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? 

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [33]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Over and Out · 5 July 2009

Back from Encinitas with a head full of this and that, just now realizing I have a hundred pages to read tonight and at least an hour of memorization before settling in tomorrow morning for retreat. The readings are hilarious—exhaustive categorizations of all possible experiences that will arise on the cushion, and all possible ways of relating with it. Aristotle meets Vipassana by way of a Shingon (Japanese Vajrayana) teacher with—evidently—more than a casual connection to Zen. At the beginning of the readings, it says that on some level, you don’t know experience until you can apprehend it precisely. I love that. It’s like what my Marx teacher used to say to students who claimed they could understand the work but just couldn’t put that understanding in clear and distinct writing: you don’t know it until you can describe it. Types, kinds, classes… Aristotle all the way. At least Shinzen’s idea is that you classify and classify until—poof—everything goes up in smoke. I don’t have to take the classifications as real, just inhabit them.

Speaking of which, I’ve been reminded of all the scholars in my life who are so busy hating the society around them that they cannot participate in it. It takes a special fundamentalism to believe that The Fourth of July means one thing and one thing only, and that only fellow PhDs understand that true meaning, and that all others are ignorant, nationalist louts. If my friends understood their own concepts, they would realize they have all the flexibility in the world to use the day of festivities to mean whatever they choose (for example, to celebrate their own unique lives), that the historical content is not the only content.

This is a big puzzle for me: that often, education is not freedom but a set of new taboos, enslavement to old ideas, over-investments in the past. Being educated, in a lineage or in a discipline, becomes such a selfhood project one feels driven to pay constant homage to her pedigree. So that she knows who she is. To the point of driving out experience.

Anyway, may I recommend Fourth of July at La Jolla Cove? Surprisingly, the most ethnically diverse group I’ve been a part of this night in years. A navy brass band playing Dixieland jazz, old people holding hands on the bluffs, waves crashing in to land as hundreds of people snap cameraphone images of loved ones mashed together with the big sun sinking in to the ocean behind them. This morning I practiced in the great mini-mall shala that is the sentimental home of so many ashtangis. Ran in to several people I’ve known in other cities, other countries and online… it's always surprising who is there. I felt presumptuous to drop in for an advanced class—led 2s—but a comeuppance about my dyslexic dwi pada was a good welcome. Tim not only led practice but did it alongside us, which I loved. And there were some extra things that made both kapotasana and the padas much more… natural. I’m writing this post because I thought some people out there would find this helpful. Here’s what I remember (you can figure out where we put them): eka pada bhekasana, supta virasana, viparita dandasana, vrksasana (handstand ver.), single pidgeon, wonky parsvokonasana (head coming to ankle, maybe behind foot)-to-vasisthasana (the one with one leg on the arm) [this is great], supta raja kapotasana (single pidgeon on your back), kashyapasana, forearm vrksasana.

There’s a new email in my in-box about how we might not be able to get to the retreat center tomorrow. It’s up in the mountains to the north, in Encino, on Hayvenhurst Drive. Friday the radio was going on about how Hayvenhurst has been a mess all week, because Michael Jackson’s mom lives there and fans won’t stop building shrines and doing vigils there. Now it turns out that our retreat center is the property adjacent to the Jackson residence and retreat organizers are concerned we may not be able to get past the police barricades and crazy fans! I wonder, are they blasting Thriller out of ghetto blasters, as they were down at UCLA Medical Center the day of Michael’s death? Will I have the opportunity tomorrow morning to do some mindful vulture driving, or mindful giving of the finger? I bet if the cops just told the mourners that we were trying to meditate next door, they would chill out and join us in silence. Ommmmmmm over and out.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [44]
Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory

Go home take rest · 28 March 2009

More fragments from Narasimhan. They come in like traces of dream, which makes sense since I’m in a bit of a trance sitting there in the Anantha library.

And speaking of dreaming, he reminds me that there is this whole business in Patanjali about the import of the dreamstate and the pursuit of dreamless sleep as a kind of samadhi. N says: Samadhi without knowledge is sleep; Samadhi with knowledge is evolution.

Admittedly, that doesn’t make much sense to me intuitively.

We think of sleep as our relaxation time, but in yoga, this is in a sense a time to leave the body. You sleep on the left side to let the right side of the brain—the house of the imagination and creativity—have some space. Relaxation is a conscious endeavor, the way N talks about it, and the way savasana is taught… if it is taught… in ashtanga practice. When you exit savasana, and when you get up in the morning, you roll to the right because that puts the left side up and engages your rational mind. When you get up from savasana or from sleep, it is time to engage the world and use the rational mind.

N: sport, unlike yoga, is as likely to excite the mind as to relax it. What is the purpose of it? Sometimes in the west, athletic endeavors reveal a great, delusional absence of purpose. People are lost, so they go bungee-jumping. But yoga has a clear purpose.

And again, the purpose of asana is to work the nervous system—to purify it. This actually happens after asana, during Savasana. You consciously feel and relax the nadis. How do you know nadis exist, and that there are 72,000 of them? Well, it’s the best we know for now. It was a revelation—just like the old revelations about the structure of cells or the speed of light, which practitioners gained without the benefit of scientific instruments. The chakra system is different from the nadis—it’s a different map of similar territory. Research now on the multiple nerve-junctions throughout the body also finds there are about 72,000 such branching-points.

It is a wonder that for all the study and advancement of Indian society, basic technological developments never happened here. Not only were there no scientific measurement devices, but also no economic advances like mass production. It was in the west that the great curiosity about the external world and how to know and shape it was gained; and by the same token in India the best understanding of the mind—it’s structures and how to work with and reshape them—has been developed.

There was a long, light-hearted discussion of the idea of dharma, and how it’s as much a structure of freedom as a fate-given constraint or duty. If you recognize what is given and work within it, your mind is free from fear or doubt and you simply know how to act. It’s as simple as following the rules of the road: if you are outside of the law, you must always look over your shoulder, worry about being caught. Inside it, you know your way and can travel it freely.

When it comes to one’s relationship to practice, arrogance and fear are two sides of the same condition—insecurity. If one is secure in his practice, there is no need to defend it with arrogance. Often the superiority that practitioners express is not even related to the claim of one’s own prowess but rather the inferiority of the content of others’ practices. So one’s supposed superiority is not based on her own wisdom or skill but simply on the imagined existence of others who are said to be without skill. There is a kind of dependence on others to be inferior so that the insecure practitioner can feel less fear and more superiority.

Oh, and I remembered that the four kinds of student classification maps on to Krishna’s commentary in the Gita on the four kinds of “men” who pursue God. There must be commentary on this in a variety of places. The classification is a little bit interesting, but again, it’s transitory—intended to describe rather than create social structures. One may pass through each of these states and therefore require different kinds of practice or teaching as she changes, but all conditions, including the "lowest," are those of a person who is dedicated to learning.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

Justification Machine · 3 March 2009

In school when the tribe really wanted to insult me, they’d call me by my bad name. Ms. Why.

By the end of eight years together (school started in first grade—before that we were feral), the 17 of us knew all each other’s buttons. We were 13 boys and 4 girls, children of corn and beet farmers with a few shadow children whose parents were constantly avoiding the law and wouldn’t be noticed or hassled coming around our isolated county school. And me, a preacher’s kid imbricated in frontier farm society for reasons I’m still not supposed to tell.

Anyway, I never understood why Ms. Why was supposed to be such a bad thing. The more affectionate nicknames based on body size were much more annoying. It was  my curiosity coupled with extreme luck that eventually made me one of the two of us 17 to escape and attend college. I like the Mrs. Why in me, and like the But why? vibe in others too.

But I understand that it can become annoying. We had a little hiccup last week over whether we should chant in a teacherless room. People coming from different perspectives, considering reasons for and against an arbitrary, senseless, beautiful, meaningful, crucial, empty, formational act.

As a public service, I am trying to think up a justification for every belief system that an ashtangi might hold. (There are reasons not to do it for every belief system too. Haha.)

Why chant to invoke the jungle physician with his thousands of gleaming white heads? Well that depends. What’s your belief system?

Proto-nationalist/groupist: You want to be a member, don’t you? Chanting is an inclusion-rite.

Magical thinkers: It’s a mystery. Nobody really knows how the spell works but let’s not risk not doing it. I hear that if you practice on moon days you get really bad injuries, too.

Mythic: We are speaking the unconscious in to existence!

Psychological: Chanting establishes rapport between teacher and student. Chanting without a teacher present calls that rapport to mind and helps us feel supported by the teacher’s. It re-engages the transformative energy of transference.

Scientific: The cadences and vibrations of the chant initiate a shift in brain wave frequency. This is especially true as students reinforce the practice until it becomes a trigger to shift mental states.

(Reactionary Postmodern: Science is the control-myth of the powerful. We liberate ourselves into the randomness, by doing something irrational. Fuck you, science.)

Postmodern: But isn’t it more beautiful that way? (And beauty’s all we’ve got now that we have temporarily deconstructed truth and goodness.) Do what thou wilt, but do it in style.

Postpostmodern: All of the above. With maybe some extra love on the side.

I am learning to appreciate the mindfuck of substituting in a different belief system’s answers to arbitrary questions. So, for example, the Encinitas/Carlsbad shala is our knowledge center for moon days. The dominant belief system of the shala is mythic—they’re a good bunch of practically minded Hanuman-worshipers down there—but the reason they give for refraining from moonday practice comes right out of the Farmer’s Almanac: our bodies are mostly water so like the sea we respond to the moon. That’s science, not myth. Woah! Are you saying it’s about molecules, Tim?

Swapping justification schemes on people is likely to piss them off: it can be harsh to tell a therapy head that transference is empty and we babble like idiots merely to celebrate randomness.

It can also be dangerous: in ashtanga, groupist and magical thinkers like to use “science” for false power. They tell students not to question authority, but instead of stating their true reasons—that they dislike noncomformity or think the chant is magic—they justify their own unconscious power plays by telling students that the system is a perfect science and cannot be altered. That’s a pretty hilarious misunderstanding of self-conscious science, which is thoroughly experimental. This self-contradicting delusion—that ashtanga is a science and therefore is perfect—used to show up a lot. Thankfully, our culture seems to be mostly over it as practice turns us from quack scientists in to real ones. (Admittedly, in addition to the mythic belief system, the scientific one is my favorite.)

Despite the drawbacks, a good sleight-of-ideology mindfuck can create empathy, inspiring a person to shift between belief systems. Sometimes it’s worth taking the risk.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [22]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

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.

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

Act like you've done it before · 27 January 2009

From Ryne’s Sandberg’s 2005 acceptance speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Smarmy conservative David Brooks quotes this in today’s sort of beautiful column on social reproduction.  I’m for trusting your experience as the first and last word. But: doing that within the context of others’ experiences over time. Institutional structure and tradition are crusty-sweet old romantic gifts.

[Wo]man makes h[er] own history! But not under conditions of her own choosing.

I have to admit this gives life meaning, and offers to prevent one's becoming a self-congratulatory ass. Here's Sandberg:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect…. If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory

Stages of Grief · 18 January 2009

I had wondered if I would feel the right way when I first lost someone close. Would the appropriate emotions arrive, or would I find some way of taking advantage of, or maybe running away from, the event?

For the first days after it happened, what I felt quietly was both my loss and his loss—of life at a young productive age, just two years into a deep rich vein of happiness. I began to dispense my debt of gratitude to this person who thought the world owed him nothing. I spoke in peace to his colleagues, to find out how much he meant to them… and to fill them in on the parts they never really understood. Where was he that sabbatical I worked in his office and spirited away the mail? No, not like the others on writing retreat in Provence or a Idyllwild… but in noble silence with Thic Nhat Hahn. I never thought I’d be the one to share his not-very-academic secret, but it was impossible to hide in response to inquiries about the joy and non-agenda-seeking of our one peaceful professor.

Breaking the news there was a Buddhist among us, I explained the thing about this Zen business is that you confront your own death up front. We scientists leave consciousness of mortality for the retirement years and instead ride ragged our unconscious fear of death in order to make ourselves write. (Probably best that way—makes for more science, less hand-wringing.) But if you’re Zen you stare down emptiness and loss and suffering until you move past the denial the fear and the sadness into a place of radical acceptance and peace. Academics buy in to stage models from Maslow, to Kubler-Ross, so this explanation worked. And it also served to explain my own equanimity.

So that was the first days. Acceptance. Strange to fast-forward straight to Stage 5 of the Kulber-Ross model of grieving, yes? There was both wisdom and bullshit in it, as there is in any flight toward peace and equanimity that denies the depth of the psyche or the reality of life in the world.

A couple of the skipped-over "stages" came right back in when I was able to manage them. Kind of a depression-anger-depression two-step. Anger was the most interesting and cathartic. I’d been practicing the primary series for a few days (3S is so joyful and strong—it would have been easy to do but also a pushing away emotions that I wanted to honor), attending to the weird moist heaviness in the sinuses and chest, when round about Mary C something shifted.

If an emotion is a somatic event, going radically into the body daily is a way to circulate those events and move them on out. But I never realized—not in years of Vipassana practice—how concrete and specific a strong emotion could be until that morning on the mat. Like a little clockwork click backwards down the supposed Kubler-Ross ladder, I twisted the chest free and felt the slow heaviness replaced with a hit of excitement and power. I moved through the next few asanas, made eye contact with the teacher, and initiated the march of tormentor-sages and grim reapers that is the beginning of 3S. I didn’t even realize the energy was angry until the ideation showed up. Suddenly I was rolling up my manduka and marching back to flog my friend Betty (not her real name). She was practicing owl-driste that day—a common bad habit that usually doesn’t phase me but that day felt so damn invasive and unsupportive and even vampirish. While I flogged her (in my mind) I also gave a clipped little lecture on WHAT YOGA IS and how if she didn’t muster some integrity and contain her energy she would degrade the practices of everyone else in the community.

Oh my god, hilarious. WHAT YOGA IS, right there. Betty and her nutty owl-driste practice kissed me on my way out and instead of taking her into the office to let her have it, I received her best intentions. I needed them, together with the support of everyone else in the room. Community is a strong discipline. Better to eat my sour words than let them become something lasting and terrible among us all.

But is it important to be so forgiving of inanimate stressors? At the Whole Foods 10 minutes later I parked next to a Harley-Davidson and wanted to maim or even kill it. Kill it with my Honda before it killed its rider. Would have been a mercy to its owner for me to beat that machine, punish it for the death it brings us too early and with too much violence.

The anger made me sleepless for two nights, but it must have passed because I came home from the funeral yesterday and slept for 14 hours.

The funeral was a blessing, even though I couldn't stand the smug condescending of the Zen friends toward the devout Catholic parents. I’ll spare a retelling of that, because it’s inappropriately hilarious and cannot be told without leveling the kind of perfect insults that my mentor taught me to let pass. I’ll only say that the Buddhist statements of faith stood out starkly against the Catholic gestalt in a way that made the family squirm and made me wish for an even more minimalist death-ritual. Why does a funeral have to be a time we all theorize about the meta-realm? Isn’t it in poor taste to choose death, of all times, to get philosophical? Isn’t death—so spare, non-negotiable and emotionally deep—so meaningful that we don’t really have to adorn it?

I don’t know. Maybe there is no such thing as simple ritual; and maybe we have to adorn our mechanisms of acceptance so they feel familiar and beautiful. It’s true that I needed something collective and solemn now; and it's true that the two poems sent from friends seemed more meaningful this week than ever (but only because they were good... though I also confess there were days this week when every previously-vapid pop song seemed to be about him). It's good to live in a poetry-filled world, where weeks are afforded for mourning and day-long rituals used to summon the best we can make of acceptance and closure. They don’t get that in Gaza or Baghdad. Rolling mortuary lawns and tearful hymns and unselfconscious group hugs are for the non-traumatized life. Recognizing my debt to this teacher I feel I must acknowledge the many peace-resources here and make the most of them, choose to be marked but not scarred by this, and pursue that choice into the body if that’s where it leads.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

Human Creativity · 11 January 2009

I was in MacArthur Park this morning, practicing with friends in a grand century-old house that’s been a mansion and a craft shop of sorts, a fraternity, an apartment building, and now an ashtanga space. This—bohemian, in your erstwhile livingroom, with a man repairing furniture in the kitchen, a Salvadoran woman walking by the windows with fruit for sale and a Jack ‘n’ the Box billboard filling the driste of the farsighted—feels in a sense like how it should be. Kid on the instructor’s hip, unmufflered engines in the alley, vendors screaming in the street. Practice.

So much more creative than the way most choose to live in this town—antiseptic, paying the jacked-up rent, with dues to some corporate studio whose propaganda features stickthin yoga teachers spandexed in all white. MacArthur Park is teeming in creative risk-taking humanity, colorful, fecund, noisy. Yeah, scraping a life off the surface of society is a grimy affair. And beautiful. The things that people think up in order to live, and live well. Learn the insults, keep your head down, act a little knowing. Dodge the obvious punches and see so much beneath.

There’s this wave in me that rises and falls on my faith in humanity; and I drove home fast to Mountain Goats survival anthems, feeling so lucky to be part of the world now. Human creativity. The element that can never be predicted by any model nor explained by any theory. And it’s the main thing! Everything.

At the close of the day, the tide got sucked all the way to the floor. I sat in my car for the better part of an hour in the blocks surrounding the Federal building. This is where you go to demonstrate in LA. Yeah, I know the story of the conflict over the holy land, and am named decisively for one side. I know how everything that has happened the past 60 years is supposed to be god-made and how I’m not supposed to say I understand unless I have skin in the game. But this time, I’m just letting the celebratory violence and the death-wishes mystify me. What am I doing rejoicing in human creativity in these days—these months—of destruction? Yeah—I tried not to hear the lyric edge of John Darnielle’s flat out neuroticism this morning—but yeah. We are going to make it through this year if it kills us.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: arbitrage , markets-networks-society , social theory

Fetishizing Balance · 23 November 2008

I. Got the best anonymous text message today: “I got the prana aligned right out of me in this workshop.”

(If you achieve perfect alignment, will you go poof in samadhi?)

II. Last week I met a friend at CityBakery for pumpkin pie. She said she’s always experienced me as vata to the nth degree, but has seen a kapha side of me since I’ve been practicing third. Told me I’m much more grounded now. I was all excited, until I started wondering about my pitta.

(If a person constituted herself as exactly 1/3 in each dosha, would she trans-substantiate to a fourth post-dosha dimension?)

III. I’ve been thinking about a crazy activist campaign I participated in exactly 5 years ago, and the anarchist lawyer who befriended me during that time. He consistently scored dead center on all four scales of the Jungian Myers-Briggs personality test.

(If a person beats the Myers-Briggs, does his personality spontaneously evaporate?)

P.S. Hahahahahaa. As experienced people know, constant alignment-obsession is the method quasi-ashtangis at YogaFranchise use to run away from intimate experience of the self. Also, pumkin pie is probably all wrong for my “dosha.” And mister anarchist lawyer? Most slithery-skilled manipulator I’ve encountered. He always laughed too loud and too long, like a sit-com character with a screwball secret.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: evolution , social theory

Eschatology · 16 November 2008

The city’s on fire. This morning the sun was blood red coming up through the ash. There are two streams in the heavy air, pushed down from the mountains by Joan Didion’s Santa Anna winds (but montionless, eerie-still, outside my wall of windows).

First is is a smell like life—the fast-living oxidation of brush fire. Earthy with undertones of vetiver just like my brother’s French cologne. Our father, also a volunteer fire chief, taught us to love grassfire because the hard-scratched soil couldn’t work without its nitrogen, and love forestfire because that’s what it takes for pine cones to open (there’s a sermon on “refining fire” in which he burns open a pinion cone on the altar—god no wonder I’m doing what I do now).

But, second, there’s just death stench in the air. Homes converted to tarry gas. Grass burns white; forest fires are browned by treesap; but a house burns a horrible plume of black—shingles, paint, insulation, carpeting, appliances, overstuffed furniture, shoes, records, photographs.

We are fine here, eye of the hurricaine style—a mile south of the Getty, a mile east of the beach. But others are not fine. Twenty-six square miles ablaze, 800 homes down. Yesterday on the north end of the city 500 trailer homes went up: the fire chief unfurled a charred American flag and wept in a school gym, telling a evacuated thousand senior citizens the team had done everything they could to save their little hamlet. Usually when my dad calls to ask about fires, I’m just disappointed he cares more about nature’s reclamation of  hilltop mansions that never should have been built in the first place—I ask whether he’s read The Tortilla Curtain yet and change the subject to some less natural disaster.

But this time feels apocalyptic, I guess. I’ve been wearing my apocalypse goggles for months, it’s true—those years training as Armageddon lookout coming back around with every ATM out of service and every thoroughfare billboard painted white because there’s nothing to say now, and nothing to sell. Even art in this moment feel apocalyptically bad. We saw Synechdoche NY last night and wished we’d sold out instead for a quantum of narrative solace. As the Editor said, it's fine for an artist to misunderstand Borges or Baudrillard, but don’t make art demonstrating that ignorance. Abstract referencing is the "art" of unlived experience with a private school degree in lit crit: sophomoric in the extreme. In this case, an incoherent mixing of two conceptual schemas (parallel worlds and infinite regresses) insults the audience--referring to nothing as if winking to a knowingness shared only by "deep" people.

EDIT: The script is so vacant that I was tempted to interpret it as a meditation on emptiness and form: but nothing is not nothingness. Any ape can pelt signifiers at a canvas: what that yields here is neurosis and death, not emptiness and form. I emerged from the theatre awash in manufactured mysterey pumped up on the raw but dehumanized emotion of beautifully rendered little episodes. Over the hours, my irritation grew as I realized that conceptual art has the greatest possibilities but the lowst standards, and that a conceptual piece that seems to be fashionably Buddhist would shortchange me with half-baked nihilism.

Pretentiousness is one thing, but pretentiousness that trades on fake depth blows. Like the Santa Annas. Is this what America has to offer as high art? Dada existentialism? In the end it’s just Kaufman throwing at the screen whatever shit (literally) surfaces from his subconscious, flattering the audience that this shall spark “deep” recognitions about the nature of whatever. Letting the shadow wander on screen is genius when David Lynch does it. But Charlie K is no David Lynch. The film rings false, a small falseness amplified by self-satisfaction, enormous budget, and the adoration of confused reviewers. It's a movie about lit crit posing as a movie about experience. It feels like the end of art not because it's a final statement, but because it's really, really bad.

I do worry for a culture that praises this as its own high art and funds it to the nines. But... Kaufman isn’t really America’s idea of profound. He’s Los Angeles’ idea of profound. Or at least what's left of this town's Bush-Schwarzenegger era conceits, playing themselves out.

Today we burn. Down through the tar to the vetiver, I hope.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Adventures in Organized Spirituality · 6 November 2008

I. Are you spiritual but not religious? Yes; No? By the way, what does this mean?

II. Have your feelings changed about the possibilities of mixing spirituality and associational life? Have the internal and shared experiences of recent days been spiritually transformative for you--in part because bound up in organized, institutional life?

IMAGE.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [35]
Categories: evolution , social theory , spirituality

Answer to a cryptoepistemological question · 16 October 2008

Intellectual honesty is its own game in social science, where truth and falsehood are scales rather than dummy variables in mathematical models.

An interpretation that is more truthful is internally consistent, informed, engages counter-explanations, and speaks meaningfully to new evidence and interlocutors. One can articulate the conditions under which the interpretation would fail. Fewer qualifications make for more elegance; and my aesthetic preference for understatement seems be tied to something deeper—to the way a person weights argument vis-à-vis evidence. It’s difficult for me to disentangle truthfulness from a moral sense of integrity, and I’m ok with this.

Most of the sensemaking I do as a writer takes place within practical brackets set by the literatures in which I work. The explanations we piece together depend on a web of shared tacit assumptions that it's not always useful to articulate. How can we build a web of knowledge if the first half of every treatise is theroetical introduction? Sometimes it's actually more honest to act as if a background of shared understanding, since every effort to map the meta-realm will be windmill-tilting anyway. I find that bracketing more abstract questions returns me to practical questions, which in turn expand the universe of abstract questions.

Nietzsche in On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

“Truths are illusions which we have forgotten they are illusions… coins which have lost their faces and are considered now as metal rather than as currency.”

But, some coins exchange at a higher rate than others.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Ok, I think I've got it... · 6 October 2008

What is the relationship of authoritarianism and intimacy?

This was the question I was trying to find. Questioning patriarchy isn’t a demand for gender-bending. People express their genders in so many different ways. It’s great! This has to do with personal history; and it has to do with your hormonal profile (seriously, this is fascinating: variations in hormone levels and intimate self-expression.) The energy in my self-expression is more dopamine than anything, equal parts serotonin and testosterone, and kind of low on the estrogen. And I wear high heels and, as they say, lipstick. Anyway. Gender is beautiful.

What I’m bringing to light is this very difficult, basically unseen masculine domination. I’m only doing this because I’m trying to understand a very wise teacher’s insight that yoga is going nowhere as long as it remains patriarchal. It’s pretty interesting, knowing me, that I’ve left this topic alone until now… but that’s why patriarchy continues. We’d rather not bother.

It’s like the editors of Ashtanga News, when I wrote to them about this mind-blowing article exactly a year ago. I asked, privately, why in the world they’d post something so old-school patriarchal and they said “we were just repeating what the previous woman had posted.” Yes. Exactly. This is how masculine domination gets legitimated! It’s passed on as if it’s just great and something to celebrate, and the non-critique is justified by saying it’s not our responsibility. At the time, I let it go. That is kind of bullishit on my part and all others, now that I think of it. Check out the comments on the post, too. It’s pretty amazing there was no real discussion there—only a few women expressing shreds of angst. Great illustration of the barriers to looking at this but also the fact that it's right here in front of our faces.

MM said that patriarchy is more evident in women teachers in this scene than in men. That’s true to my experience as well. In my experience authoritarianism is women’s effort to claim lineage-based authority—that is, authority within a still fundamentally patriarchal lineage. So in its manner, its still patriarchal. I could go all Pierre Bourdieu to argue this, but I have a sense that people will agree. Authoritarianism is pretty much a patriarchal thing. Yeah?

If practice is more about obedience than about self-exploration, what’s the point again? Reproducing domination seems to me to be a really large barrier to inside-intimacy as well as relational intimacy.

Sorry this is all scattered. My head’s in three places. Thanks for the patience as I try to find some traction on this topic… this blog is not normally such a haphazard scene. But it seems like a really good idea to figure out how to talk about this specifically in the context of ashtanga practice, and given the abysmal starting point here, I’m a bit at a loss for how to begin.

BTW, check out the penultimate post at Budismo e Yoga—in the article on ashtanga, there’s this wonderful discussion under the heading “Dharma en el Corazon.” The author writes that it is a great blessing to be able to use the practices of self-study without having to wrestle with the inherited baggage of a Guru system and the superstitions and self-denials this entails. I wrote to this guy to ask him if I can do a better translation of the article since the auto-translation probably isn’t great, and he said he'd be happy to work on that with me. but he did not write back. I’d go ahead and translate it anyway, but that’s a bit imperialist. A certain meaning is always lost in re-interpretation and I hesitate to take liberties with the author’s native language without his permission. I'll try to work up an English version when I have time.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: astanga yoga , social theory

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

Today · 1 October 2008

Three years ago, I spoke with a wonderful financial historian about all this. She said: let us hope that the US declines gracefully from its place of supreme dominance. Hope it for everyone’s sake.

Well… this is horribly abrupt and traumatic, and it will still be a long time before our mundane, taken-for-granted reality catches up. This vacuum of political power laid on top of a vacuum of market organization is ok, in a sense, because on mental and interpersonal levels things are holding together. We go on reproducing social order through our habits of being, thank god. It’s actually kind of great… the microsocial strength that sustains a whole society amid two phenomenal macrosocial failures.

Barack Obama’s ability to hold back from full-scale demagoguery makes me love him more—those crying for him to show more power and leadership are so very old school. He’s already running the show in his way.

For me, I love to watch the practical nature of the sense-making we’re all doing now. Had the LHC created a black hole last month the physicist would have all looked at each other shaking their heads Oops, tapping around to find where exactly it went wrong. The present crises are in certain ways the same. The levels of technical understanding vary, but even for those who have seen this coming for years, there’s some kind of aporia.

For me, there’s so much going on it’s ridiculous. I’ve been getting my dearest remaining presuppositions undermined to hell, and beautifully, by Mark Whitwell in recent days, and ought to blog about it but feel maybe it’s just too much to lay on you. Also, with what time? There’s none. I’d leechblock everything to stay on target, but the world is too good. Some bits for today in case you missed them and for my own future reference:

George Soros on a better bailout.

Thomas Frank on blame.

V Good Mark Buchanan Op-Ed

Kathy G’s Palintology

Oh, also important: Mohair Gravy.

Happy October. I woke this morning on the other side of about three rabbit holes, and will definitely need some time for these known and unknown revolutions to remake my everydayness.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Breaking it Down · 8 September 2008

Why do I feel more anger when Sarah Palin mocks the Styrofoam Acropolis set at the DNC than when I think about what is going on right now in Guantanamo?

1. The GOP’s campaign is an attack on my feminity on many levels. Their fun insults me personally... whereas my tax dollars going to torture innocents feels somehow less about me. And for some reason part of me needs to experience these global events as being all about me.
2. Also: she’s messing up the plan! It’s our turn already. No fair! We didn't plan on being foiled by a last minute comicbook nemesis! Those wascally wabbits!!
   

What’s the use of my outrage at injustice if it’s built on self-protective fear and schoolyard reactivity?

I am not sure. I think it’s still useful, but there are also (1) it can’t be trusted insofar as it’s not self-aware and (2) it will spark a backlash in anyone I scorn. But… given that there is just so much straightup killing and torturing going on right now, why not work through the childish, un-self-aware, hateful anger and direct that energy into open outrage? Then act on it in a focused way, and let it go. Hmm. It would be nice to have a leader who could take it to that level.

(By the way, at the time, I really did think the columns were campy. But now: I really do feel they were a nice, fun touch. Kind of like ice sculptures! And balloon drops! Only the columns have the added bonus of being phallic! {P.S. let’s not talk about the hadron collider this week, ok? I’m completely taken by it but the name is a bit much.} The only thing that’s changed is that SP has ridiculed the columns, so I deduce that my newfound like for them is as much defensiveness as it is good humor. Poor ridiculed columns. I hope the BOPL rescues them from EBay.)

Who do some people not know what to see in all this… feel like it’s not relevant?

1. It’s too much information and there are too many issues. It’s hard to see the true difference between these two campaigns.
2. Staking out a moral position is too uncanny. It’s dirty and connects you too much to social events. The intensity of feeling makes one feel that much more ungrounded and disconnected—that much more Camus’ stranger.
3. There is too much irony in acting. Malaise follows from the impossibility of acting, is the 21^st century version of Arjuna at loose ends.
4. Nothing really matters.

Just random possibilites, those. I don’t have an answer to this second question.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

Death Embrace · 8 September 2008

It has been asked: Do rural people really feel hated?

Yes. (Insert a decade of ever more alienated returns home. Also, many painful slips of the tongue on all parts. Cf, when professors say things like religion has no sociological relevance because it’s “atomistic” or that rural America is “empty,” they don’t look smart.)

I think there are two streams of feeling here. The first is straight up fear—the libertarian strain of rural feeling. Giuliani’s sneering use of “cosmopolitan” points to the sensation that rural people have interacting with the cosmopolite: they feel authentic, hardworking and sincere… talking to hypocritical, affected lazyasses. I actually love the critique of hipster-bourgeois consumption (latte-drinking, volvo-driving liberals) that goes along with this.

The second is the desire to be hated for one’s own righteousness, as the New Testament promises—the evangelical strain of rural feeling (for pure distillations of this see Matthew 10:22, Vengeance Rising, etc. etc.). Martyrdom is a really common sentiment all over the place, and (together with anti-conservative haters and liberal snobbishness) it feeds the anti-snob politics that have worked brilliantly for the GOP since Nixon. The GOP’s line that “they won’t like Sarah in Washington but we sure like her” trades on this martyrdom-turned-aggressive vibe. And the thing is, the left keeps feeding it. The too-good-to-hate-you hatred is everywhere. And it’s easy for a progressive to begin to feel it when her own freedoms from sexism, racism and homophobia are being attacked.

I broke down and joined Facebook this summer when I got all sad that my trip home was falling through. The trendy timesuck factor of Facebook always put me off; and the idea of my three main networks coming together made me cringe. But I wanted to feel connected to certain people from high school, and letting those networks intertwine in a single node required a level of self-honesty that was good for me. I don’t want to be particularly available to people, but I also don’t need to hide from them. In the end though, it’s not about who sees me. It’s about who I see with a degree of connectivity. Who I see is SAHM conservative activists, a diesel mechanic, a few people who escaped MT by the one dependable route—joining the military. And the rest who I still remember so sentimentally: they aren’t online. Because they’re working and poor, and don’t live the kind of lives where far-flung global social networks are a reality.

It raises the question: where do we learn about the world? I mostly learn through reading history books, mainstream internet sites, datasets on demographics and public opinion, and making my friends who live really diverse experiences tell me about their lives. How high quality are my data? Why are the people with the best data in the world—American political parties—using it in such different ways? Seriously. I’m asking.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , 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

Reticulation and the world inside the world · 19 August 2008

I love to watch networks of humans create themselves and halfway-retreat, surge, drop whole nodules, regenerate. In web space the networks never die—the information down to the last errant comment-thread always remains out there, somewhere: the relationships forged and ebbed away, the self-discoveries through expression and through being witnessed in this way, the vast inconclusiveness but inexorably forward, expansive movement of it. There will be more human nodes in this web, more journals deployed in blog form, more relationships and conclusions and hiatuses and returns. Events that seem to divide are vicariances, separating species that then flourish along parallel trajectories on separate self-identified “continents” (“India” and “the West” in our ashtangosphere, these days)… though on the web a new pangea is possible at any moment.

The sheer amount of personal and collective data in every corner of the blogosphere is wonderful, stupefying, trivial, transcendent: boring as fuck and at the same time uniquely totalizing it its human digitization. No single brain could really ever see it all or understand its dynamics.

What excites and frustrates me is that even in the little corner of the blogosphere that is ours, most of the digitized relationships flow through hidden channers. There is the outside digital self, and the inside, that is, the email side of things. Sitting here in my in-box this morning, waiting for the time I let myself read them late tonight, are new missives from two most fascinating and very far-away quasi-strangers. People who know me in a sense, and who I know, in a sense. I feel awed by these little connections--by these interestingly personal, decontextualized but also sweetly (uniquely?) private, and all-over delightful sparks between would-be strangers.

Would it double the data to add the email-train of relationship formation to the map of the network? Triple it? Would it crash even the most capacious network analysis? Is the secret email web where the reticulation of the blogosphere really happens—in simple, private dyads?

I suspect so. Here’s something else in my blogger inbox, from a reader I adore in DC.

i had a dream about you last night that i had to tell you about, it was so weird!

i was having an "issue" and i can't remember what it was, but it caused me to have a little temper tantrum and i threw the coffee maker through a picture window (perhaps i hadn't yet had coffee and that was the problem?).  well, to cope with/ fix the problem i decided i had to go visit you in LA.  the next thing i knew i was in LA with you at your shala and you gave me up to karandavasana.  then we went for a hike in some crater lake type lake bed.  the water was recessed and there were all sorts of amazing skeletal remains. we were just hiking around looking at everything, when all of the sudden someone came running and shouting that we had to get out because the waters were rising and soon the way we came in would be covered with water.  i knew this was silly and i wasn't worried because i knew we would be able to get out no matter what.  and we did, and then i was back in the kitchen with the broken picture window and no coffee.

The dream side of the blogosphere… world inside the world. Is the understory always this good? I guess it must be. Imagining the secret notes exchanged between so many twosomes out there adds a layer of romance and intrigue, somehow. I'd love to peek (just a little) in your inboxes; I really would. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

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

Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

The Logos and the Tao · 26 July 2008

I dreamed that I was doing a comparative analysis of The Logos and The Tao.

My subconscious, apparently, has its own sense of humor.

The dream is funny because the Tao and the Logos are both concepts that purport to be the one thing. Reality’s underlying substratum. The logical principle. That which has no equal, no opposite, no split-apart twin. The Most Meta.

The two concepts are also different in very many subtle ways. That was the point of the dream: I was comparing the concepts to see where they lined up and where they mapped different territories. Where one conception of “the way” falls short of capturing the totality of experience, at least vis-à-vis its own distant reflection in a split-apart concept of “what’s really real.”

So comparing the two reveals that neither is natural or complete—each has a social history, has edges, has the ability to express some stuff and the inability to express other stuff. If you research enough of the world, you find there is no one way dammit. It's contingency all the way down.

Comparing is interesting because you come up against harsh evidence that everything has a history. I like that kind of spelunking, but lately I’ve been just annoyed with comparison as a mode of analysis. “Compare and contrast” is a jayvee operation—a frosh exam. Simplistic. Pre-statistical. Non-causal. Abfuckingstract. When you strain to see what is similar between two cases, don’t you lose all the interesting, highly specific aspects? Is it not more useful to focus on JUST ONE THING? Like, one-pointed style?

The tao and the logos are two things and one thing. But not one thing in the way I want it. My unconscious is having fun with that.

I googled the collective unconscious, an activity almost as automatic as dreaming. Turns out a lot of people have done compare-and-contrast projects on this.

There’s even a book, The Tao and the Logos. Has the words “literary hermeneutics” in the title (kneejerk eyeroll… hermeneutics is too circular even for me). But… the authors are quoting Rilke (p. 86 & seq.). It’s all ok. Better than jayvee. Check it out:

Though we exist but once and never again, says Rilke, to have lived once fully is in itself worthwhile:

even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

…Here we have one of the most powerful pleas in modern poetry for the power of language. Saying is conceived as more intensely ontological than things themselves could have ever dreamed of being: it is language, the naming of simple things—house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher—that brigs things into existence and defines what is uniquely human. Rilke proclaims:

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness.

One thing, two things. Red things, blue things. I don’t know.

Comparison is about creating abstractions, and also about ignoring case-specific qualities that don’t generalize. Maybe I can do that, but still find specificity in it. My two research cases are “one” thing, insofar as I can find what’s sayable. The tao of social science is that banal. Tonight, I will read Herakleitos.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , science , social theory

Some notes on Mysore Style · 24 July 2008

I. Working a room. It helps to have waited tables for a long time. It helps to have great peripheral vision developed over years of sophisticated driste practice. Does a teacher understand that the first key is to coordinate, and intensify, the energies of the individuals? Or does she make the huge mistake of letting her energy pool in certain parts of the room, or—worse—periodically honing in on single students in a way that the rest of the room falls into darkness for several minutes? Driste—one pointedness, but the environing universe is still present and in motion. Teachers who don’t get this—and who can’t handle being service persons/facilitators—should do some time in the hospitality business.

Related: once I went to work at Amnesty International for a summer, taking three months of my waitressing job. Came back and tried to serve the same-sized sections on day one. DISASTER. Took many nights before I could play the table service video game again with any kind of skill.

Also: So can my working class service skills jump the hierarchy to working the rooms at the dozen giant cocktail parties I have to attend in Boston next week? Even though we’re talking rooms of very powerful, smart people who have things I—from my spot at the veeeery bottom of the hierarchy—want? Or will I let my energy pool in corners, stay occupied with those I know, fail to engage with the whole space? I actually hate this question (I never use that word). Working a room from the bottom, where you don’t have a prescribed service role but instead are doing self-promotion, requires a sense of entitlement or just another level of connected charisma I don’t possess. Bravado I can do, but essentially I hate the spotlight. It’s a question of whether I’ll decide to hone a high-brow version of my middle class skill. Such an annoying, creepy prospect, but if I can see table-waiting as just a video game…

Thoughts to develop some other time---

II. The dynamic between what you know what you’ve been taught, and the way this shows up in how you engage a student. And how this dynamic shapes the degree to which a teacher is able to teach an individual or teach a system.  

The first “teach” is a transitive infitinitive verb. The second is intransitive. Both have value. I am biased toward the first.

III. Holding a space, or owning a space. How this relates to a teacher’s feelings toward her own now-absent teacher. How teachers’ authoritarian vibe relates to her own projection process, specifically to whether she has followed this process to its resolution by recognizing that her teacher/therapist is a human.

What’s the teacher’s own relationship to authority? Has she seen her own teacher as such an authority figure that practicing without the teacher is still very mournful and makes her feel abandoned? (One way to tell that is if she tries too hard to fill the shoes of the departed authority: sometimes the heaviest-handed teachers are filled with nostalgia for the imagined heavy-hand of their teacher and trying to fake it in order to comfort themselves.) Often, put-on authority is rooted in sadness for the departed teacher, and for the fact that the young  teacher herself can no longer be observed as a good student and act out of submission and compliance. Lots of karma yoga in moving from compliant to first-person active.

IV. Ritual—what is it there for?

Between (a) mind-containing structure and (b) grasping for meaning…

in other words, (a) understood as arbitrary or (b) understood as magic.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory

Process mindset, release of expectations, peripheral vision, problematizing documentation · 20 July 2008

All those terms have the same meaning here.

A client who is also a personal coach says she chose me as a teacher in part because I have a “process mindset.” This disposition “makes everything ok,” and turns experimentation and “failure” into play. It doesn’t give a shit about accomplishment. Doesn’t think about “results.”

This student, who describes herself as “fixed mindset” and “goal oriented,” has the, well, goal of becoming process-oriented. Because it seems like someone goal-oriented is less able to experience flow, does not experiment or learn very much from foul-ups, is less happy in general, and is more attached to getting things.

Ok. This is a useful conceptualization. Process and fixed mindsets. And I guess for YOGA practice, a process mindset is pretty helpful.

But what if you’re a writer? What if you’re a scientist? What if you want to contribute something for godsakes?

Not so helpful: this spontaneous, flow-oriented, “screw accomplishments” sensibility. Let me just confirm that.

Should I really be immersing myself in a practice that makes me even more process-oriented and even less interested in objectifiable results?

There’s the rub. This whole personality-definition just legitimates my endless playfulness. At a time when fixating on results would particularly annoying and painful.

Here’s what I’m thinking. If I can generate results as a byproduct of happy but sincere action, staying in process-mind is possible and—this I can verify—way more fun. I don’t swear off or denigrate results, but as long as they keep coming, they can stay parenthetical. They can be at the periphery of my field of vision. Just like my body parts when I put them in an asana. This is ideal, though. An anti-goal that is really a goal. I'm not there, when it comes to the writing-practice. It means being good. 

Here is what else I’m thinking. Of the blogger called CP. Cody Pomeray, Dean Morarity: alternate names for the man who catalyzed a whole movement of obsessive thing-creators. But what did Neal Cassady himself create? Enthusiasm, relationship, life. His life was his art. That it got documented is an accident: how many other artists- detached- from- product never made the history books? What unwritten, unpraised current lies there?

But then… getting praise isn’t the point, in that current.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [30]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , science , social theory , 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

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

Frame Bold Conjectures! · 5 June 2008

I get some pretty weird email through the contact link on this blog. But one today was so alienated by my writing, and generally angry towards my strong positions, that it concerns me that others might feel the same.

If you do, I’m sorry.

If you have been reading this for a little while, and looking at the comments, hopefully you have an idea of my personality—that any strong position is usually taken with a wink. If I get in to it with R or DailyM or Carl or Cody or Patrick in the comments, that is us enjoying each other and learning a lot in the process.

I am sort of a child of the philosopher and research methodologist Karl Popper, who said Frame Bold Conjectures! And then do everything you possibly can to try to falsify them. 

I see ashtanga as a “science” of research on the self, and feel that Americans get in our own way by heaping unnecessary fantasy-world beliefs and hero-worship in the way of their own experience. So sometimes I toss out a bold conjecture in hopes of encouraging others to frame their own, different experiences in a clear way. The contrast challenges all of us to pare down useless beliefs, understand each other better through ribald epistemological compromise, and dig that much deeper in to our own intuitions and experiences.

I’m here to figure out what ashtanga is about. Collectively, culturally, individually, spiritually, whatever. This is just my way of investigating. 

My favorite people are those who are curious, brave, interested in everything, and have finely-tuned bullshit detectors. I guess I write the way I do to attract those excitable skeptics, expecting that a little non-PC boldness will be taken lightly.

Namaste and shit. And with all the love of my well-loved, wrung-out, blown-open, hardworking little heart.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: social theory

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

A small bridge · 5 May 2008

The workshop this weekend was sweet. For someone who is often drained by social interaction, it was surprising to see how inspiring and energizing this community can be to me. I sat around the edges, an active wallflower. I don’t often step back in this way—being in a group is all or nothing and usually involves getting sensitive to each individual's needs. But the relationships in this group are mutually supportive at a deep level, even as we transition into predominantly spoken interactions.

Sunday, I stayed afterwards and talked to my teacher—who I won’t see for a while—and then slipped away before someone buttonholed me in to the group dinner. Drove down the ramp and stopped short as a light, determined and quick walker darted into the sidewalk space I was about to cross. Who else dresses in all black and moves with such Newyorkish purpose on a spring evening in Santa Monica?

It was my PhD adviser. Same age as my other teacher and twice the body weight if just as light on her feet, she bounded around to the driver’s window and said she’d been thinking of me all afternoon, because re-reading a book she knows I love. I wanted to hug her, but I kept my hands on the wheel while we talked.

What a beautiful transition, one teacher still upstairs and the other there on the ground, and my path down the ramp linking the two. One a hippie ex-engineer who dropped out and found a spiritual path, one avid and brilliant Marxist feminist who just by staying with her work accidentally became a major player. Both big names despite themselves, anti-self-promoters who laugh at the organizations in which their work is embedded even as they believe so deeply in the value of giving themselves as they can. They are both (unlike me) coffee lovers and easily could have met on this street some other day this spring, bumped in to each other in line and laughed together at some little thing in the world around them. I never realized it, but their dispositions and aspects are so similar, and nothing like mine. But otherwise I'm their only link.

I am back in her hands, for now.

Here’s a passage from a really disturbing talk by Bell Labs physicist R. Hamming. People who identify with their work and become one-dimensional research bots drive me to blogging in the margins, obviously. I have very different notions about how to enjoy and cultivate my energies and mind, and how many dimensions of myself it’s possible to maximize at a time. But this tribute to the shadow-benefits of one-pointedness did give me pause…

Well, we know very little about the subconscious; but one thing you are pretty well aware of is that your dreams also come out of your subconscious. And you’re aware your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day.

If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there’s the answer. For those who don’t get committed to their current problem, the subconscious goofs off on other things and doesn’t produce the big result. So the way to manage yourself is that when you have a real important problem you don’t let anything else get the center of your attention - you keep your thoughts on the problem. Keep your subconscious starved so it has to work on your problem, so you can sleep peacefully and get the answer in the morning, free.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , social theory

SLI: Dirty Feet, Dirty Concepts, Ashtanga on Demand · 25 April 2008

Skipped work Friday and took my two-year-old niece to the beach. We rode the creepy carousel on the Santa Monica pier, me just zoning out to the nightmare calliope, staring into the spiraling mirrors, and waiting for it to end.

Then we rode it again. And again.

She’s so excited by her environment, her huge slate blue eyes beneath hair the same weird color as mine are wide, glinty, always hypnotically changing. She misses her mom and attaches to the thing that most resembles her… a big plushie owl. The intense, preternatural need in her, the rawness of emotion in this, her first transference relationship. Her trust and love for me, as perhaps with students’, come from other associations that map easily on to me. (I am not too maternal, but don’t throw up much static for someone who might want to see that here). It is wonderful to be there for it. I will be her Aunt her whole life. I feel myself reciprocating the bond, letting her pull me out to the water with my jeans on, even though there’s nothing I hate like dirty feet and sand in my things.

What else? This week, the longstanding rivalry between yogis and hipsters dissolved when Time magazine equated the two.

It’s not that a cultural boundary has changed so much as that both concepts have lost their crispness enough that the middlebrow milquetoast magazine can throw them around like nothing. As a notorious, maddening, extremely cute, French sociologist reminded me Thursday, our concepts are little animals and when we take them out to play, sometimes they get dirty. That’s when we bring them home and clean them up again for future use, so our thoughts become clear again.

I’m all for cleaning up “hipster,” restoring it as a properly circumscribed term of abuse. But maybe we’ll leave the concept of “ashtangi” a little more dirty?

Meanwhile, until the hipster/ashtangi boundary gets redrawn, I will celebrate yoga-hipster nonduality by publicly demonstrating the primary series, on a Saturday, at a yoga lifestyle store I often ridicule. (Turns out their labor practices are improving a bit). The friend who set up this event is upset that there is no ashtanga awareness in the culture this corporation is generating.

Ok. So I’m taking my manifestly nerdy ass over there in my anti-brand-name clothes. Will they dress me up in trademark garb to get a on my Marichyasana D?

It’s one o’clock Saturday at Lululemon, and don’t you dare bring a camera if you swing by. I’m feeling weird enough about it already, but I know two hours of secret Saturday ritual beforehand will mellow out the introverted awkwardness. Saturday after SS is when my wheels finally, briefly spin to a stop every week, so it’ll be interesting to see how public ashtanga-on-demand fits in to the energetic cycle.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , social theory

"Decatur memos" · 22 April 2008

The first year, the question in play was What is this mental state am I experiencing every day?

I was all interested in neuro-linguistic programming from Milton Erickson through Bandler and Grinder to the self-help guy Tony Whateveritis. That was all about suggestibility and the idea that there was a sub-conscious mind. (Side note: the first day I practiced with my teacher and he said “just establishing rapport…” I knew he was hip to the NLP and probably an eclectic like myself… which of course turned out to be exactly right.)

In that line were yoga nidra of course, the intriguing Edgar Cayce, a lot of dimestore self-hypnosis New Age nonsense and cheap evolutionary theory á la Robert Anton Wilson, and finally a mysterious, ancient cassette tape I had mailed in from a distant archive like a character in Umberto Eco. On it a woman called Jasmine Riddle intoned the most potent yoga nidra sequence I’ve ever found, but I can’t tell you what’s in it because I never got past the second minute without my mind shutting off. It would return 50 minutes later, Ms. Riddle whispering to me to wake up. I guess I could try to crack her code but I don’t want to re-request the thing through ILL because my reputation with the university library is already sketchy (seriously).

At the same time, that first year, I was starting to explore Vipassana. Which, at first (shamatha practice) was all about concentration and operated on a simpler idea of the mind than the hypnosis people. For Vipassana, for a practical purposes the mind was just the house of “attachments” and “suffering.”

Together, the NLP and the Vipassana led to a relational question (usually the best kind question): what is the relationship of meditation and hypnosis? (And: which framework is better for mapping my experience, or do I need both?)

The Vipassana people will tell you meditation is not the same as hypnosis. Not the same! Of course they will say that: if it were the same, you could get the method without the metaphysics (the metaphysics being the belief system anchored in the Four Noble Truths, though they will also tell you that this is not a theory but a fact revealed by looking inside, like Socrates supposedly revealed geometry to the boy in the Meno). Over time I found a few very good answers from Buddhist scholars for why meditation and hypnosis are different (along with a lot of answers that made me suspicious), but none of the answers were so good that I remember them.

So now I am concluding the fourth year, and I am still not sure—experientially—what is the relationship of meditation to hypnosis. But what is different now is that I trust myself more as a first-order experiencer and when applicable a second-order witness of that experience. And, I’m a lot more interested in the tones, textures, and subtleties of altered states, and in the meaningfulness that seems to arise out of them after the fact. Also, there is the whole phenomenon of other minds (not the so-called "problem of other minds," thank you), and the ways groups actually share and collectively deepen altered states.

Outside/objective approaches would just quantify things: measure brain activity and be done with it. What if they found that the elecrtromagnetic map of asana (which I experience as meditation ranging from light to deep) is the same as chanting (which I experience as full-on hypnosis)? Would having it quantified externally as 1=1 answer the question?

Actually, yes. And no.

The problem with the subjective side is that once I’m in an altered state I’m not much fit to gather data. And since I love altered states my reflections on them are colored with the emotions of wonderment and joy that I associate with them after the fact.

Is there some kind of meditative-hypnotic spectrum that cannot be reduced to an electroencephalograph readout? Inside, there are other spectra in play:

-witnessing/nondual

-passive/active

-receptive/one-pointed

and others.

Just to mix it up, I practiced this morning with the Gayatri Mantra droning over and over in the background. Swaying right out of my body just standing up, but sharp and focused for the rest of it. It was pretty strange and delicious. Chocolate with chili powder.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [24]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , 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

Thanks, Raul · 6 April 2008

I had the best talk last week with CP about the topic of dynasties. What a phenomenon. The whole ideological premise of the “America” thing is that there is nothing holy in royalty—no God running in the veins of a child just by dint of birth. My understanding is that Brahmin family ties are more political- economic than holy, so it interests me when I see Americans of all people attributing spiritual leadership qualities to children. Legacy is in nurture, not nature... I actually like the sociological shorthand on this one.

Anyway. The dynasty that is blowing my mind right now makes NO appeals to other-worldly legitimacy (given that they're a bunch of materialist athiests--ha!): just the thickness of blood. It’s an old Latin American Strongman anti-coup strategy to install your kid brother as chief of the military when you take over the ship of state (see especially Daniel Ortega); and in Cuba Raul Castro has been holding steady in the beta role for decades. (And I guess there's a little birthorder "nature" stereotyping in that: insofar as a Beta bro would likely be that must more trustworthy than the presidential Alpha in such a role.)

The NYT’s reporting on Cuba is just as odious as its coverage of WMD, but I actually don’t like Castro either. At all. I’ll hold off on the litany that starts with political executions round about 1959. 

What’s getting me now is the bag-o-tricks that Raul’s dispensing on the populace to play the Good Cop now that the dynastic succession has taken place. At first there was the authorization of sex-change operations and the intimation of something like domestic partner benefits to come. (Cuba has been awesome on sex ed if your straight and non-trans, but that's a fascinating top-down expansion their unique version of the "human rights" regime.) Last week, Raul announced the legalization of cell phones (never mind that Cubans live on $25 a week—not a huge Verizon market unless you're specially connected) and the news that for the first time in 50 years the people will be allowed to stay in hotels. Also, Cubans can now buy and sell CDs and DVDs.

Is this a joke? Mind-blowing on so many levels.

Good luck keeping the Cubans appeased with stocking-stuffers until the northern beast takes notice and authorizes the CANF to strafe Havana with Big Macs. From my perspective it is ALL a drag if you're in Cienfuegos or wherever—albeit the near future will be worse than the present. We and Fidel have teamed up to screw these people over pretty badly for fifty years, but the few things Cuba has done right—mass education, sustainable agriculture, basic healthcare, some social equalities—are about to go bye-bye.

But hey, a tiny elite will very soon have a lot more stuff, and this is the story we’ll hear from the right-wingers at the NYT Havana desk when it comes time for capitalism shock-therapy.

Till then Raul’s symbolic but life-altering concessions may at least soften the blow that’s about to land.

Go spend some dollars there in the meantime… feel the last echoes of the epic twentieth century and help some humans afford phones. It is beautiful, fascinating country buffeted by so many storms--all the kind that brew offshore and descend as a cyclone.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: morality , social theory

Overedited · 18 March 2008

Our only weapon, only strength is justice, truth. But effect of truth, justice, sometimes takes longer time. Weapons power is immediately there.

The Dalai Lama, also today

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: markets-networks-society , social theory

Unedited · 18 March 2008

 

Also, Jonathan Raban in the LRB. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , social theory

Tripping the Dreck Eclectic · 9 March 2008

I can feel you all out there bristling that I’d fill this space with ideas that are not “all mine,” that I would present this system as if it could be valid. Do devil’s advocacy for a dangerous idea that can’t hold together without tinges of hierarchical thinking, essentialism, determinism and necessity (dispositions it’s easy, these days, hate). It’s pretty irritating, I know.

But back to the idea of migrating concepts from one system to another, disrespecting them, taking them out for a night of slumming through the dreck of eclectic thinking. I guess that's a smirch on the integrity of any system.

Bring it! It’s 2008! Here, concepts are free-floating against the background of god-knows-what. They are not locked away inside isolated systems. Concepts are happy whores. Tools-at-hand. (When is somebody going to nail me on the Heidegger shit?) They are rafts to sail across whatever river, and to abandon once we reach the shore. They don’t belong to anyone. They’re loose women. I’m done trying to reign them in and judge them by the rules.

So I wonder:

What would spiral dynamics say about my reaction to spiral dynamics?

Is it more interesting to deconstruct a tool or use it to deconstruct yourself?

These are richer questions than What is wrong with this worldview? We already know how to locate the contradictions in a worldview and tear it down. Who cares? Who needs perfect worldviews?

I offer that it is worth suspending the meta-critique to look (from whatever point of view) at what is revolutionary about the proposition that consciousness evolves. The possibility that people are not all at the same place in their, well..., development of consciousness. (Insert quotation marks as needed.)

Come on. Think about where you have been in your lifetime. The ways you feel your awareness and your own ego changing. Just use your personal experience and nothing else, but subject that to some close, detailed examination. Before you turn on these questions one last time, turn them on yourself.

You are already acting on the assumption that consciousness evolves.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , social theory , spirituality

Breadcrumbs from the Owl of Minerva · 6 March 2008

Are some people deeper than others? More highly conscious?

Oh, don’t ask that question, Owl. It offends my egalitarian values. Personal development is equal opportunity! 

Um. Sorry.

The first objection any pluralist will have to the spiral dynamics story is that it is hierarchical. Later consciousness is bigger than earlier consciousnsess. Shit: there’s development (which smacks of colonial politics right there). Hierarchies mean power and power means authority and those two together mean domination. Which the powers of social science and the humanities intend to delegitimate and deconstruct in Mighty Supertwins style. Ready steady go!

Hey, I’m in. Except for on this topic. Stay with me: I'll just make a quick incision and then it will be over:

If consciousness evolves, there is this logical problem of everything seeming to flow necessarily toward one predetermined end-point, what the Greeks called a telos. What about chance and openness to changing the course of history? What about unforeseen catastrophe? What about human choice over the matter? The other big problem with teleological theories is that the reek of conservative post-war thought—the functionalist systems theory that saw society as a well-ordered mega-organism and said social action was all about roles and structure and nothing about agency and sensuous individual human creativity. Great picture of the 1950s, that, but the ‘60s changed all things thank god.

There are other problems too. All structural theories, including my beloved Bourdieu, are like that: you can’t lean on them too much or really take them seriously, because they generate inner contradictions and collapse. This stuff is interpretive, not explanatory. You wield it lightly if you understand it at all. Spiral dynamics is an uber-theory that academics cannot use because it's unfashionably large--a borg subsuming all the psychological, sociological, economic and anthropological time maps produced the past century. Do you think there’s some sense in Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs? In Habermas’ picture of communicative sociality? Or did Aurobindo ever do it for you? All of these are theorists of the evolution of consciousness— smaller players absorbed in the bigger game of spiral dynamics as it’s understood today.

To clarify, spiral dynamics as we're talking here is a map of the evolution of societies. But what is really interesting and threatening is that it also contains maps for the evolution of individuals’ consciousness. Color-coded maps! Most people in this zone would dial in at green/pluralistic, but there are a few turquoise integralists running around without even knowing that this is what you are. And there’s tension because the ashtanga world also contains blue fundamentalism, purple superstition, and red primitive ego. But no matter where a person is at on this map, he still contains multitudes—the authoritarianism, superstition and pure ego, etc., that he personally passed through on his way to the present point of view. It’s not a class system because none of the stages are bad! They are what they are and if we think they're bad that's our problem. For me, It’s a pretty beautiful, subtle picture of wholeness and a validation of all the mentalities we personally experience even if we are consciously seeking to increase our own consciousness.

If the idea that consciousness has evolved seems improbable, well, what do you think of the idea that life itself has evolved? Uh huh. We don’t dispute that natural selection has reordered and expanded the content of life itself—made it more complex and, well, higher-functioning.

This doesn’t have to mean everything’s going to a predetermined destination. We do have some examples of what seem to be very highly-evolved states of consciousness that give hints (and don’t even tell me you don’t believe that shit is real, because most of you have briefly tasted from it, ashtangis); but as for end points, it could be bad or it could be good or it could be up to chance. (There’s the suspicion that some higher energy is in play, of course, but I'm not the Owl of Minerva so how can I say?) See what my friend JJ says at the end of the video I embedded below.

The only really audacious claim that spiral dynamics makes is that yes, some people are more highly conscious than others. And while all people are beautifully whole and perfect wherever we are... we happen to be at different places on the ladder we are all, if ineptly, probably  (hopefully?) climbing.

None of it is my idea (see esp. Ken Wilber, or William Irwin Thompson), though when I delve in to the map of consciousness and use it to interpret the beautifully diverse mentalities and worldviews of those around me, the system does blow my mind a bit. If you want to know where it would place you, read some recent Ken Wilber (the last I read was Integral Spirituality and it did the job fine, with an even bigger Integral philosophy encompassing spiral dynamics), or google. Integral people are all over the web, creating culture and doing some of the most subtle but audacious analysis of our world that I have encountered anywhere. It gets to me, because even though they don’t have the tools of the pluralist sociologists (exemplars of The Statistical Age), they have an arguably higher consciousness.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: arbitrage , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXXIII: Invading the Inner Sanctum · 1 March 2008

My beautiful little office is a secret. Hidden behind one and then a second heavy oaken door in the corner of a first-floor suite, with a 15-foot window opening out over the heavy red California-gothic Royce Hall and the glowing-green upper quad. The office is “off-master,” so no janitors or building staff have the key; and it's off-limits in casual conversation so’s not to arouse jealosy in the other grads who huddle in the basement in cold little plastic carrels. Carlos Castaneda, when he was writing his dissertation here, hatched Don Juan in that basement—Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the building just across the lawn—and I can feel these and the detritus of far better, more difficult discoveries and creations pressing in. It’s like practicing at Eddie’s in NY or at the LA Center for Yoga: years of sweat and shakti hanging from the rafters, if you love your history enough to tap it.

I stayed in the office late on Thursday, but sometime before I slipped back in Friday morning, there was a visitor. Someone with a copy of my special key, a screwdriver, and a roll of electrical tape. 

They stole my lightswitch! And replaced it with an evil motion-sensor light! Curses! Sensate technology invading my space. I thought I was off the grid, but now I’m caught in a new game.

The massive window is all the light I could ever want before 5 pm, and a Japanese paper lamp picks up after that. I never even touch the two gaudy fluorescents in the ceiling panels.

But now they trip on with any sudden movement. Toss my hair, twitch a little too much in working out a thought, or even just recross the chair-lotus too quickly, and bling. Friday I was pushing away from the heavy desk, walking the 14 steps to the switch and back, and re-establishing, about every 8 minutes.

It’s going to change me one way or another, this fucking light. Create a stealth within stealth—dodging the colleagues on the way in, and outsmarting the machine once I’ve conquered the outer labyrinth.

I’d smash the infernal mechanism to bits, but the new Mission: Impossible element is just as sexy as it is stupid. There’s always a blind digital sentry of lasers and motion sensors guarding the big jewel in the inner sanctum. This is essential to the M:I narrative.

And in this zone I guess I’ll take any epic narrative I find.

Saturday links.

● The outer extremes of self-regulation: Listen to this NPR story: a modern nightmare. Preschool children forced to plan and document their playtime. Foucault told us this shit was coming. Who wants to write on Foucaldian dynamics as they apply—and can be avoided in—the teaching of yoga? Guest blogger applications welcome.

● A bunch of Japanese people like to film owls inside their houses? Wow. This one’s the best. (No, you wiseasses: I did not find this by auto-google.)

● Montana Diary in The Economist. Whores, strip mines, threats of secession, and wide open spaces.

[T]he scenery—and its emptiness—require no overstatement. I saw more grazing cows than people in the vast flats, and those humans I did see were in a small number of tiny towns abutting the road. The towns usually consisted of little more than a post office, a general store, a saloon and, of course, a video-poker casino. People live out there to be autonomous, perhaps even alone.

● Social networks are like the eye.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: markets-networks-society , science , social theory

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

I Don't Want To Be A Goat, Nope · 11 February 2008

I want to think I churned down through another layer of sediment of my unconscious today, and that’s why I hit a whole oily-black vein of VBS songs. (VBS: that’s vacation bible school, for you non-initiates.)

I don’t want to be a phairisee, I don’t want to be a phairisee…

‘Cos the phairisees aren’t fair, ya’ see….

How many of these tics/ vrittis/ scary buried memories are left? I think we’re back to about 1982 at this point and I haven't glimpsed any of the fire and brimstone that must await down in the denser layers. It's going to take more than foot behind the head tricks once it's time to call in the diamond tip.

Ha ha! Scary scary scary. Really.

I just want to be a sheep, baaa, I just want to be a sheep, baaa

I just want to be a sheep, baaa.

This too shall pass. Meh.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXIX: 2012 is the New 1999 · 18 January 2008

Little apocalypses here this week. Which is good, since 2008 as I knew it was not going according to plan.

Now, I can’t stop listening to Prince’s end-of-the-world songs. I love the bat-out-of-hell sound effects. Was this stuff written during his Jehova’s Witness period, or is it full-on devil music? Party like it’s 1999 = death for rebirth. In other words, more of the Tower theme… but this time I’m cool with it.

It’s not the world per se that will end: it is our view of the world.

It’s been said apocalypse returns to fashion every two decades, which might explain why 2012 is the new 1999. That sounds about right. But it may come even sooner if what I’m hearing about visitors in Texas is the case. On which more later.

Apocalypse brings to the surface a lot of mythic scared-shitless dread that got deposited in my mind 'round about 1982. This is the annoying thing about a practice that pushes back the curtain between the conscious and unconscious: now I’m running in to all this Biblical stuff. Gads! Horribly, there's so much early memorization that's still buried, just where I put it at 18. This week, 1 Corinthians 13 shored up in the yoga archipelago. Saint Paul was always the blowhard apostle, but this one is a gorgeous passage.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Anyway. Esoterica on Saturday morning, and then a lot of dissertating in addition to a dusty grey drive to Covina. And maybe I’ll have time to see There Will be Blood at the Westwood Crest. I hear it is sufficiently apocalyptic. Links I'm thinking of:

● Ok since we are talking about the Bible, here is Robert Alter (whose beautiful translation of the Pentateuch my father did not appreciate as a Christmas gift a few years ago) on his new translation of the Psalms. Really nice interview, especially because it’s with the beautiful Michael Silverblatt. Alter is so subversive! Also, he’s a damn poet. If you're really in, see too this week's review of the work in the LRB.

● Tova, we never got back around to talking about your dream. I had an insane one the other night and it took the aforementioned devil music to get it out of my head before practice. Here’s something from an Integral blogger who takes reductionist views of dreaming and adds a dimension of interpretive possibilities for people who are actually know something about their own minds (because they have a meditation practice or whatever). No need to black-box this stuff like the behaviorists do if you have the tools to explore it.

● Ok, this is the only good politics I’ve seen in months, and it’s actually just art. George Saunders: genius and author the Braindead Megaphone (hilarious). This is a seven-minute reading of his piece “Manifesto,” a press release from People Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction (PRKA). Just listen.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [21]
Categories: evolution , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXVII: The Dry Soul Is The Wisest · 5 January 2008

The barometric pressure and the local news have been building up for a gale. Very exciting—unless you are on the streets, where dryness strategy in this town is thin—but where is our inundation? Still it’s grey and 100% humidity—a luxury only because it’s such a contrast. Turns down the volume on the outside world and brings the dissertation on strong. Mmmm. What if I ever return to my Pacific Northwest? The years in Seattle and Portland drove me to prolixity, writing-wise. Soul drunk on moisture, with Heraclitus insisting this was not good for me. Why? Maybe this seduction for rain will only make me more prosey and I should orient to… Elko?

Anyway, it is wet. And I love what a storm does for the inside spaces mental and otherwise. Steamy mysore rooms; intimate cafes; sheltering car; and my apartment so cozy for being in.

Speaking of everyday life, we decided to start going to the movies more than once a year. Both the good art-houses are within blocks, but since we saw I’m Not There at the new Landmark, it’s the only place I want to go. Place is crazy! It recalls theatres in poor countries (where rich people zones are—in the absence of a middle class—injected with markers of extreme class domination, such as ultraplush giant seating and snack-delivery direct to your seat courtesy some minion). But I guess the polarized class structure of the Westside increasingly resembles that of Latin America, so it’s no surprise. And FWIW, the Landmark is a trip. You select your seat numbers when you buy tickets from the “host,” wait for the show in an ultramoderne cocktail lounge, order fresh bruschetta, and piss behind frosted glass. Another “host” introduces the film and stays onhand in the aisles in case you need her to bring you a tissue or read you subtitles. Is this a strange place to go see Persepolis today after my always-unmentionable activities at the Masonic Temple conclude?

● Freerice. If you have a problem with this, holler at Patrick. Not me.

● Orlando posture enforcement.

● This year’s World Question is What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

● Ok. Hilarious. The sociology blogosphere just got really excited about this crude “How privileged are you?” survey. Sociologist are brilliant at parsing hierarchy… and they can also be totally self-deceiving about it. Cartographers of race, class, gender and national origin; appraisers of intellectual, cultural and money capital; and inventors of the backasswards “I’m more oppressed than you” game. Ohhh, confusing ourselves with our own categories. But this is interesting as a vague social locator and, more than that, an a suggestion of all the income-independent ways we are enriched. (Yes, I changed my mind about materialism a long time ago.)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: markets-networks-society , science , social theory

Little Shift, for Pancake-Flip · 19 December 2007

A few years back, I started asking how-questions.

I was initially trained in statistical and formal modeling—ways of asking and answering why-questions predicated on a world constructed out of “things” also known as variables. Think Freakonomics: elegant pat-answers to elegant why-questions. Beautiful, but trite. The just-so stories of my formal training were appealing, but the non-recognition that they were analytical houses of cards collided head-on with my background in Continental philosophy. Because of all those dead Germans, I wanted more attention to the humanly-constructed nature of the realities at hand. And to the endlessly tactile, experienced, immediacies of the WORLD. Phenomenology, baby.

How-questions are messy and they pay less, but the process of answering them is more involving and the provisionality of their answers seems more honest. I like the idea of letting the data, or simply the world, discipline my big ideas. So it is: now I do ethnography and interview-based research far more than large surveys and statistical models. Even though it’s the models that get the phone calls: the world loves tight explanations. Close description, hesitant generalization: much less sciency and much less useful in our facts-you-can-use forward tilt existence.

Anyway, as I looked back the other day on the first year of writing in this space, I saw a hilarious predominance of why-questioning. God, do I know how to write 500 words without making an argument? What am I, Maureen Dowd-meets-Yoga Journal?

Well, hrmmm. To a degree I’ve been nicely trained that words are tools for putting together just-so stories; and this effects the structure of my thought down to the way I engage with ashtanga yoga and our weird modern cultures of transformation and quests for the sublime. Very 21^st century American of me. But the thing is, I have plenty of (equally western) resources for doing thick description and grubby worldfulness and how-questioning. And this year I’d like to light them up a little bit more, work closer to the ground, and grasp a little less for arguments and explanations.

More of the how, less of the why. As the big shift comes in on us (do you feel it? do you? our pancake’s just about cooked, you know), we will see what happens, and how interesting my boring can get.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , science , social theory

Saturday XXXV: SFOWL · 14 December 2007

The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the interstices. Good god the world is interesting.

Meanwhile, moonlighting ashtanga. Too much to tell. Except that AYSF is a dream and so’s Eeyore. Links from the past week:

● Thursday the 13^th: planes, trans and automobiles hugging the westcoast, business travelers’ noses in the Style Section with this article big and eyecatching on the cover. Thanks, New York Times. Presidential politics be damned, in some dimensions we the people really are living in the Al Gore era. I came within one degree of separation from the great gomer twice this week. Getting Americans to face the connection between their consumption and climate change: governments aren’t making this happen. Grassroots movements and marketmakers are. Which is why Gore is better as a pissed off subaltern insurgent who has faced his worst fear—losing—and moved on. And why this dissertation is on regulation from below.

● End of the year lists. Blame the internet and blame the accelerated culture: the lists are everywhere. Rex has the metalist here. The only one that really rewards me, now the third year going, is the Guardian writers’ individual favorites for the year. I always find one or two treasures in here, especially because it’s blind to genre and publication date and so not just a list about “keeping up” with the world. Delightfully, though, the man who has kept the tiny pleasure-readerly flame alive for me the past five years—with the occasional pitch-perfect tip—is now an official listmaker as well: I give you Matthew Korfhage’s holiday ménage-a-trois (readers here know MK as the Daily Miltonian). And apparently I also need to read this, this, and this.

● Oh! Deeper into geekiness: a podcast about scholar-practitioners. This is just nice: a meditator-professor discusses hyper-objectivity in religious studies, the peculiarly American tendency to divorce study from practice, and the possibilities for “contemplative educitaion.” For her, it was Chogyam Trumka who “ripped out the division” between study and practice. Some words from the talk:

If we only practice meditation we become stupid meditators, and if we only study we become arrogant scholars…. If you don’t have some kind of wisdom [e.g., reading of historical texts] dawning in your practice, then there’s a sense of “what is the point?” But if you bring some light [from study] into the practice… the thing that I hear over and over again from my longtime practitioner-students is that they feel completely re-energized.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [43]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

My Two Curves · 5 November 2007

Curiosity : New Learning :: Nostalgia : Repetition

So it has been a long time since I advanced in the series. And people are starting to suggest it’s time I take on the next pose.

Nono noono nonoooooonononooo.

And sell myself out of one of my few remaining chances to participate in a ritual ashtanga moment? Chances are that I’ll add a posture another ten or at most twenty times in the next twenty or thirty years. Learning a posture is this obvious, almost comically obvious, moment of imitation shaktipat built in to the practice at intervals; and in my old age I’m coming to see it as a very sweet thing.

In a practice that is all about intense personal experience, that hinges on meaningful relationships of student and teacher (including where the student takes the method itself to be her teacher), advancing to the next pose is this no-duh moment of live transmission. It’s a mini-enactment of the whole method.

I did not always care about that at all. When the learning curve on the physical level was steeper, I had more curiosity for what was next and at the same time longed for challenges. But the curiosity has leveled off as the physical work becomes less about new openings and new powers and more about refinement. There’s a ton of work left before I’ll master my practice such as it is (hello, mayurasana), but it is quieter work than it used do be.

As I show up every day to repeat--and try to refine--what I know, my nostalgia for the method is a rising trend. It's pretty weird.

I don’t think the word for my condition is “reverence” or “submission.” It’s not that I’m afraid or feel wrong about giving myself a pose. It’s that the longer I spend in this practice the more I feel the strength and sweetness of its master, SKPJ, and the way he’s personalized the method by transmitting it individually to so many. I don’t have any pretention to a personal relationship with the man and don’t regret this, but do have an increasing gratitude for the whole tradition. For me it’s not that learning from a teacher is “correct”: it’s that it is awfully sweet. And because much of my practice during my life will be without someone steeped in the subculture, I’m pooling my nostalgia around the obvious symbolic touchstones.

So! There I go shrouding power in foofy cultural nonsense in order to legitimate a hierarchy. That is actually a great counter-argument to everything I'm feeling. There exists the following criticism of the ashtanga method: that teachers become old-school hoarders of the crucial knowledge. That they dole it out in ways that increase their own authority and students’ practical dependence and emotional subservience. I take the point. I’ve not been subject to this kind of thing, though I am sure it happens. But the possibility of a messy dynamic is what I accept for the benefits of not having to administrate the program myself. For someone like me who lacks the kinesthetic brilliance to practice spontaneously in a way that is both quiet and challenges physical boundaries, administration is annoying mindstuff. It’s a gift when someone will do that pain-in-the-ass thinking and planning and fussing for me. This is why I see teaching so much more as service than as control.

I suppose this knowledge-hoarding criticism is most valid to those who see ashtanga as a set of postures rather than as a living tradition. If it’s just postures, then the method should be Do What Thou Wilt When Thou Wilt.

But it’s not a set of postures. It’s an entire subculture. Subculture without postures is tourism; postures without subculture is pilates. Or something like that.

Ashtanga’s a subculture the same as punk rock or skateboarding. And while I used to experience it with a vigorous curiosity, now I feel more like a sentimental old girl who thinks that for all its neuroses and pathologies, the more traditional ways are meaningful enough that I’d like to re-enact them the same way I do any other received tradition.

Maybe this is just what happens to you when you do the same exact thing day after day for too many years. You fall weirdly in love with all of it.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , social theory , spirituality

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?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

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?

 

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

This is What Democracy Looks Like · 26 October 2007

● In the Authoritarianism is Old School news category, an MIT professor has issued a manifesto against bloggers commenting on papers presented in the workshop he organizes. Because, you know, we wouldn’t want the people reading online about what happens behind closed ivory tower doors in Cambridge. Academics have "rights."

Elitist.

Welcome to information age, Sir.

● In completely unrelated news, this week an ashtanga teacher quoted Sutra 1.11--

A yogi desirous of success should keep the knowledge of Hatha Yoga secret.

--to a blogging student, suggesting she not discuss her experience with others.

Nice try.

● Meanwhile in the ashtangosphere, there’s been excellent discussion this week this week about liberals and conservatives (boom boom boom boom). On this score I am a liberal who appears every bit the conservative. Others are true conservatives who outwardly look to be liberals.

In my case, I play along with the method in order to simplify my life and my mind, to support others on the same road without distracting them, and to respect a crazy brilliant tradition. Not because I believe the rules are true, or that people who follow them closely are better.

I take heart in this discussion because it shows how simple conversation denatures the sectarianism that’s strengthened by closed doors. The most liberal practitioners here in the post-authoritarian world have strong community with the most conservative.

Hello. 

The question for us is always 'how can we turn information into transformation?' How can we use the sacred texts to lead people into new places with God, with life, with themselves?

-Richard Rohr 

Let a hundred flowers bloom.              

-Richard Rorty

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , social theory

Fall · 7 October 2007

Textpattern went on strike this week. It’s a young program and still wily, but I like that. Having this outlet sealed off ought to have narrowed my life right down, but it did not. Turns out that I have a long way to go before I achieve sociological one-pointedness (thank god: I’ve witnessed what damage that can do to a person). Conclusion: it helps to have this bin for orthogonal thoughts.

Thanks to those of you who asked whether I was allright, fussed about the error message (for those who do not want to hear there are multiple errors in your root elements, maybe you need to work on that), and especially for the generous offer of server space.

Anyway. It is fall.

I keep taking people for walks on the palisades. It’s the time of year you can see Catalina Island in detail. I am listening to Bat for Lashes, eating pomegranates, and going tonight to the premiere of Control, the Joy Division biopic. Should be good and dreary.

Meantime, am looking for autumn-appropriate occult reading for bedtime. (I think it’s in A Whistling Woman where A.S. Byatt has the gorgeous tangent about November being for creepy fairytales, but I prefer the Editor’s version. A good scientist, he tends to go in for the dark side of rationalism in the fall. But he’s already advised me not to reveal what embarrassing creepy Alastair Crowley nonsense he’s been bringing home from the library this week.) This brings me to the questions DZM sent over, about books. So, ok: no playing around here.

In other news, my parents (who are obsessed with National Parks and frightened by The Urban—the first time they visited me in LA someone stole my dad’s Bible out of their car) just announced they have a conference week after next in San Diego. They asked if I’d meet them next weekend in my choice of the three following locations: Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, Torrey Pines. Real difficult decision there.

Not that the Canyon and the Desert don’t have their charms.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , social theory , sound , 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!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [24]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXV · 22 September 2007

I accidentally flew first class back into Los Angeles late-late on Monday. And for the first time after this restless desultory summer, it feels like a place I want to stay for a while.

So now I will go down to the workshop and construct a machine. This is my life for fall: practice, research, write, relate, sleep, repeat.

Clockwork is what I want. Small little interlocking orbits. From which novelty is meant to emerge.

I don’t know if the machine will work as intended. 

As for Colorado, I’m not going to write about my grandmothers whose selves are shrinking, my 87-year-old grandfathers who are becoming the sweetest caregivers, the avuncular difficulties (me too, ESJ), the good cousins plus the horribly criminal one, or the pair of ghosts that haunted all family events. The trip was a body blow, but not in a bad way. I need to get reality-checked like that sometimes.

Except I could have done without all the Nabisco. That’s the thing about working class roots.

Monday I practiced in Boulder, which contrary to my expectation did not make me want to ply the U of C for a job next year. So much for expectations. But my perfect brother and I did have a good lunch outside on Pearl Street after the rain, and then drove the Hyundai back to DIA. In the Avis shuttle I hugged him and his three bags of Telluride Film Fest paraphernalia, and sent him off to a three month artist residency in Paris. That part is always a little wrenching.

By the way, that last post generated more stats (189 distinct visits a day? Who are you silent people?) and more off-blog email contacts than anything heretofore published here at IO. Maybe it’s just the gossip factor, as Tiff experienced a while back. Or maybe there needs to be a support group on the subject.

Saturday links, for the first time in a while:

? So I keep watching the trailer for Southland Tales. Mike Davis apocalypse-ness with Wm. Gibson plot devices, Pixies soundtrack, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s flashy teeth, dystopic Los Angeles, choppy reality TV edits and gratuitous color saturation. And, if you are into that, a side of Justin Timberlake.

? Podcast for AF et al. Robert Spellman discusses the “key distinction between the theoretical and the yogic, and how that distinction relates to artistic practice.” Bear with the first few minutes of ham-handed metaphysics, because afterwards he discusses how practice can render a “clarity and accuracy of being.” Good thoughts about the different ways shamatha (one-pointed) and vipassana (insight) methods interact with artistic process. He quotes Chogyam Trumka that vipassana introduces the conceptual mind back into meditation after that mode of thought has been set aside for a period of time.

Spellman seems a reader of John Dewey, which is nice. This marriage of pragmatism and contemplative practice hits close to home.

If the above is inspiring, Anna Douglas has some talks up at Dharma Seed. I have not listened to them, but her understanding of meditation and creative process is interesting and sort of deep. She is a doctor of psychology who has practiced vipassana for 25 years and shows strong Zen leanings.

? I decided to link my Goodreads profile here (also in sidebar) in order to encourage myself to keep it current. Hey you: get in, be a friend.

? Funny entry in the geekipedia: Collins-Dawkins Faith Smackdown.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , spirituality

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

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXII · 19 August 2007

I’m just getting reaccustomed to the Southern California light. Anything more than a week away, and I wind up in Los Angeles-loving homecoming mode for days upon return. New York is perfect, though. I spoke a couple of times at the ASA conference, and it was not too disastrous. I’m trying to find a way to deal with speaking and teaching now that my bs bravado, which used to win prizes for impromptu speaking, has deserted me. I’m still pretty wobbly and adrenaline-wracked on stage, but I think it’s because I’m trying to communicate rather than perform. So I’m trying to to be patient instead of horrified by my own amateruity. In all, ASA has a way of reinvesting me in its world. I had an almost-four hour dinner with a big deal professor I’d never met before, and sort of fell for her. In the third hour, Tim Robbins walked through and when I bolted upright in response to a second’s eye contact (wow) she shrugged and told me to go back to what I’d been saying.

I practiced many times, and it was good. Met briefly the light and nympho genius boodiba, who gave me homework to improve my UKK-B, but repeatedly missed REW due to my gravitation away from (absent) Eddie’s and toward G and the excellent showers at YS. G introduced himself by criticizing my backwards supta vajrasana (I do it crim some days to ease the torqued lumbar), then put his hands on my sacrum and moved it brilliantly. That’s hours of bodywork I’ve been putting off, I thought. Worth the trip in itself.

Saturday afternoon, I skipped the conference’s key social event, where I’d only raise suspicion with my sobriety and meatlessness, and did a supposedly 3-hour workshop with Dharma Mittra that stretched past 9 pm. I think the experience deserves a review in this space, when I get a chance to recollect it.

Yesterday was our 7-year anniversary. He offered Encinitas, but I was still in LA reintegration space. Before dessert at some French café, we went to The Majestic for a terrible swords and sandals epic which I thoroughly enjoyed (the whole genre is so wrong, and I love it).

Then he finally showed me to the beautiful secret cemetery, hidden among highrises and accessible only through a long unmarked drive that appears to enter a parking structure, where various celebrities have plots waiting. Ray Bradbury, The Fonz, etc. For all my sincerity about it, I have to grant there is something kitchy about a secret garden whose entrance is marked by the sentrylike individual mausoleum of Armand Hammer. There are real-live dead celebrities there too. Billy Wilder’s headstone says “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.” Someone had left fresh flowers for Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. The undead Jack Lemmon’s stone is engraved only with “in”—I suppose because it’s morbid to inscribe the “Rest” and “Peace” until the time comes.

Weekend links now.

? MIA’s record is officially out on Tuesday. Good to see some uncynical attention this time. Screw Pitchfork. Christgau’s review: “The eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam M.I.A. has constructed is an art music whose concept recalls the Clash.” Also, South Asia-o-philes will appreciate her Jimmy images.

? China tells the living Buddhas of Tibet they must obtain permission to reincarnate! “The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid.” Read this article.

? The new Wm. Gibson book is pretty good, although for the hawkeye humor of his prose—he nails lines with the shrugging precision that Mr. Miyagi nails boards—it felt a bit thin. Still, while Gibson’s surfaces leave me cold, I increasingly feel in love with his subconscious. Here he is talking about process in Salon, and here’s a tribute website to Spook Country that goes a little far.

? More UCLA work on mirror neurons, this time their role in successful advertising. Crazy.

? Really good article by Jaron Lanier, whose idea of spirituality is “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions,” on the Dawkins project. He writes:

It isn’t disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way.... A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs…. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God…. Because people are afraid to die, they sometimes find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. Take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Owl In New York · 8 August 2007

Tomorrow, Manhattan.

(Just picked up the new William Gibson to read en route. Germane reading material, I anticipate. Will touch the earth, in the zen sense, for DZM when I land briefly at Sky Harbor. That oddest of places with the SciFi name.)

God I love New York. 

Friday, a conference at Columbia on consumerism and consumption.

That should be amusing. People who wear dockers and don't watch TV (I fit exactly one of these categories) talking about why others buy. Incidentally, I'm also into market research lately. To fill in the picture from the, well, Cayce Pollard side of things. 

Then: four solid days of the American Sociological Association, the main disciplinary conference where we enact all the rituals that tell us who we are as professionals, and establish the hierarchies, and posture like hell…, and in the meantime share ideas, get a handle on the leading edges, rub shoulders with people whose books have taught us much. Yes, I’m ambivalent. I don’t speak until Tuesday afternoon, by which time we’ll all be deeply wound inside this straaaaange world of thinking and interacting.

I’m looking forward, in a snarky way, to a wine a cheese reception entitled “Sociologists meet New York activists” as well as a presentation about how mindfulness practice is the handmaiden of the “late-capitalist” cult of self-creation. We’ll see if either is sufficiently bad to be blogworthy.

I’m also looking forward to thunderstorms, if any remain. God that would be a nice release; and besides, that torque of barometric pressure the seaboard builds up in summertime can make me a little weird.

As for the yoga. Yes. In addition to the astanga in the land of plenty (though I hear several teachers are in Mysore now?), I’m eyeing a Mark Whitwell workshop, Alan Finger the chakra guy with the inappropriate name, and Dharma Mittra’s midday masterclass. Since there are about 50 sessions going on at once at the ASA, sporadic disappearance will be achievable.

Colleague: I didn’t see you in the Global Supply Chains session?

Owl: No, I caught a different session. Brilliant.

Then… house-sitting some professors’ place up in Washington Heights for a few excellent excellent days before coming back west in time for Jury Duty the week after next. Of all things. Thanks for reeling me in there, Los Angeles Superior Court.

I’m a most quiet, clean, extremely grateful house-sitter who loves plants and pets and benefits immeasurably from a refreshing place to be a silent little writing ghost for a few days while you’re off in the mountains. All I do is sit at the dining room table with the notebook, take meditation breaks on the living room floor. I leave gourmet cheeses and nut butters and Green & Blacks in the fridge when I go. I pacify your cats because they secretly miss you.

Just so you know. Because for weeks I’ve been itching to get off campus and take my work on the road, and I’m free from teaching all the coming year. I’ve not much mentioned it here, but restlessness has overtaken me in a way that hasn’t been seen since August of ’99. It’s a little intense. I’m listening to Gordon Lightfoot and doing flickr searches for Reykjavik and thinking about storage units.

My father in law wanted to know the exact dates of the NYC trip so that he could mark it on his calendar to pray about it. (Christian fundamentalists do fear the place.)

God bless you, New York. And thank you for taking me in.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , science , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XIX · 21 July 2007

Allright. Today I’m abstracting 12 law journal articles—on the WTO, labor standards and environmental regulation—for a globalization archive. Very nice to get paid for reading the intimate details of a history I need to know anyway. But: no relief to the suspicion that I'm not fully living these days.

These articles are thin if long, and I’m planning to skip the footnotes, so the work will not take much mental energy. I’ll unplug, put my head down, and push though.

The dissertation is different. It’s turning out that I periodically have to take a spin around the quad, or the coffee shop, (or the blogosphere) to keep it together. All that time the deskworker armies are “wasting” online? In some of us, I think it’s as much about vital mental recovery as it is pure effing off. (Not that effing off isn’t the half of it.) Daily, I can pull off at best a couple of two-hour periods of deep concentration. The rest is surfacy, frenetic administrivia, and thus benefits from breaks to walk around talking out sentences, envisioning little worlds. A lot of talking to myself, lately. During the surfacy hours, which seem awful, I am (below the surface) processing ideas, reflecting on data and (most importantly) recovering for the next writing session.

I have professors who can write a great book in a summer, meditation instructors who can sit for eight hours without going to pieces. In comparison, I have the mind of a child. Too bad there isn’t an academic shaktipat to bypass the ridiculous experience of learning how to do this rarefied, sober-ass practice. I have almost no experience of feeling hemmed in, negative, inept (and understand those who can't stand to see me frustrated)—maybe if I did I’d be less mystified by why this is hard, and better at rolling through it. Phhht. For one whose greatest flaw is impatience, this is the perfect design for madness. Swear to god.

Here’s some Saturday morning trawling, as per usual.

? The Editor likes to have the occasional almond butter sandwich, yet thinks I am 40 years too young for recycling the little bags. So yesterday I surprised him with a godawful sandwich transporter, just before (thanks to bindifry) I learned of a companion product. The bananaguard. J—Mr. Bento meets Americana? I’m considering waiting until they re-stock the glow in the dark model.

? Alex Grey: winking at the artworld, or naïve representationalist? AF blogs the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, with photos and veiled nostalgia for the pre-art school days.

There's something about the way that true believers work...: as if they've never been critiqued, that their ideas are worthy of a masturbatory squeeze into the consciousness of others without second consideration.

? Turns out “IO” is the Latin exclamation of joy, and the precursor of the exclamation point. More history of everyday sybols. 

? Two friends just went to see the hugging saint, Amma. They stood in line for hours for whatever it is she’s got. Here's what Salon has to say about it.

Innocuous and intimate, the hug is a brilliant gesture for a reputed saint to make, a cosmic download about compassion and connection delivered in a package that's about as challenging and exotic as a Hershey's kiss….

If humans are nothing more than neurologically programmed DNA machines, why not run sacred applications that bring happiness and meaning and active compassion?

The writing is hipster-anemic [“As a fan of alt-dolls and vinyl figures, I'd have to say the Amma dolls are pretty cool”], but not in a bad way. Nice quotations from Amma and great discussion of her transformation into a brand and marketing empire.

? I could be alone here, but am amused about Joe Bageant’s new insider-outsider ethnography (review) on returning to his redstate roots. Apocalyptic fundamentalism, anti-union wage slavery, xenophobia, poverty, the American Dream, the whole bit. Good argement that a community can make two responses to being marginalized and screwed over: revolt, or dive into patriotic myth.

? Nice HBR article on forecasting: The goal of forecasting is not to predict the future but to tell you what you need to know to take meaningful action in the present.

Prediction is possible only in a world in which events are preordained and no amount of action in the present can influence future outcomes. That world is the stuff of myth and superstition. The one we inhabit is different… the forecaster’s task is to map uncertainty, for in a world where our actions in the present influence the future, uncertainty is opportunity.

Comforting, under these circumstances. The author advises to hold strong opinions weakly, look back twice as far as you look forward, and to distrust the hope that revolution will arrive overnight because disappointment may lead to giving up in the moment right before the transformation actually arrives.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: arbitrage , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

Monads · 17 July 2007

Thanks to those who went in for the what is fashion? Rorschach test the other day. I didn’t give you anything to go on, and you turned up many good and unexpected bits. I have this tendency to seek puzzles and hidden ironies in the things humans do (think Freakonomics, the apotheosis of the academic gimmick), but there’s a non-ironic nub in the things you say: people simply want to beautify, to imitate the beautiful, to copy those around them, to create “in” language that both demarcates a group and demarcates an era.

University is about closing off most thought-worlds in order to nurture and perfect singular lines of reasoning. This makes paradigms robust, but closes the mind. Bringing the conversation here opens me up to charges that I’m assuming too much, that I’m saying nothing but stupid common sense, that I’m forgetting to see the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. Most days, the fact that organized society exists—that we’re not all anarchically killing each other but actually live together in crazy complex (beautiful) organization—blows my mind. But some days, here in the iron cage not only of bureaucracy but of extremely patterned thinking, I forget to be amazed. Could it be that our natural tendency is toward organization—not entrorpy? And that ingroup-outgroup dynamics are the primitive form of organization? Aaah, so.

The main reason I brought you this question is that I’m trying to think of what I might be missing about ethical consumerism movements—especially sweat-free campaigns and (less so) the new environmentalism of green industry and (cough) carbon offsetting. The obvious way to conceptualize this (at least green consumerism— sweat-free movements are harder to nail down) is as a social dilemma: we’re all gonna die when pollution chokes us out, so the best a girl can do is to encourage others to pollute less while herself covertly enjoying the “personal utility” of polluting. Moreover, she can use green consumerism as a coercive device— stigmatizing those who don’t practice it and motivating them to join the in crowd and do it. So it looks like a classic tragedy of the commons: individual rationality (using as much of the free resource as possible) leads to collective irrationality (we hit the margin and go extinct). Very Freakonomics.

Thing is, this doesn’t do it for me. First, it doesn’t help me understand why anyone would give a shit about their T-shirts coming from a sweatshop (whatever that is). And second, I don’t think most people really, practically, believe that we’re all gonna die from pollution. So I opened it up to see what people think about where imitation trends come from. I think the thing about existential anxiety and not wanting to be alone is pretty rich (and corresponds nicely with where neuroscience is going).

I can’t even begin to investigate this stuff, really, until I settle on a unit of analysis. Is it a society (whatever that is)? Is it individuals? Dis, with other tough-minded, clear-thinking individuals who see the social whole as equal to the sum of its parts, says: “Strictly speaking, groups themselves don’t think and act, individuals within groups do.”

Ok, yes. This is the part where I kiss your little typing fingers for letting the monads in by the back door. Monads! A decade ago The Editor and I discovered the little gremlins. I actually have no fricking idea what a monad is, but I do know that “monads have no windows.” What? Ok, so when I say a human is a monad, all I mean is that it’s a self-contained organism. When a human does something, all the “parts” of the human do it. They don’t get to do something else. When I take a bath, my spleen doesn’t get to stay out on the balcony. But, if there even is such a thing as a society, it definitely isn’t a monad. There’s not some dominant volition that necessarily takes its constituients to and fro without any say from the parts. Action at the level of a society just isn’t that clean: some of the subparts are joining the infantry but some are going to Canada. Some pursue only money, some art, and some would trade it all for an ounce of enlightenment. Or sex with Jon Stewart. It just makes more sense to try to explain and predict a monad’s (individual’s) movement than that of a society, especially if all a society is is a collection of monads.

Except, I would submit, it isn’t. Network theorists and biologists (the most cutting edge social thinkers in the game, I’ll admit) see groups as “emergent properties” of interactions. This has the advantages of being beautiful and of focusing analysis not so much on concrete individuals themselves as on the stuff they do. Groups aren’t made of people: they’re made of relationships. That’s a really great idea. And it’s great for explaining how groups form on, say, the playground or the internet. It’s all just interactions, over and over, and with time groups emerge.

Yet...this individual, processual version of reality doesn't work for everything. Would you study a school of fish like that? (Or junior high girls?) Or a dictatorship? A world trade agreement? A religion? Many groups are more than emergent: they’re institutionalized. We don’t reproduce them merely as individuals: we are born into them and die out of them and the group lives on. Stuff—like the weight of history, or the fact that groups aren’t made of homogenous or equal parts—gets lost when we say a trend is the aggregate of social actions.

I’m interested in what the regnant ideas can't account for with respect to something as irrational and bizarre as a bunch of US students making common cause with a bunch of Chinese workers. These people are monads… but have they through interaction created a kind of transitory group-level entity? Whose actions and efficacy are not reducible to those of its constitutients? (Mmm... Leibniz meets Whitehead.)

In case you missed it, the implicit question here is: what are the limitations of oneness?

I don’t know. A rote Marxist would say ethical consumerism is just the last gasp of late capitalism—a dialectical move to preserve the system just a little longer while it suffocates on its own contradictions. That’s a little too system-level to me: Capital, alas, is not exactly a monad. As usual, I’m trying to find a middle path between the view from above and that from below.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Fifteen for Thirty · 2 July 2007

Conspiracy theorist self: Holidays are power-written histories on the palimpsest of social memory—“Christmas” to cover for the solstice and “Easter” for the equinox, “Thanksgiving” to cover for smallpox, and “Memorial Day” for Mayday since the latter is so awfully dangerous.

Practical self: Ease up already. None of these “meanings” is inherent. Commemorate what you will.

The specifics of this life and the commitments I make with it take up most of my days. Given a break in the action, well, I’m going to create my own ritual out of it any way that I can. So I mourn this lifetaking warmaking entity and the red it’s spilt in the soil, even as I see I’m part of the red in its veins. There’s nothing for me to add to the national symbolic moment, which is pitch-perfect: GWB taking sweet old Pootie-poot for rides in daddy’s blue and white speedboat, pardoning the highest of criminals while they tool around the summer waters.

So that’s already perfect without me. I’ll make this day about a historical memory less symbolic and abstract—not of a country, but of one small coming-of-age inside it. For me, the Fourth is the watermark of every given summer, the arbitrary date I use to mark off the year in the little bedpost of this individual human history. Here’s the arc of the last 15 of 30, so I’ll have them for my own archives.

1992: Estes Park vicinity, Colorado. I make Grandpa mad when I use the campground bathroom to curl my hair. Waste of time and electricity! The six of us eat tacos in our little egg-shaped fiberglass Scamper. Off to fireworks in Granby.

1993: Colorado Springs, top of Fillmore Hill. Mom asks me to go up alone to watch the fireworks, and gives a desperate lecture against my Mormon boyfriend, TB. Then we are quiet. She doesn’t ask if I am drinking (TB is president of SADD—and the fact that this keeps me from driving drunk while my skills are at their least developed is a blessing she’ll never know, outweighing the Mormon tincture that will always be on my soul). For once in the face of efforts to control my sexuality, I don’t talk back. Because she is desperate, and there is something different in her voice. She knows her control is running out. I’m no longer oppositional, taking her guidelines as a point of departure. Rather, I’m turning independent; and this is boundless and awful. That night together is quiet and still and full of misunderstanding, as we sit on the hill where my dad used to dig up arrowheads as a boy.

1994: Laurel, MT, with J. Sit in her old red Subaru wagon, in which I used to lift up the gearshift-cover and watch the road go by beneath, and drink. Best place to watch the show is from the edge of the cemetery atop the hill outside of town. It’s close enough to hear the drunken emcee on the PA system out on the high school baseball field, announcing which local business donated each individual pyrotechnic. For the finale, financed by Exxon (whose local refinery is the most polluting in the country, because MT has effectively no environmental regulations), they blare Born in the USA and everyone in town sings their hearts out.

1995: Laurel, MT, this time with TL. Same spot on the cemetery. Same emcee. Twenty feet away, the QB and one of the super-athletic farmboys are parked in a Ford F-350, drinking and repeatedly playing “What’s Going On?” by 4 Non Blondes. TL (my second straightedge boyfriend) in his mail-order skate shoes and oversize clothes from the back pages of Thrasher, and his tricked-out Civic that nobody in town understands, grits his teeth and wants to hit them. If they only knew how ripped he is under all those strange clothes.

1996: Laurel, MT, now with G and R, right before I leave for Costa Rica. Again the cemetery. This year, singing the finale, I think I finally know what kind of song Born in the USA really is.

1997: Dillingham, AK. Skinnydipping with the fish-house crew in some warm shallow lake that goes for miles into the moraine. Then I stay up all night with TM, the swarthy auto-didact cold-storage foreman who would hold the ground until Editor had other ideas. The Pozos family (migrants from Guadalajara to Umatilla, and the heart of the fish-house operation) set off fireworks when the sun dips below the horizon for 30 minutes around 3 am. “How ‘bout them fireworks?”

1998: Washington, DC. The National Mall with M and a crowd of her Pakistani intellectual friends. We lie out under the obelisk with thousands of other interns. Metro back home to Falls Church is as packed as any third-world transit I’ve ever ridden. O, humanity!

1999: Portland and the Valley. Go to the party at the Rummel House, then met L on the Portland waterfront for fireworks. Sleep a bit in S’s empty apartment, then drive my Hyundai the 17 hours back to MT before boarding an airplane with a year’s-supply of malaria pills. Between Tri-Cities and Ritzville, Ray Suarez is doing a special episode of TOTN, on the history of the Hot Dog. When it finally fades to static, I think about how much I am going to miss Ray when I leave the country, and drive across the Hanford-radiated high desert writing out the utopia where my beloved Ray gets elected President of the United States. Later that year, they’d make him anchor of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Take what you can get.

2000: Just back from the tropics and staying with inlaws-to-be in the stunningly tacky, yet rich, consumeropolis of Beaverton. Drink good Willamette Valley wine in their jacuzzi adjacent the neighborhood park, listening to adolescent boys with firecrackers out in the cul-de-sac.

2001: Bellingham with A, K and R. Lie out in the grass in some idyllic park in the hills above a lake. Everyone speaking Spanish. Then to a party at a waterfront house in Bellingham—mom and pop professors are out of town. See the fireworks rising above Anacortes on the drive back home to Seattle.

2002: Granada, Espana. Perfect echo of ‘98, there in the seat of a previous empire. Walk all over the Albacyn, and watch a huge red sun set over the mountains to the northwest. Read about Ferdinand and Isabella, eating peaches and pears.

2003: K, G, R, and I walk all over the LA Marina looking for our friends. Pre-cellphone days. Set up on the beach south of the canals and picnic among the crowds anyway. Head full of sand after lying back to watch the show.

2004: Koreatown Rooftop. Ten or twelve stories up for a “white trash” event whose Evite title is “They Hate Our Freedom.” We celebrate accordingly with wine coolers (Coors would be going too far) amazing vegan beans ‘n’ franks, and my not-so-vegan (but artistic) flag Jell-o. Later I feel like a jerk for satirizing the Born in the USA scene with a bunch of people who graduated from Amherst and Smith. Talk about anemic hipster cynicism. The fireworks panorama—from Compton on the south to the Hollywood Hills on the north, the Marina on the west to Echo Park on the east… and more importantly from half the rooftops in Koreatown—makes up for it.

2005: Hungover from the Marina mixup and “They Hate Our Freedom,” R and I leave town ISO something rootsier. Picnic according to habit in the park above Ventura, and then stumble on the last bits of the annual 4^th of July Ventura Street Fair downtown. Pledge to return.

2006: Just off a week of noble silence at Spirit Rock, I stay four days in somebody’s beautiful house on Portrero Hill. Their office is mine for the writing as long as they’re off in Chicago; and after the joy and peace of retreat I’m not ready to leave the Bay. On the morning of the 4^th, I ease off the ambient soundtrack and let Dangermouse take me to practice downtown, then spend the day alternately writing and walking the dead streets of Portrero, to listen to the hollers of the World Cup watchers waft out from the row-houses. The only flags are those of the soccer teams in the running, and not so much as a bottle rocket flies through the dead-quiet, post-game night.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
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.

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

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?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Having Objects, Having a Body · 29 May 2007

So on Friday, Chris and I edged out of a nighttime reception at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and made up the escalator for the South and Southeast Asian galleries. Chris is the best companion for this kind of thing, since strapped with the most serious antiquities fetish I’ve ever witnessed, and because his talk is sharp and attentive and wryly clever. An historian, he’s writing a book on the half-forgotten American plunderer who “discovered” Macchu Picchu and packed off its riches to Yale University. In this age of crocodile tears for colonial sins (Harvard, the Getty, the South), Yale alone knows better than to undo the secrets of its own primitive accumulation, and so sits on its Peruvian treasures with the excuse that it paid for them back in the day. Interesting questions: patrimony and who owns it, the price of culture, the justice of market exchanges between such unequal parties. All this achatter in my consciousness, ascending on the escalator...

…and then we step into the museum-dim that is supposed to hood your perception—curate and domesticate it—and make modern whatever primitive, realer-than-real THING it pretends to offer for our dithering, sentimental edification…

And there’s Siva, four feet tall in sandstone and under those soft supposedly-harmless lights, surely more gorgeous than the first day he was carved. The THING pulls the plug on our banter. Something like nirodhah happens for the duration of a gulp.

O, goddam. Screw curation. That belongs in a museum, my foot.

And screw modernism, for the moment. Smarmy Singer-Sargeant, lame lame Monet: all this stuff intended to look good on the walls of the well-heeled, or in the postmodern cases simply unable to resist their own domestication, despite “subversive” intentions.

How often is it that a thing hits you cold like that? Maybe it’s just that Siva is stalking me now—tomorrow, for the first time in two months, I’ll face up to his terrible aspect, Bhairvasana, and the others—but even if I were safe from Siva, I think this chunk of sandstone would undo me a little. I think the yoga makes me receptive to, even credulous in, what the thing might have to say. For the superficiality of my engagement with the Indian myths (and superficial is all it will ever be), their effect is still interesting—and potent. “Art” doesn’t often know how to go to that place even when we want it to: it’s just there to comment on something, or to be appreciated, or to suggest the brilliance of its “creator,” or—let’s face it—to occupy space. Seriously: claiming to “get” most contemporary art is like claiming to “get” the emptiest passages of Derrida. And the whole stupid anthropology of museumification doesn’t exactly facilitate transformational aesthetic experiences: professional mothballers don’t exactly move from their guts.

Or… maybe I’m jaded, and a good dose of the ancient is my only hope.

I’d think so, but a strange thing actually happened last week between myself and an overt-avant mass of plastic and cardboard at the Brentwood Getty. A gimmicky, pandering installation piece, which left my brother the postmodern artist unmoved, made me want to cry. (Albeit not actually cry: maybe the best that contempo art can do is make us want to feel—itself a mediated response.)

This THING, Tim Hawkinson’s Uberorgan, is so damn wonderful. You walk inside it half-knowing, because it’s suspended in the atrium-now-peritoneum of the hilltop building—where glass and perfect Greek marble reflect and re-reflect the clarified white smog to encase you in unreal, heavenly brightness. In the midst of this, the billowing white plastic bellows of the Uberorgan are just one more strange membrane. But you stand under it, on the marble floor, and its shapes start to seem sensible—you see a giant white liver, an opaque stomach, and a heart. You’re so interested that when the Chuck E. Cheese factor kicks in, suddenly transforming the bodily “organs” into an organ, instead of getting caught in the pun, you yourself are transformed by it. The organ is bellowing, making an ultra-bass kind of whalesong that shouldn’t be possible for air pushed through giant plastic bags fitted with awkward cardboard pipes. The sound makes you be in the membrane, observe the functioning of the organ/organs like a living, digesting thing. It incorporates you, digests you a little. When the music stops, you’re like the idiot in a game of musical chairs, standing under the billows with a stupid wonderment that, like all postmodern experience, turns into an writeoff when you lower your head and make eye contact with all the others who, at the same moment as you, are getting and shrugging off the joke.

So the Uberorgan trivializes itself at the end of the day, but if you are in Los Angeles before September, you must experience it. If you liked Innerspace, you’ll love the Uberorgan.

Anyway, in these cases, there wasn’t much difference in my delight between a dead-serious god statue and a deadpan plastic organ. Odd, really.

I think the common passion here (if passion is a “capacity to be moved,” as the other ancients would have it) is the having-a-body practice: the yoga, for all its tendencies to strip down and dust off my inner and outer life, is shaping my experience of having-a-world. And the art that clearly speaks to the way I have-a-world somehow points to the physical practice—either its evocative history or its more literal inner pleasures.

CJ’s return to Sartre this week reminds me of his associate Merleau-Ponty’s every-other-page refrain: I have objects because I have a body. That may miss quite a bit, considering that M-P’s idea of “body” was purely physical and there’s plenty about a body that’s subtle and energetic too. But there is something to be said for objects that go for the viscera: if a thing cannot go to that place—pity. If it can, I’m ready to call it art.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

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. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Scientific Disposition · 15 May 2007

A mentor sent over a freshly minted syllabus this morning. At the bottom, he’s printed a kind of empiricist’s creed, straight from Shakyamuni Buddha.

Not something you see in the university too often, even though it’s so harmonious with the disposition of scientific research. If only social scientists would take the time to flesh out our standards for evidence and our working assumptions so clearly.

Rely not on the teacher, but on the teaching.

Rely not on the words of the teaching, but on the spirit of the words.

Rely not on theory, but on experience.

Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.

Do not believe in traditions merely because they have been handed down for many generations.

Do not believe anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many.

Do not believe in anything simply because it is written in your books.

Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.

But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and the benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: science , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , 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....

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [6]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , morality , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 5 May 2007

Today’s extra four hours of sleep brought to me by: the American Sociological Association, Air France (“please keep your eye cover, with our compliments"), and... the Quadratus Lumborum.

Managing to sleep past dawn is reason to celebrate, but there’s a large chink in my equanimity. It’s going on five weeks without the endorphin-levels I’ve come to take for granted: 15 or so deep backbends a day make a big difference when they go away. Practice is the province of a different body, which today has me in a strop. Anyway, a few Saturday links, as usual:

? Christianity catches The Secret.

This is truly amazing: conservative Christians were unlikely to buy into the “law of attraction,” both because it signals the dreaded “new age” thinking, and because it directly contradicts the “God is in control” cosmology. But I guess there is no limit to how far a self-serving idea will travel. And, if it brings on some gratitude practice, so much the better.

? Speaking of syncretism: punk rock yoga. More punk than yoga. 

? Vanity Fair has a spread of airbrushed photos of “leading lights” of yoga. A few of them are very nice, but overall: Godhelpus. Not linking it, so google at will. Apparently this is part of their championing of ethical consumerism, which culminated in last month's "Green Issue." Commodify your good intentions!

? Are you wise? A sociologist’s scorecard.

? TLS review of the new book Inequality.com, which critically examines the potential for the web to foster news kinds of democracy and social equality.

In a clever reading of McLuhan, the authors suggest that his famous term the “global village” should be read less as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of far-flung places than as a forecast of the 360-degree surveillance.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , social theory

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Saturday VII · 25 March 2007

? Guns and Yoga, in the NYT. It does take a Burbank day in the life to bring the together phrases "namaste" and "lock and load." 

I was the only guy in the yoga class…. they know they had a rifle-eyed street panther in their midst? .... Like the legless, armless silhouette I shot at earlier that day, I had holes of self-loathing blasted out of me. My Corpse Pose must’ve looked eerily authentic…. All these thoughts whizzed through my head like tracer bullets as I lay there, in the evening gloom of the studio, with a dozen moms breathing mom-breaths around me. I floated out of my body. I hovered over Burbank. I was one with my target, and my target was bliss. Namaste. Lock and load. 

It's gross to get off on the idea of shooting anybody, there being a war on. But looking for meaning in Burbank, the author might have limited starting points. And he writes pretty good.

? NYT science article on the argument that morality’s rooted in our biology, and that four behaviors—empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking—are the basis of sociality. This evolutionary perspective is a bad bad threat to the last 200 years of social theory, which assumes that social life is a product of human creativity and institutions. I’m deeply bought into this legacy, but sometimes the evolutionary stuff is sexy. For example:

Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are….” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But… natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people… with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.
 

? Segment of This American Life, the  AV version. How does the moving image enhance this word-dependent narrative about… the moving image? Not enough to make me learn how to turn on my television. Or sit still for the rest of the show.

(Michael Leunig sounds like an old crabapple talking about television and relationship, but I have to admit it’s about that simple to me as well. No need for social theory on this one.)

? Smart review in the TLS of Mick Mann’s ethnic cleansing book, in which Mann argues that it is not African or Balkan nations but democratic countries that are responsible for “the most successful cleansing the world may have ever seen.” His examples: the US, which saw an 80% drop in its Native American population, and Australia, where 90% of Aborigenes died, in both cases mostly during the 1800s and early 1900s. No shit. This recollection suddenly puts these rich “white” nations’ liberal, missionary zeal in serious question.

? Am ambivalent about Susan Sontag, but not about Jenny Diski, who reviews a new Sontag collection and an Annie Liebowitz photo book in the LRB. The second half, on the photographs, is great.

A new S quotation:

I am often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonise over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’ Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue. For instance: ‘Be serious.’ By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

And an old one:

I like to feel dumb. It’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday VI · 18 March 2007

Uh oh. Interesting proposal in my in-box this morning, to assist a philosophy of science class next quarter—a small honors seminar. The prof is a chemist-philosopher who has written a great deal on the (very exciting) periodic table, and has a way of shredding those who poach physics to substantiate the claim that everything is connected. Given that I use sociology to make that claim, this endeavor would sharpen my schtick. And it would take me back to my undergrad years, of running the philosophy club (very Secret History) and writing papers on truth-claims of the Institute for Creation Research.

I ought give thanks for my grants and focus on the dissertation, but I haven’t taught for nearly a year and it itches. And I don’t have a strong practice of saying no, in general. We’ll see how the schedules mesh.

Meantime, since yesterday morning got away from me, here’s the usual Saturday sweep, a morning late. Hope all is well with you all.

? New issue this week of of democratiya, “the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes.” Short reading-investment for decent context on global politics debates. The review of Saskia Sassen’s historical sociology is a bit awkward but covers key questions and ideas.

? The Guardian reviews Terry Eagleton’s new book. After all that overcooked lit crit, his popular writing (especially The Gatekeeper) has been delightfully smart and kitschily quotable. His new offering is on the meaning of life. What a public service.

? For an even more refined version The Secret, an infographic.

? This is amazing. Thic Nhat Hahn has returned to Vietnnam after 40 years of exile, fomenting Buddhist revival. For the ceremonies, “Marxists are invited to recite passages and statements from Marx which reflect his spirituality and his love for humanity.” That’s saying a lot, considering the so-called Marxism of the government that locked him out. SB, I thought you would be particularly inspired.

? William T. Vollman is one of the greatest writers writing, but he’ll be gone before he’s appreciated. He’s uncynically human, mercilessly so. Here’s the new book (& LAT Review), about poor people. Poor people In general. Bold guy.

? To see. Documentary arguing that “the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human.” It's a modern history of the rational actor model, the theory of action that makes mainstream econ and poli sci into such abstract-theoretical exercises that I got out of that business and into sociology. The film is only airing on BBC, but the linked article is a nice, practical overview of the theory, and an outline of the its worldly consequences. 

? Chris, T-shirts.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , 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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
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. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , science , self-deception , social theory , 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.”

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: integration , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Neurolinguistic Programming and Siva's Terrible Aspect · 5 February 2007

I just transcribed my notes from last week’s 90 minutes of ineffability, that is, from observing T’s good old vinyasa yoga class. When students were in a wide-legged forward fold with heads approaching or on the ground, here is what he said: “Lift your thighs as you press the feet down. Dig the shoulderblades in toward the chest and, if you want come into tripod, come on up. Stay with your breath: the quality of your breath is the quality of your practice.” 

With that unremarkable, almost parenthetical suggestion, one of the visiting dancers (whose gorgeous 15-minute solo to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on Saturday night put my date in near-ecstasy, though it was a little emotionally overwrought for me) lifted up like nothing into a headstand.

With apologies to third-rate 1990s anthropology (the “texts read us” school), the action did her. It was at least as natural as breath. I wondered for a second if my friend and teacher T was doing a Milton Erickson number on the class or had spent some time with the offspring of the genius. (That would be Richard Bandler, who turned neuro-linguistic programming into something unhelpfully interpretive, John Grinder, who used its magic for ill and destroyed himself, or the next generation like ultimate lifecoach Tony Robbins, who has distilled NLP technology into riches and cheese.) NLP, which builds on hypnosis, the practitioner’s intuitions, and the beauty of the possible, is a way of getting people out of their own way. It shortcuts our dumb cogitations and resistant-tense realities by integrating radical suggestion so into the fabric of taken for grantedness that we act upon it. Through this radical, unselfconscious action, we change our meager selves. (Not that I’ve spent a lot of time in the self-help genre. Though I hear it has its charms.)  

Echo that this morning, when I was instructed to take up “Siva’s terrible aspect,” a posture in honor of the diety’s skull-amulet-bearing, fratricidal side. Before putting myself into bhairvasana for the first time today—or rather, letting it take me into itself with another’s guidance—I had feared that it would be something of a long, slow trainwreck: a daily undertaking that could open up my sacroiliac joints to an unsustainable gape. Make me a bag of ligamentless bones by 50. A year ago, maybe; but my body’s been tilled for for this and it’s simply a nice, new little habit that takes me to a previously unknown part of myself. It shows me to a minor place, in a sense, but a good and joyous one.  

I can say this only because the way the posture was given made it second nature, if not downright natural.This is because the teacher, my teacher for the season, deeply understands the power of suggestion, and how to relate with a student in or near beta state to create an easy and beautiful reality out of our weirdest possibilities. Not only is this teacher on to the NLP (a comment about establishing rapport the first day made me suspicious), but he just doesn’t complicate the yoga.  

It’s so easy for any teacher to revive and rehash her own students’ resistances to authority and needs for attention—the dynamics we learn with our first teachers, our parents—into the learning relationship. This bit of baggage can be incredibly subtle, present in even the most beautiful student-teacher dynamics. Even after years of observing and draining the blood out of my bodymemory of being an authoritarian-preacher’s kid, I sometimes feel these seeds sprout up as I interact with my gracious mentors, or sit one of my own students down in my university office. 

But this morning’s teaching was uncomplicated with such stumblingblocks, with which we sometimes decorate reality so-defined. This is a gift, one this particular teacher both exhibits and bestows. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound

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.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory

Prolegomena to any future manifesto · 25 January 2007

I. Matthew K says he didn’t see this coming. Me neither. I’m blogging because slow deductive academia is giving me a cramp and because Charles J told me to do it while I while I was entering a suggestion-receptive state. (That is, in the 15 minute brain-wave stretch we learn to do on ourselves before astanga practice.) 

II. ANYWAY, more later on faith in academia and the hooey of hermetic seals, mentioned earlier. The Dawkins posse have rallied at the edges this year in the most brilliant way. It’s a belief-purge!! I love that they’re screaming at us to get serious, root out superstition, and take verificationism to the limit. And: they are delusional. But that’s another day. I still take their point that skizoid belief systems are common and problematic.

III. Attempts at cleverness after yoga practice:            

A----So, what kind of sociologist are you?

B----((Lost for words))

A----That is… are you a Durkheimean, or a Marxist?          

B----(((Mental images of fuzzy Marx peering over my shoulder))) A nondualist! 

Yeah. It’s just as easy to keep the practice in an airtight container. “Me time” for achievers. But what when it eventually turns fom a consolation for daily life into its baseline? Then you might want the easy way out – cultivating alienation from the day job, or quitting it, because you can’t feel “authentic” doing it anymore.  Whatever.

IV. There’s also the possibility of pushing back into intellectual life, and the empiricist limits its placed around mind, consciousness, morality and evolution. The edgy ones are doing that in a way that’s loaded to shoot up kind of a lot of previously serviceable theory—looking at things like evolving value systems, the social nature of selfhood, and…mind. This is the time for revolutions in everybody’s working assumptions on the nature of consciousness and self, for practitioners of both inner and outerworldly research. Daniel Kahneman gets it. The Dalai Lama gets it. So do you, friends, if you’ll suspend the hipsterism with me for a second. 

Science is more a disposition than a methodology.  “Research,” as much as it’s inspired by speculation and intuition, is the bracketing of (1) faith and of (2) authority.  Research is investigating, first hand albeit aided and undergirded by traditions, what is the case. Do you really want to leave that work, in any realm, to somebody else? 

So before you yell at me to please go back to talking about the nature of American Empire, class divisions and social boundaries, and the subversiveness of the journalism profession, let me say that I’m doing all that while having bought in to the woo woo. Which, at its best, has a way of burning off the bullshit, because if we’re just reliving dead inquiries (while consuming the same culture over and over), there are simply more important, revolutionary, inquiries to join. 

So, what about: consciousness (yours and, um, transpersonal); evolving value systems; the proposition that everything is connected; the social nature of self; the push and pull of experimental faith and, its near-enemy, self-deception (?). 

If I can make a leap across the lacuna the rest of this journal seeks to fill in, all this is why I’m thinking about... consumerism. I submit that consumerism, a pervasive habit of being now, is a mode self expression through affectation of cultural objects, contributing to both self-commodification and group-creation with others of like taste. With consuming being so dear to self-creation, it’s not shocking to see some moves to make it “ethical." To feel better about ourselves when the label says sweatshop free. Yet... maybe, for all its great logistical limits and its self-congratulation, this new, aestheticized social value forges new connections between humans, and actually changes not only our minds but our future. What's the relationship of social networks and personal identity/value, and the implications of such a relationship for, well, social structure?

On which more later. For now, let me note that for the love of Karl, changes in consciousness are, oddly, a subject I’m not quite welcome to discuss up in the tower when we sit around in our empiricist caps. That’s ok, because for the moment I’d rather work some thoughts out here, in everyday language that doesn’t have to wait four years to get published on some journal that 30 people will read, sitting defensively at their desks.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

The Hermetic Seal · 24 January 2007

This is an experiment in dissolution. My life is in two disciplines: academic analysis, and inner experiments. At the melding point, is the stew any good?  

Here is why I ask.  

Even for a breakout preacher’s kid, it’s not ok to look faith askance in the ivory tower.  Colleagues I love run tight poisson models of the probability of social protest, predicated on certain assumptions about the nature of the universe during bankers’ hours.  And then in the rest of life we have, unexamined, the belief, faith, meaning, and the morality, religion, conviction, habits, and relationships, entitlements and things we choose not to see… that are the conditions of our productivity.  Keeping things in their separate spheres.  Uncontaminated.  

Social science, where we’re more insecure about our truth claims than the natural scientists, can be a dry, 20^th century realm. Abstraction; deduction; certainty. Suspicious not just of metanarratives but of metaphysics, meaning, and definitely of mystery.

I’m not looking to bring matters of the spirit up to the ivory tower, or transfer the intellectual wonder of the latter into some folk realm of meaning. Those are two versions of arbitrage—bringing the ideas of over to the other. Great career-builder, arbitrage.  But neither the first—some taxonomy of consciousness—or the second—self-help for scientists—strikes me as all that great. 

Rather, my question is whether the two hemispheres of inquiry can, pulled to center, make a more interesting whole. Don’t know yet.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , science , social theory