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

Comment

1. Hi OvO,

   As the board administrator that found herself in the middle of the fraught, I would like to comment here.

   I agree with you that there was a lot of shadow self conflict in that thread. But was it our colective shadow or individual ones? I suspect at points one, and at some other points, the other.

   For me personally, I didn’t become emotionally involved in the thread until the very last posts. All through the thread history, I participated here and there, but mostly I found the whole thing quite amusing. The thing with trolls is that as much as you try, you can’t make them reason or use logic. You can kill yourself trying to present an open, well-thought out argument. They will just spit out the same hateful garbage. You point out inconsistencies in their behaviour (eg how he felt entitled to insult several members of the board but claimed we were the ones insulting him) and they will just go off on another tangent.

   The argument became personal for me when he directly insulted me. That crossed a strong boundary for me. The same way that if someone hurls an insult at me in the street I walk away but if they actually are guests in my home I kick them out instead of ignoring it.

   For as long as I am administrator of the ashtanga ezboard, I won’t tolerate personal insults. If the community there thinks I should take them as they come, then I will be more than happy to resign and give the reigns to someone more capable. But until that happens, that will be the policy I will be applying.

   Guess we could go on about why I care at all if anyone insults me on the ezboard, but then we are making this about myself and really, I’m not that interesting :-)

   Cheers
   V.

   Posted by: Vanessa · Jun 5, 10:13 PM · #

2. Hello! I felt horrible when the troll attacked you. For all the distance I could take— he’s just a wounded animal and cannot be taken personally; it’s just an online form shorn of the richer kinds of interactional cues; etc.— still, when he went there, it crossed a line for me too. It’s crazy how much power comes through in a simple act of direct hostility. Banning personal insults, even if you have to edit them out, makes sense to me now.

   About your first question, yeah. I wouldn’t say there’s a “collective unconscious”—a community-sized version of an individual’s subconsciousness. Yet there are community taboos (maybe especially in a devotional culture like astanga), and strong group ideals of “compassion” and such that might make each of us more likely to disown/project particular feelings in similar patterns. Followers of Anna Forest behave eerily like her; Iyengar teachers share the man’s penchant for yelling at students; SKPJ is in my eyes awesomely defies imitation, but maybe there are ways we do narrow ourselves in an effort to become the same.

   Still… does all this tell us something about the true nature of the community? I REALLY think so. And from what I saw, what it revealed was interesting and a little complex, but not shameful. It’s surprising how far down the rabbit hole we’ll go before coming back to the practice at hand, but whatever.

   Anyway. Your moderation skills are refined and judicious, so I’m not convinced you’re uninteresting. Are you the MindBending blogger?

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 5, 11:35 PM · #

3. Very nice post – I’m looking forward to reading #2.

   To ask your own question back…why lurking for 3 years? what made you de-lurk?

   cp

   Posted by: cody pomeray · Jun 6, 12:08 AM · #

4. I watched this post as well, although there were times when I’d had quite enough of it. The recipes were always good distractions, though. Leave it to me to think about food…

   I hadn’t visited the ChitChat forum in quite a while, and I was amazed to see that the thread was still active, and a little disappointed as well.

   Interesting observations.

   Posted by: Jenna · Jun 6, 07:26 AM · #

5. CP:

   I hadn’t read the thread, but then looked at the last several entries and had a reaction. Stepped back, let the reaction simmer down to a response. When the response didn’t vaporize, I realized I wasn’t saying it out loud because posting to that board was way out of my comfort zone. Forging an (online) identity takes work and some backbone, and meanwhile I was enjoying the innocence of non-participation. Yeah— like the audience at a bullfight is innocent.

   So I broke the seal. It’s part of a larger process I went through as I transitioned into third series. Up until recently, I experienced my practice as individual, personal, “mine.” But even as I go through a serious injury that nobody but me can truly know (as my teacher reminded me this morning, after wonderful tales of his own 25-odd years of practice), I’m seeing my practice as just another test case of the Astanga Yoga Research Method. I’m part of a movement and may as well offer back to it whatever I’ve got, even if the only consequence of that is that I myself open up along a new dimension.

   As for the more sinister, less rationalizable, motives for engaging the troll… I’m still watching those materialize and wondering if they’re made of a substance that’s capable of catching fire.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 08:00 AM · #

6. well, i’m glad that you de-lurked.

   between the lines you also just revealed that you’re a prodigy – just 3 years of practice, on third series, and burning up samskaras as well – wow!

   have you bought the open ticket to bangalore yet? Do we see authorization in your future?

   Posted by: cody pomeray · Jun 6, 10:10 AM · #

7. Aaah CP, I’ve already spent down the precocious years. Now I’m just another thirtysomething on a mat. But yes, the teaching door’s been blown open and so I do have an intention to resolve in the next 18 months, and amid two strongly countervailing pull-factors: WHICH research/teaching programme to make central? Or, in keeping with the vision of yoga as a resolution of apparent opposites, whether it’s possible to weave the two threads together in a way that enriches both. Nagarjuna ascends, hopes the owl.

   Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 6, 10:28 AM · #

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