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 Why not strip away a bit of the clunky, heavy, distracting outdated technology?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?

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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. 

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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.

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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:

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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. 

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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.

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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

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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. :)

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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.

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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.

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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 refin