Security Camera · 22 February 2009
Practice with others, no teacher. What I'm doing.
I sense, again and again, that practice brings together three streams, known variously as:
Energy---Method---Community,
The Truth---The Way---The Life,
Buddha---Dharma---Sangha,
&c.
The first--some kind of God-energy, a sovereign Spirit--is what we map on to the person in the teacher or therapist role. Easily. But where do you source a sense of consciousness… a seer… the receptacle of all-knowing… when there is no teacher to fill the space?
Right now we are insourcing the seer. Going without a teacher is incredibly sweet, everyone tapping self-reliance they’d forgotten is there, strengthening it, and in the weaker moments keeping it together for the team if not oneself. Sometimes it’s easier to stay on target if you feel you’re doing it for the benefit of others. Some people who have less understanding of the practice don’t even show up to join us because there’s no teacher to care for them, and that’s actually a benfit to us.
Everything is stiller than ever. The energy is not even that of witness-cultivation (which you seen in the quieter practitioners in a sort of chatty room) so much as just being there and letting it be enough. Of dropping the flight away from it just being exactly like this, and finding joy in the thisness. Without a teacher but with high stakes conspiration and strong fidelity to a taken-for-granted method, the possibility of nondual states in practice seems much more obvious to me. This can be easy, with simple strong support.
Afterwards, the other day, I remembered the bitter existentialist line from Saramago…
How often have we shown ourselves as we really are, and yet we need not have bothered, there was no one there to notice...
Ah the resentment of the baby atheist, the anger of the lonely young post-Christian! Poor child, realizing your own end-in-yourself. We in the room are so over it.
That said, it never hurts to throw a security camera up in the rafters even when it’s not rolling tape. There’s some part of us together that turns on even to the imagined dialogue with some vaguely-felt seer in the machine. A dialogue that wants to collapse in to mutual participation, and does so more easily because the fact that the camera (or statue, or photograph) is lifeless is perfectly known and no kind of secret.
The hanging SKPJ on the wall and lighting the candles to Ganesha. So here we are surface-level atheists, post-projectionists; but there’s still an ongoing participation in that which cannot be discussed. And some part of experience that lights up even in deeper in theta state if the unspeakable is mirrored back in ritual. Let the ineffable try to take form as photo or statue or security camera—it’s always a lost cause but the incompleteness of trying still creates a resonance, makes us all a little stiller, sometimes even makes it feel that we’re held by something. In a suspension. Weirdly ambulant in time and space by the grace of whatever.
I had forgotten about that for some years, during bitter post-Christian teenagerdom and the activist and grad school years of seeing it all as just atoms and the void. It’s nice to recover the security blanket. Even if now it’s just a tiny thread not backed by anything at all, it still feels warm.
One of the least ritualist, most self-reliant, among us is Lily, a clockwork-methodical practitioner who has her "own interpretation of practice.” She has no interest in some larger subculture around ashtanga, in anything at all religious or philosophical, and no need to participate in owl-typical what’s-it-all-about inquiries. The other morning as we began and found SKPJ out of order she stamped a foot ruefully and said,
Listen I don’t care if it’s a pain in the ass to put it up I’ve got to have the damn picture. I can’t do it without the picture.
Brilliant. She cracked me up.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
, evolution
, having a body
, power of suggestion
, spirituality
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LOL, sounds pretty ritualistic to me!
Posted by: V · Feb 23, 11:51 AM · #
Utterly. :-)
I wrote this when exhausted… now I see it doesn’t really make sense.
I guess I’m in a place of seeing how the ritual becomes supportive moment-by-moment, in a practical way, and at least gives this group of practitioners tools for being ok with the existential stuff.
In other words, the ritual is oddly calming and supportive—makes it more ok that life is radically uncertain and we are in some ways alone in it.
It doesn’t matter that most of us in this group don’t particularly believe there’s anything “behind” it. For this group, picture and statue are just kind of nuts and bolts of practice—the better to make the machine run.
I am really loving practicing with these people who aren’t desperate to manufacture spiritual beliefs but who also have the sense of humor and humility to build up some meaning with the tools at hand. Very humbling but also funny and lighthearted. I sense these people as gracefully focused without being superstitiously pious.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 23, 12:30 PM · #
Well, from the moment that you are doing the same practice every day, it’s only natural to ritualize parts or all of it, no? I even ritualize my morning routine, if only because it makes it more time efficient :-)
Light-heartedness is always a great attitude, but I also have a weakness for the seekers of meaning, even if that translates into desperation for manufacturing spiritual beliefs. We all do our best with what we’ve got.
Posted by: V · Feb 23, 12:35 PM · #
True.
I used to have this sort of artistic disdain for all forms of ritual and try to root it out wherever I saw myself creating it. (That when I was 16, losing my religion, and enraged at Christianity for being bigoted and coercive. Not a coincidence, I guess.)
But I guess I’ve come around.
And it’s not like this blog isn’t an all-purpose, vertically integrated, meaning-manufacturing free trade zone! We could start minting currency.
...Still doing the best with what we’ve got, yes, and what we don’t got…
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 23, 12:45 PM · #
Let’s manufacture currency and solve this stupid crisis. Dollowls. Or Vounds (this one sounds dirty somehow).
Posted by: V · Feb 23, 12:55 PM · #
Nice. If equanimity is our stock in trade, the Vounds-USD exchange rate might be rising fast!
I’ve been looking at some consumer spending numbers vis-a-vis large-scale demographics this morning. My god. Gives a whole new meaning to 2012, but I think the meaning economy (information economy) can spring us out if we work it.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 23, 01:04 PM · #
I’d suppose that any socially organizing influence is bigoted and coercive. That’s the nature of society, right? I’ll probably change my mind about that idea within 20 minutes so don’t worry too much about quickly pointing out its errors.
This post and comment thread reminds me of the book Bumblebee Economics , which I’ve been meaning to read. Might be good material for your upcoming trip to India, too.
Posted by: Carl · Feb 23, 01:22 PM · #
I love the fact that you all get together every morning to practice even without a teacher. Not many people could sustain that type of community for too long. That’s some good energy!
Like you said, the multi-decade drop in the saving rate from roughly 10% to 0% mirrored the surge in consumer spending share of GDP from about 63% to almost 71%. Yikes!
Posted by: cody · Feb 23, 02:16 PM · #
Made sense to me! Self-reliance is a nice thing to play with, since our intention is to take on more responsibility. And ritual is the container to do it within, there is a beginning and an end and a purpose in the middle. Made me think that to be a teacher is to provide objective feedback with some secure sense of purpose, and wouldn’t that be a good mind to cultivate through self-reliance. Sounds like Big Mind, or connecting Dual with Non-Dual…
Posted by: Gregor · Feb 23, 03:17 PM · #
Well… not every practitioner has an intention to take responsibility! It’s just that it becomes interesting over time. At least, for some it does.
Carl, since you love western fiction, have you read the Poisonwood Bible? Kingsolver can be emotionally ungenerous and her characters are usually simpletons, but the character Ada in PB is unlike anyone else I’ve encountered. She’s Niklas Luhmann meets Camus’ Stranger, with a fetish for wordgames and fascination for insects. I think you’d love her.
Re: society, of course it is coercive. :-) Things go better if some institution has the monopoly of violence. I stopped hating Christianity when I realized it’s the same as any human institution: tragically flawed; foundation for community; laced with beauty. A lot of what I’m doing now, it feels, is finding out what’s left after the hatred for the past is gone.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 23, 07:31 PM · #
CP, yeah. The demographics that disturb me (especially as I think about LOHAS mkts) are the proportion of the population (both US and throughout the industrialized world) that is age 40 to mid 50s. As the boomers have passed through that bracket, their stupid soulless consumption (and addiction thereto) has driven the world economy. By 2012 or 2013 their consumption power will have died fully, egged on by 2009’s sudden evaporation of their 401ks. There just isn’t a cohort of affluent human consumers anywhere to take their place. In Keynesian terms, aggregate demand—even without the shock of the financial collapse—is about to drop off sharply. Most economists don’t look at demographic data; and the historians who explain massive economic adjustments in terms of population shifts (students of a guy named Malthus) are marginalized for good reason. But seriously, the aging of industrialized nation’s populations is sort of terrifying in terms of global economic health. You know I mock the cultures of consumption/ spiritual materialism that is the boomer way of life (and yoga), but the economics of consumption… I freely admit it has been the collective daily bread in this, well, world system.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 23, 07:39 PM · #
With the aging of western industrialized nations, there is perhaps an “opportunity” to redefine the notion of nations. The workers have got to come from somehwere, and it’s not like they ain’t out there. A Schengen world, anyone?
Posted by: knl · Feb 24, 05:54 AM · #
Rituals… I kind of like them unless I’m forced to do them!
While working with mentally disabled kids, I found out that the reason so many are fiercely attached to music, especially specific songs, is that they find comfort in the known in a life where they have little control. They always know they’re going to hear the same lyrics or the same beat, or whatever. It’s a constant in their lives that makes them feel some grounding. I don’t know anything about music therapy, so I could be way off, but it sounded like a good theory to me.
Rituals, repetition, routines … they all seem to soothe in one way or another.
Posted by: Liz · Feb 24, 04:07 PM · #
Schengen world, would be a dream.
Liz does this explain why I can’t stop listening to Ulysses by Franz Ferdinand first thing every morning? It is either that or my feelings about Alex Kapranos.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 24, 06:05 PM · #
Actually a lot more embarrassing than the Jack White crush.
Posted by: (0v0) · Feb 24, 06:27 PM · #
Sitting here in what feels like close to 40 degrees celsius in BF I am missing the point of the Schengen world. People here are bending over backwards to get a Schengen visa and the ARE willing to do any job, just to make ends meet and help their family, so I don’t see the joy of Schengen. Or is it different Schengen you are talking about. Oh, I think I get it, all world should be part of Schengen, is that what you are saying? My brain is cooked, sorry.
Posted by: Fatou · Feb 25, 10:01 AM · #
Yes, that’s what I was saying when I said that. — A global sense of “schengen.”
Posted by: knl · Feb 25, 12:44 PM · #