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.

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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.

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Categories: having a body , integration , self-deception

Prana · 1 December 2009

Explanations change.

A long time ago in ashtanga years, a woman on her cycle was dirty. Shamed in to second class status and a sense that her body was profane, she was all out shunned on certain days of the month. Signs were posted. Don’t compromise us with your stink. Don’t profane our rituals – be they puja or asana – by participating in them when you are unworthy.

Consciousness grows. The old belief is recognized as a pillar of patriarchy. We react to it, analyze it, mourn it, let it go. Slowly, the background beliefs that maintained the boundaries and the hierarchies are disavowed.

But do we find other ways of making them true?

What is the New Age belief system but a set of superstitions and justifications, codes of fear and prejudice interlaced with little liberations?

The idea that a woman is dirty has been replaced with woo woo physics. Woo woo physics has replaced the English words “up” and “down” with “prana” and “apana.” Somehow if you use a different word for these things, it’s more meaningful and you can make lots of fun claims.

I remember the lanky guy in my first ashtanga workshop, interrogating Richard Freeman about vatayanasana: Is it pranic or apanic? Which? Which? What is the physics of the thing? Tell me! 

Dude. It’s not just one thing. We are all upward and downward moving at the same time. Whole postures and PEOPLE don't fit in to your cute orphan categories - prana, apana, kapha, vata, pitta, sattvic, rajasic, tamasic, &c. &c. &c.

But according to the most simplified New Age physics, prana and apana are important because that’s what differentiates men and women. And it’s especially what characterizes a woman’s cycle. That is her apanic – downward moving – time. Once she becomes more "in touch" with the rhythms of nature, she will learn to “respect,” “honor,” and “surrender to” apana when it is “her time.”

We are living an sort of wonderful contradiction here.

As one goes deeper in to this practice, one does start noticing that those women who are, in fact, "aligned with the rhythms of nature" will cycle together. That collected rhythm shapes our life together, tied like everything else we do to the moon cycle. But do the orphan categories really explain our experience?

More to the point: if the women’s cycle is so exclusively “apanic,” then why do the sensitive ones tend to menstruate on the full moon? 

 

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Question · 2 November 2009

Under what conditions does yoga make a person

1) more egotistical or

2) less kind

than one was before?

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Categories: astanga yoga , morality , self-deception , spirituality

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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , self-deception , spirituality

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.

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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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

Liberation · 27 February 2009

What if it is mainly in the minds of Americans that ashtanga is a rigid law? Is that because it’s what we need it to be? So that then we can break free of it and find our liberation?

We are so much more interested in catharsis than practice. We turn everything into a liberation struggle, but are so shallow that we keep running on the American cliché that liberation is to be found by fighting the system. I do it to. Less so now than in the beginning, but it comes up.

But the System is no big deal (blows on fingernails). Smash patriarchy on your time off. Work out the alternatives to authoritarianism in your sleep. We only tilt at that windmill during practice to avoid the liberation struggle that’s closer to home. We have thoroughly confused internal peace and freedom with abstract liberation struggles fought against imaginary authorities.

I guess it is kind of more fun to obssess about some mean old people out there who want to take away our practice. It also feeds the catharsis addiction and gives us material for the eternal power struggle we must fight in order to feel free. Mavericks. Individualists.

“Don’t put some pre-conceived rules on me.”

What? Conceived where? What’s the issue?

This practice is so full of criminals and outlaws that there’s almost nobody to do us the favor of representing the law. The ashtanga police? Who is that? We want to imagine “they” care about what we’re doing, want to fantasize that we are wild west cowboys throwing off their oppression. Well…good chance “they” are more concerned about (1) paying the rent and (2) managing your projections without collapsing. We should send them a check for being strong rocks in the shifting sands of our daddy issues.

The cult of the law-breaker is a rehash of the commercial myth of noncomformity, and strikes me as especially immature in a time when we could be realizing how intimately and practically all our fates are connected. Instead we just liberate ourselves from some phantom system, and then re-liberate ourselves from imaginary dictates, and then proclaim ourselves liberated to form a maverick collective, and then unite to go get some more liberation.

Liberated Americans: united in noncomformity!

Individuated.

Free.

OM.

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Categories: astanga yoga , self-deception

Advaita bromides, cont. · 5 February 2009

A model:

Spiritual Bypassing Index: the time elapsed between event A and event BS, where A is the occurrence of real, juicy pain or struggle or conflict and BS is the utterance of some nondualist cliché.

Or, maybe:

advaita bromide : experience :: fidgets : vinyasa

They’re escape-doors. Escape doors are nice. We have to check out sometimes: it’s stressful to be on all the time. But come on. The words of the great sages turn to gravel in our mouths when we use them to control others, appear realized, or run away from our own real personalities. Why is this so common? Why not be with experience in a gritty, generous way… why not be thankful for an edge and resolve it with breath and the movement of energy… rather than deny it, flee from it, using the advaita eraser? Sometimes when the air gets hot, I feel that this practice is an elaborately choreographed cowardice, just as much as it is a sharp forgiving tool for joy.

I have been reading Advaita for 11 years and do not understand it at all. This philosophy grew up in relationship with hardcore samkhya dualism in a world where the two are as much complements as they are contraries. We westerners don’t really understand this context, the capaciousness and generosity of the tradition, so we reduce it to an “it’s all in the mind” escape hatch. A homogenized, pasteurized export with a vaguely Indian flavor. No wonder SKPJ doesn’t want to hear us theorize the tantric codes. We use them to turn a direct practice into goo.

End rant.

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Categories: self-deception , social theory

Projection Junction, What's Your Function? · 19 January 2009

Here is a radical (or maybe just a grown-up?) theory of learning...

What if the big story of “lessons” to be learned in a practice room (or wherever) is: that the knowledge is always already ours for the taking? What if all the lessons are just freely available and free of charge? What if the learning you do is NOT the genius orchestration of some other (or “the universe”) pulling strings on your personal behalf? What if there is no cosmic babysitter, or even a technical babysitter?

What if the lessons learned were simply those you have identified out there in your environment when you were ready and, in a self-responsible fashion, finally took in to yourself? What if the unifying factor isn't another's omniscience but your intelligence?

I know it’s radical, this personal responsibility thing. I'm stating it in the extreme. But if you are at the other extreme then perhaps you need to be paying your teachers roughly $150 an hour to carry all your projections.

I hereby hail a new era of personal responsibility. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , self-deception , spirituality

More Pieces · 14 October 2008

The beach at dawn is full of bums wrapped in Army/Navy surplus. I drove right past the shala and out to the pier this morning, under a huge harvest moon made orange not from the dust of tilled-under cornstalks but the ash burning luxury homes. There are fires in the hills and it’s just as well—gives local news something to distract the masses from calling their brokers. (That's what you get when you let riffraff like me invest.)

I walked a few miles on the beach, toward Malibu, which was all pink with a glowing haze like in soap operas, thanks to the fire ash. As the sun came up the oversize bum-caterpillars spread across the beach started moving, packing up, trudging in across the sand.

Great place to be homeless, in some ways. I wonder how many people will slip out of the middle class this year. I wonder if I will get a snot-nose job and slip in to it.

I was shocked to hear Dr. Doom on the morning news. Usually the financial media pretend he doesn’t exist—how odd it would be if this wing of the journalism profession practiced the compulsively “balanced,” phony two-sided reporting of the "objective" politics reporters. Roubini, because he sees an end to this, actually makes me feel better, given that the credit markets are still locked up and the DOW is full of puckey. Amazing to watch it oscillate.

To hedge that possibility—of slipping from the bliss-following margins and in to the middle class—and because I just about outed myself today (and in so doing got a large insulin spike—sad to see I still need subselves hermetically sealed off from professional life), I’m anonymizing this owl. If you’re here already, eh, you know me and I love your being around. But I’m not all that excited about new lurkers and am short-circuiting some of the routes to my house. More self-expression, less identity-construction. That’s the idea.

They say the moon is the time to observe the attachments and ridigity we form around practice (and also around compulsive non-practice—ever notice that there’s as much authoritarianism and superstition about You Shall not Practice on Moon Days as about You Shall Practice Correct Vinyasa?) To that end, I want to say that I’ve been disillusioned by rigid ashtangi refusals to think critically. Is it refusal, though... or inability? I never know whether some people shallow for life or if it's fair to say shallow a choice. But... it does seem to be shallowness that enables us to believe that subservient, unreflective expressions of this practice are deep. Ommmm....

It is wonderful to work within and negotiate a tradition, but this week I've been aware of ashtanga's fear-laced gullibility and ways in which it is not about going into our own immediate experience. The specific ways we use ashtanga to avoid our inner experiences.

Sonya of Long Island sometimes moves me very much, when she hits me with unadorned honesty that is not even looking for approval or agreement, when she shows her ability to just sit in the flames of her own experience and wonder what the hell it is about. By contrast, it seems much of what we do is approval-seeking, or neurotic self-control, or just using the body as a driste-suck on others.

I was stunned, in retrospect, that it took until the fifty-fourth comment (blisterkist) in the AshtangaNews thread for someone finally to call out the superficiality and self-fleeing nature of this ashtanga fantasy of having a so-called guru (the guru tradition is something so different from this beguiling culture clash), together with our failure of critical thought when it comes to the life-or-death matter of our own practice. Sometimes I give tradition itself too much weight and respect—trying to act compassionately but perhaps just avoiding disagrements. My wish is that we masses could have both beds in which to lay down our heads and brains to occupy those heads. This world is too beautiful to inhabit halfway outside of what's real to us, drifting between other people's mumbo jumbo and their competing assertions of rightness. Wide-eyed redulity is for summer blockbusters, but it just takes the edge off self-inquiry.

I worry this practice will dull itself with its fearful authority-worship and its repetition of arbitrary rules as if they were magic. If that is all there is, then of course we will turn outward, to performance and recognition, for rewards. I'm starting to wonder if any aspects of practice that take us out of our experience are a waste of energy.  

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Karl Marx, Hero · 7 October 2008

Spoiling my chances of running for President, one blog post at a time.

Actually, I didn’t write what follows below. It’s from Gregory Rodriguez at the LATimes. Very good. I've worked with the data he discusses and he's right that there's a lot of fear in there. A lot.

           ......................................................................................

The debate between faith and atheism leaves too little room for figuring out why humans believe.

Forget Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. These atheists du jour have nothing on the most famous anti-theist of all time. Good old Karl Marx is still the most eloquent and thoughtful nonbeliever, and his “religion is the opium of the masses” is still the best one-liner in the business.

But as famous as that zinger is, it’s too bad that most people have never read the sentences that come before and after it. Marx was a whole lot more sympathetic to religious faith than most people give him credit for. He saw religion as a source of solace that should only be abolished until the sources of people’s pain—an unfair economic system—had been eradicated.

“Religious suffering, “ he wrote in 1844, “is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Marx wasn’t just another hater of religion as a childish fantasy or a retreat from rationality. He saw faith as a symptom and not the disease, and he was interested in faith not in terms of right and wrong but because of what it told him about the human condition.

That’s a far cry from the tenor of today’s brand of assertive atheism. According to surveys, atheists make up only about 4% of the U.S. population, or about 5 million adults, who tend to be more educated and affluent than believers. But thanks to a slew of bestselling, God-debunking books and Maher’s new film, “Religulous,” in which the comedian lampoons religious beliefs, atheism has never had a higher profile in this country.

And, of course, you could ascribe at least some of the resurgence of assertive atheism to a backlash against evangelical Christians and the way they have assertively injected religion into civic life.

The fury of the debate between faith and atheism leaves little room for an inquiry as to why 90% of Americans say they believe in God or a supreme being and more than 40% say they attend religious services each week. These days, a typically silly argument between a believer and a nonbeliever revolves around whether religious extremists or godless communists murdered more people in the 20th century. Like so many other public debates, the one over religion is dominated by extremes.

A new study out of Northwestern University, perhaps without really meaning to, gets at something much more interesting. It starts to provide data and insight that add to our ability to understand what Marx was getting at—not if there is a God and not whether it makes sense that humans should believe, but simply why humans believe.

The study, by psychology professor Dan P. McAdams and researcher Michelle Albaugh, was aimed at finding out about the religious sources of political leanings. They interviewed 128 devout Christians in and around Chicago, and they avoided the usual questions of “How do you know God exists” or even “Why do you believe?” Instead, they asked their subjects to describe what their lives and the world would be like if they did not have faith. In other words, what would the world be like if Christopher Hitchens were right and there were no God?

The study analyzes the results mostly in terms of political divisions. It found that politically conservative Christians described a godless world “as one of incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people’s inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions.”

Liberal Christians, on the other hand, had a different set of concerns. For them, a world without God would be “barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them” and in which they would feel lost.

All of the respondents generally imagined life without God as “entailing fear, sadness, interpersonal isolation and loss of meaning and hope.”

The political findings are intriguing, but not nearly as interesting as the way the question and the answers it elicited get at deeper, core issues. It appears that we do believe out of need, but it’s not, as Marx suggested, primarily because of material deprivation. Instead, it looks as if faith answers fear, and many different kinds of fear, which we can begin to delineate in some detail.

In the end, even these specifics don’t intrigue me as much as this fact: Zero-sum arguments about faith and faithlessness just go round and round, generating heat and no light. It’s better to return to real knowledge and fundamental questions. Rather than arguing over the existence of God, rather than playing believer-nonbeliever gotcha, we learn a whole lot more if we just keep asking ourselves—in as many new ways as possible—why it is that so many of us feel compelled to pray.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Not to belabor the point, · 4 October 2008

Some questions opened in the long comment thread on the previous post.

This is an interesting set of questions, because of the ways they’re NOT interesting. It’s an almost-annoying topic, because it asks for reflection on stuff that’s somehow fun to leave unseen. Also, there’s this sense in me that talking about masculine domination is “whiny.” Ha! Obviously that’s the patriarchy in me trying to talk back. Still, it is good to speak of this forthrightly, not with self-apology and periodical impulses to run away.

I'm not trying to smash patriarchy. I'm saying it's a big, dumb obstacle that misallocates energy.

So if there is energy that I could put in to self-understanding that instead I'm putting in to reproducing and justifying patriarchal relationships and organizations, it's just inefficient. Why not strip away a bit of the clunky, heavy, distracting outdated technology? 

Maybe I’m asking these questions prematurely. Maybe people aren’t ready to think about masculine domination as an historical pattern, and are also afraid that all this will lead to a deconstruction of the basic ideas of masculinity and feminitiy. It’s not like that at all.

Patriarchy is both a way of organizing human activity (hierarchies, exhales, achievement, dominance) and a way of organizing personal, interior lives. Anyway:

Why would masculine domination be a problem in practice--a practical problem? I’m thinking both principles (goal oriented-ness, performance mindset) and politics (who gets/has to take power, who pretends/has to pretend to be needy).

Can there be systematic practice and transmitted lineage (two super useful things!) without patriarchy? (Is the very idea of energetic lineage just a legitimation racket for patriarchy? Shit.)

Is the experience of surrender sometimes—as we experience it—about participating in male-dominance? Can surrender be something else?

How can you learn to get really intimate with your own experience when you’re taught in a patriarchal manner?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

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.

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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

Obama Pranayama · 12 September 2008

Pretty excited about Obama Pranayama here. “Whether we are doing yoga or just taking our next breath.... let us consciously breathe in the intent for change and help move Barack Obama into the White House.”

I want a breathe-in. Not kidding. I’m going through an extroverted cycle here

But about the OP. On the one hand, ok, it requires the solipsistic worldview of a very small child and hilarously low standard of reality-checking to think you can actually shape external political outcomes by sitting around breathing. The aether theory of consciousness-raising.

It is interesting that we Santa Monicans, whose lives are the most disproportionately blessed in the world by technological advancement and the inequities of global capitalism, hold to the most hocus-pocus explanations for our dramatic privileges. “The Secret,” the apotheosis of the hocus pocus, is first and foremost a legitimation scheme for those who are disproportionately privileged—so they can believe their parking spaces and the SUVs they park in them are manifestations of their own superior mental power.

Yeah; because people in H3s are the smart ones.

We actually don’t get to sit around and will Obama in to office. Ever hear of precinct walking? That’s what they do in neighborhoods a little closer to the reality line.

Onnnnn the other hand, intention does have power. Besides mind-reading and occasional clairvoyance (didn’t just say that), there are no superpowers of yogic consciousness. What looks like siddhis is just the intuition trained to a very high level of self-knowledge and knowledge of its environment. The more you are aware of the operating systems, the more freaky-accurate your reading of the present moment and the better your predictions of what’s to come. Breathing is really good for that: pranayamites have a mysticism about them because they’re hyper-aware. More conscious of the fine details.

A corollary of the idea that you can effect political outcomes with breath practice is the magical thinking that you automatically make the world a better place by working on yourself. If I may part ways with Ramana Maharshi and co., there’s no magic in this either. You don’t sit in a cave and raise global consciousness by some “vibration.” It’s that if you’re more worked out in yourself, you relate to the world in a series of relatively healthy encounters that increase the goodness in the world. Sitting in a cave (or at obama pranayama) doesn’t do that: it just prepares you to do that really well.

Preparing the ground for action is not the same as action. But… it is still a good idea.

So, it’s all good. I’m excited about obama pranayama.

The thing is: I’m wondering about Obama himself. Is he doing the OP and tapping in to the world-soul/ prevailing discourse/ dynamic possibilities of the present moment in a way that’s prepared him to speak with apparently-magical accuracy? Does he have a better map of this territory and where it might lead than the GOP with its tired fucking culture wars?

It might not happen, considering what I’m little I’ve seen of recent days’ politicking but

The guy could bust out. He may have his intuition so finely articulated, and may be so ready for this moment, that he finds the way to speak to these angry ghosts so a margin of them hear him. I only say this because the race speech in March was that. He wrote it himself when the time for it was perfect. The content and tone were the most brilliant political moment in the US in my lifetime. I was amazed.

The guy is carrying some measure of awareness and discursive power. The charisma factor, easy to forget amid this week of dread, is a big deal. But he’s also moving along in the rickety old sinking mothership of the Democratic Party, filled with a crew that doesn’t get it at all. So we’ll see what happens. If he can get some headspace to tap in, and just allow himself to get righteously pissed off, something might happen.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

these times · 6 September 2008

Dahlia Lithwick: “There is a way in which she's cashing in on the ability of very, very, very pretty women to say very, very vicious things with a great big smile.” (Day to Day)

Gail Collins: “[Her] speech totally swallowed up all the attention in St. Paul, leaving nothing whatsoever for speakers like Mitt Romney… announcing: ‘We need change all right! Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.’ Tragically, nobody seemed interested enough to point out that this made no sense.” (NYT)

wozu: “since Plato, animals have played a vital role in political rhetoric.  That the barracuda, a fish universally regarded as vile, predatory, mercenary — a shark lacking even the nobility and solitude of sharks, a shark that also scavenges — has been elevated into the panzoon of respectable animals tells us a great deal about the state of American politics.”

Tom Friedman: “There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.” (NYT)

(0v0): Uncorked a cheap cabernet last night and caught up on Jon Stewart. It's all political theatre at this point, all of it, so of course the campaigns are going to be exercizes in overstatement all the way through. Statements made for effect. The bad cab shined up my sense of the absurd last night and here I am thick-skulled in the morning. I feel like archiving some thoughts here.

For months I’ve had a difficulty relating to people in my generation who would even consider voting against Obama. Or to be more accurate, the idea of voting against him makes me sick to my stomach. Facebook is a more private community than this one, but the (0v0) network—at least those of who talk to me—is much closer to me ideologically than the immediate friends in my Facebook. They are close to me in life, but far in feeling; and you are the inverse.

I have zero surprise that my family and everyone I know back home would vote against Obama—they have ways of seeing and hearing that pre-determine the message they’ll receive from him as Clintonesque and coat any line from the GOP in a sheath of pearl before they swallow it. Also, most of them are unconsciously racist in small ways, despite the best intentions of their hearts. Social conservatism is its own world of perception. But those from my generation—even the trust fund kids and the high-earners who I know have at times voted GOP even though it’s not hip—who are capable of even wondering how to vote… that’s just disturbing. Particularly those who do it for fiscal reasons, because fiscal conservatism is atomistic, whereas social conservatism goes much deeper inside. Yet conservatives of both kinds are fairly nestled into my life, and I don’t want it different. It is mind-blowing to read down a list of facebook updates with such a rage-range.

The theatre is out of control, but I really do have to engage this process sincerely. Both political science to my right and New Age Yoga to my left would say disengage and don’t identify with this, either because engaging is irrational or because it’s "bad energy." And then there's a certain hipster disconnectedness. To that, fuck irony. Irony is the near enemy of historical perspective. To all of it, we don’t get to sit this out. Don’t get to pretend that we’re moving to Canada. We’ve benefited from being Americans in every way, and constitute this monster both by our actions and our inactions; and that creates responsibility.

In a way, I wonder if my trust fund and high salaried friends who would think twice about Obama are practicing a form of cynicism. Disengaging from the political level of the question as staying the course as fiscal conservatives. Talk about making it easy on yourself.

Anyway. I wonder if all this will make my case to the academics that rurual America is real. Yes, the GOP is pushing this politics of “outsider” resentment because it’s just what has worked for them for so long—all the way back to Nixon. But also, of course their polls are telling them it resonates. Hello: people in rural areas have a completely different experience of nationhood. This stuff is real; the people who buy the “son of the soil” line are real. It actually is elitist not to know that.

A dear friend who is gay and Mormon—though not allowed, obviously, to go to church—is trying to convince the more politicized of her siblings that gay marriage is not a threat to their privacy. Some of them, meantime, are on the anti-gay activist rosters, and asking my friend not to “take it personally because it’s just about protecting our privacy.” This is the church’s line: if marriage is legalized, then the church’s privacy (their right not to honor the unions) will be threatened. First, pure lies. Second, what a brilliant inversion. It is the vagina police—of which the Mormon Church is an important constituient—that wants to violate privacy. What happens in the culture wars is that the public/private dichotomy gets breached in the wrong way. In a way that kills invidual choice while leaving the conceptual public/private binary intact. The right is so brilliant at self-identifying its own greatest outrage—here, that it is only the right that wants to invade your home life and your sex life—and declaring that this is exactly the sin of the “other side.”

Speaking of sides, these campaigns don’t even know how to talk to each other. They are both running against Bush, and doing so orthogonally to one another. It won’t go on like this—they GOP is trying to force the Dems to argue on their terms, as always—but wouldn’t it be interesting if they just talked past one another all fall? It’s what makes sense, really. The two campaigns are pitched at totally different kinds if mind. Luckily or cursedly, the media will make make them intersect. Must have “two sides” to things in the world of agree/disagree. It would be boring as hell if it weren’t so infernally interesting.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [23]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

New Age Not Same As Yoga · 27 August 2008

Or, Marxist and Marketing Exec Unite. Ohhh! I am not blogging any more. I keep deciding this. Must redirect those little “I'll journal that” impulses. But… I listened to CP while chopping vegetables for lunch and here I am. Today he’s making the case that New Age Spirituality is a far greater source of bullshit for yoga practice in the west than is consumerism. We got on this topic here recently as well.

What’s the difference between New Age and Yoga? This is off the top of my head, so please add suggestions or disagreements in the comments.

  NEW AGE                                    YOGA

Self-affirmation	Self-study
Reincarnation	This incarnation
Chant and pray to spirits and gods for the promotion	Do your best and let go of expectations for the payoff
Ritual	Practice
Superstition	Equanimity
Scorpio, Cancer or Virgo?	Bhakti, Karma or Jnana?
Bliss	Mysticism
I’m too sexy for my shirt	I’m too sweaty for my shirt
Yoga Journal Ad pages	Namarupa
ancient wisdom	Science and research
The Law of Attraction	The Yoga of Action
Consuming Ethically	Consuming Less
Self-adoration	Self-transformation
Asana shows me how much I can accomplish	Asana shows me how much I can let go
Asana makes me feel like a sexy beast	Asana makes me care less about being a beauty object

Oh and by the way, it’s weird that the CP-Owl relationship has dissolved into a love fest. Now that we’ve broken bread together, it’s probably irreversible.

The ancient history of the CP-Owl relationship wasn’t so great, you know. I got into writing here because I had an axe to grind and stuff to “figure out”; he got in to writing for the laughs. We disagreed about everything. I thought he didn’t get advaita; he thought I was I a punishing meanie. I thought his progressive politics were a sham; he thought I was angry and overly threatened by benign western culture. I thought he lacked tapas; he thought I lacked middle pathway moderation. I thought he should get his ass to India; he thought (perhaps) I had something I was running from. He while claiming to be a jerk treated me with respect; I while claiming to love everybody lost my temper repeatedly.

Me: an uncompromising person who critiques western culture for a living. Him: a compromiser who produces western culture for a living. What’s going on? Why do we keep agreeing?

Yoga oughta worry about this. If it’s trafficking in beliefs so empty that both the Marxist and the Marketing Exec can see through them and thus stop arguing and combine energies, there might be real trouble acomin.   

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [43]
Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , self-deception , spirituality

Ashtanga and Imperialism · 16 August 2008

CP wrote this post yesterday—one that’s difficult for many of us to handle. I’ve been waiting and hoping for just that kind of sacrilege out of him, and he delivered. In the comments (which are a terriffically honest and interesting conversation about the future of ashtanga), someone asked me the following:

For those of us who are long finished school but are still interested in these matters, what theoretical perspective has replaced tired 1990s neo-Marxism [and 1980s post-colonial theory]? I am serious. Please save this practicing lawyer from the tedium of her daily life by discussing some theory!

Ok. Trying to make a short answer. I’m just going to freewrite a bit and post whatever comes up off the cuff. Because if I try to make a coherent I’ll spend hours! It would be so delightful to build a study group or seminar discussing different philosophies’ and social theories’ perspectives on the moral, cultural and spiritual puzzles that the east-west meeting of ashtanga creates. I have a background in philosophy and social-political theory but rarely work in these literatures because they’re disconnected to real life. The mind likes to be bound; and I like the constraints of doing research on the ground—theory can say anything it wants without the discipline of real-world data. Abstract rhetorical wars are too easy.

Anyway, I should clarify that neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory have not effectively been replaced by something called post-modernism. Postmodernism is a disposition rather than a theory, and as much as it’s intellectually dishonest and stupid if taken to extremes it’s also the condition in which we all live. It’s just a suspicion of metanarratives (Lyotard’s line), or an awareness that all knowledge is situated in someone’s perspective and some matrix of power relationships. Postmodernism at its best is a background question of Oh yeah? Says who? It doesn’t stand alone as an interpretation and it explains nothing.

For me, by far the richest node of theory and research about culture and social philosophy now is in the little subfield of the sociology of culture. A lot of the subfield is bad, but the good stuff expresses what to me are the there most important aspects of what is now good theory: (1) non-essentialism, (2) a bit of self-aware empiricism, and (3) an attempt to synthesize all the modernist (Marxist and other) binaries like material/ideal, economic/cultural, structure/agency.

Briefly, non-essentialism (1) means that you don’t think race, nationality, culture, etc have any transcendent reality. They are social phenomena, or ascribed and acquired characteristics. This is huge—it takes the neo-Marxists’ critique of reification and follows it to its logical conclusion that culture itself is socially constructed. It means you don’t buy the idea that someone with brown skin is “naturally” a soulful dancer or the idea that someone with south Asian ancestry has a “natural,” superior claim to yoga. People are just people. Cultural artifacts are just artifacts. Which is not to say culture does not go deep—the ways in which we grew up, for example, determine our understandings of the world perhaps more than previous (non-empirical) theory could recognize! Culture may not be real on an “essential” or transcendent level, but the ways it shapes personal knowledge appear—based on research—to be very deep. As culture becomes increasingly complex and fast-changig globalized, this just becomes all the more interesting.

So (2) empiricism is the sense that social theory that isn’t rooted in examination of the world is probably BS. Seriously, how do we know that cultural traits are socially constructed? Well, for example consider how race works in Brazil vis-à-vis how it works in the US. Totally different ideas of what is blackness and whiteness, what characterizes race, how many races there are, etc. (Yet at the same time, some things are common: racial hierarchies priveliging white skin, the possibility of becoming more white as socio-economic status increases, local beliefs about the essential qualities of different “groups,” etc.) It’s complicated. The sense now is that even universal pronouncements about social construction have to be made in reference to something real. Pure theory is a joke. Even in philosophy, the richest areas of development are empirical—biomedical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. For me, my hero of empirical social theory is Pierre Bourdieu. He makes me think, first, that pure ideas without social research are boring and, second, that living one’s life as a kind of social theorist—always considering the theoretical presuppositions and implications of action—is a rich and beautiful form of practical self-awareness.

The third characteristic I see in present-day theory, a valuation of synthetic work (3), is both the most interesting and the most difficult to summarize. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, theory was obsessed with “difference” and “play” between the supposed binaries of male/female, dark/light, material/idea, structure/agency, objective/subjective, inside/outside, etc. etc. etc. And, since Hegel, the idea of the thesis-antithesis dialectic of consciousness has been encrypted within much social theory. To be brief, now there is a sense that theory does not have to be just about structure or agency, not just leftist or rightist, just about material or ideal, just from the subjective or objective point of view. In fact, theoretically insightful empirical work SYTHESIZES these apparent opposites. This is a dangerous idea, because it resonates with the wacky Integral people with their fourfould AQAL framework, and because it sounds an awful lot like eastern mysticism, what with yoga being the “union of apparent opposition” and all that. In my own work, I strive to synthesize whatever oppositions I find in the world, and not just settle to oscillate from one side to the other. Incidentally, this is why I find it difficult to take a hard line either way in the present debate on the regulation and commodification of ashtanga.

I have saved my withering remarks for the ashtanga mercenaries for the end, so hopefully they will be missed by anyone who will find them offensive, and only read by people who understand the lightness of heart— but also the impatience with self-deception —with which I write.

Anon’s critiques of the cultural imperialism of Cody’s market analysis, and righteous indications that Cody has transgressed against Edward Said, indicate little more than that Anon got a fancy western education before s/he went off to India and discovered huself. If Anon and likeminded western practitioners who see themselves as guardians of the Eastern authenticity (oh essentialist modern concept!) are the true guardians of the lineage, it is only because they’ve performed another level of the cultural appropriation of which they accuse others. They are, as Bourdieu would say, the cultural imperialists par excellence, both appropriating the tradition and then pretending to be its owners and protectors.

In case anyone out there didn’t quite catch it… Yes, traveling to India to practice ashtanga yoga is “imperialist” for both ideational and economic reasons, both material and ideal, both personal and collective. If you are actually concerned about “imperialism” because you think (erroneously, I’d say) that culture belongs to particular nationalities and races, than you really have no business traveling to India nor raging against anyone else for being imperialist. Because to the degree that you think you own ashtanga, you are the biggest “imperialist” of all.

The same people who are out to defend the integrity of the tradition are those who are extremely identified with it and fantasize that they own it, through all manner of superficial language study, celebration of holidays they actually know little about, professions of love for certain kinds of cuisine. But do these people really understand the culture they are appropriating? Do they see only light and spirituality in India—do they fantasize (ultimate Imperialist self-deception) that the beggars have equanimity or that Indians themselves are simply “more spiritual.” Do they recognize that they are using India as a playground where their currency and passport buy easy living and implicit international protection? Do they see that they see “spirituality” because it’s an easy life where they don’t have to deal with a more grounded spirituality that comes from their own early experiences, don’t have to deal with the economic pressures that give so much value to their dollars, don’t have to look their own history in the eyes but can instead vacation in an alternate spirituality with rituals that are easy to love because they’re different and new, and seem to offer an escape from all that is too real and too dark and to dirty to examine at home?

I’ve departed from social theory to psychological theory here at the end, but if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t this the terrain for examining this particular war over who owns ashtanga? The “imperialist” slur is a red herring, is it not? I suspect that when we westerners tangle over who owns ashtanga and whether it’s ok to see the practice from a (creepy but not at all irrelevant) marketing perspective, we are fighting at a deep level with ourselves.

Apologies for the incoherence and doubtless typos all over this post. I wanted to respond to Monkey’s question, but also am not going to take the time to make the response shorter.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , science , self-deception , social theory

Yoga Journal: Lowering the Bar, One Deep Thought At A Time · 22 July 2008

Bhakti Collective posted a letter to the YJ Editors. Excerpt, with a little emphasis added:

“For me, bhakti means whatever strikes your heart with beauty, whatever hits the mark of your heart and inspires you to feel the love,” says Sianna Sherman, a senior Anusara Yoga teacher….

[In this YJ conception,] [b]hakti becomes whatever you want it to mean, which gives rise to odd ideas of bhakti sadhana. Ideas which could be better characterized as more of a New Age mental adjustment, something to make the mind to feel good.

I found the art accompanying the piece particularly relevant. It is a painting of a naked woman, waist deep in a pond with her head dropped back... It reminded me more of a shampoo advertisement than any traditional depiction of bhakti I’ve ever come across…. It is a somewhat warped idea of yoga which nurtures an egoism in which one conceives of oneself as a beautiful woman.... There is a shift from yoga being the restraint of the minds modifications… [to] a state of mind which is perhaps a bit more sattvic, but not really yogic at all.

P.S. Feel the Love by Donna Summer. At least better than shampoo:

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: self-deception , spirituality

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

Cheez-it® · 25 June 2008

Last friday I walked into the living room and I smelled Nabisco. What?

He wouldn’t do this. Not Nabisco, flagship of American obesity and mindless addiction? Not this level of anti-wellbeing and all-out trash in our home?

I opened a few cupboards and file drawers, looked behind the sofa. The smell of deep-fried salty cardboard, refined flour, congealed corn syrup burnt into dessicated brown bubbles and marketed as “food” was unmistakeable. I tipped over the guitar amp behind the chair and there it was: a large box of Cheez-it® crackers.

A "food" with a registered trademark. A "food" comprising 26 ingredients, among them partially hydrogenated soybean oil and something identified as TBHQ. A substance brought into my house for the purposes of ingestion.

Ok then. It’s either me or him.

Sometimes this contrarian imp comes out—the imp that’s curious just how much shit the practice can neutralize. The imp who’s angry at parents (not mine, bless them thank god) and a culture that teach children to find comfort in “food” with trademarks, and who wants with spite-tainted curiosity to take it on myself. The imp who thinks she can neutralize all shit.

I reached in and took a monkey-fist full, sat down on the floor like a primate and crunched. Cheez-it, for all that oil and salt, tasted exactly like cardboard. Did nothing for me, not even an insulin rush (thanks to the spinach and cauliflower on which it landed). Tasting and feeling nothing, I took several more monkey-fistfuls before returning the Cheez-it® to its hiding place, knowing I’d soon be in more trouble with the Editor than he was with me. Can’t I leave anything a secret? Can’t even the space inside his guitar amp be free from my ideas about clean living?

The next morning the solstice hit and I made 108 sun salutations in the most peaceful quiet home studio in Venice. As I raised my arms for number 20, a severe wave of nausea drew me down.

Gawd. I have to do 88 more of these? Maybe I can get through one more before my first trip to the bathroom. Nice of them to install this beautiful bathroom right off their studio, though. I really hope I don’t throw up.

On salutation 21, a bead of sweat formed on my brow. And all I noticed for the next two salutations was the droplet gaining volume and momentum as it ran up and down my nose. On the 24^th, I waited in ardha uttanasana while it rolled to the tip of my nose and flicked it like a frog, rose up quickly, and checked in with the nausea. Gone.

Did I neutralize Cheez-it®? Conquer and assimilate?

Would the anti-human evil of Cheez-it® in my body have even been observable were it not for the practice?

I will write more about food in the next post, about what I actually eat even though I sense that this is not even useful or interesting to anyone because eating is as much play as it is science. Or, at least, should be.

For now here is one idea that might useful across the board.

If you want to begin to hear your body correctly, put the screws to your workout.

If you are having trouble tapping in to good intuitions about how to eat, honestly: ramp it the hell up.

From what I have seen, straight cardio won’t do it. From what I have seen, in order to clarify the messages, and increase their urgency, you want to start making your body build finetuned strength, balance and nervous-system endurance. If you tell it that it has to build smart muscles, excellent proprioception, all kinds of new balance and movement skills: under those conditions, the body will demand what it needs to do that efficiently. It will respond to the trauma of a dramatic increase in exercise by getting smarter.

I say this because, time and again, I see new practitioners realize that they have been doing something wrong with their diet. Of course they are: they live in a Nabisco world. Astanga is the most they have ever asked of their bodies, so it’s no wonder new practitioners try every kind of new eating regime in response to all the new feelings.

You always have the option of making an intellectual decision to nourish yourself “right,” based on nutritionists’ research. But this shortcuts old habits while putting the new ones up to a higher authority.  

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

WWND, Moon Play, Streams of Practice · 18 June 2008

What would Nietzsche do is a concentrated question. Use sparingly and apply only to the affected area. Yields extraordinary mental clarity! But may cause will-to-power-disease if taken incorrectly.

It was a WWND day.

First thing in the morning, I went out the Santa Monica pier and skated north to Malibu and back. A summer idyll—waves big, sun clear, light salty breeze. Me and the runners—tourists don’t show up until later. Listening to Tropicalia and, after that, David Byrne.

It’s indecent to have access to this picture any old day.

Afterwards, still hyper, wrote for a while. Then I hit the asana class NYT billed as “most advanced in LA,” to let the teacher know I still love her. Received some amazing personal instruction (very helpful), was told to take lotus in handstand (ok, interesting that’s possible), and might (as a result) have frightened one or two students. A surprisingly, sweetly internal class for that venue, opening and closing with instruction on pratyhara (which calmed me down the way a few sun salutations and standing postures cannot). This deviation from the tradition is “damaging yoga”? Really? Damaging the monopoly, yes. But a scene like this is so different from ashtanga that the two do not need to fear each other the way they do. I wish they would stop trashing each other. Soon, we need different words to refer to the two kinds of practice: they have little in common and neither is going away.

Anyway.The thing about the ashtanga teacher, the one who does primary before a moon, is that he doesn’t go in for arbitrary rules. He’s got too much positive instruction on tap to need to frame his room in negative instructions. It's different, but there are a lot of reasons one might specify first-only before a moon: my guess is that he knows he attracts physically intense students whose minds could use a super-internal practice at regular intervals on random days. No kidding: this guy is the best asana instructor I have ever encountered. This shocks and amuses me. He is gifted in physical intelligence and has made third easy yet particularly intense for me. And my back, which has been trippy for 16 months, has undergone some kind of healing this spring, in a way that I might try to explain later.

I am still not very “physical” about this stuff—thinking and talking about asana is unbearably tedious, especially where my own body is concerned. I’m interested in the head-trip, energy, culture, history, spirit, emotion—ANYTHING but mechanics. Which is why a very physical teacher, who has mastery in the area I avoid, is a great benefit.

This brings me to something Gregor and I put together in a thread the other day. I think he was drunk when he brought it up but the idea makes sense if you stay with it. Say there are different streams of mastery—physical, mental, spiritual, maybe another. If you’re going to practice something, you’ll probably be drawn to focus on the stream in which you feel most competent. Too, maybe you feel insecure in one of the other streams and try to avoid it. High school athletes (who might claim to be non-intellectual) find a physical practice; introverts (usual klutzes) turn to meditation; mental people (who say "quieting the mind" is a stupid idea) pursue intellectual athleticism.

Would it be possible for a single practice to work in all three streams simultaneously, and actually harmonize them over time? A practice in which you may get in for the appeal of, say, physical mastery, but soon find you have to work with equal intensity in other less familiar streams in order to pursue that supposed strength?

Ashtanga has the potential to be that. A kind of practice that balances the streams.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Mellow Gold, Steel Trap · 13 June 2008

Mellow gold: summer music. The other morning with memories of beery oak grove sunsets circa 1996, I played the old record on the way to practice. Loser is the first song. It’s hard not to sing the chorus, but I have no memory for the absurd beat-nick hip-hop verses except for when he finally slows it down…and my time is a piece of wax fallin on a termite… that’s choking on the splinters.

Except for at 5:40 when the mind is all quiet and sharp and the song goes on fresh. What the heck? I belted out both verses traveling up and around San Vicente to practice (there just one road that describes a giant arch from house to shala—I just have to turn right out of my building, and eight minutes later left at a light). At the end of the song I hit the deck and played it again. In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey butane in my veins and I’m out to cut the junkie with the plastic eyeballs spraypaint the vegetables...

What? I was happy to find that of all things intact in my head, but couldn’t reproduce the trick brain-tired after a day’s work. The Editor said: Yeah of course you know the lyrics word for word. Because your mind is a steel trap. Unless you are telling a story to friends. Then you are unreliable and make shit up.

Steel trap? Thanks man. As for unreliable, I guess that is the trick with subjectivity. It skews everything and makes me a shadier character.

Which reminds me. It’s not really accurate to say I’m the child of Karl Popper (you listening, Natalie?), only sort of his child. Popper , like Gregor's Carl Sagan but more abstractly, thought the truth was "out there" and believed trying to dis-prove bold propositions was the logically strongest way to find it out. Except, er..., unless we're talking physics, the truth is not out there. The truth is what works. I’m with Wittgenstein and the Buddha and Karen on that. Or a better way to say it is that what’s true is specific to every social- economic- religious- political- cultural era, which is what Marx and the Integralists bear out in their different ways. The truth is ephochal.

So if it isn’t out there—if the truth is just what works—why bother to frame bold conjectures? I guess if you don’t want to deceive yourself. The truth is what works to hide from your problems. But on the other hand the truth is what works to develop your character. The truth is what works to let go of your pain and be a nicer person. I dunno. I really don't know what the truth is in this sense.

I guess you only would want to frame bold conjectures if you are curious about existence. Otherwise, sure: don’t. You’ll be relatively shallow and easily duped, but maybe that’s your truth. Go om shanti go.

The only reason I bring it up is that I’m working over a paradox here in the SoCal yoga subculture. People go thorough daily life as tough customers, smart operators, asking the world to be honest with them and yield its best stuff for their efforts. They get amazing things done, take care of themselves and their families, learn and grow as a result. Except for around their yoga, these same reasonable people might employ bizarrely low standards for truth. Instead of truth being what works for happy relationships and productive work and a beautiful life, truth becomes: whatever the authorities tell me, or whatever seems fun to believe. The truth is what feels good on a surface level. Kind of escapist, that.

It’s almost like we don’t take spiritual life seriously here in this little breeding ground of modern lifestyle norms. 

It's almost like we don't expect anything real from spiritual life.

Wouldn’t this be the area where we would employ the highest standards for truth and meaning? Isn’t this the part of our life where truth is most important and worthwhile? Wouldn’t we want to make ourselves most open to finding out new shit in this particular area of our lives? Why are people who are not flakey or fake about work and relationships happy to settle for other-worldly, airy-fairy yoga?

Don’t believe everything that you breathe you got a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve

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

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

People who dance often tell me the practice makes them feel beautiful.

People who practice ashtanga often tell me the practice makes them feel fat.

The median dancer is 20 years older and 40 pounds heavier than the median ashtangi. 

Other differences in form, state of awareness, and possibilities for expanding boundaries of “self”:

Ashtanga: lotus binds; pick-ups; strong boundaries around individual experience.

Culture of “working on myself.”

Mental states: advanced practitioners (regardless of place in the series) cultivate trance and practice meditative contemplation through tristana, while it’s key for earlier students to focus on the physical forms. Energetic thread is lost when posture takes over and movement stops. Weak correlation between mental state and physical posture because you can’t really deduce mental state from posture.

Dance: free form; spontaneous; weak boundaries around individual experience. 

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

Mental states: most people pretty instantly go in to trance with the pulsing rhythm and the energy of a large, sophisticated group. It seems like they go into either a gut-level, emotion-rich undifferentiated consciousness (a sort of primal state?) or a sophisticated, contemplative state that feels a lot like the open-inquiry stages of vipassana. If they stop moving, it may mean they’re “not feeling it” or that they’re in a trance state in which stillness brings even more depth than motion.

Does ashtanga make one feel fat while dance makes one feel beautiful, regardless of actual body-looks? What’s up with this? If good sex is partner-merging and bad sex is body-critical and self-conscious, what does that make ashtanga?

Also…

What’s the best place for the “self” within an altered state—front and center or “forgotten”?

If you experience emotion as “not mine” and “not-me” in dance, does that limit the possibilities for it to be a “transformative” thing during which you process your own shit and finally, personally, letting it go?

Does ashtanga give you less of an escape from difficulties of transforming the psycho-emotional stuff in your own body… is it more difficult in this respect than other embodied practice? More transformative?

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

Mercury is Always in Retrograde · 27 May 2008

Am I going to have a car accident now because Mercury is in retrograde? Am I safe from car accidents the rest of the time because Mercury is direct? Shall I initiate nothing for the next month because the planets are more powerful than the clarity of my vision? Shall we all just sit around and wait, hoping not to awake the sleeping astral giant of calamity? Will June 2008 be not worth living due to something as insanely shallow as a little misfortune, even if it does come? Are fortune and luck what we are living for anyway--elaborately constructing our lives so as to catch the planetary winds at just the precisely perfect moment so everything will be ok?

Stop it right now everybody. Come on. Can we please look life directly in the eyes again here?

Chaos is always present. We don’t get to draw tidy boundaries around it and pretend the rest of life operates according to some magical order. A lot of times there is no control, and everything is chaotic, and there is no god or law or element organizing everything and making things happen for a reason.

We are so afraid of admitting that there is chaos, and become greedy for explanations. But chaos is always out there, just beyond the edge of our imperfect explanations. Even when Mercury is not in retrograde! Myths and archetypes just give an operating framework within the chaos. 

Which is all good. I love that. I saw Indiana Jones on Monday and take rueful energy from its image of disheveled scholarly heroism—a hero who winkingly apologizes for his own cornball sincerity even as he smashes power hungry commies (and capitalists, this time) in the face, chases away the demons of unreason, glorifies fieldwork (!) as the real route to knowledge of the world, and (especially) bears witness to magical-realist secrets that the scientific framework can never incorporate. Indy’s a real fucker, but he’s also perfect. How do I even know what kind of scholar I am without that image? Would I have even thought to research culture as an object, wear khakis and live in the tropics, or button up for the ivory tower without that image?

Astrology—the idea that I’m a Scorpio/Aries in a productive cycle at the height of my powers—is the same. There’s a lot of energy in that archetype and myth, even if there is no literal “truth” in it at all. Experience is the only thing I have, the only thing that I can honestly say is true. I like having some structure, but the control it gives is a game.

Archetypes and myths are interpretive. Not explanatory. They create meaning and outline possibilities for action in an uncertain world. They are not the reason that things happen.  I am (sometimes). Other times there’s no reason to be found at all.

Scary. :)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Beyond the Pale · 8 May 2008

Los Angeles is segregated by ethnicity and by wealth. Very generally, the two residential indices of affluence are (1) elevation and (2) proximity to the ocean. The elevation peaks in the north and runs from west to east—along the raised spine from the Pacific Palisades through the Hollywood Hills, with some southerly heights in Mar Vista, Inglewood, Boyle, et cetera. Beachfront property is prime from north to south, though in general the money hugs closer and closer to the shoreline as one moves south away from the hills.

I will cop right now to the fact that my present studio sits on the most affluent, whitest commercial corner in town. Ashtanga ends before the Porsche SUVs quite fill up the valet parking, before the skinny ladies with their perfect children arrive to shop the kiddie shoe store housed in a quaint Tudor cottage, or the specialty chocolate nook opens in the back of the oh so provincial Country Market. We enter our own building before first light by a side door and, being ashtangis, tend to represent for the bohemians, the working professionals, the world-traveled, the somewhat ethnically and economically diverse, the hot chiseled bodyworker-yoga teacher service sector. So I’m sheltered from the full force of white Brentwood affluence, even as—when I leave each morning—I enjoy the deeply middlebrow string quartet that Le Pain Quotidien pumps into the building's passageways. The double provincialism of a restaurant calling itself “The Daily Bread” in French, for white people reaching for the sense of “the cosmopolitan” they find in packaged French country aesthetic is pitch perfect for this corner. Mass produced rustic benches, artisan nut butters packaged in China, lattes in ginormous (supersized) bowls. Which is not to say I don’t like le P.Q., which enfranchises within a block of any respectable ashtanga shala with a global clientele and has thus made itself—in London, New York, Santa Monica—an official home of the traveling  ashtangi meetup. Tasty, with chagrin on the side.

Anyway, why am I talking about geography of affluence and whiteness?

It’s Yogaworks, itseself franchising down in the South Bay in a way that crosses way, way, way over the line of getting off on your affluence. Fellas, I’m writing this so you will know what the seasoned people in the community are saying about you. People who know yoga, or simply know LA, who know your expansion is inevitable and are ok with this but nonetheless find the current wrinkle extraordinarily disturbing.

The new location is just off the industrial zone near LAX. Miles south of the east-west axis of rich that is the northern hills, down in the South Bay you find more economic and racial diversity, more quickly, as you move east from the oft-gated exclusivity that is Manhattan Beach. Indeed, the new studio in rent-cheap El Segundo sits midway between the health club set on the west and Inglewood on the east. Inglewood is an awesome, historically rich, cohesive zone—home to a lot of middle class people and, due to the heights on which it is built, some excellent real estate. There’s no major yoga studio there. Also, Inglewood is black.

Down the hill from Inglewood in El Segundo, Yogaworks—which in its other locations takes in its steepest revenue from drop-in students—is experimenting with a new visitor model (see another blog discussion here). Traditionally, Yogaworks franchises in exclusive zones: Manhattan, Santa Monica, Westwood. But again, El Segundo—with its unique geography and social diversity—is home to an innovative new model.

No drop-in students whatsoever are permitted. If you want to attend YogaWorks in El Segundo, you can buy a “membership.” So what is for sale is not exactly yoga instruction. It’s association.

Given the way I’ve laid this out, you now know exactly what people are saying.

Except, of course, for the corporate conservatives, who say it’s your “right” to pursue whatever markets you want or envision to be most “productive.” After all, the South Bay is an “untapped yoga market” and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

But those of us who understand that markets are not asocial, amoral autonomous forces will tell you that every “market experiment” is a social experiment. There is no passive, inert “yoga market” waiting for you to exploit it. Rather, there is whatever market you choose to create for your business. You, mighty corporation, have the power. You have the freedom to choose how you provide your service and whether your “serve” anyone at all. For now, you have chosen… exclusively, affluently, whitely. And the tastemakers--who have every "right" to judge your matters of taste--think it’s creepy.

The “bottom line” in the sands of El Segundo, like in any market, will always shift: there is more than one way to make money in that zone.

When the experiment ends and you change the policy, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to post a follow up praising you for taking yoga back off the gated community model.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception

Micro-Emotions · 4 May 2008

The first time I got three or four days in to a Vipassana retreat and the dominant fluctuations of the mind had died away, I realized that on a micro-cognitive level I tend to live a few seconds in the future. If I’m doing any kind of activity at all, I prefigure it mentally before I do it. Pour the tea before I pour the tea, chew before I chew, pee before I pee.

That first retreat, this made me so frustrated. Why can’t I just drop the planning and be an open slate of perception? 

Now I’m less bothered by it, or at least ok that this is how it works to do things like drink tea or take a pee while in a deep state of concentration. Measured from the outside, this is how action works—it’s horribly modernist and non-Bourdieuian to say, but there is a flicker in the mind before you move, most of the time. It’s practical. If I may be so bold, the way cognition itself works is not necessarily “suffering” or “not living in the present.”

I had a beloved friend who ran off and became a nun, and in the second year of her practice her teachers decided to undo her mind. They attacked her categories of understanding—causation, time, space—in an effort to get her to a constant state of non-duality.

Works if you live in a cave.

Except for my wonderful friend: she was not only deconstruction her own cognition process but also doing a lot of administrative work to earn her keep in the monestary. Having her practical notions of causation, time, space and (key) relationships with others broken down without exactly knowing why she was being told to do this to herself resulted—no shit—in deep anxiety and suffering. It also resulted in her pulling out of relationships because the way that intersubjectivity undermined the deconstruction project felt like a spiritual threat. No! Fuck your categories! All that is real is my own mind and we can never get through to each other! You’re not even real!

It’s a wonder that after this intense heartbreak—of watching someone self-induce solipsism and drain the power off her uncommonly wonderful and deep intersubjective abilities—I still chose to pursue meditation practice at all.

Anyway, all this by way of a little defense. It’s true that I am extremely curious by nature, and pursue experience regardless of emotional valence—regardless of whether it will be “unpleasant” or “traumatic” or “luxurious” or “happy” or what. My optimism—and lack of patience for neurosis (neurosis being “a bias toward experiencing negative emotions”)—are marked and somewhat annoying traits. I want to be alive. Working the edge is more important than being comfortable. Non-curiosity and sloth are what bore me the most: and their deepest source, often, is fear of future suffering.

When I tell you that I dread the future in part because the present is so perfectly and beautifully realized, I’m describing a micro-emotional state. When it comes to reflecting on and choosing my emotions, of course this is not my situation! Of course, insofar as I choose, my disposition toward the future is gratitude for the opportunities and years that await, and great curiosity about what experiences they contain.

But on a micro level, one that’s really only possible to observe right after practice when I’m still in a deep state of concentration, there is this new emotion of micro-dread.

It’s more a particular than a universal emotion, and I think I’m sane for feeling it. The economy is fucked; the sociology job market is extremely bad; and most places are less wonderful to live in that the place I live in now. I’m not talking about neurotic fear of the future or existential angst: I am saying that even though I’m in my usual state of equanimity-tempered optimism, I’m able to observe that there is this negative micro-emotion creating some feedback.

Get real, ok? Some possible futures are better than others. Some situations do afford deeper, more interesting experiences. On some level: every possible future is not the same. I can create a life that encompasses more or less self-realization, creative work, loving interactions with others, and usefulness in the world. And hell yes it is scary to be at a precipice

If you don’t see that these questions are active for me on a micro-level, you don’t know me. And insofar as I know myself, it’s ok to experience what this is doing to me—for the time being—in the subtlest way.

If change is either desired or possible, isn’t it better to work from the tiniest little root rather than casting about like some crazy lost person—making massive changes in search of you know not what? Contemplation shows me parts of myself that feel out of character. It’s ok. Just because it undermines my own idea of my personality, at least it is interesting.

And impermanent. Heh.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: esoteric shit , self-deception , spirituality

Fisheyes · 16 April 2008

In the ladies' after the yoga, some of the willow-women talking how fat they have gotten. Bitterness and self-revulsion. And some of the others, amazingly still, understanding what they are witnessing. But also not understanding.

The transcript replays in my head. It has knocked one of my tracking beams off course, sent my perspective of mind-bodies in to a removed third-personhood.

The bewildered side of wonderment.

What are we humans doing? What is the relationship of minds to bodies? How many different ways of being are possible, and how can you tell what they are?

Tripping myself out, watching all the undergraduates move around the campus like I'm seven, beholding brand new species on vacation at the Seattle aquarium. Giant eel! Hammerhead shark!

Where is the awareness in that one? How is she swimming through space? Why are all the ones coming out of the econ building all tilted forward and moving with their fists tight? How are these three moving together? What is the feeling in them? Do they feel? What are they seeing? What am I seeing? Won’t someone please make eye contact with me?  

Maybe this is what it feels like to be tall.

Are we all equally trapped inside our own experience? Equally free in our bodies? Students are spacey, uncertain, late for everything. Ashtangis are deliberate, quiet, controlled down to the breath. But maybe just as clueless?

Liberal political philosophy is big on this idea of “self-ownership.” My body and my essence: they are mine. The whole autonomy thing. (You can argue yourself into a corner with it, but that’s true of all theory.) This assumption—the self-navigated boundaries of personhood—is the underlying left-liberal ethic of the day.

So go for it! You are free to dislike your own body and attack your own mind. 

Or are you..?

Are you just your own? Do you have carte blanche to disrespect and fail to thank anybody else for this educated, fed, disease-free, safe, genetically refined self-body-mind regardless of who gave it to you and regardless of the circles of relationship in which you’re enclosed? Are you just yours to fail to care for, to isolate, to beat up? Is it personal? Or is trashing yourself fundamentally non-relational, ungrateful, falsely disconnecting?

I actually don't know. All I see just now is pretty fish.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [22]
Categories: having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory

The Return of the Inapprpriate Yoga Guy · 3 April 2008

Sheesh. There’s sexual energy that sees itself… and sexual energy that is just desperate to be seen. 

Should be no surprise that an informal collection of teachers (of both sexes) counsel each other on the gender biases that we have inherited from past generations of yoga asana tradition. How to engage this legacy while acknowledging and gracefully altering that aspect? Important discussions, and ones which don’t quite need to have their energy drained away by continual public re-explanation that yes, folks, the tradition has been sexist. (This discussion good because of how easy it is to re-gender yoga, reactively, with an angular, uber-disciplined harsh-girl vibe... YJYW culture, with its ballet undertones, might hold the seeds of that.)

Some participants in that conversation about gender have made a commitment not to study with teachers who throw their sexual energy around a classroom. It’s not like it’s any secret who these teachers are. Some of them get famous because they are so very sexy. I don’t have a policy or go around investigating teachers' sexualities, but I understand the impulse to be mindful about this because, obviously, a teacher has access to what Steve calls your inner sanctum. Your "psyche" or (whatever you call the inner world of motivation and desire) is available to a teacher’s subtlest suggestions when you practice, so why expose it to someone whose sexuality/ creative energy is adolescent, dominating, or attention-hoarding? That’s sort of the definition of uncontained— wasted— energy.

If you find yourself doing your hair for yoga, tanning for your practice outfits, or getting nervous stomach… what’s that about? Is it coming from you, or are you responding to something?

How do you know if someone’s not self-possessed sexually? Well, there are the painfully obvious indicators. If they constantly, tenderly adjust students' hair (my favorite), or gingerly align waistbands, or breathe on you heavily, or seek out a lot of charged eye contact… well… give me a break. How tacky do you want your practice to get? Why not practice with someone who is more refined and alchemically sweet?

There is a part of us who wants to go back for the blatant mind sex (Oh yeah! Fun! They keep me mindful! They put me in an “altered state”!), and a part of us that sees this behavior for what it is. Adolescent.

Probably better for yoga to recognize it even if it doesn't recognize itself.

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

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)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Narcoleptic · 10 March 2008

The body may be open, but this does not mean you’re all processed out. Or a nice person. Or whatever. Besides, there are a lot of places that asana cannot reach.

Which does not mean that yoga cannot reach them. No seriously: this is a practice of pushing back the veil into the unconscious.

It’s reassuring when I can catch an edge that I didn’t realize was there. Here’s the snag: reactivity about yoga practice that focuses on outer form rather than prizing the breath. An objection that’s completely legitimate. Except in this case it’s more like a little delivery system for my personal hangups.

How could I not feel this, coming out of a school where much of the teaching is to create cover-ready poses. I’ve been oppressed by form! Praised for “perfection” and taught such a thing is attainable in asana of all places. All while in a highly receptive trance state. This history’s in me.

Some artist-friends have this phrase for ambition: “He wants to be on the magazine.” But in my history, that is more than a funny turn of phrase. All this weird energy about being on the magazine.

And here I am, the contrarian who goes narcoleptic when people talk about physical practice, who says throw away the magazine, who won’t watch the DVDs or look at the practice manuals. Won’t do it! Let me out! I’m dying of boredom!

Seeing past form to breath and energy is all good and puts the focus in a deeper place… but, in me, also fosters this invisible hardness that I’m getting away with carrying. I can hide it because (1) the body seems open and I know how to act calm and (2) if I do talk about it, I can easily legitimate the rhetoric that the reactivity creates.

What I’m figuring is that the source of my asana-narcolepsy is this little nest of tangles. Trigger what I feel is obsession with form, anything that looks like perfect body OCD, and I immediately tune out. I can’t stay around for it. Just realizing this doesn’t make me ok with it. I’m still SO narcoleptic, and underneath that, annoyed by the superficiality of form.

This metaphysical fussiness doesn’t go in to any obvious places in the body, but the stupid truth is that it has a little trigger in my solar plexus. I’m somewhere between amazed and further annoyed that, due to the yoga, I can feel that quickening-tightening in the nerves.

I’ve got some peace to make here. If I want to chill out, it means accepting of and valuing form as not the enemy of spirit.

There is a huge amount of unhealthy obsession with bodily “perfection,” and with postural form, in western yoga. God. I am sure it’s nowhere worse than in this town. But I’m not in a place to see that clearly if I’m just letting the reactivity in the solar plexus do the thinking on this matter.

It’s a little funny to practice hundreds of asanas every day for years and simultaneously hold the belief that physical form does not matter. And ironic that the way I’m finding this edge is not by thinking about it so much as coming across physical and half-physical cues in the body itself. The latent fussiness about physicality actually has a body of its own.

EDIT: ANY READERS WHO KNOW ME OR SUSPECT YOU KNOW ME NEED TO SEE MY CLARIFICATION IN THE COMMENTS: IT'S COMMENT #14 BELOW. THANKS.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception

Starvation, Contortion, Self-Regulation · 29 February 2008

I almost broke my policy on comment non-deletion. There was something I said among friends—among ashtangis—a while ago, and later it caught the attention of another group of people and raised a bit of looky-loo, clicky-click. Oh yeah, it’s the internet. More than just your friends.

The comment had to do with the practice of intense calorie restriction, and what other people's "research" shows to be negative effects on sociability, energy and mind. As with ashtanga, some people have given their own bodies to this research, so we can know in physical detail how it works. But with both of these radical programmes (one of which is fun, one of which sounds to me like torture) :), I wonder if practitioners ourselves should be the only reporters of our research… or if feedback from the world would help to balance our self-reported results.

I commented along these lines because I was thinking of the simple but deep Being in the World chapter of Desikachar—a piece of writing I take as a praise for householder yoga along a middle path and a call to engage deeply in relationships as—among other things—a way to gain “objective” information about oneself.

With ashtanga, very strange desires are born—for lightness and flexibility of body—and images the world deems gut-wrenching become, to us, iconographic. We are only humans—we want to be the most and the best on the dimension we travel—and in the context of ashtanga this can lead to self-harm quite easily.

Starvation or contortion: choose your poison.

At the beginning, the striver-impulse is to look at others’ edges and seek to internalize them. This is such an easy way to avoid working from inside, and maybe to get hurt.

So we listen to the world when it tells us we are being crazy. Say, with the not necessarily bad ashtangi tendency to undereat. One becomes aggressive, hard, and one-track-minded for lack of food… or lacks the energy to keep up in conversation much less on a hike: we might not be able to see this directly but we can see it reflected through the eyes of others. Helps define the edge.

But that is an internal process. To dispel my personal regret about making any comment about a practice, CR, in which I do not even engage because I love eating and need a good lot of daily carbs to do intellectual work, I want to say that I’m sorry. I do have some objective data here, but no subjective data. Sociology tells me the former are enough; my gut tells me they are not. I overstepped.

There is such a fine line for me between honestly reflecting back to others what I see and actually reaching to participate in their self-regulation. Who the bejezus am I? Just another data point for you. Not your ultimate witness, not your judge. Screw me! :) I want to trust others to do their personal practice with honesty and grace, not intrude upon them. What's the use intruding?

All of this is about playing our own edges. This is what I do—consummately, compulsively; lovingly, excessively. It’s how some of us move and grow. Edges are scandalous and rarely pretty. The only way to work there for any length of time is if you can regulate yourself. I am remembering that for most people who are mindful self-researchers of this sort, they instinctively know themselves better than I ever can.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Ahead of Myself · 25 February 2008

Someone new and kindred in New York wrote to me, about the whole “becoming the disease in order to cure it” theme I worked over last week—both with the third series grit and with the drug withdrawal. He’d been reading a forgotten one of UG’s books on the subway, and ran across this:

Because will implies conflict, struggle, the contradiction: I am this and I must be that. And to become that, I must exercise will. We are asking if there is not a different way of acting altogether, without will?

Nice to know Krishnamurti asked the same question, given his ultimate teaching is to remove brute force from practice—and to transcend discipline (which it is said that I have in spades). Thanks for writing, J.

As for me, I’m not satisfied with my thoughts about the will. Not satisfied with my thoughts! (Laughing.)

And it dawns on me that I’m not going to find intellectual satisfaction about this topic, because this particular road is not one you travel by way of analysis.

I’m trying to telegraph a kind of understanding that I don’t have. Getting ahead of myself.

I’ve always used writing as a way to get to the nub of things, to become clean and conclusive. I really had to write in that mode for the first year of this writing practice just in order to get myself talking, but the past two months I’m finally letting go—a bit—of the narrative, analytical modality. Eased up on the drive for intellectual satisfaction, just to see if it makes things interesting… and if lightens up the habits in me.

What it’s revealing lately—and I think you will agree—is that the stream of my consciousness is fucking dense. I’m letting that happen—letting the blog be less well written and far less accessible—because it feels like good process. Interesting to see so many of you staying around for this. Who knows, even as the signs seem to indicate travail is coming—poetry may not be far away.

Which is not to say I get to rewrite the dissertation in free verse.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Will as a Puppy · 17 February 2008

Third series home practice. Funny joke. Yeah, me in the kitchen standing on one leg with the other behind my head. Don’t miss a beat as the fridge clicks on, the phone rings, and the neighbor harumphs out on the balcony to holler the squirrels in for breakfast.

My kitchen-floor practice is growing little by little (Shambhala Sun calls it kitchen sink enlightenment, the practice that is done without constant community and teachers, but I am talking about my literal kitchen floor). I usually begin with the first half of primary. The surrendering series of forward bends, the series I’ve done over a thousand times, to the point that it does me more than me it. It’s all easier after I let that old lover, the first series, draw me down. I finally let go of the little distractions, the hanging-out, the laziness and the doubt.

But third series is not about the practice doing me. It’s not something to which I surrender. It’s something I do.

I’ve been floating this idea that you don’t home-practice the third series. It’s too ridiculous a practice. Built for exhibitionism, for godsakes. Who am I kidding that I’ll muster that kind of power of my own day after day in the kitchen? (V. joked that I should finally get a puppy, to keep me honest.)

Tried out the theory on my teacher the other day. No dice. And no excuses.

Third series is the will. It develops the will.

What? Will is for two year olds, I thought. Will is my first complete sentence (hollering): “Do it self, Mommy!” Will is leaving Montana, leaving a religion, leaving rural culture and leaving the quasi-peasant class. It's achieving shit. It’s everything I’ve softened in my personality as intuition and feeling and what feels like a deeper nature have come in.  

I’m supposed to go back? I left something behind back there in my adolescence? Something I need?

Maybe. Certain things are a struggle now. Staying present for everything, not just the things I like. Finishing the goddam dissertation, which is enormous (and which I extend in order to stay in the place that I love and because the job market is shit). Practicing third series alone in my kitchen, for godsakes. If I was still a willful one, I could muscle this stuff.

But is there a kind of will that just squashes the distraction and the difficulty, a kind of will that is less effortful? Can you harness gravity somehow as this insane discipline teaches you (supposedly) to fly? Can you have a willfullness whose character feels less like Do it Self, Mommy and more like a good puppy (ok, maybe a bull terrier or something) watching the play of consciousness?

I have no idea. But it’s been said, and not by me, that the time on the plateau is over for now. That it is time for building. I just hope I can do what is given to me without getting tough again, without narrowing myself down, and with a sense of humor.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [30]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Saturday XXXX: Family Jewels · 8 February 2008

Battered re-re-recycled box arriving in the department on Thursday: a stash of antique family jewelry, nestled inside the delicate old wool blanket I requested from the homestead (without disclosing I will use it for meditation practice, having wrapped up to read inside it as a girl).

Sweet mom. She loves her shit, but she lets it go so easy. She’d almost thank us for breaking priceless thises and thats when we were ruddy little nakeds running around the house in winter.

And what will I do with these (unfortunately unbreakable) preciouses I’ll never wear? Thank god I’m not responsible for the giant diamonds or the furniture or the china. Oppressive preciouses.

She comes from middling Denver beer barons but halfway abandoned that family history, and for good reason. The once thriving clan up and sank mid-century like a big tragic cruise ship in a drunken sea of skitzophrenia and suicides, its fragments parceled into lifeboats that drifted in all directions. I’ve re-forged some of the lost connections in adulthood, even as its physical detritus drifts in to my life here and there.

The waves of objects from some lost fantasy family are psychically heavy, but do make me feel slightly less alien in a working-class rural conservative clan that regards me with suspicion. I have the scrappy little physique of my dad’s Irish mongrels, but the increasingly angular aspect of the Bavarian brewmistresses in their old daguerrotypes. The best of both worlds, in some ways, now that it’s more or less clear my personality isn't going to split like the skitzophrenics' do in the early 20s.

Oh, wait.

Right.

It’s been three weeks since I posted on a Saturday, and links are stacked up. You know, Pema Chodron went on Ophrah; the TM yogi died; the aliens in Stephenesville just got more and more exciting. Also, an insightful teacher finally made the connection between fundamentalist yoga and the larger political moment (!), and CP kept the conversation going. And a lot of other stuff. But in lieu of links today I’m going to empty the cache and give you headlines from my life.

● Actually, despite the confusion, the “true” new moon was Thursday. How do I know? Because that’s the day the migraine hit. This is what I get for messing with my hormones. Lame.

● Wednesday I finally went in for the cheaper, more absorbable spirulina. The powder, rathen than the compacted little tablets. OH MY GOD! Why didn’t someone warn me? The color and consistency are sludge, and the taste…. God, if anything can inure me to pure unadulterated spirulina, it’ll be the next two months it takes me to get through the one pound jar of it. Curses! 

● No. I am not on Facebook. No!

● And yes, working for the ivory tower is still a tragedy. Two friends did get jobs, but on balance the market is busy crushing souls. Why do we humans do this—create these viscious markets?

● Yes there will be some kind of ashtangi gathering next week as things come to a close. Do send me your email if you’d like to be invited.

● Sunday I am finally making the first of many meetings with Anna from New York! The first agenda items is scratching the muffins. If you don’t know what that means, lucky you.

● With all these weekday outdoor breakfasts in the yoga idyll that is my life, my hair has turned a horrific strawberry blond. This might call for an intervention.

● People out there are actually running the google search: “Yoga three years suck your own dick.” Lots of people. I wouldn’t put that in print but they’re coming here anyway. Sorry, guys.

● Boys with sledgehammers are wailing on the pink concrete walls of my apartment building. Having a great dusty old time of it, day after day. Either the owner is replacing the plumbing or someone is pretty mad at him.

●The restlessness index climbed back into the double digits this week. Forecast cloudy.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception

Humility Tuesday · 4 February 2008

The blog has been redesigned but several readers are lobbying for the installation of a widget before Alex brings the new template into being. The widget will set a quota for posts about popular culture and politics, and limit the amount of ineffable nonsense that makes it into these pages.

No widget! Don't do it!  Here, I'll go all-out. A whole post of my opinions about electoral politics. The most distracting kind of politics! And yet for my jadedness, I have suffered this week a little transformation. 

John McCain, old guy, what am I going to do with you? Who would have guessed that you would finally bring it together? Your relative good intentions belie a frightening level of social and fiscal conservatism bound together in a consistency that's even more potent than stupidity. And I'm concerned: if tomorrow ends with a McCain/Clinton matchup, we are in for a traumatic race around all the wrong differences, with all the meaningful differences off the table.

I used to be a political scientist. I joined the discipline with a BA in philosophy and journalism, and no idea the anti-intellectualism, rah-rah nationalism, and paradigm-bound incuriosity I was in for. Six months with the reductionists and it took a spring break in the Grand Canyon, hiking out through the sheer suffocating cliffs of the inner gorge, to make me realize my situation. I had to leave. Went home, rapped on the door of the Soc dep’t, and gave them my reasons. They were only too happy to take a disciplinary refugee. But that year in political science gave me as much respect for the accuracy of statistical models (which I learned to do well) as disdain for their truth claims. GET THIS: for about 80 years of elections and arguably right into the present, the outcome of a presidential contest can be predicted on just three variables: change in real disposable income, whether a candidate is an incumbent, and whether the country is at war.

Hokum? As if people still vote their pocketbooks. And is there even an understanding that the country is at war? What does incumbency even mean when the same two families have had someone on the ballot every election in my voting lifetime?

But still the models tell me something, and it’s more than the stupid heads on the tv. This is why the last two Bush wins didn’t take me by surprise. The reason I'll watch the RDI sink quarter by quarter and see it as socially beneficial process. But still... especially considering the fiscal fear that's building, the spectre of McCain is haunting me enough to change my vote to someone who can overwhelm him.

I’ve been for Hillary all the way through this thing. The argument was (caveat lector): to those in search of an “inspiring” candidate they "can believe in": stop identifying with the country. Heal thyself, nationalist: be citizen of the world! Stop deceiving yourself that America is a nice country. Let's make it a nice country (w.r.t., especially: trade [my obsession], welfare, war, prisons, education, environmental cooperation) before we think we deserve a nice face for it. No top-down national makeover. Hillary is not a nice person, which is why she works on an symbolic level. Way more importantly, she’s got infrastructure. All that matters in government is organizational resources and bureaucratic know-how. This is power. Hillary is ready to rush the power structure because she’s been writing the plays for a decade. She’s the only one I trust to go back and UN-DO as much of the last eight years of policy as possible. She’s the only one whose ego is invested in that. We can talk about “moving forward” after we do some serious policy repair, chez Hillary. "Moving forward" is naive and amnesiac when there's so much horror on the books, waiting to crust over into "the way things are done."

But no matter. She cannot beat McCain in this environment, I think; at least not without insane blood.

I’ve done my best holding out any emotional involvement in the symbolic nonsense. The Obama show with his fake MLK cadences and his plaintive open brow and cute ears and that anything-but-macho way he dips his head and touches a shoulder. Because I wanted a policy juggernaut, not a symbol to help me lie to myself about the deeper nature of the beast.

But this is why the cute man can do it: he can mobilize so many who want to believe in the show. And who are not your father's oldsmobile pocketbook voters (those anti-idealists). The show is a shallow construction, but even constructions made out of the fleeting miasma of culture can have consequences that are real. Enough people believe in the symbol now that it will be real. Who am I to look askance?

Of course he is sweet. Of course there’s a little bit of feedback from the ideas he creates of ourselves into the polity we are to become. Of course the symbolic shit and the culture it creates can be beautiful. Of course I can love this man and the new ideology we're giving him (though please don't ask me to sniffle at these bad Scarlett Johanssen videos--I don't have disposable emotion for electoral politics). I hope Obama appreciates all this psychic and emotional labor people are doing for him: charisma is in the eyes of the crowd and it is us creating the Obama tide.

I voted absentee two weeks ago, before the change. So this is my way of changing that vote. By proxy. One owl for Obama, this time around.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception

Superbowl and Seven Veils · 3 February 2008

In 1990, Esquire Magazine excerpted Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs an All—the story of a girl named Salome dancing the Seven Veils in a  bar during Superbowl. While half the crowd looked past her to the game, and the other half learned beautiful things about the layers of deceit and distraction with which they veil their own perceptions.

Back in 1990, I was reading for the sex, not the moral. Salome stands mysterious before her repressed but randy New York audience of bankers and bartenders, and the first veil she drops is the one that should be the last.

I was in the seventh grade, and still someone who cared about commercial sporting events. But one Sunday after church I sat up in the living room with the Esquire tucked between the pages of something more benign and discovered the smallest possibilities for transgressive writing, transgressive thinking. Transgressive acting. That first veil dropped before I even knew what was happening.

O god o god o god! I can't believe I am reading this! O GOD! Can he write that? This magazine is so great! I could get in so much trouble for this. But I can't stop!

Shit, is anybody going to come up the drive and catch me reading this? Will they know from the look in my face that it’s not Brio Magazine? Crap this is dangerous.

How an issue of Esquire made it past the threshhold of my folks’ house—where “secular music” was prohibited and I was not allowed a subscription to Newsweek because it was “too liberal—is another story, and a funny one. So is the story of how I actually learned popular music those first decades—buying up all the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” sheet music at the piano store in town. The Beatles and Elton John, even Led Zeppelin and Guns ‘n’ Roses: all available in sheet music, and me playing the piano since I was six. The shot of recognition the very first time I heard Stairway to Heaven played on CD in my college dorm was so deep: oh, that’s the mood they used to sing the lines “it makes me wonder”…. I had it right all the time, just reading from the page.

Anyway, how lucky to sneak Tom Robbins’ Salome past the gates. In the story, she’s not the evil murdering Salome (who dances for the severed head of John the Baptist) from the Bible’s version of the story. If I remember at all she is awkwardly tender and wants nothing less than liberation for those who would objectify her. As she competes with the Super Bowl and wins, she uses her body (and Robbins’ words) to say this:

The veils of ignorance, disinformation, and illusion

separate us from that which is imperative

to our understanding of our evolutionary journey,

shield us from the Mystery that is central to being.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

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.

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Categories: evolution , integration , self-deception , spirituality

Pushing Back the Veil? · 23 January 2008

What is practice?

1. a self-soothing routine we use to build up a stable, continuous sense of self in the face of uncertainty
2. a forum for pursuing a vision of perfection
3. an arena for self-mastery
4. competition
5. PERFORMANCE, duh
6. a systematic daily pushing back of the veil between consciousness and the unconscious

Yeah. REALITY CHECK on aisle six!

Given the possibilities (and here are some other definitions of practice), isn’t it wildly self-congratulatory to say what we do is number six?  

What exactly does it take for any systematic action to be “practice” as self-inquiry? In other words, under what conditions can we actually honestly push back the veil into the shadowy places?

What energies (perfectionism, nervousness, sloth, disbelief, willful shallowness?) will sabotage practice and merely deposit new neuroses behind the veil?

Can anything (asana, pranayama, sitting, writing) be practice? What actions are most likely to make for good practice? What activities are least likely?

Oh, And is the new mantra of Yogaworks—“practice makes yoga”—anything other than a backwards double-double-entendre, spiritual materialism, and a craven appeal to the unconscious? Come on ladies: get a practice—everybody’s got one! Get perfect!

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , self-deception

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.

I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.

Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.

Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.

Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.

● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.

● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.

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Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , 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.

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Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , morality , self-deception

The Shadow of Moroni, Part I · 6 January 2008

The other night I exited the 10 Freeway at Overland and drove north all the way to Wilshire under the shadow of Moroni. I considered the prophet’s anger.

Overland goes from thoroughfare to commercial zone to quiet residential, with the gilded Moroni on a spire, on a huge square pedestal many stories up and gleaming in floodlights, just staring you down the whole way, as you approach from the bottom of his long slow hill. I felt pretty well shaken by his gaze from up there on the Los Angeles Mormon temple: retribution for the horrible little gift I left there at the temple gates one night in 2003.

Get away from Moroni! Seriously, you might want to stop reading now.

What I left at the gates, there at the perfect perpendicular intersection of Wilshire and Overland at the bottom of the Temple Hill, was—not that I remember the leaving it—a little pile of vomit.

Worse—so much worse: I left the exact same gift a half mile west, at the gates of an even more tragic institution. The Los Angeles VA Hospital. The reason you should have stopped reading is you don’t want to know… that the VA never cleaned it up and neither did I. I drove Ohio back and forth to school for a week, like a dog that returns and returns and returns, as the little alcohol-laced pile sat there and rotted.

So horrible, to disgrace the maimed like that. Who wouldn’t stop in her tracks after that?

I had blacked out an hour before the vomit vandalism, late at a party celebrating a dear friend’s joining the Bristol professorate. We started with a rich pinot and went on to good whiskey, but what killed me was the Transylvanian plum wine brought by a Serbian who is obsessed with saving people from themselves. Is that what Sasha was doing with me out by the pool—making me face myself down, down the neck of a bottle—right before I started revealing departmental secrets to the little crowd? Is that—a self-reflection—what I was gazing into well into morning as The Editor held my hair in the bathroom?

As if I remember. Learning all I had revealed and disgraced was a good shake the next morning, because usually the blackouts didn’t end in overshare or sickness like that. But blackouts were common.

I was a good enough drinker—having begun at 14 at cornfield keggers in a state where there is nothing else to do outside the back seat of a car—that I could ingest large amounts and appear to be in control physically and conversationally. In college the philosophy boys liked that I could drink them under the table. But the truth was that my memory would usually go blank by midnight. My friends were numerous and true, so the blacking out was, when we reckoned it out the next morning, regarded as amusing if not a little sweet.

I had a way of drinking in high school that was as immature as any Montana teenager’s; and my college way of drinking was not much different except that it was luckily more rare because I worked late most weekends. By the time I was 22, I still had the free-for-all, go-for-drunk relationship to alcohol that you would expect to see in a teen using it aggressively to celebrate--to create--her freedom.

The morning after Moroni, lying destroyed on the sofa, I tried to remember how many blacked-out nights there had really been over the years. I tried to look at the compulsion that took me to that place over and over again. The edge where I took advantage of the loss of inhibition not to feel a buzz… but to drive on for more and more.

It was sort of horrible going through that stuff I had never examined; and then I ran into the memory—or non-memory—of leaving a kegger one night the winter I was 15….

(More in a day or two.)

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Categories: evolution , having a body , self-deception

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!

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , self-deception , spirituality

Gurus & Good Old Boys · 27 November 2007

Let me say at the beginning that I feel you might want to disregard this if you do not want to be put off.

Well ok. Here you are.

Sometimes a new reader will mistake me for a man, and send an email that’s a bit mis-pitched. I like that.

Is it because I don’t dissimulate? (Though really: there’s feminine “maybe” and “I feel” backpedaling all over my prose, in a good honest way. And I am always soft… unless someone gets overly declarative.) The excessive analyticalness? Am I… turgid? Actually I suspect it’s just the odd references to music or books that are not for women.

What business does a female have with Norman Mailer, Ian Curtis, Bob Dylan, Henry Miller, (and for godsakes this masculine legacy of yoga practice)?

Apropo off all this: A friend sent a train of thought past me the other day, a train she didn’t intend for us to condense into an argument or a statement about the way things are: When do good old boys and gurus get conflated? Is full-on hero worship ever a useful part of practice?

But as I was saying. Some recent man-art mentioned here: Bob Dylan biopic. Henry Miller Library. Norman Mailer obits. Yeah, all of that is some serious hero worship. Good old boys erecting gurus. And at the same time defining lineages--who gets to claim them and who gets left out. All examples of appreciation that's really more like appropriation.

The Dylan movie is a total drag in this regard. I know you were trying, Todd Haines, but you failed. I walked out thinking: every editorial decision was made with “What Would Bob Think?” on your mind. Even your effort to smuggle in a woman’s subjectivity to the heart of the work can’t save you from the hypermasculinity that guru-erection entails. I walked out saying: Bob is for me, but this is not for me.

That's because, for example, Haines cannot resist re-appropriating the collective male in-joke that is Martin Scorcese’s interviews with Joan Baez. Joan, who mothered and made Bob and then got left in the dirt the second he was a little larger than she, said some unfortunately weepy and submissive things to Scorcese, who then edited and amped them to make Bob look like a big, ladykilling hero. Haines seizes it and re-makes a fictional version: that Bob, what a cock. Women artists fall before him, swooning “He was so much better at expressing my thoughts than me.”

I walked out of the Henry Miller Memorial Library, in Big Sur, feeling I'd just witnessed the same kind of man-on-man hagiography. Miller is for me, but I can do without the creepy little hipster-clerks who want to own him. Voyeurism is bad enough, but voyerism post-mortem? The library’s centerpiece is a bookstore that in addition to offering Miller’s works, showcases all the things that appreciators decided “go” with his lineage. The beats, the transcendentalists. (And oh, the Russian masters. Easy, guys.) No women. No women authors.

I get it. Miller’s all about transcendent, male self-discovery. The appreciator-curators’ erotica selection, set alongside the Sexus trilogy? Not Anais Nin’s short stories—which were enough to make me blush and cover when I first read them on a public bus traversing rural Taiwan (though other passengers wouldn’t exactly be able to read over my shoulder)—but the creepy, not-really-sexy Marquis de Sade. Wouldn’t want to let the girls in.

Let me go on. All the appreciations of Norman Mailer, that violent, condescending hack? Yeah, brilliant guy I want in my personal canon. But please, let us not perfunctorily praise great men without an eye to who they held down. Follow my link of two weeks ago and check it out: that’s all he really is, and he is all of that. Most memorials glossed this in erecting uncomplicated “greatness.”

Anyway. This is one place that gurus and good old boys flow together: in the appreciation cults. In how memorializations create in-groups, and who you put in those groups, and in what you leave out.

Beta boys, god love you. You started out Say Anything but died derivative in High Fidelity: you wanted the brainy strong girl when you were fresh and ballsy, but ended up fantasizing for a fan.

Why not love it when women find their voices? You won't stop knowing who you are if girls get in with the gurus too. Or even if we become them.

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Categories: evolution , self-deception , social theory

Commodification and Pushback--Subcultures and Scenes · 26 November 2007

Bear with me here.

I’m back from utopia, where subcultures still hide in the hills and cityfolk come around looking for a piece of the enlightened ones, the creators, the real libertarians. Big Sur. You can feel the almost-serene pushback—a quiet self-preservation—from the people who get it as the San Franciscans in beemers come around for fine fine food and flickr-ready views. My guy Henry Miller (whose get-a-piece-of-me memorial library does its best to discourage women from inheriting him, what with all their sick, tired, parasitic man-on-man hagiography) has wonderful things to say about utopian subcultures and how terribly real they can get, but here is someone else who has interesting thoughts about NorCal enclaves. Wm Gibson via Warmhunting, from 2003.

You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?

Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?

Well, utopians, bohemians, and ex-pats at heart: can we really get off the grid now? Has Gibson finally lost the pulse—failed to see that now subcultures engage in SELF-commodification (start a record label, trend-set in your own community, get yourself one way or another “on the magazine” as my brother the artist of information systems likes to say). Or are there still subcultures that are a refuge? Is ashtanga a place for self-production or, as the Miltonian might have it, for a kind of self-consumption? Is the market at our door?

Well, god knows plenty want to be ashtangis. Thanks, Gwyneth. But the funny thing is that once most people get on the mat they’ll never hack it. Boredom will get you if weakness doesn’t get you first.

So increasingly I swim in a soup of commodities and images and attitudes “inspired by” this practice. So what. It’s tacky, but do I have to buy in… and let my subculture be sold back to me as Gibson says?

One thing that’s coming up in the dissertation is that, as I see it, commodification in cultural fields is always partial. Yes, it is a pernicious devil of a tendency, but with apologies to my Uncle Karl there is always pushback. Not in a latent revolution: in the now. Yes the market gets the hell into our home lives and our relationships both to our families and to the land—there is always an economic side to these things. But at the same time, there is reclamation. Stillness, even.

There is the possibility of not re-buying—and not merely producing—ourselves. And I don’t think I have to go to some remote enclave place to get that. If I can show up and practice sincerely, finding community among the dedicated ones in a room full of all kinds of intentions and inside an entity leading the world in yoga commodification, as I did this morning, then there is definitely a self-contained-ness, and a power of non-grasping, that this practice generates. So interesting to practice contentment and stillness in a world that wants to package those qualities into things and sell them back to you as magazines and t-shirts. So interesting to see that there is a little bitty subculture that's not moved by it, sitting right there at the center.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

That Was Embarrassing · 4 November 2007

Some of you will have read the nice story I told on Saturday, about being born the day they elected Jimmy Carter.

That’s my truth. It’s been my truth for years. 

Also, November 3, 1976, was a Wednesday. Election Day was the day before that. My mother did go off to the hospital after voting in the high school, but I didn't arrive until well in to the following morning.

Huh. At least learning this was not as large a disappointment as the actual Carter presidency, which began with such hope and populism with Rosalynn and Jimmy walking down Pennsylvania rather than taking the traditional Inaguration Day motorcade (or so the story goes)… and led quickly enough into gridlock with Congress, oil crisis and eventually hostage crisis, and laying of all the ground for the enduring horrors of the Reagan Revolution. Come to think of it, I’m so glad I wasn’t born the day they elected Jimmy Carter.

So much for peoples’ history.

We have some stories like this in my family, and I suppose the historian in me finds them a little too fascinating. There's a case to be made for letting the concealed things remain concealed, though I'm too interested in everything to operate that way. A true story worms its way to the surface every now and then.

Meanwhile, damn the blog and its auto-correction tendencies. When I start writing about my early years, I wonder what the hell is going to break loose.

There’s much to be said for “my truth” even when it doesn’t map on to the truth. The subjective side of history is as determinative of the present and of the future as is the objective side. (Or more determinative...? Naaaah, I'm too far to the left for that.) Both subjective and objective histories are alive; and insofar as my sense of destiny and possibility lives in the mindstuff, that Jimmy Carter thing has been ramifyingly true for years. Not trivial.

But it is nice to let it go.

Those of you silent ones who caught the mismatch and let it go again without saying… mmm… what am I going to do with you?

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Categories: power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

Bait and Switch Yoga · 29 October 2007

Wow. Which yoga-consumer group sold my mailing address to “Yoga Pura” of Phoenix, Arizona?

They want me to come to their teacher training, a “journey of a lifetime,” after I have asked myself the following questions.  

Am I fearlessly committed to living happy now?

Do I want to understand—really, really understand—the mysteries underlying yoga and all great spiritual traditions?

Oh yeah. Happiness, and real, real understanding. That’s my bag, allright. But Phoenix is some distance from LA. Could I do this training by correspondence? Probably, because it turns out that Yoga is ANYTHING I want it to be. Check this ad copy, you poor, unenlightened readers.

Yoga is not about stretching. Yoga is not about meditation. In fact, contrary to what you may have heard, yoga is not even about yoga. And while it may be true that yoga involves all of these, it’s [sic] real potency and value lies [sic] in its ability to create something much greater: the transformation of your life. Yoga is about living your life to the fullest…. It’s about joy in the workplace and love in the home. Yoga is about the fulfillment of your life’s purpose with a… fulfillment previously unimagined [sic]. At Yoga Pura we’re unlocking the real secrets of the ancient science of yoga to help people do just that. More than a simple course in yoga postures… the Teacher Training… will immerse you in your own personal voyage of self-discovery and awakening—transforming you into a mature spiritual guide able to help others do the very same thing.

Classic yoga bait-and-switch advertising here. Not just “happiness,” “fulfillment,” and “real understanding” but the wisdom and knowledge to be others’ “spiritual guide.” Right. Right up until you get about a month into some kind of practice and realize how clueless, monkey-minded, and how not qualified to be another’s authority, you really are.

To me, this Yoga Pura type of thing is more painful than blatant yoga materialism that promises fashionable pastimes and a nice ass. Because this is yoga as candy apple “happiness” that represents a quick escape from the life you presumably want to change. Since there’s nice enough intention here, these corny promises make it easier to forget that yoga is just a practice and not an express ticket to some other self.

Nothing in this ad is about establishing a personal practice and using that as the field for transformation and understanding. Rather it feels more like they’re selling me into yoga charm school where I will learn to think like Tony Robbins and walk like Christy Turlington and speak melodically like Rodney Yee so I can go out and reproduce more of this brand of self-help/actualization. My new consulting gig: Insideowl Lifecoaching!

Well, bother. If it is this simple, what am I doing taking the toll road?

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Saturday XXIX · 27 October 2007

Thursday was the cursed full moon. Orange from the horrible ash of the horrible fires, but so beautiful for it. Like the summer moons back in Montana, when the dust from harvest hangs in the air for weeks.

That day in the sculpture garden, pent up and tense, I passed a professor for whom I worked in the fall of 2003. I corrected exams in Ancient Greek History in order to make my IRA contribution that year. We had catty workload issues at the beginning, him first year on the job and me a union steward with standards to set. Then I saw him lecture on the Peloponnesian War and oh my god. Co-opted owl, right there. In the years since, he’s gone gray (adorable, but shows we’ve both been here a while). He called out in the garden:

“You’re still here? Ha! Did they give you tenure yet?” (Very funny.)

No man. I just… added a second course of study.

Anyway. It’s Saturday. The truth is I’ve had two out of three disastrous weekends in October. Rolling around to a Sunday night walk and finding myself enervated and distant, feeling uselessness in what the previous 48 hours have been. Hmmm: I’ve structured the next two days so tightly that there’s no room for reflection, irritated or otherwise.

Am I trying to hide from something, or just taking the insight from practice that my mind sometimes likes to be bound, needs to be reigned in, and operates better with some structure?

Couplea links before I head out again.

● You know that they’re mutilating the women in Juarez, right? And in Guate. Horrible, sick terror. According to Amnesty, “almost 400 women and girls have been murdered in Mexico…. In Guatemala, 2200 women have been killed since 2001. Exceptional cruelty and sexual violence characterize many of the killings.” For the Day of the Dead (a more intense holiday than Halloween, where we use children to chase away death instead of celebrating it) lots of people are sending home-made crosses to the countries’ consulates, asking yet again for attention to epidemics both countries have basically ignored. Cool project.

● Anthopologists, who take themselves so seriously it hurts, love to issue referenda on this and that cultural issue. They’re guilt-racked, you see, given the disgusting colonialist legacy on which their analytical framework rests. This is why many of them have retreated into lame textual criticism. Anyway, this beyond-ironic thing is happening, and I can’t say I oppose it (for as much as I despise everything GWB has ever done, like the rest of you). Anthrpologists are going out with US troops in Afghanistan to “culturally sensitize” them as they go busting down doors. Of course they’re being pilloried by their colleagues. Here’s the balanced view of the situation I’ve been wanting. 

● It looks like my people are in decline. Awwww. Large NYTM article on the Evangelical Movement. Now there’s a death I can celebrate, but it will have to wait until I actually read this article.

● Looking for a film recommendation for Tuesday night. Last year we went for a walk in the richer parts of Brentwood, where the denizens have had “their” gardeners deck out the houses in the latest and most ostentatious Halloween dress-up, and had “their” nannies do the same with the children. A great show, appropriately decadent. Then watched Terror By Night (1946) with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock. I don’t know what to watch this year. Any gore goes straight into my dreams and terrorizes me, so I’m more looking for artful suspense than horror. Also, for all my comfort with the dark side, there is still latent fear of Christian-style evil (namely, Satan) that just does not need to be primed until my sense of humor has full reign over my subconscious. Any suggestions?

 

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Categories: morality , science , self-deception , social theory

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , spirituality

Unscientific Postscript to Yoga is Dangerous · 25 September 2007

I’ve thought over this matter in the past week, thanks to the many people who have emailed me. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes it amazes me that there is true community here, and that these are relationships where we work out aspects of our practice as much as we participate in creating a bottom-up side of astanga culture. We are creating this world as much as its authorities who we mostly revere, and that is sort of revolutionary.

So, two notes on the matter of petite brunettes with daddy issues.

One. If the desire to “put oneself out there” as irrevently funny trumps a sensitivity to the real power big men have over small women—if ego trumps empathy—then clearly this person has not gone through the process of self-examination of inherited gender conditioning, and radical affirmation of human equality, that I’d wish he had as a modern yogi.

To do that, to learn to be feminists (get over the word already: it doesn't connote female domination and you know it), most men need to have a transformative relationship with a fully realized woman.

In the same way, white people in this country don’t even begin to undo their inherited racism (even if they emotionally antd intellectually despise racism) until they enter in to deep relationships with people of color as equals. It's not just a matter of professing the right politics. Politics is surfacy, but race and gender are visceral. 

It is difficult to imagine someone who understands the process of self-transformation through relationship explicitly taking advantage of his gender and size to leverage a sexualized power over small women. Someone who’d sensitized himself accurately to any women’s subjectivity would have some idea of the almost primitive responses that would call up in her, and would respect her enough to give her space. (It's not like women don't create gender inequality just as much or more than men.)

I do hope this teacher will find this discussion, because maybe he truly doesn’t know that his conduct is symbolically freighted and viscerally affecting. It's so much easier to be lighthearted about this, and not see its serious side. But you are a powerful man, man. Have some respect for that power of yours.

Two. WHATEVER! Ashtanga yoga is about doing what is uncomfortable. That's it. End of question-period.

This practice is a process undoing fears through direct experience. I worry that I have made a “thing”—a personal mental obstacle—out of my feelings about this stranger.

"I won't go to that teacher because he scares me." Hmmm. Really!? Again, whatever. Doing your practice in the presence of fear is one of the few things about which SKPJ is explicit.

Most people are still sexist on some deep level. This behavior is common in the world I inhabit: people who get it are the exception. It’s just not up to me to care. Or correct. Though if I'm in a relationship that's messed up, of course I have to do some pushback and take responsibility for protecting myself. Doing that is itself just a part of facing fear.

So it looks like at some point I’ll have to track this joe down and practice with him. Not repeatedly or anything, but for the sake of it. I’ll try not to flirt with him, which is exactly what I would have done if I hadn’t seen that profile (because word is he is a funny guy, and I would have cued into that to take the edge off any potential authoritarianism). But I might have to do something that violates his sense of propriety on my way out of “his” room. Any suggestions?

Ha!

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

The Natives Are Restless · 23 September 2007

Ruth: [hearing chanting] What's that?
Dr. Moreau: The natives, they have a curious ceremony…
Ruth: Tell us about it, Edward.
Edward: Oh, it's... it's nothing.
Dr. Moreau: They are restless tonight.

                                                         -Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Yeah, the natives are restless. Phone calls. Email.

Politics. Or, as they say, shalatics. Schedule changes. All these teachers, all these studios: and nobody can manage to offer an even vaguely consistent schedule. Woah! Trouble in OCD land!

Seriously, though. The amount of schedule drama in this scene is stupid. The best I can do is get an annual pass at one place and just take it for granted that that's where my mat lives, come what may.

Here is my situation. Around the time the Iraq War began, I made a decision not to commute. It’s about gas consumption, and about family time. Also (let’s be honest): the fact that I don’t suffer bad drivers at all well. So: my yoga practice, and what there is of a weekday social life, live on the Westside. So it is. Gives me a chance to defend this zone to the hipsters.

I made a choice at the beginning to see west side yoga as a land of plenty. This was a way of choosing not to see it as ground zero of yoga politics. Of course it’s both: land of plenty and land of politics. Plenty generates as much politics as scarcity ever did.

I’m a student of politics and a lover of the tiniest details of interpersonal stories (it’s always being suggested that I write an ethnography book on this scene—and sometimes I like the idea, though thank god I’m not trying to pass off such total nonsense as a dissertation), so while making that choice up front saved me a lot of distraction, it also meant sacrificing a few excitingly gossipy potential friendships. Walking out of the ladies’ when I had one too many good things to add; shrugging like I didn’t have an opinion when really I did. Not asking the crucial little questions I knew would open floodgates. Letting stories stop with me even though passing them on would be an interesting experiment. On the surface, sometimes it’s been a drag.

Funny thing, though. Over time, I’ve found that acting like I don’t have an opinion on shalatics means to a large degree I actually don’t have an opinion. (Completely revolutionary finding.) And the process is self-reinforcing: the less I appear to care about shalatics, the less interesting I am to talk to about them. The less I know. The less I harbor opinions. The more I love to practice. &c.

Putting together a practice in this town gets difficult if you’re a divider, a person who has some teachers and other practitioners with whom you're just not ok. If you are, well, a hater. Or just afraid. Practicing hyperexclusivity makes you take yourself more and more seriously, and can make for a  spiral of self-isolation.

Then the voices in your head become deafening.

Yoga can make you so inflexible.

The shalatics have been so prominent recently that I’m getting sucked in. Gezus. My job is to take the best out of any teacher (myself included), any circumstance. Yet I have less ease in extending that attitude to a certain large corporation. When something actually gets under my skin, I see there are still traces of a political creature capable of getting stirred up and involved in it. At this gets so, so in the way of having practice as a refuge or as a time I set aside to be content and grateful.

Ah, well.

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Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Yoga Is Dangerous, Part III · 18 September 2007

This is not a rant. Maybe it ought to be. 

This is a request for someone to help me find humor in a dark bit of tabloid-quality ashtanga flotsam.

This is not a rant because I’m trying to find a middle path between two thoughtful, true perspectives. One, Lax’s reminder that Astanga Yoga is a subculture which tends to cult-like boundary-policing. Yes, it is; and I don't want to be the police. But two, there is Cody’s ongoing meditation on the way in which teacher- student relationships are at least traditionally an integral, even "sacred," aspect of this practice. 

So here is the story. A friend was just surveying the ashtanga alternatives here on the west side of Los Angeles, and googled a local teacher neither of us has met. Authorized teacher. Well-connected guy about whom I have heard some good things. Has taken over the room built and nurtured for more than a decade by the philosopher-king Chuck Miller.

Google result: Myspace profile. Who he would like to meet, quote: "Petite brunettes. With daddy issues."

Dude.

Disturbed owl.

Very.

Maybe I’m being uptight. In general, I’m particularly uptight about professionalism, and about respecting teachers. Both those dispositions keep me from knowing exactly how to feel about this self-advertisement, but taking it as a joke feels like it legitimates a sad old sexist dynamic. (What if a female yoga teacher tried this? Now that would be funny.)

Some would say a teacher has a right to express all the beautifully complex and shadow parts of himself openly. That’s a really good argument. But it also would legitimate viewing a teacher as a person with multiple personalities, whereas an implicit goal and undeniable effect of this practice is that it brings the various parts of our selves together over time.

I’ve said before that yoga is dangerous. Because, among other things, it strips away conditioning: lets you see your own behavioral patterns and the power asymmetries in which you indulge, makes you aware of your own sexual energy and how you tend to use it. Yoga is incredibly dangerous, but this has me thinking that some times it is not at all dangerous enough.

I'm sitting here imagining walking into a room where this was the “secretive” intention. I cannot envision it without a visceral feeling of external threat. And that’s not the kind of danger I’m after.

I wonder how many women around here have done their research before class, found the profile, and decided to stay away.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , 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.

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Categories: arbitrage , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , self-deception , sound , spirituality

The Slacker Meditates: Some High Points · 27 August 2007

                                DAY 1: STATIC

Candy saaaaays…

I haven’t had a sexual fantasy today. Which can’t be healthy...

I’m gonna watch the bluebirds flyyy… ovah mah shouldah 

Who else in here is having a sexual fantasy? Maybe if I can find them out…

What do you think I’d seeeee?

If aliens bombed the White House, would the retreat directors tell us?

If I could…

I knew the Velvet Underground was a mistake this morning.

Walk a-wa-y from me…?

             DAY 2: DOUBTING THE METHOD, RATIONALIZATION, MIND-GAMES

Isn’t this being the witness thing a little jayvee? Why cultivate dualism?

I’m not sure about yesterday's sublimation of sexual energy strategy. Isn’t that more for the Vajrayana set? And Kornfield did give that lecture about not mixing methods…. 

If a sexual fantasy spontaneously arises in my field of awareness, isn’t meditating on it a form of Vipassana?

How many days until my awareness goes transpersonal? Maybe I can work some telepathy.

If the TM people think they can meditate together to bring world peace, could we raise the vibrational energy for regime change?

This is all so dualistic. It’s wallowing. I want realization. Screw practice. This just reinforces smallmind. What’s the sutra? With swift effort become wise… And that Kornfield line: “It’s not that we’re too greedy… It’s that we’re not greedy enough.”

This is boring. If my brainwaves don’t drop down tomorrow, I’m done. Why don’t they teach us lucid dreaming or something halfway interesting as long as we’re going to sit here all week?

What am I doing on the slow train? Maybe the diamond vehicle…. Maybe zen…

              DAY 3: OBSESSION WITH IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT

But the slow train is scenic! I’d forgotten. God this is good.

…And lunch will be even better…

Whose shoes are those?

Was that 30 minutes of dead air? Existence is beautiful. Emptiness is beautiful.

Are there really not any sexy people? Really?

They have heirloom tomatoes down in the kitchen. Tomatoes…

How many hours until asana practice? Maybe I will start earlier tomorrow. Sun salutations…. Ekam inhale… Dwe exhale…. Shit. The instructor just took the look on my face for a sexual fantasy…

Ok, I’m wasting time. I don’t have all millennium here. Let it go, let it go already….

That dead spot in my trapezius hasn’t gotten any smaller since last year.

Ekam…. Dwe…. Ekam… Dwe… Sat… Nam… Sat… Nam… that’s more like it already… Nam…

I think I have to go to the bathroom, but that might be more drama than I can handle.

I feel happy. Happy happy happy. Pardon me while I exploit his emotion. Get lost, witness.

If I’m going to reset my alarm before bed, I better rehearse that a few times in my head first. It’ll be the big event of the night… I’m already looking forward to it.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , self-deception , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXIII · 25 August 2007

I’m still smug for getting out of jury duty, though now people are telling me a royal flush of five days without the call isn’t all that special. Six years in this town, and not once have I done my part to uphold the integrity of the justice system.

Even if the dispensation isn’t so special, the whole past week felt like a free trip, a 53^rd week that doesn’t show up on the books: so it was with the out-of-nowhere commandeering of my practice by a benevolent pirate who’ll soon disappear, and with the five days of pure-empty lines on my varied little OCD (“GTD”) calendars.

I felt creative this week with energy and focus like I couldn’t believe: because nobody was keeping track. I play games to slack at the margins whet I think my other self isn't watching—skimming the almond butter, taking halfassed notes on my background reading, skimming time off from sleep to read the newspaper. Note this  occurs when I’m playing both the slacker and the tracker—I don’t try to skim off waiters, teachers, employers, whatever. Subtle self-sabotage, in conditions under which I feel divided against myself, is the main kind that interests me. Sometime I should figure out it’s not actually a fun game.

But this week I was in a void because I’d put my diabolical inner accountant on vacation, and it was faith-giving to see that when I shut off that shadow I’m always trying to outfox, I’m not full of shit. In fact, I function pretty well. Go figure.

This spate of relative clarity makes for a good moment to slow everything way, way down. I’ll be in silence Wednesday-Monday, over a long Labor Day. The Editor is off grocery-shopping for faque meat and other BBQ items right now (he loves soy dogs, the horror). Guess my own self isn’t the only one who sometimes needs a break from my overly watchful eyes.

Next time I do a links post I’ll be vipassana-ed and probably back in a post-political blogging disposition. So this week, in honor of the fact that the world is at war and 99% of the ashtangosphere (the 1%) could not care less, and in honor of the fact that we celebrate “Labor Day” three months late because FDR feared placing it on the the day that’s actually associated with honoring workers, here is: owl as political animal. 

? Start here. Your political compass. Take the test. (My results. According to the graph, a little left of the Dalai Lama.)

? Then go here. Take this test too. (My results: 38 for Kucinich. But that’s not true. I’m pragmatic.)

? Next, order the brand new paperback version of “Marxist- environmentalist” Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums. For people who want to solve everything with feelgood token environmentalism, well come on now. If you think individual carbon neutrality will save us, prepare for heartbreak at this picture of the relationship of most of humanity with ourself and with the earth. The guy is a good writer. 

? Next, read about the latest in the travesty of de-regulation and fake-regulation that is the neoliberal era. This time, it’s the re-labeling of irradiated almonds as “raw.” There goes a staple of my diet.

In less political links (or maybe these are the actually political topics in this post):

? Thursday’s NYT story on Inappropriate Yoga Guy. I keep writing commentary here and then erasing it. Hmm.

? Hipster Olypmics! Does this offend you? Withholding my comments here too.

? Yogaworks Westlake opens today with a full schedule. "This is yoga adapted to American culture," said Maggie Mellor, a veteran Conejo Valley instructor who plans to teach at YogaWorks.... Americans delight in choices. They want their 31 flavors." Ditto.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

I Have the Secret: Empirical Proof · 23 August 2007

jaz : as we were saying
cog: hello!
cog: i was about to leave.
cog: what's up?
jaz: i have just proven the SECRET!
cog: wait, what?
cog: your toes?
jaz: (do you know the Secret? the law of attraction? new age: "your thoughts are your reality"?)
jaz: my toes??
jaz: no man, i sent don't choose me energy all week to the justice system! i called them just now and i do not have to report for jury service! five days in a row!
cog: BOOM!
jaz: this proves that my thought-power is indeed real. a causal force.
cog: there you go!
jaz: yes.
cog: congrats!
cog: thought power is totally real
cog: i feel you.
jaz: i was surprised they didn't play a little "you won!" jingle at the end of the recording. r said it should be a "you lost" jingle since i don't "get" to play.
jaz: it is real. "thoughts are things!"
jaz: you can take some of the credit though, if you were crossing your fingers for me.
jaz: i got all superstitious just now when i was about to call. cos my odds of selection were getting high, statistically.
cog: oh yeah. i was there.
jaz: like, "am i standing in the same place i was standing the other four days? is the music off like it was before? AM I THINKING POSITIVE THOUGHTS?"
jaz: ha!
cog: okay. okay. amazing. i'm going to go over to the office so that i can focus yet another night of my time here on veneer.
jaz: i actually had the thought that if i didn't listen to my voicemail before i called the jury it would mess things up. because the other days i listened to my voicemail. but this time i just have vm from [edit] and i don't want to listen to it until i’m supercalm. so i TOOK MY CHANCES on that. and positive thinking worked anyway.
cog: i'll be back online in twenty.
jaz: okey
cog: whoa. the superstition comes back to haunt us.
jaz: EXACTLY what i am saying.

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Categories: self-deception

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

What is fashion? · 13 July 2007

What is fashion?

What is it?

Throw me a bone, people.

I think I have 75% of the answer worked out, but what interests me is the remaining 25%.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [25]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , 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.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Reduced to Poetry · 25 June 2007

Been thinking my hermit-thoughts, of empty rooms and silence. But then they were reading Guantanamo detainees’ poetry on the radio, as I shuttled between the beautiful quarters where my days play out—the gorgeous little shala in Santa Monica and my Bel-Aire-adjacent campus idyll. Poetry about the insides of prison cells, the taunting of the sea, and us free rich Americans who let them waste away down there without protesting. Even though it’s such an easy, obvious thing to call out. God, who am I not to protest every fucking day; and who am I to live in this beauty while wishing hermitlike for a cell of my own?

The poems reminded me of something I read randomly in a bookstore in Havana’s university district at the height of the Clinton-Dole campaign with a hurricaine blowing in. The first poem below is from current Gitmo prisoner Osama Abu Kabir, and the second is a twisted anticipation, written some 50 years earlier by the Cuban poet Pablo Armando Fernandez. Reading these two against each other opens up space, and questions.

Is It True?
 
Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?
Is it true that the flowers will rise up again in the Spring?
Is it true that birds will migrate home again?
Is it true that the salmon swim back up their streams?
It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.
But is it true that one day we'll leave Guantanamo Bay?
Is it true that one day we'll go back to our homes?
I sail in my dreams. I am dreaming of home.
To be with my children, each one part of me;
To be with my wife and the ones that I love;
To be with my parents, my world's tenderest hearts.
I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.
But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?
We are innocent, here, we've committed no crime.
Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still
Justice and compassion remain in this world!

To a Young Freedom Fighter in Prison

You already know it:
suddenly
it's as if you'd awakened free.
Those walls don't isolate you,
they concentrate
all the world within you,
in your body which alone
without looking for itself, finds itself
resisting, living.
It's what matters.
Rumors from the world arrive
(never so many)
and they break the silence
of your brave solitude.
Torture, mockery,
do not degrade or humiliate you:
they've left your body transparent
and today, you see
your inner self more clearly.
You already know it,
you know what you don't want.
You don't want for yourself the freedom
of the commissioner, the district attorney, and the priest;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
of the bankers, the industrialists
and the landowners;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
that day by day brings you to the Parliament,
to the Army Generals, to the Academy, to the Stock Exchange;
you don't want that power, you don't envy that force.
You have no desire for adulation, for pampering, or obedience.
While your name is paraded in the press:
hero, bandit, sane one, crazy one,
adventurer, apostle, and many other things
that you didn't want to be, that you aren't,
you really know
because of you and for you, what brought you to yourself
to those four walls
where you resist without fear now.
That's what matters.

(0v0) isn't sure about Fernandez, the second time around. But Kabir has immediacy--more is than ought.

The first book is Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

The second book I think was called Aprendiendo Morir, and does not seem to be in print in English. If I remember right, it's beautiful--equal parts ideology and art. Translation by Daniela Gioseffi, retrieved here.

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Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , 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.

 

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Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XIV · 9 June 2007

Self-loathing is here. She’s so uncommon in these parts that I barely recognize her, but this being the dissertation year(s), I should expect that symptom to arise now and again. It’s just an emotional state, an emotional state, an emotional state: don’t reify it, girl. You don’t need that shit.

 

But GAWD. She—the symptom—showed up in the night and bashed me and beat me with anxiety dreams. In one, I was in the most amazing airport-of-the-future, with old friends, headed toward an interplanetary flight. I dropped my “documents” (could the subconscious be any more obvious?) down a death-star-like shaft, but thought I could get through the boarding process fine on my finesse. Always one to work the system.  But as the line grew shorter, and shorter, and shorter, panic and self-loathing drew me down. Imposter! God it was horrible.

 

Marry years of fire-and-brimstone sermons (the terrible parable of the 5 foolish virgins is great for such torture) to a Philip K. Dick aesthetic and the possibilities for anxiety-narratives are horrid. I applied direct sunlight to my body, dragged myself to the studio for an excellent late-morning flow, then talked it all out with the Editor (which he semi-appreciated—it’s so rare I have the patience to discuss my work), and spent the afternoon in books. (Just an emotional state, yes: but one related to practical actions: oh the damn moral games writers play.)

 

Then we went reverse-slumming for our afternoon walk (Brentwood—our route takes us past the façade featured in the old opening sequence for the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and some people in a silver SUV cruised by and pelted us with eggs. Actually, they missed—though one that splatted a pole came close. My eff-you reflex fired instantly (spoiled kids, go find yourselves some real effing danger!), but now I’m delighted about it. Considering the neighborhood, they could have been assaulting People of Consequence. Brave. The Editor’s fumes didn’t start up until later and now he’s real mad. That’s the trouble with being uber-nostalgia-man: the past’s effects increase with time. Hell, I’ll take comic over cosmic egg-pelting anytime. Real egg in the face would have been a nice release, and cleaned up so easily.

 

Anyway, since it’s still a semi-ease-up Saturday, a few links before returning to the lit-review writing.

? You don’t say? They’re jacking the numbers about “offshore” (including uber-sweatshop) production? Straightforward discussion in Business Week to put yesterday’s widely-hailed drop on the US trade deficit in perspective. 

? Cult of the Amateur out this week. Andrew Keen, who has equated the democracy of Web 2.0 with Marxism (the horror), decries the death of “our cultural standards and moral values” as hierarchies in information-provision are flattened and we learn more from each other. Awwww. Keep at it, little bloggers.

? Most intense astangi I know sent over this vision of nuclear holocaust. Flash is annoying, but it’s hilarious. Even though the artist forgot South Africa and North Korea. 

? In honor of the egg-pelters, this is a crazy NYT Mag short film on kids and money in Los Angeles.

? Richard Rorty, post-pragmatist and the "most talked-about philosopher" of our time, is dead at 75.

? (Quiet hype.) (And.) Bad owl!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception

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?

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 12 May 2007

The real argument of last Saturday’s wisdom quiz was that fools seek situations where they don’t have to think deeply or engage fundamental questions. The wise eat it raw, and don’t need their world to be pre-digested by preachers or teachers or ideological shorthand.

I've been thinking about this in relation to the commodification of music: the smoothing, compressing, normalizing, generalizing, predigestion that happens to its perfectly edgy elements when an artist makes a bid for the big market. The difference between the genius Regina Spektor's penultimate record and her last, whose final track "Summer in the City" for all its soupy abstract over-beauty I can't heartbreakingly get out if my head.

However! I intend to get back to troubling about Monday’s meeting with my adviser. In which: I try to sell her on ethical consumerism (for a dissertation chapter, that is). Meantime, today’s links are all provocative and question-opening. May we remain open to the questions.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the “position” of Insideowl dot com.

? PORN. Oh; I forgot. Not only is the internet edifying as hell and the ultimate community-builder--a ceaseless human wonder--but... what can beat skin? Great video from Good (safe for the office).

? NYTBR Review of Hitchens and his clever new religion-screed.

“The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”

? Buddhistgeeks discussion on the birth of the seeker. Fantastic question and good connection of hungry-mind and the will to achieve, but is this as good as it gets?

? So is some kind of spiritual or kosmic consciousness the only hope for reversing the insane tide of consumerism and capitalism gone astray? Social scientists, take note. Daniel Pinchbeck at realitysandwich.

“In my head, I keep writing my movie of the next few years. In this gripping adventure yarn, the ticking time-bomb of ignorance and greed gets defused at the last moment by teams of stylish secret agents of consciousness and compassion, working in coordination across the planet.”

? Gadfly artist Bansky makes the New Yorker. Iyengar says never degrade that which another holds sacred. When is this not the best advice?

? Is all moral philosophy just a post-hoc legitimation scheme? Great article on the neurology of moral judgments in the WSJ science section.

? ALSO, candy. Math rock this, but ooh I like it. Watch. (Yes, they always sing like that.) "Atlas" on Altertube.

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

"Going Through Something" · 10 May 2007

“So I’m going through something with my back…”

This is what we say in yoga. Not: “I’m injured.”

What does this language hide; and in what ways is it more true than using the language of injury?”

For months I’ve been keeping notes on the subject of injury and astanga yoga, and noting the variations in experienced teachers' takes on the subject. [Since many in the second generation of teachers in the SKPJ lineage are online, the web catalogues some of this variation, e.g. Anne Finstad (scroll to 8.26.06), Steve Dwelley, and Matthew Sweeney (see #3, "Easy Practice").]

I’m not ready to write about this topic, but wanted to archive for posterity the wise comments of an adored mentor of mine (at least until he clicks over here and asks me, in his modesty, to take these down). Below are outtakes from our exchange today. His third paragraph from the bottom is like a well-polished stone— burnished with experience, and one you’ll take home from tonight’s walk while you toss others you’ve picked up back into the sea.
…………………………………………………………………………….
IO: …Meh. It goes, but whatever is happening in my back has been... interesting. As mentioned on the blog, I took five whole days off Mysore practice and instead practiced in the afternoons in my kitchen. It was an experiment and gave me the chance to tailor. I got a better understanding of what's holding in my back (and how it keeps changing) but it's not like it made it all clear up….

Anyway, I seem to be inhabiting a whole different body for the past month--a delicate one. This thing is definitely maturing me, but some days I could care less about maturity if it meant I could have my kapotasana endorphins back.
…………………………………………………………………………..
CZ: Sounds like you're in the territory that yoga was 'invented' to get you through.  Mumbo-jumbo aside, look around you and you'll see that you have plenty of company.

Rejoice. You're in juicy territory. A place with an easily identifiable obstacle. 
…………………………………………………………………………...

IO: This is an amazing email. Good luck with your crazy workday and thank you.

P.S. Are you saying that I'm only just now glimpsing what the practice is all about? That this is the name of the game? God help me I want to go back to my twenties and flow class!
…………………………………………………………………………….
CZ: Oops. Sorry it's too late to go back:)  Don't you just love this quote?

"You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.   < Morpheus"

Yep, it's too late (lol) you took the red pill so start working on your super powers :)
……………………………………………………………………………..
IO: (Phhhhhhttt….)
……………………………………………………………………………..
CZ: It's the old "press on or back off" fork in the road that you've come to. I could recount volumes about the advice I've heard and been given, but I'm afraid it will all sound like yoga mumbo-jumbo or new-age drivel. But here is some of it anyway:

For the first six months of Ashtanga Yoga, my hamstrings were in agony and I could hardly walk. I remember thinking "if I had to run for my life, I'd sit down and give up." My hamstrings were screaming all hours of the day. I met C and asked him if this pain was 'good' and he told me something like "I can't tell you because I'm not in your body. Maybe you're a wimp and just complaining or maybe you have an incredible tolerance for pain. Either way only you can know for sure."

There was another student that started practicing at the same time. His knees often bothered him and he asked M about it and talked of his knees often. In the end he concluded "it's like the stock market, everyone has an opinion but no one knows for sure." And yet another teacher told me when Supta Kurmasana was wreaking havoc on me "it might hurt for a week, it might hurt for ten years, who knows?"

Working with asana is a two-way dialogue with your body. You ask your body to open and to be strong and the body speaks back. When you ask in the right way and listen carefully, the body opens and floats into arm balances. Pain is the body shouting to get your attention. Stress your knee and the body shouts back "HEY BACK OFF THIS IS THE WRONG DIRECTION, OPEN YOUR HIPS YOU IDIOT!!". But it also hurts to remove a band-aid after a cut has healed. "OK DO IT QUICK AND GET IT OVER WITH!" The former is 'back off' and the latter is 'press on.' It takes discrimination to know which is which.

Pain visits ashtangis often. I've heard that Guruji often doesn't back off and says "opening, very good" even when students hobble around in pain. But I think Guruji is highly adept at knowing whether a limitation is real or imagined. And when a student is ready for more.

It seems that the Ashtanga series are progressively more difficult (or impossible), and designed to take every student to their threshold sooner or later. There you develop the discrimination to know whether to press on or back off. Because only you know for sure.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , self-deception , spirituality

Conversion Story, Part II · 8 May 2007

As I was saying, I keep practicing astanga because it gives me a body. In a layered, dynamic way that makes me curious and more alive. It’s a low-maintenance thread of ecstasy one can pick up and run with for years, without a dealer or tryst-schedules or the baggage of a charismatic religion. (Ecstasy may seem precisely the wrong word for embodied presence, but Milan Kundera makes a nice case for the term.)

I grew up in a prairie on the eastern slope of the northern Rocky Mountains—on a ranch in rural Montana. My mom was and is a therapist for people labeled emotionally disturbed (but strange and violent pathologies do sometimes grow out in the empty country—this is the world where Matthew Shepard died strapped to a fencepost), my dad a preacher. We were off every grid from plumbing to television, but—even in the idyllic years before meth—never bored.

Rather, I learned early to find transcendent experiences by generating natural rushes in the out-of-doors: my dad was a sometime wilderness guide and our family were serious climbers, skiers and cyclists. I loved to go into the miles of contiguous cow pastures and run, sometimes for hours. My dad, whose hyperactive, mongrel Irish constitution I mirror, had a tendency to shout in joy to God in the middle of some empty snowfield in the Beartooth mountains or atop a peak miles from any sign of civilization except a USGS seal, but for me the ecstasy of running around outside had no connection to Christianity. [And I didn’t understand until later that, for my dad, God only revealed himself (sic) where there was no sign of society, which for him symbolizes only corruption, shallowness, commodification.]

Though I shared in my dad’s corny gratitude for natural beauty, and relationships, and being alive, “God” was something that scared me and made me think on my supposed sins. Being intensely alive was a way to get out of that God, who mostly showed up at church camp and late at night in my basement bedroom.

Where God was really upon me—in church—I wasn’t one for expressive charismatic devotion (or displays of piety)—so I didn’t give my folks’ communities much by way to measure my spiritual commitment. But I did show a strong will, uncommon bookishness, a penchant for logical argument, and a bit too much curiosity—all qualities that signaled “Godly leadership” in someone of a different sex, but the stirrings of Satan in mine. By early adolescence, as the culture wars heated up nationally and white-peoples’ evangelical-ism became apocalyptically politicized and fearful of “spiritual warfare” lying just below the surface of daily life, their congregants and friends started letting me know that I was an outsider, and alienation from that whole lifeworld reinforced itself bit by bit.

Very afraid of becoming a prairie wife, and with some stupid luck on a compulsory pre-SAT (administered in part so the military recruiters would know where to assign people?), I broke out of the ranch’s split-rail fence as a charity case to a school near Portland, Oregon. I studied philosophy, and added a journalism degree with the intention of becoming a foreign correspondent like Graham Greene (he was a fitting illusion for that time in my life). I took a year of Hebrew, enough to read the Old Testament with the greatest awkwardness, and enough to see a difference between the bullshit of Leviticus and the beautiful truth of Ecclesiastes, and to start to get suspicious of the Apostle Paul and his come-lately religion-making projects. I found my friends and an eventual spouse among the artists and contemplatives outside the college's Greek mainstream, worked in a winery-brewery and later a newspaper, for the little that the scholarship didn’t cover, and drank hard enough to engage semi-meaningfully with Hegel and do those Montana origins proud. More interestingly for today’s question, I took long bikerides and runs out into the wine country as a matter of course, without asking why I did it any more than I reflected on the runs in the back pasture... while my delicate, creative, chain-smoking friends shook their heads at my non-beatnick ways.

My parents told me to join an evangelical church in town and I nearly did, but then realized I’d be faking it. So I told them I wouldn’t, in language so strong I still regret it a decade on; and for the next four years the little relationship we had was angry and resentful. This severed my last connections with "legitimate" spiritual practice for several years, though I was finding a lot that was transcendent in the human spirit and in the collective effervescence of humans gathered together in, well, solidarity.

This is because I went away to Central America, both in college, and on a postgrad Fulbright, and was born again politically amid studies of US-funded insurgencies and absorbing what was left of the cultures of solidarity in El Salvador and Nicaragua (Cuba, not so much). Liberation theology was instrumental and fuzzy at the edges, but it was an emotional match and goddam were the marimba music and the mural-covered houses of worship evocative....

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Conversion Story, Part I · 3 May 2007

Why do you practice astanga yoga? What brought you to the practice?*

I practice because: how could I not? If I hatch a reasoned explanation, I might just lie to justify the sacrifices I’ve made and the quirks I’ve taken on as I have habituated to the yoga. Astanga is a weird and jealous lover, quite the wallflower at parties: making our relationship out to be rational cheats her of her brilliant lunacy.

I found astanga by accident—a literal one, involving a car and a concussion. And I stayed because its culture made sense: the no-bullshit intensity and sublime understatement of Patthabi Jois’ personality, the habitual interiority of the technique, its grounding in a philosophical lineage (and adaptability to the nondualism that resonates with me best), and the sacramental gratitude built into its gestures and ritual patterns.

I can say I love the danger of practice—the way it puts my most precious self-harming habits and safest inner caves in peril. I love the pleasure and joy of it—the way it sets my energetic rhythms and releases some addictive elixir of endorphins and breath onto the platform it sets for awakening. And I love its refuge—the way it builds some peace and honesty into days that otherwise might get far too dramatic. Post hoc, these are reasons to love practice, but I don’t know that they get me to the mat.

The best I can say for why I show up is: I’m a curious little nerd. Astanga gives my body to me as a terrain of exploration, and I am both grounded by the fact that it sets me a peaceful meditation schedule, and curious about the shifting nature of this ground.

I’m emphatically not a creature of habit, but rather one who tends to impatience and nomadism. The impatience, manifesting as a boredom with repetition and a desire to collect experiences, is the most consistent demon in my relationships with self and lovedones and work and the world. My curiosity can be a distracting, greedy kind of energy. But in practice, I turn it inward, and suddenly it is luminous. This is a place I can be active and exploratory without killing receptivity and repose. I don’t get on the mat with the expectation of philosophical or existential payoffs, but because it distills a problematic tendency into a little pinlight that seems to be taking me somewhere, even if it is just to a place where novelty has lost its allure and deterioration is the real name of the game. I’ve piled up a lot of scrapmetal out in the garage in the search for truth, but this inquiry feels genuine because there’s just not much to it. (Little more than a strip of Manduka PVC, if you know what I mean, on the trash heap every 3 years or so.)

Growing up evangelical, in the blood-red, poor-white backcountry of a redstate, and a preacher’s kid at that, I learned the value of conversion stories. But unfortunately, force-fed a belief system with my baby food, I grew up with the conundrum of having never been evil and thus never rescued by Jesus from the maw of vice. We’d do evangelism workshops to practice sharing “testimonies” as a conversion tactic, and I’d feel like half a person. For a preacher’s kid, the classic temptation is to give yourself a dark period, a Christian rumspringa, of drugs and sex and rock music, and then let Jesus bring you back from the dead in time to settle down to a life of ministry. No matter how far away you get on this prodigal venture—even if you’re a leftist, anti-racist, gender-equality-loving, environmentalist, non-patriotic, secular humanist intellectual, who lives in the DEN OF VICE (Los Angeles, California)—there’s always the question of whether you’ll give up the way of the goat and return to the fold.

I have returned, allright. My conversion story to astanga practice is not all that interesting: car hit me/ I hit yoga mat/ life reconfigured down to the roots. But the story that best answers the question of why I practice is the one about how I found my body. I think I’ll write out a version of that story in the next few posts.

*These questions originated here. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , morality , self-deception , spirituality

Saturday X · 28 April 2007

? Flickrblockrs. Funny kids.

? Speaking of, why do some people/ inventions/ ideas fly?

1. Social structure (Your cultural capital/ cred, or, “ideas whose time has come”). 2. Quality / Merit (The “cream rises” argument). 3. Karma (The “the caste system is there for a good reason” argument. See #2.) 4. Power (The agent you hired does it for you, or your gun-penis-bank account is bigger than the rest. See #1.) 5. God (No comment.) 6. CHANCE.

Epistemologist of chance, archaeologist of self-deception, and deep self-promoter Nassim Taleb has a new book this out week. His project is to trace the ways we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we really do.

? Jack White, pasty and unrefined and exciting as usual. Is he channeling Eminem on a couple of levels or is it just me? Not that this ruins it for me.

? Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s disillusioned co-founder, writes in Edge about the boons of Wikipedia’s egalitarianism and its revolutionary possibilities for reformulating common knowledge. Yet he also says Wikipedia is broken, both from a pragmatic perspective and ultimately from his realist position that, in the end, re-legitimizes traditional powerholders.

Wikipedia is the perfect vehicle for epistemic egalitarianism, since it allows virtually everyone to edit. [But] nobody really believes that reality is constructed by Wikipedia.... [T]he power to declare society's background knowledge is awesome… political decisions are deeply influenced by that…. [T]he internet makes it possible for society's background knowledge to be shaped by a far broader, inclusive group of people…. [But] if we reduce experts to the level of the rest of us..., we reduce society's collective grasp of the truth.

? The TLS reviews I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter's book on the science of (self)consciousness. Nice discussion of how investigating subjectivity is difficult for scientists, who work inside the ideology of objectivity.

? New Stuart Davis Show—an integral take on current events. Usually he’s hilarious, but this show is about Virginia Tech.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound

Saturday IX · 22 April 2007

So, some links for this weekend after all.

? Now you're telling me the Antichrist is a terrorist? That’s Guatemala’s excuse for canceling his birthday party.

? California deserts, an epically charismatic Peruvian, Powell library shamanism, pseudo-ethnography, suppression at the NYT, the politics at UC Press, and the whole trouble with anthropology. And all this before Carlos Castaneda turns into a creeeeepy religionmaker (with all the cult criteria: the sex, the suicide, the funny haircuts).

? Neuro-linguistic programming creative Philip Farber gives an interview about his understanding of the technology, and the old days with Milton Erickson.

? Jack Kornfield says that contemplative practice is radical, because it clears the ground for changing the world. (That’s the Spirit Rock center in the background.)

? Beware, dirty yoga men.

? NG recently sent me the best and most accurate version ever of the “Screw Leviticus” argument (for those who actually know people who use the Bible to condemn gay people). Those Humanists of Utah are fighting the good fight. An excerpt:

Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can't I own Canadians?

? Clips from Yoga, Inc.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Saturday VIII · 6 April 2007

Links for another Saturday, in miniature, from someone who’s just coming back online...

? Profe Douglas Hofstadter makes a couple of nonchalantly brilliant quips in the NYTMag, on the occasion of his new book on orders of consciousness, the phenomenon of self-awareness and a modest proposal for the existence of souls.

? Alterati interviews documentarian Micha Peled, about his brave and crazy film, China Blue.

“We’re all told we live in democracies where the important decisions get voted on but in fact many areas of our daily lives are controlled by corporations that are not accountable to anyone—and we are not consulted on the decisions that they make.”

? Just so we are on the same page, The Economist points out that: “In secret locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google.” Good thoughts on what this will mean for different genres of content heretofore known as “books”—from scholarly research to poetry anthologies. Nice; but blithely trusting as usual for TE.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday V · 10 March 2007

Ok. Here are this week’s Saturday diversions.

? How, or why, do we (evolve to) believe in god? Even if you practice panentheism (yogis, Spinozists), atheism or agnosticism, do you carry a deep-seated idea of a humanoid god?

On this note, a bright star in the smart-mag orbit (that is, it was forwarded all over the place) this week was Darwin’s God in the NYT Magazine. It’s print-it-out-for-the-bathtub long and focuses on logical debates in the socio-anthro-biology of religion, but the last two pages (beginning from “In 1997” on p. 10) are an elegant weighing of whether religion and science ought be separate spheres. Unfortunately, it leaves the answers up to us.

?  One suggestion for this scene: Ecumenical Spam. Wow.

? Here is Salon’s expose of The Secret, sent over by RE. I fly far enough below popular culture to have avoided the phenomenon, but Salon's righteous, crisp tour-de-force makes me suspect the truly weird aspect of this apparently superstitious, self-serving project is the way it leverages the idea that events begin with “thought-forms” to serve the most craven materialism of “getting things.” I mean: If thought-forms are what’s truly real, then shouldn’t thought-forms be sufficient for happiness?

Excerpt: I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're ‘blocking it with their thoughts’ [and] … by a culture in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement. …It's bound up in the… idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from ‘believing’ in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at… by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry… we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all.

? Jean Baudrilliard, the philosopher-clown and “sociologist,” has departed for the desert of the real. The guy was intellectually cute and terminally insincere, which makes for funny commentary. The TLS is a pretty good example.

? Have you ever gotten to compare everyday life in multiple third world regions, and noticed eerie similarities across the globe? Zinc roofing, breeze blocks, meticulously-swept earthen floors, firepit kitchens, struggles to find water. As Mike Davis is always saying, Wake up! This is how most people live! His Planet of Slums is out, reviewed in the LRB. Please do not let the torrent of images and numbers stop you.

? On which note, this guy takes very beautiful photographs of Americans’ refuse. He says:

When I... talk about our rampant consumerism, no one ever seems to think I am talking about them… [It] is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem. Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet, to the people of other nations, and the people of the future. And… we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits. We are slowly killing ourselves, and we all feel it. We know we are somehow getting screwed, that all this stuff isn't really satisfying, that we have lost something sacred that is related to the very core of our selves. But still we don’t act.

? New book on modern India.

? I'm not a Speaking of Faith podcaster, but this piece on author and yoga instructor Matthew Sanford is good. It is not about the so-called triumph of the human spirit. It’s about having a body. About how a paraplegic body is still, if I may, a platform for awakening.

? For R and any other Studio 360 podcasters, people who read it are loving Kurt Anderson’s novel.

? And, the etymology of meh. They say it is just blog-glot.

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Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Letter to NPR · 8 March 2007

I just read a nice new working paper by UC Irvine’s David Meyer, who researches peace movements (including the current one) in the United States. It got me thinking about responding to John Mayer, the famous musician I hope none of you know, who got a huge piece of Morning Edition air time today on NPR.

 

Dear NPR,

 

John Mayer (age 29) claims to speak to, and for, his generation.

In Thursday’s interview, he ridiculed war protest songs and championed a new “political” music about “waiting on the world to change” rather than taking action. Forget old-school music that intends to wake up a listener to “making a change”: Mayer sings to express his helplessness and inability to commit to any particular path of action. 

Well, in the terminology of his generation, John Mayer’s a wuss.

We are the generation who began Teach for America, vitalized the ethical globalization movement that altered the exclusionary course of the WTO, and empowered a new progressivism in the Democratic party by championing Howard Dean. Though we graduated college amid the dot-com boom, more of us opted for the Peace Corps than for Pets.com. We are teachers, hybrid-drivers, and yoga practitioners. We hailed Neil Young's Living With War without a freaking drop of irony (listen free), and are still streaming it and letting it make us cry. And if you think 9-11 killed our spirits, then wait a few years until it’s us at the helms of organizations and running the Congress. 

If Mayer thinks that everyone else his age is spineless, shallow and arrogantly self-centered, it’s not because he’s channeling the zeitgeist. Instead, he’s probably only listening to himself.

Our generation has a term for that too. It's megalomaniac.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , social theory , sound

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. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Thought-rut Rotgut and the Problem of Evil · 14 February 2007

In the beginning was the word. 

No wonder it’s so easy to be superstitious about words! Language is the way we reify: humans’ method for making things things. 

There’s one moment of my yoga practice I strictly do not discuss for fear of reifying fear itself. Today, because I can see the other side and because it’s a day for laughing at fear, I’m going to go there. 

This is because the past three days have been much about the problem of evil, or rather: the problem of shit happens. (Shit happens to one you love beyond words, in this case.) Or again, by the subjective turn: (the "problem" of) the first noble truth. 

That topic is still raw. So for now I’ll bracket my interrogations of the idea that shit happening is good for you (see for example, the Apostle Paul, the Pali Canon). Are these rationalizations of the random nature of the universe? Legitimate narratives of liberation? In any case when the shit is on top of you, you either have the grace and grit to deal, as it is, or you crack up in storytelling or hysterics. The only reason I’m not doing the latter is that a younger and wiser person is my guide: stop explaining and do what you do. Sleep. Hugs. Vitamin Water. Ambient Eno. Gratitude. Backflips. 

So yeah. Beginning last summer, I had a mental block at Viparita Chakrasana. I said it. Did I just screw myself over? Give substance to a passing whisper?  

VC is this: having brought yourself from downward facing dog to a handstand and then dropped over into a backbend, one merely does the thing in reverse. Breathe in and arch the back deeply, kick hard in the legs, and bring the feet neatly back oven the head to some kind of standing forward fold. 

It was interesting to be mentally disabled. The relevant anatomy was the brain, which, having shut up for the first half of the maneuv., struck hard into soma each time I asked the feet to come back up. This requires the feet to precede the head, in a sense. And the body has the thing in the bag.

But for months the head wanted to decide: wanted to lead, not follow the feet. Cro-magnon tendency, again. In the moment of truth the false conviction would arise: the hands aren’t ready to take on footlike responsibilities! Flinging the feet off the floor means the hands must support the world (or merely the body…), but what if the hands fly away? What if the palms become light, stop holding me down, and then I’m stranded in air? The palms would then tremble and wilt. The feet would root to the earth, frozen in slapstick-comedy concrete. 

Months ago, Rolf N let me initiate the movement and wordlessly drove an index finger right behind my heart. The feet got it. This was before I learned to make a controversy over it all, turning it into foot and head competition. And then for months I coaxed, condescended a little. Took the body to the top of the doublediamond to gaze down it most mornings, made that moment playful instead of some routine little spat, and waited to see if she would give it up. She wouldn’t. 

These days my teacher tends to come over and cut any bullshit out of the equation. Everyone but a few renegade neurons knows this isn’t a big deal, so we collaborate on patching VC together without them. With practice, this is having the effect of gradually reconstructing the world, taking for granted the doability of asana in the way this teacher tends to do.  

There’s nothing exhilarating about it, because this is not achievement-oriented action. It’s just doing what you do, in a way that isn’t even worth remarking on except for to concede that for months I manufactured its ridiculuous, trembling remarkability into a big blind taboo.

I guess sometimes a thought-rut can be as real as words.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

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.”

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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.

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Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory