out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [42]
Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

More Shiva · 12 December 2007

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

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

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

                Alain Danielou, L’Erotisme divinise p. 42

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

Both And · 10 December 2007

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , spirituality

London, Paris, Rome... · 4 December 2007

Pendulum is on the swing again, these few weeks, for the elusive one. London-Paris-Istanbul-Paris-New York-Billings.

Aaahh, Billings. I'll tell you a little about it, since we got talking under the last post about how different it is in the redstates. The returns to Montana were so weird for so many years after I moved away, but now it just is what it is. I’m comfortable being uncomfortable about Billings. And then, after a few days outside its metastisizing edge, I always lose the sense of a reality beyond it. That is when I cave in to a weird, nostalgic, adolescent, totally myopic headspace.

AF inbound from Europe via New York, as is now his usual, reminds me of a T-shirt I wore to gym class (we played football and lifted weights, thus my surprise a decade later when I found out about stretching) in high school. It had four words followed by four little pictures:

London (Big Ben icon)

Paris (Eiffel icon)

Rome (Pisa icon)

Billings (buffalo silhouette)

Hmmm. Which one does not belong?

Billings is the only place with a 365-day a year rodeo. The only place, they say, where Exxon still hasn’t installed scrubbers on its refinery smokestacks (cancer rates downwind are off the charts). The only place I’ve smoked cloves or drunk Miller beer (both in large quantities). Laurel, which is the town closest to my folks' place, had the highest rate of alcoholism per capita nationwide when I was a high school heavy drinker. According to The Economist, five of the poorest counties in the US are in south-central Montana--though what the magazine ignores as much as the white residents is that it's the people on the Crow Reservation who are pulling those numbers.

Billings is an old cow town-turned-big box stopover on the plains, an hour from the Beartooth mountains and just over the shallow Pryor range from the Res. The Nez Perce got chased through what became my folks’ backyard on their doomed flight to Canada, and then German corn farmers settled the same black earth and farmed it dry until now all it makes is sileage, and that only with the seeds’ genes all tweaked and planes flying low over the yard to dump chemicals every few weeks.

Billings is several miles down the Yellowstone from the “Ranch” where we grew up, and a regular stop for Horizon Air, which nicely for me was bought out by Alaska. It’s always the 10:40 pm arrival and the 6:00 am departure to and from Seattle. 26-seat turboprop packed tight with Carhart canvas and ruddy faces I know from decades past. Free beer in flight, passed down the aisles with stale mini-breadsticks from Keebler.

Last year we all went for Christmas, and braved the icy wind to check out the Yoga Center alongside the old Burlington Northern train tracks downtown. Sign in the window of the gorgeous old hardfloored building said the center would close at the new year; and we were the only three in class besides the teacher. I had a nice practice, but it did not go at all well for the boys. They were too aware of the situation, which was not just a little awkward. Which is funny, because it was the boys and not me who set aside the same awkward awareness and represented last year as usual at Sunday church.

Which is one thing about Billings I’m not facing right now. I think about it often enough, but since the American flag was installed on the altar, the ante has been upped. A lot. I’m slowly easing up, though. Me and Jesus are working it out.

The night of awkward yoga was when the idea to write out my tangent on yoga and popular culture got planted. Though I did not know this consciously until a few weeks later. Almost a year of posting now; and it’s still not written out. 

I’m not sure what to think about what this blog-tangent has become. I thought I’d use it to articulate my question of what this practice is in the context of our political-cultural-economy. I guess I’ve found myself some vocabulary, and some sensibilities, to that end. But I haven’t put too fine a point on any conclusions and I haven’t run out of ruminations.

So I guess as a second year begins I’ll keep coming back here and having a look at what it brings up. Though maybe a design shift is a good idea.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: integration

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!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Inverted, Again · 20 November 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey suckers—made you look.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

Knowing, Being Known · 24 October 2007

Is practicing with someone intimate?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [24]
Categories: arbitrage , beta state , having a body , integration

The Yoga/Hipster Problem · 22 October 2007

Dear Frustrated Young Men,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , sound , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
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)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , sound , spirituality

The Guru's Segway · 26 August 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , sound

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.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

To have and to hold · 7 August 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
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…

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
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.

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
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…. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration

Five for the Archive, Part I · 14 June 2007

Wherof we cannot speak, thereof we must…

Ack!  No; no; noooooo. I’ve been making a case for yoga as a demystification project, yet here I am avoiding straightforward questions of how it rooted into me. Here I am falling back on the raised eyebrow and the shrug that are my writing at its most flirtatious and, as the critics have noted, worst.

As I set out on Tuesday, coming to have a practice defied my previous experience of life as flowing forward from my will—a product of my own decisions. With that caveat, a little concrete description of the how’s (with the why’s on the side, to keep my dissimulations at bay) is the most useful thing I can add to Tim’s dataset. He’s asked five questions, and here are answers to the first two, with the others soon to follow.

As I’ve been saying recently, I am just another data point in the Astanga Yoga Research Experiment. Here’s chalking this one up for the archives.

1. The start. What brought you to yoga?

A Honda Civic. Which hit me in the crosswalk in front of my house in October, 2002. When I woke up strapped to a board and swatted at an I-V, an EMT told me to settle down and obey because my neck was broken. Which had the intended effect of paralyzing me for the rest of the night, but the MRIs came out clean except for a chip on the chin-bone. Nevertheless, my mandible had been slammed hard into my head, and the resulting TMJ hell and cognitive-emotional backup were unwelcome visitors in the fifth week of my so-called career as a PhD student. Five months later, after steroid cycles, other wicked anti-inflammatory regimens, physical and cognitive therapies and very many tension headaches, a TMJ surgeon said to me:

 “You know, I can help you release some of this tension, but if you’re going to get better, you’re going to have to do some of the work yourself.”

What?

But this is the effect of something somebody did to me. I’m not responsible. Plus, are you implying that I am not a brain in a jar? Don’t pull that mind-body shit on me. We’re both scientists here, Pops: so buck up and talk like a good Cartesian.

But god how the pain and tension fastened into my bones and held there. So I took a hatha yoga class anyway, in the spring quarter of 2003. It was on Friday evenings, at UCLA’s beautiful, shady-hilltop Sunset Canyon Recreation Center. (I would drive up to the center, sweat out the week, then pick up my favorite cohorts after their Friday seminar and drink pinot noir with them on my balcony until 2 or 3 am.) The yoga teacher was an ahtangi who became my first flow teacher, and whose flow class I still take on Saturdays so that I can continue to learn from her and honor that relationship with a bit of continuity.

2. First class. Describe your first class(es) or practice and your reaction to it.

It occurred to me that yoga might help relax the jaw, because I’d taken a half-dozen classes at Seattle University in 2001. I was a mindless gym-goer in those days, managing my hyperactivity and keeping the endorphin-fixes regular with daily afternoon workouts (I could disappear from my job as a grad program administrator without being missed—o the beauty and the inefficient evil of university bureaucracies). In the spring, there was a Wednesday afternoon hatha class in the carpeted, mirrored ex-aerobics room where I used to do my post-workout stretches. The same way I took the university’s financial planning and software-proficiency classes (all free for employees), I showed up for the yoga too.

The teacher’s name was Cassandra. She had great hair and told us stories about her crazy boyfriend and how yoga helped her stay calm on the drive over from Queen Anne hill. I remember the way my hip popped in Trikonasana and the great distance between my knees and the floor in baddha konasana, and that I was put out to have to front $20 for a mat. My body wasn’t very flexible (in junior high school, the one test that always disqualified me from the Presidential Fitness Award—which goes to students who are in the top percentiles in a series of tests like the mile run, the standing long jump, and situps per minute—was always the “sitting reach”: my fingers wouldn’t go past my heels). As a result of this inflexibility, I had a satisfying and not-exactly-subtle wall of resistance that I could explore. The new sensations were interesting. That was nice, so I added some of Cassandra’s hip and shoulder stretches to my daily post-workout cool-down.

When the class concluded, I started going to the university sauna on Wednesday nights instead. That was equally relaxing.

I don’t think that, even after a half-dozen classes, I had even begun to key in to what is first truly arresting about yoga: the linkage of movement and breath.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , integration

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?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
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. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

The Emotional Lives of Yogis? · 2 April 2007

AUGUST 2010 NOTICE. ATTENTION YOGAWORKS TEACHER TRAINING PARTICIPANTS. YOU, LIKE HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF SUCKERS BEFORE YOU (MYSELF AMONG THEM), HAVE BEEN ASSIGNED THIS WORTHLESS ESSAY QUESTION. YOUR TEACHERS HAVE SEEN MANY ANSWERS PLAGIARIZED FROM THE ESSAY BELOW.

BUT PLEASE, DON'T HESITATE TO USE MY IDEAS. AS YOU MAY AGREE, THE PHILOSOPHICAL VACANCY AND PRACTICAL IDIOCY OF THE QUESTION IS A PIECE WITH THE QUALITIES OF YOUR PRESENT "TEACHER," THE YOGAWORKS CORPORATION. AS A TEACHER, THE CORPORATION IS AS IMPOVERISHED IN YOGA AS IT IS RICH IN FEES. LET'S NOT MISTAKE THIS EXPENSIVE TRAINING AS PREPARATION TO TEACH YOGA. IT IS NOT AN INITIATION IN TO A LIFE PRACTICE. IT IS NOT A TRANSMISSION OF METHOD. IT IS NOT A REQUEST FROM A MENTOR WHO KNOWS YOU THAT YOU TAKE THE ENORMOUS STEP FROM LONG-TIME PRACTICE IN TO TEACHING.

Here’s a little more essay-writing as I bring this winter’s teacher training class to a close. I don’t know if it’s my ancient history as a forensics nerd or just living in three non-overlapping value zones (yoga, sociology, Christian fundamentalism) that makes me question any question in the process of answering it. But so it is. Not that critical thinking doesn't belong in every zone....

How do the kleshas and the gunas effect your asana practice?

In yoga philosophy, kleshas are mental obstacles to enlightenment — specifically ignorance, egotism, attraction, aversion and clinging to life. Gunas are thee qualities of our prakriti—ignorance, passion and goodness—one for each of the trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.

Yoga philosophy provides many lists such as the kleshas, and also frequently divides up the world into three essences. These are wonderful interpretive tools, especially for one living in India while practicing Hinduism and ayurveda. However, because I do not intuitively understand the samkya system of purusa and prakriti (or the tantric Siva-Shakti), and how it integrates the theory of karma, my understanding of the kleshas and gunas is still superficial. The gunas, especially, and the kleshas of “wrong understanding” and “ego” seem particularly subtle.

Though I need to study samkya philosophy to develop a practical understanding of these concepts, this does not mean that my yoga practice itself cannot inform me about my inner states. While wonderful tools, kleshas and gunas are not causal agents which actually “effect” anything. My mind loves to grasp after categories, to substitute a map for the territory and thus pretend to know the whole terrain. Thus, for me, categorizing my experience according to these new concepts, while it will be terrifically interesting, might do more to substantiate the categories themselves, as if they are exhaustive of the mind’s possibilities, than it will to show me what is in my mind. If I imagined these concepts as causal agents which create “effects,” I would be mistaking abstractions for reality, or treating as real that which is transitory. And, working with a definitional, non-integrated understanding of the concepts might lead me to confuse myself, rather than know myself better. Ultimately in practice I am hoping to attenuate conceptual, discursive thought rather than increase it.

Still, if kleshas roughly categorize destructive mental tics and gunas an approach to psychosomatic dispositions, my asana practice is subject to both. It has been almost three years since I began a daily astanga practice and so found myself meditating on the body. After the first year, curious about the nature of consciousness, I began exploring different forms of meditation. Last year, breath meditation inspired a pranayama practice. So far, these three practices illuminate one another: the resistance I experience in meditation—where discursive thought and deep emotions frequently cut in—and pranayama—where a physical-mental-emotional fear of death arises in kumbhaka—both highlight that my asana practice is relatively open and quiet. Asana practice supports the more difficult practices, even as the latter teach me to breathe rhythmically and sense my mind downshifting in asana.

In the first six months of astanga practice, remembering the sequence of postures and disciplining my body into their shapes required my best concentration. This was the yoga—linking the mind and the body. Once I had attained the basic union that resulted from settling the physical practice into my body so I no longer had to rehearse movement mentally or pause to query some isolated part of my mind, I was able to practice what TKV Desikachar describes as dharana in asana. In the beginning, nobody told me that thoughts or emotions were supposed to “come up” during asana practice, and my journals indicate that I experienced practice as a quiet, physically pleasurable “zoning in” as I dropped into meditation. (I am thankful that no one mentioned mindstuff to me in the beginning: had I gone searching for kleshas, I am sure I could have created habitual stumbling-blocks to fulfill that search.)

While I would like to have more to say about emotions that “come up,” or the way asana helps me manage distraction or energetic fluctuations, I have very little. Beautiful generalizations by writers like Joel Kramer and Stephen Cope resonate with me somewhat, but they say too much. I rarely experience a deep or intense emotion in asana, and find that even on the most heavy days initiating practice resets my psychosomatic disposition to the best clarity I can manage on that particular day. That quality of clarity is always a little different, but dissecting it too much leads me to grasp at false explanations.

Before I had been practicing a full year, I underwent what I can only describe as reordering of my nervous system that manifested as a kind of spiritual crisis. The peace, joy and equanimity I’d begun to find gave way to loss of patience with the world. Intense sound, food, light, or emotional expression made me shudder, and I withdrew from most relationships even as I became more intellectually acute and physically vivacious. It is not that I decisively rejected the world, but that I became hypersensitive to stimuli and craved quiet stillness in myself and my environment at all times. I wanted life to imitate meditation. During these months, I felt that practice was more real than the world. Rather than being in the world and letting it show me to myself, I wanted to renounce the world because it interfered with my preferred state of consciousness.

It took nearly six months for me to tiptoe out of that place, and initiate a much more messy practice of life as some kind of yoga. For the past year, I have sought to blur the boundary between asana practice—which is still a refuge—and daily life. Asana practice itself is still pretty simple and largely the same every day. As Kramer says, morning practice does put you deeply in touch with how you treated yourself the previous day. Yet I find that seeking explanation for every little internal variation is a fast track to self-confusion. The mind wants explanation for everything, but on a deeper level my nature is to love, and to die. I hesitate to analyze how these ever-present processes of love and death interact with my sleep, my emotions, my food, water, light, recovery time, proximity of my mother-in-law, and endless other variables to render certain experiences on the mat. Practice is a gift, not a performance. I hesitate to rank it.

Whatever my experience on the mat, practice does set a high standard for the rest of my life. I oscillate between using that standard as a measure of my daily inadequacy (as mental tics and psychosomatic modifications overtake me completely) and seeing it as an inspiration for what clarity, love and insight a holistic practice might bring in time.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , spirituality

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday VI · 18 March 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

? Chris, T-shirts.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , spirituality

Saturday IV · 3 March 2007

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday III · 25 February 2007

Saturday morning is coming around late and abbreviated this weekend, but there are some photographs and some writers worth noting tonight. Almost didn’t get to this at all, as we’ve been without hot water for days… and I just spent 2 hours making a bath by betting the speed of my teapot against the slow trickle of my tub drain. End result: keeping with the luxury-in-contrast theme, 30 minutes in 4 inches of steamy saltwater. I wouldn’t have done it for school tomorrow or for the increasingly stringy-haired neighbors, but it was worth it for the psoas after the weekend of a hundred forward bends. 

 

Anyway: I’m excited about the young Daniel Alarcón. He’ll be talking in Los Feliz next week. Subversive radio stations, unnamed Latin American countries, universal tragedy of civil war. These tug pretty deep for a few in this orbit, yes? 

Good Magazine is awfully neoliberal and not hip. Similar to, respectively, the New Yorker and Ira Glass. However, this week Good writes on both, and nicely. 

NYTM lavishes Jeff Wall on the occasion of his opening at the MOMA. Do look at the slideshow.

Some readers were intrigued to rediscover the breath last week. I love this. Since you have asked for more, until we sit down together and do what a teacher of mine calls “polish ourselves” with pranayamas, here is my recommendation for a congenial, non-disciplinary, useful introduction. Anything else I’d note would land in the “esoteric shit” rather than the “verging on self help” category. But this CD is real nice. Hie and aquire it from your public library. 

Early adopters, go upload your photo already. (Not that I have either.) But tag me if you want an invite. 

 

Finally, he's no James, but Michael Wood writes pretty good. Before I turn to this excitement, his LRB essay on Richard Powers will be edifying if irksome company on Wednesday's flight up the coast. For Chris, I note it.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , spirituality

Reveal Codes · 24 February 2007

I’ve been on the quiet side this week, and getting nudges to open up and write. Of course that’s the idea of this project—to let it discipline me a bit, and to see if it brings about a voice that’s closer to my 90s-era, sensual epistles and further from the dense, withholding prose on which I’ve closed in as an academic.

 

The quietness of the past days has made space for me to be receptive, so I’ve been taking up on my teachers’ reveal codes. Looking at their meta-methods.

 

This came in a day with N, who is so close to her work—she writes books on globalization—that she gauges her wellbeing by her relationship with it. This is what it takes to be a good intellectual now. Forget generalism and professionalism: it’s about passionately being your work. Take this or leave it, but it’s the code for doing academia well.

 

Monday and again yesterday it was a self-indulgent, unorganized, wonderful documentary on the insanely inspiring Cassavetes. We assume that genius cannot explain itself—does not even know its own codes. But in A Constant Forge Cassavetes narrates from the grave. “I have a one track mind,” he says. “I’m only interested in one thing. Love. And the lack of it.” That’s just an artists’ statement, but C can also articulate the meta nature of his project. Most film is so conventional—in its ideas of what people are and what they do—that it cannot even see its own conventions. But his work lays bare the falseness of most film by being more true. “Films today show only a dream world and have lost touch with the way people really are… In this country, people die… emotionally at 21… My responsibility as an artist is to help people get past 21.” 

Thursday, after my astanga teacher told me casually that he’d like me to find vrischikasana on my own, he caught me in overthought. Brow-furrowed, I puzzled over what to with the head and the gaze as I bring the feet over to rest on the crown. He stopped, told me to let the focus soften: take in more—not less—of the surroundings as I settle in. The code, as he said it: It gets real kinesthetic. And it’s true. 

This—opening your focus, perceiving with the subtler body—is how you function on too much information in yoga practice. Yesterday as I stood beside the greatest flow diva in town, overwhelmed by her roomful of students in down-dog. She caught my discombobulation and whispered: “It’s amazing how different bodies are, isn’t it?”  Which is exactly what I was thinking. Each individual scapula and sacrum pressed in and rendered me helpless.

And then I remembered something she told me weeks ago: one way you know how to teach a big room is to let your focus go soft. This helps you pick up the energy, the aptitude and the needs of the group in the moment. You cannot be undivided for every individual at once, but this doesn’t mean you have to divide yourself up and distribute equally. Like in a seminar where you want to bring the text-messagers out of their distraction without distracting the rest, the method is less about doing many things at once and more about finding poise directing on a larger scale.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , integration

Saturday Morning · 10 February 2007

A while back when I lived in the tropics for a year, in a fiberboard and corrugated zinc sort of lean-to, I thought about luxury. Because I had all kinds of it: unlike my housemates, I had a laptop computer, occasional dinner in some excellent restaurant, the option for hailing a cab on days I didn’t feel like a 90 minute walk home through dust and crushing sun. A careening 15 minutes in a 1983 Lada, in that context, was far more meaningful than a jaunt these days down Sunset Blvd in somebody’s Porsche. Luxury isn’t absolute: it arises out of contrast. The ethical implications of this make me squirm, but anyway. 

Saturday morning is not like the others, and so I revel in it like crazy. I get up after the sun, scrap the esoteric breathing shit, don’t bother like usual to pack 2 meals and 4 bags of books and clothes for the day, and clean the house and my in-box until 10. At 10, the minute the despised Click and Clack come on the radio, I make for my friend J’s vinyasa class, which after six days of Mysore is a long cool iced tea. Now that I look at it, housecleaning and late morning vinyasa flow maps exactly on my (unkind) stereotype of the uninspired Brentwood housewife life. But god is it nice one day a week. 

Cleaning my in-box includes a couple of hours picking up links that have been sent me during the week, reading the smart mags and the not-so-smart ones, and a blogroll. This week, I’m going to try posting the notes I’d usually send to different sub-sets of you, to see if that’s useful. If I post something that’s 5 days old and so stale in internet time, it’s because when I read/listened to it this morning, I liked it anyway. Cheers. 

Princeton ESP lab closes. “How do you get peer reviewed when you don’t have peers?”

 

Jenny Diski explains Second Life to the over-30 set. I love her writing.

 

On neuroplasticity, or changing your mind to change your brain. No surprise to you fans of habits-and-will student John Dewey, or to yogis. (Skip the first 30 min.) 

 

Lethem on The Ecstasy of Influence in Harper’s. Read it as his typical looky-here cultural omnivorism, or an exploration of the boundaries between self and others.

 

Say Everything. NYM sociologizes the generation gap in privacy. Similar theme.

 

MIA video.

 

Buddhist geeks. Sort of promising.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: arbitrage , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , sound

On Being Shallow · 8 February 2007

Or How Organized Science (See Also: Organized Religion) Can Make You Dumb 

 

This afternoon I read Dylan Riley against Robert Thurman. (By “against,” what I really mean is “with:” reading R against T means letting each brace the other, shore up each other’s subtexts, or maybe just do reciprocal subversion.) Here’s a small thread twisted together over a sink of dirty dishes.

 

Riley’s review of 20^th century fascist intellectuals in his forthcoming book touches on Ugo Spirito (erstwhile professor of “Corporative Studies” – love that), who wrote that through the development of science and modern division of labor the “abstract individual of enlightenment thought” was replaced by specialized, interdependent human-types: no longer “whole” but “fractured man (sic)… no longer equal, but differentiated in the labor function that he undertakes” (Spirito 1999:67). 

 

Considering Spirito’s doing legitimation work for the Mussolini solution here, taking his project at face value is akin to buying Karl Rove’s diagnosis of America’s late-90s crisis of values. Still, it’s as good a starting point as any for thinking about how the “scientific” division of labor within the academy has alienated researchers from our thinking selves. 

 

Pace Emile Durkheim, who thought that divvying up individuals into roles in the social body (Sooo, I’ll be the organ of pleasure, and you get to be the patella) was a good solution to anomie, I worry that division of epistemological labor is an unhappy thing. Whatever it may do for efficiency in some “social whole,” it can make you shallow to take definitions of reality on faith from “experts.” 

 

As I mentioned the other day, academics are turning themselves from intellectuals into technocrats. Rather than taking responsibility for the theories within which we work, we’re taught to labor in narrow literatures, not examining their foundations. Even in the queen of the social sciences, to which I fled after a year of anti-intellectual “knowledge”-production in a related field, I meet new graduate students who speak a single language (rather than the 3-7 of the previous generation), who “just aren’t interested in statistics,” or who “just aren’t theory people.”   

 

The specialization ethic is as much self-protection as sloth, a little like the yogi who “just doesn’t do backbends” though his body permits it and the Christian who “just doesn’t think about the unsaved going to hell,” though her spirituality rests on the idea.

 

The lack of curiosity feels almost as crushing as lack of perspective. But at least we all have time to watch the game on the weekends. 

 

So in scientific bureaucracies just like religious ones, “busy” people rely on authorities to do either the background work or the inner work. In the limit, one way or another, this makes for the megachurch. Epistemological maladies? Ethical conundrums? We’re you’re one-stop no-hassle service-provider. So you don’t have to wonder. 

 

A lot of belief (and practical, everyday as-if assuming) is inconsequential. Other beliefs, if reexamined or changed, would alter our realities.

 

Thurman’s life (as seen is his lectures and writing) is an example. He went to join the Cuban revolution, got foiled, and soon after set off for Tibet and took up with the Dalai Lama. He explains his 1960s departure from Harvard (2001:45): “I had studied some Eastern philosophies in college and I liked their ideas as reflected in Thoreau, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Jung, and Hess. I urgently wanted to join my knowledge to my life, to experience whatever turned out to be the 'real' reality…. I left the West because; except for the Delphic oracle’s maxim 'know thyself,' its authorities all said you could not know reality.” 

 

He wanted to do a little more of the work himself, rather than receiving it. “We are all philosophers,” he adds, “all scientists.”

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Confused Shaman Accidentally Revives Marx · 2 February 2007

The marginal mystics of any era turn me on—Heraclitus, Jeremiah, forest monks, Hildegaard, Wittgenstein, Carlton Pearson. Which is my excuse for reading Andrew Cohen. But oh did he disappoint me this month by publishing talk radio shrink/NYU scholar Howard Bloom’s jayvee defense of consumerism. 

Though I’m ambivalent (if listing leftward) about what consumerism is doing to us, Bloom’s article “Reinventing Capitalism: Putting the Soul Back in the Machine” is sophistry, and dangerous because many well-meaning people will read it. New agers and shrink-talk listeners are open-minded, yet not tough-minded. Receptivity’s a virtue, yes; when the instrument can hold up. 

Not to be confused with the intellectually brawny if also right-wing Harold Bloom, Howard has promoted himself nicely with savvy arbitrage, enthusiasm for ideas, and sometimes telling people what they want to hear. An example of the latter is the project he tags: “In praise of consumerism: the spiritual fruits of materialism.“ 

Sophistry has its place. It’s decent exercise to play with ideas and provoke others with counterintuitive arguments. In this sense, Howard’s aptly calling out the liberal assumption that consumerism hurts the planet, which is largely a projection of an individual’s vague guilt when she buys herself a ton of crap. 

Howard’s essay is a loaf of overwrought, content-lite phrases about capitalism’s messianic potential, for example (paragraph 18): “We have to peel back the lumpy outer skin of capitalism and show the beating heart within…. A capitalism propelled by the troika of empathy, passion, and reason….” 

These images of lumpy bodies and chariots are actually the closest he comes to defining the phenomenon. I’m sorry Howard, but capitalism is the continuous extraction of surplus value for the creation of profit. It relies on some people owning capital, and some people selling them their labor, and on the distribution of the stuff and services they create through markets. It’s a way of organizing human energy, not an “idea.” 

Dipping into his trusty gym-bag of logical fallacies, Bloom claims that, historically, capitalism has “elevated the downtrodden.” Evidence: cultivation of cotton for comfy clothes (so, the Old South was capitalism? wow.), proliferation of soap, and rapid transit (actually a creation of modern nation-states and taxes). He posits no causal process by which consumer capitalism might save us, no examples of what it can do for us, and no refutation for any arguments against capitalism. And beyond this claim that cotton cultivation elevated the downtrodden, he says nothing about poor people. Nothing. There are consumers in his vision, but no producers. None. 

In lieu of arguing against a thesis, Howard Bloom argues against a person, portraying Karl Marx as a “hate”-ful crusader against the middle class. I am glad he has read the manifesto. It’s written at a fourth grade level because it’s a commissioned political tract meant to promote some politician-activists. It’s not social theory. 

But if Howard went to Marx with a little sincere receptivity, he would find exactly the transformative, holistic, spirit-infused architecture of economic life he longs for but lacks the historical understanding, clarity, and the vision to work out. Howard would like that Marx is funny, and learn from him because he’s devastatingly direct and doesn’t play around.

What I loved about this essay, then, is that in its selfish confusion it revealed to me the vitality, the epochal brilliance and enduring revolutionary potential of Marxist thought. (Reminds me it’s been a year since I read The 18^th Brumaire, too.) Howard showed me that the rich world doesn’t need to be told that everything is fine and getting better. If anything, tell them that everything is connected. Let them pursue that propsotion to the limit.

That everything is connected is Marx’s message. He too was a marginal mystic (just an extremely concrete one). He took every chance to challenge acceptance of given reality as “just the way it is,” stood western philosophy on its head, argued that consciousness is linked to mode of production, and said the deep and organic nature of humans is sensuous creativity and togetherness. He also said it is only by loss of consciousness that we come to believe in commodities as mere objects, alienated from the human evergy and relationships they embody. He encapsulated with honesty and beauty the play of free will and determinism: Yes we make our own history, but not under conditions of our own choosing!

If everything is connected, you don’t get to pretend that the world is constituted by the top 30% of the social strata. It’s not that Nigerian oil workers and Salvadoran seamstresses and rugmakers in Bangalore are getting benignly left out of consumer capitalism. How we live depends on how they live. They’re giving us this. This is where the surplus—the difference between what work is worth on the market and what the worker’s paid for it—is coming from. Surplus is the condition of capitalism’s endless and often brilliant innovations. But consumers are not, in turn, “uplifting” these people with these innovations; we’re demanding (via our brands and their buyers) cheaper prices this year than last. Every year. And whose energy truly drives the system? The dedicated consumer's... or the backbroke producer's?

This is consumer capitalism. So harness up your “soul” to that chariot of yours and go forth to take a look, Howard.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

The Hermetic Seal · 24 January 2007

This is an experiment in dissolution. My life is in two disciplines: academic analysis, and inner experiments. At the melding point, is the stew any good?  

Here is why I ask.  

Even for a breakout preacher’s kid, it’s not ok to look faith askance in the ivory tower.  Colleagues I love run tight poisson models of the probability of social protest, predicated on certain assumptions about the nature of the universe during bankers’ hours.  And then in the rest of life we have, unexamined, the belief, faith, meaning, and the morality, religion, conviction, habits, and relationships, entitlements and things we choose not to see… that are the conditions of our productivity.  Keeping things in their separate spheres.  Uncontaminated.  

Social science, where we’re more insecure about our truth claims than the natural scientists, can be a dry, 20^th century realm. Abstraction; deduction; certainty. Suspicious not just of metanarratives but of metaphysics, meaning, and definitely of mystery.

I’m not looking to bring matters of the spirit up to the ivory tower, or transfer the intellectual wonder of the latter into some folk realm of meaning. Those are two versions of arbitrage—bringing the ideas of over to the other. Great career-builder, arbitrage.  But neither the first—some taxonomy of consciousness—or the second—self-help for scientists—strikes me as all that great. 

Rather, my question is whether the two hemispheres of inquiry can, pulled to center, make a more interesting whole. Don’t know yet.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , science , social theory