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)
Categories: arbitrage
, integration
, markets-networks-society
, self-deception
, social theory
, spirituality
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Um (or should I say Om), what are the five stages of grief again. Denial is one of them isn’t it? Seems it’s the biggest.
If it all goes poop, I am hiking to Ashland, OR. Meet you there!
Posted by: Gregor · Sep 17, 12:35 PM · #
Owl, I had to Google “solipsists” and when I read it, I laughed so hard- you’re totally right. They are only their minds. They have been proving this over and over by dishing out bold face lies that, when tossed back at them and an explanation is demanded, they ramble answers that are so non-sensical that everyone is left with furrowed brows and resignation at getting to the truth. Sick. This is sick- but also maybe what is needed to raise the consciousness of those who usually bury their heads in the sand.
And- what is it with “we make our own reality”??? That is so bizarre. They really can twist anything.
Posted by: Liz · Sep 17, 07:30 PM · #
Aside from the fact that I keep breaking my nose on your syntax, I love what you write.
Why would anoyone want to do anything so vulgar as ‘take calves in a backbend’? I don’t like the sound of that at all.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Sep 18, 02:25 AM · #
oh, this is good. very, very good.
Is that Barack Obama sitting under the bodhi tree?
:)
Posted by: cody · Sep 18, 08:47 AM · #
Oh!
MMMaking my day, one backhanded compliment at a time. Thanks! It’s true about my syntax. Half of this is purposeful, though, to keep the readership a little smaller.
Ashland… a very nice place, especially this time of year.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 12:12 PM · #
Aaah, Barack. CP and Liz, if the Dems don’t win after this, the party should throw in the towel altogether. I’m not kidding. Phil Gramm, the architect and champion of the deregulation that directly brought this about, is one of McCain’s main financial advisers. And indeed, McCain himself is part of the deregulation movement. GOP policy can be blamed quite directly here. If the Dem’s don’t get that across… sheesh.
Just a straight ITES campaign, that’s all they need to do. They can seriously do this in their sleep.
This , though I have not had time to read it, looks like a good discussion.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 12:15 PM · #
MM, Owl’s syntax is always pretty straight. I usually have a dictionary loaded in a parallel window whenever I click to her blog though. On the topic of confusing syntax and vocabulary: you’ve laid some headscratchers yourself.
The economy truly looks a mess right now but, on a brighter note, the free market system is working as it’s supposed to, just like all the economists and capitalists say. It’s too bad they all don’t have the cojones to ride their sacred cow with faith.
Posted by: Carl · Sep 18, 12:39 PM · #
Yes – the dilution of the physical practice in the west is one thing; but the sick, superficial appropriation of the point of the whole thing in order to justify our twisted system and selfish whims – this is truly nauseating.
Posted by: susananda · Sep 18, 01:20 PM · #
Oh, and your content sometimes eludes me, but I have no problem with your syntax :)
Posted by: susananda · Sep 18, 01:21 PM · #
Susan, yes.
Re ITES: here’s a yes. Very good.
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 18, 03:39 PM · #
Fiscal conservatives and (some) superbendys do tend towards solipsism (the rest of us are just quarked with solecism). Why? Mucky material origin of their celestial status. Not to be admitted, luck and (family) money, sacro-illiac mobility and the cascading vertabrae of post-colonial history.
What a fine article. But…
You crew had better make sure that Obama wins, so get off the fucking internet and slap the walls of the non-voting neighbourhoods rather than the figuarive ghettoes of ashtangaland.
Ovo, dear Ovo, ye cannot hate her,
For she’s been seen with Walter Pater.
And though she has his flick’ring guile,
There’s no efflue of willowing style.
Posted by: meniscusmerangue · Sep 19, 12:42 AM · #
“Mucky material origin of their celestial status. Not to be admitted, luck and (family) money, sacro-illiac mobility and the cascading vertabrae of post-colonial history.”
Oh, lordy. This is some nice poetry, MM.
Posted by: karen · Sep 19, 05:42 AM · #
((((Comment threader crush.))))
Gosh. Also, this should settle the question of my syntax… it leaves much to be desired.
The Editor, who has been editing my ass every singe day this week, agrees.
Meantime, working my edge mentally is quite a wonderful experience: it is satisfying to watch my prose collapse into digital drool around nine each night. Is this different from working the physical edge? Am I being a dualist just by speaking of the mind and the body in turn?
This question from a silent reader a while back remains open to me: of course if i was “thinking” about Ashtanga i’d be wondering why a beautiful non-dualist sociologist (been reading your posts) finds it so hard to discuss the practice without resorting to dualist language
Nevermind that I’m not much of a looker; hopefully a response is contained above.
And hopefully I’ll have timespace (nondualist props there?) to return to this because y’all clarify it all so nicely…
Time to get off the “fucking internets.” P.S. Obama Pranayama is now selling (totally great!) T-shirts. Breathe your dissent; consume your dissent; or act on it. These are not mutually exclusive options. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 19, 10:22 AM · #
I just realized
the completely “off the wall”
comment I’ve written
(Apparently my mente is in recession too)
Posted by: (0v0) · Sep 19, 10:48 AM · #
I’ll join you in the recessed minds corner. Tell me again, what do we get out of this whole “working your edge” business? Somehow I feel like I’m missing the point. Maybe because it’s 9pm right now.
Posted by: V · Sep 19, 12:07 PM · #
LOL! i have been coming back to this post for several days, trying to penetrate it. now that i come as far as to read the comments i see that i’m not alone in “braking my nose on your syntax” and needing a “dictionary loaded in a parallel window whenever I click to your blog”, Owl ;-) i know this is partly your purpose, but you wont get rid of me! not even now when my brain is not working as it should (i do have a hard time reading long, dense post these days…), because i love your writings once i deciphered them :) not that i necessarily have anything intelligent to say… p.s. i need to join Obama Pranayama!
Posted by: chitta vritti · Sep 20, 08:08 AM · #
Wow, that was way all over the place for me.
But I think I got it.
Sorta. Yes.
I did.
OK! I just got it.
Posted by: Susan · Sep 20, 04:40 PM · #