Saturday XXXXV: Chaos on the Lockdown · 15 March 2008
I listened to Elvis on Friday on the drive through Veteran’s territory. The 405/Wilshire intersection slices the VA into squares like four corners in the desert: Federal Building/ Hospital/ Residences/ Cemetery. The passage through it each morning is slow: we sit in our cars checking each other out. So much makeup being applied, texts being typed, and me in silence with my bottle of hemp protein and third series fix.
I usually don’t get verbal until at least 10 am, but this week I’ve been trying to turn the words on earlier for dissertationly purposes. I despise the telephone, but even rang up a parent or a friend a couple of these past mornings to prime the system. Friday was a slow news day and I wasn’t brash enough to fire up my aging Razr, so I put on Elvis.
GOODMORNINGLOSANGELES!!! Looking out over the wartime headstones in the cemetery, sitting in traffic, listening to Jailhouse Rock. The song always makes me think of the utter bound bliss of my asylum-based childhood—chaos on the lockdown. The mind likes to be bound! Don’t you forget it. That’s part of why we reign ourselves in with conventions, and (on another level) why meditation-mantra is so much easier than spacious awareness.
But do the boundaries we set up decay? I think about the kids dancing the goddam jitterbug to Elvis, and the unpredictable chaos of the dance I’ll make today with the wolf children at the Masons’ hall. What it used to take to make a film just 50 years ago (the rigid structure of Hollywood’s golden age soothes me), and how many of those rules are just elastic today. Of the yoga icons in this town who proclaim the ashtanga system finally cramped their creativity and they had to deconstruct it, make something new.
Genres divide. Is that the way it always is?
I am always the first to know when a solution has expired. I give credit to new ideas and welcome new perspectives to a fault. Mentors hate this because it’s no way to build a career; and friends who haven’t known me long enough take it as a mark of poor character. But it is this “openness” just the hungry ghost of the genre-divider in me?
Why don’t I do this with my practice—doubt it, decompose it, reduce it to chaos?
The mind likes to be bound.
Links:
● Intriguing. Limbs of Yoga, phase one of eight. Look in to the wheel. He’s watching you all and giving you this message.
● Problematic. Aren’t Oprah watchers already doing nothing? Tolle’s great, but “live in the now; drop your problems” is a message the consumer-debt crowd has already appropriated....
● Accurate. Journal Issue researching bloggers is free til April. I like the piece on bridge bloggers, and always take note of Cass Sunstein’s well-tempered jaundice about this revolution we’re making with the internet.
● All too human. Man thinks he can fly, gets off on his edge. Somewhere between awe-inspiring and just stupid.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, beta state
, evolution
, markets-networks-society
, self-deception
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Why stupid, for the highlining? He’s either tethered or parachuted.
The only stupid thing he’s done is climb the arch, in my estimation.
I’ve heard of many more people dying from straight up climbing than highlining or BASE jumping.
Beautiful pictures, though, eh? :-)
Posted by: karen · Mar 15, 10:46 AM · #
Gorgeous. I love the SW.
Stupid and intriguing all at the same time. Not the method, but the motive. The obsession with the edge and the need for near-death to appreciate life. I do like it when humans rush in to that rather than cowering from it, but it’s a little tragicomic for me.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 15, 01:28 PM · #
Oh. I can’t speak to the dumbness of that obsession, what with having it myself and all. :-)
There is nothing like the feeling of getting your feet back on the ground after long multi-pitch climb.
Now, the alpine climbers. THEY’RE crazy.
Posted by: karen · Mar 15, 02:30 PM · #
Yeah that’s the thing — some base jumper said in an interview something like “once you’ve done this, the rest of life is pretty boring.” No doubt, but hey…
Posted by: jlafitte · Mar 16, 04:15 AM · #
It’s interesting how some people feel it makes the rest of life boring, and others feel it makes the rest of life all that much sweeter. Too much attachment to the adrenaline, in the former, perhaps?
Posted by: karen · Mar 16, 06:59 AM · #
Hmm, is it that yoga isn’t Yoga when there is no prana? No focus? The climber is focused/or dead. I think Tolle is talking spending time with the ‘now’. Not ‘spending’ time with the now. It seems to be that horrible space of ‘effortless’ mastery. I practice my pentatonics every day!
Posted by: Gregor · Mar 16, 06:17 PM · #
Tolle is excellent in my book and his books and talks are first rate as well. The fact that someone with this message has the one of the worlds most far reaching and influential microphones in the the media age of today gives me great hope. He is able to communicate a very yogic process (witness, parusha/prakrti) to a broad audience. I feel that it can be well received even with all the jacked up parameters of the current era. I am hopeful that deep down a lot of people are getting that the current consumerist spend your way to (psuedo) happiness ethos has serious shortcomings and Tolle offers a bridge to an alternative.
Posted by: es&j · Mar 16, 08:51 PM · #
Now you’re playing with fire, taking on the Oprah-heads!
Posted by: cody · Mar 17, 07:33 AM · #
ESJ, Yes. Tolle is an absolute radical, and some people will get that. A LOT of people, considering the size of the Oprahhead empire. (Others will, inaccurately, reject Tolle out of hand as “new age” I think—a lot of that viewership is crazy conservative.)
My sense on this is that people will receive his message according to exactly where they are at. Some really will use it as a license to drop their latent guilt about consumerism and pursue it full-bore…. Some will be ready to understand him more deeply because they’re already, intuitively, ready for the full force of his teachings.
He’s fascinating. Awake without a faith tradition (though the subversive things he’s always saying about Jesus are brilliant!), impish, unholy, impractical as all hell. The perfect sage for our age.
But if even those of us who want the full force of his teachings can barely begin to realize it (and instead, like myeslf, just keep listening to those CDs over and over… HA!), at what level are the more unsuspecting Oprahheads (who perhaps want self-help but likely not full-on transformation) going to incorporate him?
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 17, 08:57 AM · #
700,000 readers for the first episode and it’s the most popular download on iTunes.
Here it is.
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 17, 02:55 PM · #
Tolle’s appearance on Oprah attracts denunciations of it/her as “new age”: Fox TV excerpt
Posted by: (0v0) · Mar 17, 03:01 PM · #