Sambhav Sirsasana · 13 February 2011

In a world where the news of the week = new precision on mula bandha (“anus only, anus always!”) and a menu change at Sixth Main (the beautiful waiter will cross “Tandoori Vegetables” right off the menu in your hand if you won't stop ordering them), well... in this context, Sunday’s Led Intermediate is an event. Sorry, Mubarak. For Led Intermediate, there are spectators. Youtube films. There are practitioners who start talking about it a full day in advance; and the post-game commentary stretches to afternoon in some quarters.

The history we keep is one of “energy.” We tell stories about the aggressive days of the institution –when the old lions were in the room to show the new generations what shakti’s all about. Or the brutal days when SKPJ would stretch catvari to eternity. Or even older days in Encinitas, when you had to hold still in the hard postures while Guruji went around to adjust the other six people in the room and the Super 8 was rolling.

When I became a bit too excited about the old stories one morning back in Santa Monica, my teacher abruptly changed the subject. Come on. Wake up to this. These are the good old days.

In other words—1.1—now is yoga. Or: forget about the way we never were and give yourself to the way it is.

Good call for one who aestheticizes the past. While the boatloads of newer students suffer from culture shock, energy mis-management and supta kurmasana (but rarely forget to embrace the present moment), the intermediate crowd’s suffering lodges in another kosha. When we get weary, we empty our cups on nostalgia for different vibes, if not for younger bodies. (As if we weren’t all stiff and awkward back in our twenties.)

Suffering aside, I submit that we’re deep in salad days down here. A time of peace and soft yellow light. On Sundays, It’s practically afternoon (7:30) by the time Led Intermediate starts, so after a lie-in and a leisurely coffee hour, we mingle out front, chit-chatting up a storm while Saraswathi finishes her led class.

We love each other. We love being here. We love to practice.

Spectators gather in the vestibule: word is it’s a full house out there, though I wouldn’t know since I go way in to soft eyes in order to shorten my focal distance from the mat. But trust me on this: the laughs for people who flub technique are just rumor. The watchers feel inspired, focused and ever so civilized. Very day at the races. I want to give them pince-nez, fitted gloves, and mint juleps.

Speaking of which, Sharath and Saraswati cocktail during karandava. By mayurasana's ekam, we’ve all had a good long rest in bellyflop asana. But even rested, the peacock is the hardest pose to hold.

Sunday’s pre-practice mood contrasts hilariously with our previous meeting—Friday’s 4:15 led primary. By Friday mornings, to my eyes, we’re ground down to less loving and loveable selves. The crowd is largest for that class – the usual 4:15 crew plus another 30-60 (?) others whose start time is before 6:15. Thus the line-up outside the gates begins not at the usual 3:45 but—god knows—maybe closer to 3:00 in the morning.

Four a.m. may be brahma muhurta, but getting up in the 2:00 hour is just ludicrous. I don’t know how one would justify such behavior without drinking at least a little bit of the Kool-conuts, if you know what I mean. For most, it takes the form of coffee. But a naked, 2:30 am dance party with your cat also works to pre-func for the insane (and thus revealing) Friday ritual.

Anyway… come Sunday, the edge is buffed out. The intermediate kids are rested, fed, recreated and caffeinated. Last week, our newest initiate, in searching for a word to describe her first experience, selected: “Fun.” Exclamation point.

For sure. If we work an edge, it’s the slow finishing sequence, not kapo or croc or ut pluthihi. The karandava cocktail hour means everybody who needs one gets a flip up. And there are acres of mat space – an observer said there were 30 of us last week, a sliver more women than men. Maybe half of that number finished, while the others are gradually learning—or re-learning—the sequence.

Last week, it was only at the end that things got instructional—and the didactic bit wasn’t to do with technique or strength. We were subverted by other means.

Incidentally… my read is that practicing here is supposed to mess with stuff you take for granted about reality: notions of time, progress and entitlement are systematically scrambled. I say systematic because the practice works by being relentless. If there’s insight after the asanas have done their first layer of work (i.e., the chikitsa, or therapeudic opening, of primary; and the intermediate kundalini stuff we call nadi shodana), I’d suggest it happens because of the action of practice just keeps on rolling. The repetition churns on in to the emotional body, the relational self, the astral body, and I have no idea what else. But I suspect we only find out if we really do the internal practice... once the asanas become part of dailiness, like the coffee and the cat, and maybe the kids.

No wonder SKPJ would say don’t think about teaching until you’ve practiced a decade. No wonder Patanjali wrote that practice is only practice if it proceeds without breaks. Some commentaries on the Sutras note that ceasing practice is like setting yourself back to the beginning. You avoid whatever subtle challenge it took you all that relentless showing-up-for-it to uncover in the first place.

Anyway. Practicing in the shala is subversive, one way or another. For one thing, I swear the big clock on the wall changes by a few minutes every week. “Shala time” constantly throws me off. And within that framework, I lose my sense of duration. The best I can do is moor to 5-8 breaths in any given posture like that commitment is a rope to pull me through a a stormy (or calm) sea.

Here's a good fluctuation. Last Sunday, Sambhav ambled in to the room during finishing. At 3 or 4, he no longer totters (and yesterday during savasana he ran around whiffing a cricked bat waiting for his dad to come out of the office), but his voice is still the high, round-voweled warble of last year. I remember feeling impatient for a Dad who spent Sunday mornings tending a flock of devotees, so by default I interpret Sambhav’s interruptions as an assertion of his claim on Sharath’s time.

In any case, in the 15-count headstand that lasts forever, Sambhav decided to set his own rhythm. After Sharath’s tired tenor “Wuuuunnnn….,” the son piped up from the stage with “TooooooOOO?,” and before we could turn around the breath followed with a triumphant “TreeEEE!” Cuteness. Filled with happiness, I made an upside-down smile and stayed in drste. Then, a few moments later, “Wooouuun-teee!”: a holler that sounded as much like a safari bird call as it did a twenty or a fourty.

All this, and we're still exhaling… and then there’s the definitive tenor of “Twoooooo,” dropping low. The first time we've heard that voice since it intoned "One" back ages ago, before Sambhav jumped in.

Sambhav begins the variation again, his efforts to push the cadence forward now settling in to play between the bars. Another “Threeee….?" Then, venturing a "Fouuuuuuurh?! ForTEEN!! FIF-TEEN!” And then there’s a sound of jumping-boy excitement on the stage, and I’m lost for a breath or a year in the weightlessness of my sacrum drifting in to the anti-gravity column above the atlas bone.

And then Sharath, cueing inhalation and a sense of slow water-falling movement from the floating sacrum down the back of my spine, again toward the atlas: “Treeeeee…”. Ok, tree it is, Teacher. Growing some roots from the crown in to the “soft marble” of the floor and Prakash’s cave below.

It went on like that for a year or two, through a full 15 and then 10 (if I remember right?) in half-bend, and a final rise up for a breath before exhale down, don’t lift your head (i.e., roll straight from crown to forehead to protect your neck, and in the meantime refrain from peering around the room).

Afterwards over coconuts, a few of us mused that the new posture—Sambhav Sirsasana—was the seventh series version of headstand. In Sambhav Sirsasana, the father-character expresses as dispassionate discipline and clarity. It is not affected by annoyance, excessive discipline, or a need to criticize. It is not interested in labeling behaviors as “good” or “bad,” “intelligent,” “funny,” “cute,” “too loud,” or whatever. In steadiness, the root-count of Sambhav Sirsanasa just allows wild energies to arise, giving them space and time to play out.

Giving space. Giving time.

And within that: allowing the fluctuations to have their own is-ness...

what Nisagardatta would call suchness...

...what seventh series (toddlers or not) gives us back—after all that healing and purification—as specific, arbitrary, embraceable, and also let-go-able, beauty in the world.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , sound

Number · 24 December 2010

At four a.m., the morning of this year’s longest night, the half-eclipsed moon was huge, hazy and bright through the trees behind the house. I was up to do this thing I do twice a year on the solstices –108 surya namaskara. There’s no reason for the ritual—no magic or meaning at all. But there is rhythm.

It’s my second Michigan winter mala—or “garland” of 108. This year, my hair is several inches longer. So after the first few rounds, the braids find their own pendulum swing, rocking on the flexion of my cervical spine, parallel to each other, in the plane that slices by body from front to back. This week, my biceps were more sore than usual—maybe something to do with cleaning the basement (last year, I didn’t have a basement). My sacrum was more still – the deep structure of the pelvis has tightened up a bit lately—maybe something to do with walking around in this weather. And I felt much warmer. It’s hard to understand, now, the deep bone chill I felt exactly a year ago… or the accompanying fear that I might never get warm again. I see now that I’ve acclimated.

Lately (in solstice ritual-time, lately = the last year and a half), the full 108 takes 75 minutes. One breath in down-dog, modest transitions, no pauses. Tuesday, the body state-changed from solid to semi-liquid by number 20; and to my delight I broke a sweat in the seventies. Just a bit of mist rising from the chest and head, and toward the finish a sweat droplet traveling up and down my nose, up and down, up and down, gathering enough volume that I could catch in on my tongue in the third position of number 105. What’s that business about rubbing the sweat back in to your skin? Oh well, in any case it is good to be a liquid. And, in any case, solidity is also spirit.

As for gas, well… Mysore is a gas in more ways than one. Anyone care to vaporize?

Usually for counting the mala, I take some nearby object – keys, a tea light, a ring, and move it across the floorboards on each group of ten suryas. But this week within the floorboard framework I found myself counting one through ten aloud. First in English and then in the numbers more common to my experience of these motions: ekam, dve, trini, and so on.

Ashtanga practice is rhythm within rhythm within rhythm. The first pulse is constant: in-ex-in-ex-in-ex-so-ham-in-ex-ah-men-in-ex-up-down-sky-earth-in-ex-i-am-in-ex. The next two pulses are made of language, Sanskrit enclosing English. The nine positions of the surya namaskara sequence count off in Sanskrit, and within that, the long hold between shat (six) and sapta (seven) counts off as one two three four five. The Sanskrit-counted movements enclose the up/down breath rhythm: one movement per in-or-out breath. Meanwhile, English is the language that measures stillness. Five in down-dog, or a ten that lasts arbitrarily long when the teacher decides to take a pee between “seeaahvaahn” and “yeeight!” of the final hold in ut pluthihi.

For the mala, this year, I found myself counting one through ten, 10.8 times. Arms up to touched-thumbs, ekam. Next time through, dve. Continuing, trini. And so on through the most beautiful word, dexa, also represented as dasa. And back to ekam.

What with all that tick-tocking of the braids, and yo-yo boing of the cerebro-spinal fluid, and—god knows—the pulse across the individual nuclei of the cells—I got myself good and hypnotized after a few tens. On the fourth or fifth panca, sounding it aloud, I SWEAR I head the warble of tiny Sambhav—Sharath’s baby son, who pulls himself up next to his father during led intermediate and calls out his favorite number when it’s time. It comes off as a vowely, gigging, high-pitched “paaawnnn-cha!?” After which the gallery giggles and the rest of us, holding catvari, inhale gratefully to upward-facing.

As I continued, I realized that ekam-dve-trini belong in my mind to my teacher. Who else to imitate when first learning these strange words? I’ve just superimposed my inflections over his, as I do for the invocation. Catvari, though, is all ponderous-Boulder-bhakti. Who else? Richard Freeman has my catvari. And sapta belongs to Sharath. So many of the vinyasas in his led transition on a seven. Sapta-that’s-enough-down-dog. Sapta-inhale-right-leg. Sapta-get-a-move-on. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , sound

Snow globe · 13 December 2010

So the myth holds. Winter’s deep. It slows down water so you can see it as breath leaving your body and steam-clouds over tea. Water as ice shavings makes cone-hats on holly berries out front of professors’ homes. The sky is blue or pitch black, and the space between me and it is all layered in with brittle-fluffy branches. The snow-webs held up by these branches make a kind of atmosphere, though the air is thin. Two nests—bluejays and crows—are swept clean by wings; a third is drifted in and ready to topple.

Eyeballs ache. And it’s extremely quiet. If there is a train, or a door slamming in the next block, the sound is breaking and bone-clean. Beneath it, constant background-crackle: branches under snow making the same sound they do in a fire.

If I could dream a mothering world, it would be this. Being held in a huge, white-blue space. Being clearly—perfectly—heard. Yet staying mostly quiet against a white background noise. The physics of this place are such that nothing could smother you. There is clarity as a result of stillness. And when I’m here, the core of my body becomes sooooo warm—the depth of it can flash-heat four degree air to a nurturing 98.6 in the space of a trachea. This place is supersoft, but chill. I won’t stay forever. Or she won’t.

The usual question—It’s six am: do you know where your bandhas are?—has a really good new answer. In LA, the solution is to drive 85 on empty freeways, listening to root-lock blues-rock on the stereo. The Denial Twist served me six days a week one summer, all holler and kick drums, enough to help me deny that being addicted to driving is a problem. The denial on a motorbike is of a different sort: in Mysore, the answer is to work that bike from arches to adductors to the mulabandha after an hour of chanting sotto voce with the old guy-neighbor who does puja at 4. Pretend that the motorbike’s gas-tank is tied to the core of the Earth with an endless iron cord. Swing on that cord from your house to the shala: then the inner body will be awakeasitisgonnabe.

I thought the general formula was bass-drone singalong, plus fast vehicle, plus excitement to practice. But until I lash the planet halfway-around with planeflights (how long will I hurt the environment like this, as my practice?), the pre-ashtanga ritual involves little petroleum. Cover the body in four layers of animal warmth—silk, wool, cashmere, down. Affix enormous footwear. Then before town wakes up, kick through the night’s drifts. It’s too cold for singing, but the tree branches play an impressive minimalist electronica. After just a few minutes, the core of the body starts to simmer, and the foot-leg-pelvis system is greenlighted for whatever nonsense it first learned in the tropics. 

Same bandhas, same difference. Oh ashtanga, you make everything glamorous.

Friday night, a group of maybe 30 did a “strong determination sit” on the phone with Shinzen. He does not teach stick-to-itiveness through the mechanism of the will. At all. The instruction is not “decide not to move.” Nor “tear off your eyelids.” But: “scan your body for any kind of a restful state—even if it’s only in the silence of your auditory field—and give yourself to that rest.” Halfway through, another call beeped through the white headset noise. On retreat, the Shin-heads say that life is just a phonecall away, that is, your mindfulness is only as effective as it can be when you’re called away from retreat to some emergency. I received the call, expecting it to be big.

Both of my grandmothers went down this month. Dad’s mom—the one you know more about—a hip snapped. Her hip bone. She was reaching for a cat she’d rescued. And my mothers’s mom, 89 and kicking (in the pool, on the bike, at my shins like a champ when she says How about some lipstick?), a stroke. From horror to morphine.

The dreams are of giant animals that invade the world, and of a black Dodge Charger I drive under the railroad tracks in pitch dark.

Every night, shortly before I wake up, I stand at some dream-ocean and watch new animals roll toward me on the waves. (This happened so many nights that I broke down and started reading The Human Chain – Irish shudders, ancestors, and a watery underworld.) The dream-ocean has brought swarms of monkeys. Thieving rascals! Also, there was a gigantic squirrel. Very inauspicious. Saturday night, the waves brought in several college friends dressed as blue Teletubbies. (You had puffy triangles on your heads.) I don’t remember if this was bad or good.

Last night, a tribe of us stood naked on a sandstone cliff over the water. The sky was yellow-orange. When the animal came, it was an ancient rooster-pterodactyl, surfacing like a nuclear sub. It was white with red war-paint and a huge red beak. Instead of floating to shore, it rose up and just spun in the water like the garba-pindasana that precedes the rooster. Plunging its greedy, scythe-beak over and over in to the surf. The Editor held my hand and we shivered.

I thought I’d begun to feel grief with them in October, but I had no idea. Maybe I still have no idea; maybe this is already a lot. What’s happened these weeks is that life has spun me up in a series of weird membranes. The most notable was the Victim Sheath. I just woke up stuck in it one morning as a dream-animal (a giant spider) faded out. For three days, stuck in the membrane, I experienced every event in relationship, in the weather and in my body as a mild assault. Oh, practice felt like hard work. The weather has changed. Some people are making noise. There’s no more kale. How could they do this to me?

It felt like my nervous system had a self-pity itch it could not reach around and scratch. Self-pity is a pattern I have pitied in others, but now I feel what it would be like to live with that weakness. I am trading out the pity for a measure of been-there understanding.

The next layer was a more diffuse Loathing Sheath. Existence is loathsome. Practice exists. Relationship exists. Snow exists. I exist. Congress exists. Don’t you loathe them? Everyone loathes everything. It felt like the emotional system’s way of repelling stuff away from the chest—a set of reactions to feeling insufficient in myself and unsatisfied with the world.

The sheaths are permeable, and they unzip one after another like a series of body bags. But seeing them doesn’t make them just go poof. This is a little different from psychoanalysis, which in recent weeks has been full of vaporizings. I see a little pattern, objectify it, give it a chance to disappear. Sometimes—yes, it dies by the self-awareness laser. What’s left is psychological paydirt, revealed particularly well by life’s closing in to phone-call range.

It's pretty uncomfortable, but still, Owl Whisperer and I just cruise. I keep remembering those childhood winters of ice-skating for miles on the irrigation ditch: good sharp skates, but a meandering, out-of-control surface warped by pools of warm cow pee, frozen spillways, and the half-submerged carcasses of foxes the farmers would kill. I skate along miles and years a minute, just barely in control, sliding fast on a love of language.

Whisperer uses the a highlighter the shape of an eyebrow to makes rare interruptions. This calls attention to a denied feeling, displaced judgment or insane belief. It seems that Whisperer’s main interests are, in this order: mother, father, work, art, sex and death. I slip everywhere some days. Psyche-leakage. Slips cut through so much old, dense chatter, speeding the process along. Now that I’ve given myself to the method enough to let it catch me doing that, it responds supportively, mirroring back the secrets I keep from myself.

Thus that room—which manifests in three different offices (no, I didn’t say orifice, you louse), depending on the week—feels like a kind of honesty factory. That is, it’s a place where I create something like honesty by suturing self-understanding back together with my denial.

Whisperer slipped a few weeks back, with an “I” for a “he” that revealed counter-transference in the form of love. This is an icy method, a most impersonal way in to the psyche. But intimate. And so human. The last moments of each session become steady, unexpecting, and careful. Outside the afternoon snow usually falls without going anywhere, just hanging mid-air. I step out in to the crackling, open chill and feel more nurtured than ever.

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

Not About Bob · 30 October 2010

What counts as seeing god? Apparently, I have increasingly low standards.

When I hurried out of Thursday night Iyengar class—it is so nourishing to spend time every week with a master, and so much the better when her space is a desacralized church two blocks from my house—I brushed past a crusty, ugly-beautiful bum with a very straight spine and a crutch alongside his right leg. He had one of those steel-wool beards and eyes to match. I was already full of the feeling of going to see god (who is more god than Bob Dylan?), mistook the bum for the musician, took them both for god, and spent the rest of the night in rapture. But even for the distinctly rational Ann Arbor locals, and the Editor—who is saner than sane—it was a nadi shodana of a show. A show to lift every last shiver of spirit.

Hill Auditorium in winter is a great pumpkin. Coming from the cold and from Iyengar class—I filed in just as the lights went down. It was already steaming inside. Dylan—in a white hat that was a bowler, a fedora and a cowboy Stetson all at once; and in a dark tailored suit that fit him exactlylike an Adidas track suit and had purple racing stripes to match—was all swadisthana. American shapshifter, knowing us so much better than we know ourselves, on the road every night to educate people about their own music—or maybe just because it keeps him clean, gives him a workout, and builds in nightly high. If it’s the latter, what an ashtangi he’s become. The show is slick, clockwork-run, and quietly elaborate. Disciplined to the point of stable relaxation, if you know what I mean.

For anyone else, I’d see this particular tour, with its relatively large venues, as a machine to generate a fortune for the grandkids. But there's too much passion and method for a purely practical endeavor. He's too turned on. I suspect he's made this in to a framework to play with fascination.

In any case, even though the Dylan idol is the reason we bother to get together and the thing that keeps us focused so strongly on the music, he doesn't give a shit about being Bob Dylan. The mastery he gives off is the essence it being not about Bob.

In the old documentaries, he’s nauseatingly caught up in self-manufacture, in what ethnomethodologists would call doing being Bob. That narcissism, and the ironic shards of it that flicker in the documentaries of the older man, is gone from his body. He’s more accurately a curl in the upper lip and a figure-eight pattern in the hips. I honestly never knew that Rock and Roll was capable of the void.

Mostly, what I saw was the relationship of the hips and a series of instruments, just an incredibly vital, playful water chakra doing its spontaneous thing within a tightly structured playlist... and with the enormous intensity and focus of everyone down in the pumpkin-belly of the auditorium. And I saw that he is beautiful. Beautiful. No wonder models try so hard to be ugly.

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Categories: arbitrage , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

Apple Mysticism · 30 October 2010

Wednesday, 27 October

It was stupid beautiful this morning. Everything felt light after two days of headache, and last night’s dreams of myself as a Hawai’ian volcano. As a volcano, my high-altitude residents refused to evacuate in time for the rain of fire. When the eruption came, it was peaceful enough that these headstrong squatters had time to call their private jets. Off they flew. They were sad to go.

 

The temperature dropped twenty-five degrees from yesterday's 70 and won't get warm again til 2011. At the market, I’d just learned a new apple, the Mutsu (there’s a lady who teaches me one a week) when I was seduced. A lotus of kale in blues and dark greens, flowering around a soft bulb. Aromatic and bumpy, it brought a rush bizarre images related to communicating with a new species, and then ritually seasoning and roasting and eating it. To my politically correct horror, the Last of the Mohicans soundtrack cued up in the background (and continued to loop in my head for another hour). In this cabbage trance, I offered the grower any price he asked. “Two dollars? 

Blissed way beyond the functional horizon of my sociological mind, I took the next hour off. Dragged the Editor on a drive down the Huron River to Dexter, a village organized around a cider mill, a train stop, and cuteness. We drank warm cider on the riverbank. I even ate half a fresh cinnamon-apple donut. Advanced series is itself a mill: I’ve never asked it to press donuts in to fuel, but it’s burned through worse. [And it did great on Thursday morning—which turned out to be the first day to hint winter in the air, and the first day I not only started but finished practice in the pitch dark.]

Anyway, Huron River Drive. Ten miles of orange leaves, tasteful modernist homes placed in perfect relation to the land, glittering river bends bobbing in geese, and gusts of wind made visible by thousands of tiny yellow leaves. While we were drinking cider, a possum or raccoon died violently in the road. On our return, it was still freshly mangled, pulsing before the ooze set in. Two vultures—one of them enormous—looked at our car the way Richard Freeman looks down his nose in banker’s pose. Puh. When we slowed respectfully to a creep, they hoisted up through the bare trees like Falcours, out over the river. Looked back down their beaks at the Civic, such a clueless foreign species.

We were listening to the Witmark demos, Bob Dylan at an age younger than our undergrads, first recording the songs that still follow him. The recording is about 45 years old, officially released last week. Between tracks he complains—even then—that he sings these songs too often.

When we passed the vultures, it was the opening lines of Hard Rain: I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways…

The Editor muttered something about the Old Testament prophets and then we rounded back on the river. It spread way out in front of us, sparkly and a little blinding. I’m not joking that the chorus started as a wind-gust finally ended things for another big group of yellow leaves. It’s a hard, it’s a hard…

Ok, ok, ok. It’s supposed to get harder. And this is not unbeautiful. Where black is the color where none is the number… and I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it… but I’ll know my songs well before I start singin’…

I think that’s when my hatred and fear of Michigan winters—the depressive darkness I’ve been hating in anticipation for two years—just ended. Old frostbitten toes, ashtanga in the dark, having a life, eh. Existence won't fade yet.

Anyway, Dylan did have to get away from these songs. How could he not? They are just his version of poems you write as a kid. He disappeared in various ways. But now he’s back on in the medium-sized corners of America (tonight, Lansing), and just added a show for tomorrow in Ann Arbor. I’ll be there. We’ll see about the renewal and the decay.

I just read that the ancient Irish had a 3-day November-eve ritual. Samhain. A liminal time, welcoming but fighting the winter. The phase between November eve (the 31^st) and November 2^nd, it turns out, was full of spirit, mystery, fire, family reunion. Plus all kinds of divination based on… apples. Yes, apple divination.

On November 3^rd, you start again in the dark.  Funny, when I was small I didn’t know the date of my birthday apart from “three days after Halloween.” Dia de los Muertos worked for some years in Latin America. But this feels way more fertile and creepy: apples, cemetery walks, roadkill, vultures, orange in everything (including in hair so long I’m tripping on it in tittibasana for the first time since Montana Avenue); and trees that will be skeletons within a week.

Tá mo bhríste trí thine.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , having a body , integration , sound

Return · 8 October 2010

First, what’s lingering about beauty and rats. Then something new. A quest.

A large rat dislocates its bones to enter houses through holes the size of quarters - the circumference of its skull. This is front page news at the Detroit Free Press. All mice and bats need is a centimeter-crack in your foundation, unhinging tiny shoulder by toothpick-rib on their ways inside. I bet they have the most supple spines.

At our house, the only creatures drawing inside are the silverfish and centipedes in the bathroom. They shudder and bolt each morning at 5 when I turn on the light. All spine, these creatures. There’s also the longest-leg spider ever, who just hangs upside-down like a bud, there in front of the mirror. Won’t move for anything. Do spiders sleep?

At the ashtanga co-op, upstairs from the hippie grocery, the spider plant hangs exactly the same way, sagging dendrites. The plant’s going pale with the rest of us, blanching against the dark of fall. But at least the plant-spiders shudder with the vroom of the heating units on the roof outside. All summer the AC in those metal boxes vibrated my visshudha, but the heat is a much lower frequency. Now, it rolls the practice floor with the depth of a ship’s motor, if that ship were as big as the grocery store. That is the heating system talking the language of muladhara, right up through my feet and inner thighs and in to the pelvic floor. Good timing for root concerns: it is the season to make feral love and mulch the roots, chop firewood, plug holes in the insulation.

Every Wednesday after practice I’m at the farmer’s market, ogling the increasingly colorful riches and composing intolerable blog posts, each just as boring as this one. Do I really want to write about this beauty, which outdoes itself week by week? Or even talk about the kale? There are four local varieties, plus a beautiful, pent-up monk from the Detroit Zen Center who is even more obsessed (with kale) than I am. These monks, in their scratchy winter robes and hipster wool hats, turn out to be a bunch of yoga-loving raw foodists—who knew you could do that in a Michigan winter?

You should see what ecstasies beset the yoga monks when they talk about kale. They bliss in to attention at mulabandha, then wind up to a creative passion at the thought of fondling those leaves, and let loose beyond that to eye-rolling reverie with the memory of the eating. I guess that’s what happens in a sect without statues… you worship your own life.

Or maybe you start a kale cult.

This week I got a dinosaur kale salad with spouted quinoa and an almond-agave dressing, kale chips like the ones Karen makes, plus dried kale seasoning with aminos and tumeric (so that I can season other foods to taste like kale). I paid for these items less than the price of their parts. But how to you calculate the labor cost of a zen monk?

Anyway, a story is beginning here. It was this time of year, in 2002, when a woman on her phone ran a stop sign in front of my apartment in Los Angeles. I was also there, right in that moment, under a street light completely obscured by jacaranda leaves, with my own head wrapped up in thoughts of the seminar I’d just departed – something on macroeconomic cycles in the world polity. There was a wide-eyed moment of slamming my palm in to a red metal surface, though I still forget the impact that left an owl-shaped imprint on her hood. What I do remember is the EMT telling me not to struggle against her IV because my neck was broken and any movement would paralyze me: a threat my traumatized organism took literally for the rest of the night as it lay motionless in the ER. The jaw, with a new chin-chip floating freely from the bone, took several more days to move again. My neck convulsed and unknown head-muscles seized for months, while the doctors doped me on muscle relaxants and steroids and finally, in a last move to keep me from surgery, told me to “take responsibility for this tension” and do some yoga.

Well, that worked nicely.

And now, a cycle of autumns later, the tension patterns are back as whiny ghosts. It may be only my consciousness of them that has come back: maybe as as I’ve opened the body from bottom to top the original block has been here all along. Owl Whisperer has created an awareness of a certain reactivity to feelings of weakness, and identification with the story of vibrant health; but the headache that gently, cruelly pulled me down not just last Saturday but Sunday too was sufficiently long and muscular get my attention. Truth is I'm losing more and more afternoons to this pattern.

So... I’m going to engage this granthi with the resources I’ve got: consciousness and context. The subjective piece is a commitment to investigating that which has been avoided. The context is the University of Michigan, an industrial-era behemoth that runs on the logic of the gross body.

I think this is going to be about institutions and energy, science and spirituality, granthis, kundalini, trauma cycles, mysticism, and code-switching. Working my way through one of the most massive medical edifices that exists, finding the inner edges where the behemoth’s consciousness is ahead of itself. And the edge in myself, which for now feels like layers of memory fused on to bone.

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , sound

Vibration I · 23 July 2010

It’s a tiny bandwidth, the culture represented here at the largest fair in North America. The parameters: midwest-middlebrow home and body adornment, made from clay, wood, wire or glass, early twenty-first century period, with a touch of what the natives call panache. But this narrowly specific style has concentrated here and reproduced, booth after booth booth. All all the same mood, the same message, copied in another material in slightly different size, sometimes better quality, sometimes cheaper, maybe in different shapes, but usually in the colors aqua, lavender and forest green. It feels relentless and driven, like reproduction of a species, block after block after block on my walk in to campus.

I don’t understand that there should be so many producers of so few ideas. But the same happened to indie rock and the great American novel – certain corners of culture generate as many producers as consumers. Mimetics, an idea well hated by all other ideas, says that pieces of culture act like genes: inexorably reproducing and fighting each other to survive. In other words, objects and ideas have their own sex drive.

Well, for what it’s worth, there is one mutation in this generation of Art Fair. Out behind the Sociology building, there’s a less-traveled corner of random ideas: one booth of wax people (a security guard, a maid, and a bunch of nudes), a bunch of huge, colorful mobiles to put out in your yard, and underneath those, two men selling didgeridoos. (I know, didgeridoos are really sexual. No wonder they got stuck in the back corner of Art Fair with the nude sculptures. But nevermind. I’m not trying to talk about sex here. I’m actually talking about didgeridoos.)

One craftsman’s didgeridoos are much more beautiful than the other’s across the way, and his booth is beautifully decorated and inviting. I was so interested by the idiosyncratic swoop and the smooth, dark wood if his instruments that for once on my desultory way to work I stopped. He had an incredibly strong, refined rechaka, letting the breath go slowly, and rarely sneaking it back in with swift, soundless inhalations through the nose.

The other guy was just scrappy, sitting out in the sun smelling of body odor, with his instruments dangling sloppily from the booth’s upper scaffolding. But he had a crowd, so I stopped again to watch them watch him. After I’d been standing there three times the duration of the other guy’s exhalation, my solar plexus began to hum.

Woah. He was doing something right. Maybe chakras require a vibration that’s steady, if they’re really going to respond to sound.

The craftsman just kept playing on a circular breath. The Editor and I sat down nearby, and eventually me second and fourth chakra-ganglia got the message as well. I wondered how many of his crowd noticed the fascination in their bodies, and how many were just puzzled by trance. And how many were merely drawn in (as I first was) by the crowd itself—just copying the other visitors' attentiveness. In any case, no wonder the second craftsman doesn’t care for matters of form. His creativity is on the level of the subtle body.

I suggested to the Editor that this skill of circular breathing made the second vendor an expert, whereas the first was still stuck in form and mimcry. I added that maybe circular breathing is just as subtle and difficult as learning to climax without ejaculating. But I think I was supposed to edit that part out.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , social theory , sound

Make your own psychotherapist · 9 July 2010

Or, Lucy and the Eye with Rhinestones.

Art Fair is coming. It’s a craft fair so powerful they call it art. Take Ann Arbor’s baseline homeyness—characterized by my corner coffeeshop, which sells cute, fluffy edibles called “pasties” and decorates with home-made wire sculptures of imaginary animals—and factor in an invasion by thousands of crafters: the entire customer base of Michaels, basically. I have visions of bric-a-brac, rhinestone jewelry, and hand-thrown tableware. How many Birkenstock sandals can one town accommodate? Our population will increase by 50% and the major streets will shut down.

The professors flee. But apparently this is my summer for staying put in one place and experiencing unwanted raptures over insects, vermin and plants. (I should not have waxed eloquent about my poo back in Spring. That was the start of this reverie stuff.) I’m concerned that despite my aesthetic displeasure with Art Fair, the inner onslaught of happy will compromise me again. I might feel compelled to participate, despite lingering distrust of people who participate in anything. First thought: sell home-made birdhouses? (My folks are both wonderful crafters and DIY ideologues, though as a child I grindingly refused to learn anything that wasn’t from a book.)

Considering recent conversations, now I wonder: how would one represent the art of psychotherapy with the tools of crafting? How to reimagine a useful version of Lucy (the modern craft-booth mountebank who Charles Schultz created out of raw, unrecognized misogyny)? How to embrace the logic of the marketplace, in which transformation itself is transformed from process to product?

Well… here’s what I got. There is probably a section of Art Fair for dog sweaters and catnip toys. We could put it there.

                                          FLYER:

Do you worry about your ego? Does it do things that you wish it wouldn’t? 

It’s ok. A lot of us, especially liberals, are ashamed of our egoes and try to cover them up as much as possible. But having an ego is like having a body: you can’t leave Home without it!

Americans are bunch of ego-potatoes. We have have grown equanimity-resistant and toxic. Some of us are so obese that range of motion is severely limited! But just as we work through the shame about having a body and learn to take care of it through diet and exercise, so it is possible take good care for your ego.

Human organisms perform some of their functions so well that we’ve learned to do them unconsciously. Breathing and heartbeat are two examples of automatic processes that can go awry. Two of the functions the ego system performs so well that they become unconscious are: projection and rationalization. A modicum of projection and rationalization is necessary to get most humans through the workday, but in ego-potatoes these functions work about as well as an alcoholic’s liver or a food addict’s kidneys.

Just like other exercises bring the breathing and heartbeat functions back in to consciousness and reorganize them efficiently, this product is designed to shore up projections and rationalizations. A real therapist works better, but has the disadvantages of being accident-prone and expensive. With the build-your-own-therapist (BYOP), funds can be conserved for shopping at Michael’s. 

            HOW TO BUILD YOUR OWN PSYCHOTHERAPIST:

Here are some common statements combining an extreme projection with an extreme rationalization—in this case a rationalization for running away. Most of these sentiments were harvested locally, from the artist’s own psyche; and all are normal responses to modern life.

This is a good statement-structure to begin with because running away and self-isolation point to a part of the unconscious that is ripe with the fear of discovery. The intelligent part of the ego knows this, but one has to combine acceptance with good technique to coax out the fear. The BYO Psychotherapist will give the ego a safe place to do exactly this.

For phase one, please choose the statement that most resonates now, or craft a similar one that creates an even better freak-out. Please note: to be technically efficient in phase two, this first statement should contain both a projection and a rationalization. 

Again, having an ego is like having a body. It lets us be in the world, and is naturally good (and naturally a little stupid in places). So… as the breathing and heartbeat calm down, be confident that the statement with maximum resonance is the best one for now. Just be creative and enjoy the funny feelings this might create. That is the flaccid boundary of the ego beginning to vibrate. Check it out: as the nervous system chills out, phase one turns in to an epistemological massage. Mmmmmm…..

● My boss had so many issues that I had to get away from her. I’m my own boss now.

● Bloggers are horrible people. I couldn’t expose myself to them anymore, so I stopped writing.

● The people in this spiritual community are so competitive! Their practice is empty. I will find better friends who understand that competitiveness has no place in a spiritual refuge.

● Facebook is full of freaks! I can’t trust those crazy people in my life. Delete!

● People who care about money have bad hearts. I shun material wants and work only for trade.

● People who do this yoga practice are delusional. Their stupidity sickens me. I’m out.

● People here are intellectually (or spiritually) dead. They just pollute my mind. I keep to myself.

● My colleagues are evil cutthroats. I won’t play their reindeer games. I’d rather be marginalized.

Now phase two is easy.

Construct an echo chamber with six plain white walls. It should be a comfortable size for your ego (though most egoes will expand or contract easily if the dimensions are not exact). The walls should be extremely resonant. They should also be perfectly insulated from (and to) the outside.

Use some fingerpaint to depict a beautiful eye on one of the walls. The iris should be the exact same color as yours, but the look in the eye will be accepting. The eye will regard you the same way the sun regards the earth: Hello over there, you janus-faced old beautiful world.

Also, it might work to give the eye a comfortably subversive quality of knowingness. Then put the fingerpaint away and climb inside the cube. Close the escape-hatch and set the timer for 50 minutes.

Look calmly in to the eye for a moment. Then lie down on the floor of the echo chamber.

Remember your sentence from phase one, and say it a few times silently. Then whisper it aloud. Over the course of the next 50 minutes, repeat the sentence incessantly at a gradually increasing volume.

By the end of the session, you will be screaming. It will be loud. When there is so much vibration off the walls that the words reverberate senselessly through your organism, and you feel you're just at the point of boiling and freezing at the same time, and you know something in you is just about to die, that's gooood. Please scream the statement louder.

When 50 minutes are finished, stop.

Repeat daily for two years or until reality crumbles. Whichever happens first.

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

Word choice · 11 June 2010

Peony. A flower by any other name…

I said to the Editor: “I don’t know why, but for some reason I feel like peonies are even more sexual than most flowers.”

He blushed. Ohhhh. Ann Arbor, home as it is to Hiscock Street, loves its massive peony gardens. After these weeks’ rain and ungodly winds, the once bulbous, priapic little buds are all sagged down now, returning already to dust. But Wednesday night I tried out my nose on a dozen different varietals, so mindful of the differences between them that I missed the fact that I was getting a head full of pollen. It wasn’t until Thursday practice that I noted the three hours’ extra sleep, puffy eyes and weird nasal voice weren’t moon effects so much as my sinuses begging for a neti pot.

Insert image of spindly man in loincloth discovering cure for snuffing one too many lotus flowers. And for insomnia, ADD and constipation. Kriyas: Ex-Lax of the ancients.

The peony garden hides in a clearing at the top of the Arboretum, not far from one of the few large buildings in town—the hospital. In an otherwise still evening, the building roars, breaking in to the clarity of the olfactory experience. That bellow underlies all city life and yet I’ve never heard it before. Not distinctly.

So the epic preciousness of this place continues. The once-dreaded dinner parties are happening. As is the dumb World Cup. Both converging at my home tomorrow. I dunno, as much as I used to enjoy ridiculing (1) sportsfans and (2) people who eat salads with over ten high end ingredients (I bet you also look down on one or the other of those categories), this is working out.

My therapist and I mused that all the meditation has, for the time being, created an excess of equanimity, depriving me of the “resource” of negative emotion. There is actually a great deal of subtle negative emotion deeper down, but in theory, is full equanimity a problem? 

Either way, I know I have an edge in that I’m still offended by Camp Bacon, this week's annual meeting of the Pork Royalty from around the country. It involves a Parade of the Bacons, workshops on the art and science of bacon, and readings of Pork Poetry. Daaaark. Admittedly, most animal violence is not this precious.

…………….

I’ve been turning over two questions this week.

First, I’ve been coming back to my sense of the consciousness, or soul, of a writer. Prose always carries such a strong sense of personality, but so—now—do tweets, status updates, IM and SMS. Even the words of very refined people are charged with intention, character, and more or less unconscious agendas. Because prose has personality, some spiritual books resonate while others, equally deep, do not.

A digital self is the sum of her online behaviors. But there is nothing one-dimensional about it. Blog and email prose are so enormously rich—every single stroke and word have consequence. I’m interested that some everyday writing can be spacious but not spacey, specific but not choppy, loving but not cloying, kind but not clingy, attentive without grasping.

To some degree these are matters of taste and self-regulation. Also, they reveal one’s relationship to information gathering—how much, how good, how often, how memorable.

But what really interests me is tone. Tone is the way that instinct, heart and intelligence coalesce in language. The way selves express and intermingle in the web.

Second, let's say you’re introducing someone to yoga for the first time. Yoga is an impossibly loaded word, thanks largely to the New York Times’s efforts to redefine it popularly as “anything that feels nice” and turn it in to an adjective. But that’s a topic for later.

What about Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga? What is the first descriptive sentence you would give it, to people who don’t particularly share your values, views, battles or agendas? To people who are, for whatever reason, just curious enough to show up and ask?

Some moments, waiting for a few right words to surface, letting it stay spontaneous, I just don't know where to begin.

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Categories: astanga yoga , sound

Cloud Water · 21 May 2010

Around five in the morning Wednesday, I drove east, down in to Detroit. From Ann Arbor, I could see clear across the huge fertile basin, textured with soft treetops that a month ago were grey and scratchy. The cloud layer over Lake Huron was purple-blue and smooth, almost slick: just on the verge of changing from gas to liquid. From above, it looked like the ocean.

I switched from blues rock to Brian Eno, opening up new associations for this city. Detroit is more than the White Stripes and Motown. The DEMF is next weekend, after all.

After thirty minute-miles into the sunrise, I cruised right up under the cloud-deck, squishing between ground and the lake’s low stratum of not-quite-water. The barometric pressure under there was stifling, all those highly polarized, jumpy droplets. Underneath was so heavy and dark, except for the orange-pink blaze around the edge of the lake-cloud. Like an eclipse.

I can’t see the lines… I used to think I could read between. The best lyric of a well-titled record. Then I killed the engine and got out of the car. Out under that cloud bridging the lake and the city, creating its own blue world of atmosphere and emotion. Irresistible.

There’s a kind of falling in love that brings suffering right out into the open. The subject or object (either is possible in love) is overwhelming to the senses; and its joys feel so personal and exclusive and doomed—nothing you’ve earned or could possibly deserve. A set-up for loss.

Yeah… Detroit is way the hell out of my league. Absorption in to it makes me a different person, makes me fear the ways that leaving will mark me. If the scars of So-Cal are keloid—plasticky bands pushed above my surface—I’m afraid that this place will render nadi-level samskaras. I don’t even want to talk about the especially beautiful people, moments, tastes, rhythms. The routines I manufactured in April are already natural enough, so this new life feels as real as time—the category of understanding I use as scaffolding for my games of meaning-making.

This tendency to become absorbed in to any given context… maybe it’s not a problem. But when it feels a little dire, like it does today, I realize that at least one part of my life has become less dependent on context. Practice. It has gone from being the most fragile aspect, to the point that my entire life revolved around doing it under the right conditions, to a relatively portable side of myself. A little bit of an equanimity vehicle, thank god. That seems to happen for most people over time. In that sense, I suppose it becomes less of a vice.

Hmm. Maybe on that note, some asana porn? The past two months, I’ve been working on consistency in the backbends. For the first few years, the forward bending is variable. Some days the hamstrings and hips will let go deeply, but just as often they’re all knotty and talkative. The hamstrings ache for a year or two, after which the ache travels up to the S-I joints for another year. (Some people refer to these sensations by the word “pain.”) But eventually, your pachi-ma is just your pachi-ma. Any day of the week.

Can backbends work like that? For years, I nixed chakra bandasana on Fridays. Truly, I needed kapotasana or its 3s cognates for the thoracic spine to go there without crinking the lumbar. But now… I am interested in finding full openness and viscosity just in the namaskara and standing postures. Can one leverage the cumulative years for relaxation and openness, rather than relying just on one day’s coaxing? Can one feed Iyengarish slow-mo techniques (which I am priming back up in a summer course of full-on “backbend deconstruction”) in to this experiment? For now... it seems that as good form increases, it is less necessary to rely on heat, "prep poses" (watchwords of vinyasa flow), and adrenalin.

Adho mukha works the shoulders and thoracic; trikos and parsvos get the sacrum where it needs to be and the front hips long. And the QL, rectus abdominus and erector spinae are constantly, constantly lengthening. None of the body-unconsciousness of splayed feet and swayback lumbar and semi-rigid chest. The moment of truth is finding an intelligent self-bound CB even on Fridays. Seem insane. But, it’s there.

Sunday at the stealth shala, I practiced primary-only and then shuddered to M that I hadn’t been adjusted in CB for months. He looked straight through me like a man who’s taught 20 or 30-odd thousand hours of Mysore, and blandly placed my hands above the backs of the knees. My body was confident about that; he was confident too. But the mind that’s writing this blog post is still surprised.

Anyway, speaking of backbend consistency... maybe it's time for the negative emotion around viparita chakrasana to chill on out. I’ve been using a 2-inch-thick doorstop (a bad translation of the Bhagavad Gita) as a prop to try to launch it, even though in a group setting I can tock fine. The whole maneuv just annoys me, despite the good joke of using the Gita as a prop. May 31, Monday after the full moon: day to ramp up by ramping down. Arrrrrrg.

About “pain” that feels good. I've started figuring out how to breathe fast on a bike, and that has opened the alveoli and jacked up my heartrate to unprecedented levels. Woah. At the homestead in Montana, my dad found my old cycling shoes—which he bought ten years ago to help me attempt to keep up with him on his “leisurely” 30-mile evening rides the summer I was writing grad school apps. When I was a kid, we would always just bust it for hours, up and down mountains and across the prairie, with zero attention to form or efficiency. We’d cinch our little shelty in to paniers with her aerodynamic snout pointed in to the wind, without regard to the weight added. We’d throw the bikes on the roof and have mom deposit us at the tops of mountain passes all up and down the Rockies—then cruise down at 40mph over and over again just for kicks. We were like noble savages of biking, innocent of the concepts of exercise, or fitness, or technique, or training. 

I still don’t care about "fitness." Or gear. But… there is a new internal pleasure in good technique; and I might be a little less of a straggler among the biker chicks once locked in to clipless pedals.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , sound

Embodied knowledge · 3 February 2010

Narasimhan was a delight today, commenting on Sutras 42 and 43 of the first pada (this Sanskrit business is great for my foot fetish, incidentally). Since reading Daniel Ingram and later picking up on the whole Wilberhead/Integral discussion of states and stages of being, I have become kind of sucker for maps of the refinement of consciousness. It’s really obnoxious, but fascinating. 

I have kind of rolled my eyes at the Sutras’ map of consciousness, because there’s just not much there compared to later and more articulated traditions—traditions which speak to more complex modern beings who possess, I want to believe, a greater capacity for rapid refinement and growth.

But… then Narasimhan brought it to life today. He didn’t do what I, dumbass, would do: create a giant grid comparing vitarka, vikalpa, savitarka and savikalpa to other descriptions within the samatha/vipassana model and whateverthehell else I could root up. No… he talked from informed experience. Like this:

At first, the mind believes itself to be stable. It sees the world outside as chaos, and tries to defend itself against the chaos. The boundary between self and world is strong.

Then, once one begins to practice yoga, there’s a recognition of the inner chaos. The world itself appears to be relatively stable—what varies are the inner reactions to the world.

Then, one learns to hold the mind itself stable. That stability becomes a fulcrum for investigating the fluctuations that continue—taking the mental changes as objects to be investigated.

After that, he got necessarily vague and mystical, talking about the re-dissolution of the boundary of self-against-the-chaos. I appreciated that part less well, given my own lack of refinement.

It’s amazing to learn Patanjali from a mystic. So much for my idea that this version of classical yoga offers a merely mechanical philosophy of mind. And so much for my depending on books to learn a  living philosophy, to be honest. It really helps me to get in the presence of people who travel the dharana-dhyana-samadi street regularly and understand their experience as such.

I guess Narasimhan and Jayashree, and Sharah for that matter, have seen a lot of us logocentric, sort of uptight westerners pass briefly through their spaces. We think we can learn yoga from books; and we are mistaken. This compulsion around book-learning and “Do it self” (my first spoken sentence, as a little one) must be the background agaist which Sharath says, again and again: Spend as much time with your teacher as you can. You have to learn through experience (implicitly, your own and that of your teachers’ teachers’ teacher...).

Monday Jayashree did a miniature head-wobble and gave a huge smile. ("She's just a bucket of love," said J, my first yoga teacher, who taught that Friday night class years ago at UCLA and who's here now, coming along to Sutra class at my urging.)

Jayashree said: You don’t have to always follow along in the book… we have a sense that if there is a text we can be in control. (And Narasimhan, beside her, echoed about the false sense of control in book learning).

Then, together, they said: YOU HAVE TO LET GO OF THE TEXT.

And she, again and again, repeats: Listening is learning. Listening is learning. Listening is learning.

Learn to depend on me for the words. Watch me chanting and imitate me.

Still I cling to the text, and am learning the Devangari script so I can read the Sanskrit rather than the English pages (weren’t you guys supposed to support my in resisting that project??? So ridiculous!) Here’s what Jayashree has written on the back cover of the book:

Srutiparampara dates back to Vedic period and has a tradition of approximately 5000 years. It evolved as the best means of preserving and transferring knowledge acquried by Sages and Scholars. Sruti means listening and Smrti means memorizing. The Guru (Teacher) used to recite and the Sisya (Student) used to listen, repeat twice or thrice and then store it in his memory. Then propagate the so acquired knowledge from Guru to Sisya through generations. Even today the Sastras, Music and the fine arts are taught in a traditional environment in the above system. 

The knowledge is embodied.

Duh.

No wonder Yoga Mala is so thin.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , sound

Back to Anantha · 20 January 2010

Returned today to see the professor-yogi, M.A. Narasimhan. Office hours this season are 11-1ish (and more like 2), so I’ll make the 15-minute rickshaw or scooter ride across town a couple of days a week.

Today we did an hour of Q&A on creatively east/west topics. For example: the physics of karma, comparative analysis of Freudian and Hindu maps of self, yoga as a process of becoming an unmoved mover.

Then, to my dismay, Narasimhan’s sister Dr. Jayashree came in and for a half hour we chanted the Samadhi pada. Noooo!!! From the wafts of her voice in neighboring rooms on my previous visits to Narasimhan, and the recordings I’ve accidentally heard in woo-woo bookshops and studios around the world, I knew this woman had my siren song. But there I was, sitting in the front corner of the room and unable to get out at all politely. Trapped in a tight lotus with the MB up to 11 to contain the Delhi belly.

Oh god. You guys, she is beautiful. I can’t even tell you. There she is, a foot from me, swaying as she leads a bunch of talentless, tone-deaf foreign aspirants. Nevermind her generosity, the gift of perfect pronunciation, and the genius of the way she teaches...

Her voice is killer. There are no words. I wonder if the inner experience of asana could ever be so blissful as what she feels when she turns in to that sound.

So it’s a problem. I have intended to focus on the practices I already have – asana, pranayama, meditation. None of this language and singing stuff, which is like crack cocaine to my little hyperverbal, hyperauditory mind. But… now that I’ve had a taste of her, I probably won’t be able to stay away. There is this empty space inside my head, between the ears and the pituitary gland, that aches for her voice. My toungue curls up in my throat trying to taste it. My Q-tip fetish is getting worse. Nothing but hearing her in person will satisfy.

And once I start going in for the bliss of her wail, it’s just a matter of time before I’m compelled to understand the nonsense itself. The few Sutras I do know are a nasty hook. I’m telling myself that this Sanskrit stuff is dead language. A language which has own ridiculously illegible script: a script which ought to remain illegible! Learning Sanskrit is not morally important. Not useful. Not informative. But… sooo beautifullll....

Anyway, phew! After a half hour of the chanting, my guy Narasimhan went back to doing his thing. If he were a character in Autobiography of a Yogi, they’d have called him the Professor-Saint. I didn’t take any notes, but hours later when I sat down to write about his talk, I found myself drawing it in symbols and pictures. There was a garden gnome to recall his discussion of Noam Chomsky’s early work, a sun shining on the gnome to remind me of R. Crumb’s representation of the Abrahamic god, a balloon in the sky to denote Narasimhan’s hand motions when he talks about the ego inflating and deflating, an infinity sign floating in the sky to remind me of the number 8, a cat on the ground under a basket to recall a funny story, etc. etc. etc.

Oddly, what had seemed like random Q & A was all connected—graphically and narratively—in my mind, waiting to be made in to working knowledge. Why haven’t all the other professors in my life inspired me to catalogue them with a variety of senses, not just the critical mind?

From last year, posts on Narasimhan: one, two, three.

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Categories: science , sound

Feedback · 8 November 2009

Where are the feedback loops? Relationship…. It is all relationship.

The system that talks back to me most isn’t the muscular—that’s stretched and strengthened in to silence for now; and it’s not the bones—those haven’t begun to deteriorate yet. The breath says a lot, as does the attraction/revulsion index; but these days the talkative loop is the immune system. She’s been working full time, doing it on at most six hours’ sleep, asking for little but adequate hydration, daily practice, and please no Halloween candy.

There’s a little bit of static in the air, and when I’m near it, the immune system adjusts without apologies: heart rate elevates, breath moves higher in the chest and thins out, glands in the neck and armpits stiffen. But actually the first thing I notice is a tingling in the tops of the hands and the skin of the forearms: the same molecules that agitate when I’ve spiked the blood sugar. The boundary of the skin where it meets the air becomes wavy, like in teleportation: the message is to become very still until things, as they say, regroup. Owl, you’ve got to get yourself together! I stop everything like an animal in the woods, stay still as long as it takes (usually minutes, sometimes hours), carry on.

This is what seems to help most: awareness of how the immune system feels about its environment, recognition that the air itself is nothing to fear no matter what, acceptance that the system will do the best she can and the rest is for nature to decide.

Still, some epic quiet is nice. You know that radiating thing that plant-green does when you hit it with gold in the afternoon—the way it begins to break up in the light? It is happening in this garden, on a deck, in a small creek-valley, under giant sycamores. Nothing else is moving except for a squirrel way up and my fingertips here on the mac. It’s Ojai, the arid mountain-forest ten miles inside Ventura.

The air is the exact temperature of my skin: closing my eyes, I cannot find the edge between the two. A weekend of this—five hour dinners and ten hour sleeps—and the immune system is stoked for another week.

I wonder: would a life of this make me slothly? Equal peace but half the sleep (and none of the dinner): that’s meditation retreat. Is this retreat quite so feedback-rich as straight sitting… or is at a rest from feedback? It’s a little bit the same.

Anyway. I have been entranced, increasingly, with (or by) the rhythms of having a life. It’s so arbitrary that there should be night and day, fall and winter, cold season, years, breathing patterns that change over the day and over a life, human digestive systems and energy rhythms, eyes that have to blink, growing seasons, mulching seasons, all of it. I think it’s because I’m watching my heartbeat, first responder on the organizational immunity team.  You can’t have (or do) existence on this planet without so much tempo: it’s happening when nothing happens, even. And we build it in to everything we make, language’s songs, the structure of thought and art and commerce, this guest house with its ins and outs and its solid wall of watery glass blocks and curve of its staircase and ceiling. The turn in the freeway that I leaned in to on the way up the mountain, and that will fling me forward on the way down. It’s all a reflection of half-hidden movement that makes all of this exist. I hate to say it because I feel like Alex Grey meets Ram Dass, but it’s how things feel.

I don’t know what the rules are, but the biophysics of being on this planet are what they rae, inside of my organism and out. Maybe this is the system that is talking back to me most. The rhythms of the rock.

The stiller I get the more everything trills and vibrates, stronger like the forcefield of my immunity, faster like the gold off these leaves. It’s a little like guitar feedback, folding itself in to indecipherable white. And beautifully.

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Categories: integration , sound

Dangerous Incantation · 23 August 2009

Last night I lived in a floating bungalo off some wild green islands away in the Tropic of Capricorn.  A dream vivid enough to have its own barometric pressure—dialed up high along with the color saturation—with promising deep blue thunderheads off to the north. Friends were visiting—several of you included. We had Thanksgiving dinner on the lanai and then you drove off over the ocean in trucks I lifted from The Grapes of Wrath. My teacher sailed up and we decided to practice. We spent a long time lolling around, watching the beautiful clouds and feeling their mounting winds, deciding to practice. We were in the water, swimming around in a space enclosed by a little walkway, about to go to the studio and take asana together the same way others take tea. Then the sun came out and we said to each other: Why don’t we just do it here?

So then we were in the water, twisting in to pasasana, becoming compact little weights sinking down to fish-level, where the sunlight filtered around so brightly we could breathe it. Krounchasana was a problem—where is the leverage?—so we released it, tried to catch some other fishes… though none of them really came together until the lord of the fishes halfway through the series. It was all vaguely frustrating—we could not understand why shalabasana just would not work in the water—but we stayed out there because it was so beautiful. The light, shadow, color, fish and happiness were so strong… stronger than if we’d have fronted the cash and the carbon credits to get our incarnate asses to Tulum.

He’s actually moving right now, packing up an apartment after years and heading cross town. And so is my first asana teacher ever, who practices with us and is currently teaching me how to adjust her. And so are my grandparents, who abruptly called the assisted living facility last week and are collapsing their beautiful twelfth-story Denver condo, asking me of all people to take on their antiques. These last two weeks of August, beginning with Thursday’s new moon: I’m calling it a cycle to end a larger cycle: seven years on the ground here coming to a close. My apartment and all the routines and comforts it contains—the base of Maslow’s pyramid and the chakra scale well rooted for years—bam! Disintegrating around me. Movers arrive on Tuesday to pack what’s left across the contintent and from there I turn back from a house dweller to a nomad. Don’t ask me the details: what’s of interest now is the unknown, not the sketches that are known.

I rolled in to the shala late this morning, keys and beloved mat both lost to the black hole that is sucking in my life. (Later, Bad Driste Betty returned the keys I misplaced on Friday: "Sometimes having no driste is good!" I kissed her and agreed.) Between the communal mats laced with hamburger sweat and the hard damn birchwood floor, I chose the floor.

Q: But I can’t do this shit without my mat!…A: What’s easier, birchwood for your ground or the open sea? Recognize a gift when it's right under your nose. I thought of Shinzen—“Equanimity is radical non-interference with your own nervous system”—and set up. A process which entailed folding a sweat towel and taking up 0 position, giving SKPJ a wink, saying my secret thing, and launching in. And it was great. The shalabasana-parsva dhanurasana sequence will leave a mark on the hip points (I suppose dung floors are softer than birch, and 14-year-old boy ilia don’t crest like a woman’s) but otherwise it was just practice, albeit  without clearly demarcated personal space or a soft place to put my head in the inversions. Which is exactly what I am doing in life starting now. Technology and creature comfort are good, but maybe I can keep my shit together and thrive without.

I just flashed on myself at 20, driving a Dodge pickup 17 hours cross country to college, listening to Tricky singing about hydroponics just as the Columbia Gorge opens right up at The Dalles, both it and me barreling down to the Pacific.

Anyway, today is Ganesha Chaturthi, the birthday of the elephant god. I told the Editor some people do a little puja, bring the avatar a flower and ask for some obstacle to be removed. Being actually rational, he finds this and my own daily intention of late—a simple but apparently hazardous saying of I consent or, worse, Bring it on the last outbreath before practice—perfect nonsense.

“So is that why you brought flowers in to our home?” He asked. “You wanted Ganesh to remove the obstacle of this apartment from your path?”

Well, fuck.

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Categories: astanga yoga , sound

Trinities · 13 August 2009

I am discovering the most beautiful coincidence.

Breath-Bandha-Drste = Talk-Feel-Image

Two systems, Vipassana and Ashtanga, mapping each other one to one. I didn’t plan this—my own designs are not so elegant.

When the pairs integrate, what I have is three streams of being—Talk, Feel, Image—and three perfectly-fit drainpipes for diverting or even shutting down those streams at will.

Breath covers talk... as bandha covers feel... as driste covers image.

Breath-Bandha-Drste is the holy trinity of the ashtanga practice—the places you lodge the attention so it doesn’t spin off in to something stupid. Breath is what is is; bandha is the deepest movements of the inner body--pelvic floor lightly and diaphragm subtly lifting; and drste (or, if you like, driste) is the gazing point, whatever it may be for the posture.

Eureka! SKPJ's triple esoterica corresponds to Shinzen’s somewhat arbitrary triad—the three major vectors he uses to deconstruct subjectivity. I’ve talked about his model at length in the comments the past month, but here is an outline. Like any map, it is imperfect. But I’ve been rolling with it because, well, because it works and I especially love the number three.

So, say there are three kinds of experience-of-self: emotion in the body, talk around the ears, imagery projected around the head. The shorthand for it is: Feel-Image-Talk.

A sense of "me" arises when the the streams of feelings, mental talk and images come together as an apparently solid thing. For those who have not asked, like William James, “What are the elements of me?” this clog of inner experience appears to be solid much of the time.

Go through life experiencing your self like this—as a pulsing undifferentiated goop of 1) emotions and 2) visualizations and 3) mind chatter—and thus be enslaved as their multiplicative product. For example, mind chatter ramps up emotion, which is in turn exploded by visual fantasy. And so on. But! Part the streams—perceive how the three move together and apart and only flash alive in the briefest moments—and find some home in the chilled-out space between them. Emotion minus image is just body sensation. Talk minus emotion is just words passing. Image minus talk is an artful silent film. Living with space—living spaciously—is still a life. It’s just a life easier to understand, control (no joke), love and enjoy. This is Shinzen's model.

So anyway, I roll out of bed every morning with little use for all this epistemology-ontology Vipassana stuff. Breath-bandha-driste, that’s it. It’s habituated and it’s all I need. And now I’m realizing that all along I’ve been using this system to stem the triple tide of subjectivity. It is a fairly elaborate little tool for keeping quiet: like a Swiss army knife with not only a blade, but a corkscrew and a pick.

In the mornings, what fires up first is the talk-stream. I wake at 4:30 ready to write a thousand words; and the practice is to put that on pause for another four hours. The key for me always is to listen in to the breath and follow it like a passionate devotee. But of course It covers my otherwise dominant auditory thought-stream. If the object in “talk space” is the sound of my breath, the sound of my thoughts fades to the background and increasingly—with time—goes blank.

Image and Feel spaces work the same way. If something triggers a fantasy of any kind, taking the driste from peripheral to harder focus usually makes its imagery fade if not give up and die. It’s so obvious, but I am only now learning to watch that happen. Just try to conduct a good fantasy while you’re devoting your attention to the tip of the nose.

Same for being caught up in emotion. My emotions travel around my chest, belly and jaw. But in the midst of some drama, if I just place the best of my loving attention, I stop being so convinced that those feelings are “me.” If experience is what matters, well, the pelvic floor is equally me; and so is the gazing point; and so is the breath.

The key is this. Breath-bandha-driste are relatively neutral, objective streams of experience. I can hear, physically feel, and actually see them. They are, in a sense, manifestly “not me.” But mental chatter, emotions and imaginings—they are made of unalloyed mindstuff. They feel like my special little creations and are easier to mistake for “me.” As such, they are far more highly charged. Much more likely to high-jack the attention and take it for a ride.

Just compare the energetic charges. Which one of each pair is more radioactive? Breath/Talk, Bandha/Emotion, Driste/Imaginings.

The so-called “tristana” is chill, while its rambunctious twin the subjective triad is anything but.

This ashtanga practice is complex, as humans are complex. This practice doesn’t just throw you a blank wall and ask you to focus on the void, or give you a single mantra and let you dissolve everything in to that. Rather, it provides its bizarre breath-bandha-driste trinity.

It is built for flexibility and the flow of several single points. It is prone to insight. It has the power to create space.

For a long time I thought that this bewildering instruction to focus on many things was too much to ask. But suddenly, knowing myself better, I find that it is and always has been so much to offer.

God it’s a beautiful system. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , having a body , integration , sound

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.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

The S.S. Kali Yuga (UFO Roundup) · 6 January 2009

(Ghost Ship soundtrack)

The Editor rolled over in his sleep the other morning and said, Soy un naufrago. He’d been watching Shogun, the 1980s epic of cultural insensitivity about an Englishman shipwrecked amid samurai intrigue in 1600s Japan. But Naufraugios—shipwrecks—refers in to the West Indes. It’s what Cabeza de Vaca, the 1500s sailor who was after the fountain of youth, not Japanese trade, called his chronicle of mucking around Florida in a quasi-psychedelic daze. Anyway, shipwrecks, sailors, samurai intrigue. Since the Editor’s writing about South American history I guess his subconscious pulled the story closer to home, into the territory of Spanish rather than English plunder.

Me I’d been dreaming about iron cages, a recurring theme since I started reading Max Weber years ago. I tried to read Sivananda’s Self Knowledge on New Years but found it awfully disciplinarian. But before I put it down I felicitiously misread this line: “Even in this iron age (Kali Yuga), when the vast majority of persons run after women and money, there are earnest and sincere young men who want God and God alone.” Iron CAGE? Kali yuga? Sivananda said Kali Yuga’s an iron cage?

But I thought hyper-rationality was the iron cage? (This is what sociology has taught me all along.) Sivananda says Kali Yuga IR-rationality is the iron cage? Oh oh oh! Is everything the iron cage? Are Weber and Sivananda saying the same thing???? I woke up this morning at 4:40 and googled “iron cage kali yuga.” Yes, this is the kind of near-shipwrecked idiocy that wakes me up before dawn.

Duh. No such luck. Iron age (Sivananda) not same as iron cage (Weber). Pseudo-spiritual irrationality (Iron Age) not same as hyper-westernized rationalization (Iron Cage). But it was fun to think it all came together for a minute. The result list instantly revealed my error but in so doing brought everything right back to SHIPWRECKS! The first hit was this awesome song by the metal band Therion; second hit was the 2002 issue of UFO ROUNDUP.

Thus, I learned this beautiful story of The SS Kali Yuga, an ironsides ghost ship lost to Lake Huron in 1905. The clairvoyant Chippewa stood on the shore and bid it godspeed, as they did I think for the Edmund Fitzgerald. Maybe the iron age and iron cage are not so far apart.                                                            ………………………………...........................                               

The USA's five Great Lakes are famous for their ghost ships. Many are the vessels which have "sailed away" and vanished, never to be seen again.

The story begins in St. Clair, Michigan in the spring of 1889, as shipbuilders put the finishing touches on a brand-new wooden "oreboat" 270 feet (81 meters) long and 40 feet (12 meters) wide. Only three years earlier, the Merritt brothers had opened up the Mesabi "Iron Range" in northern Minnesota. Tons of high-grade iron ore were coming out of the mines and heading for the ports of Lake Superior. Ships were needed to ferry the ore to the steel mills in Buffalo, N.Y. and Cleveland, Ohio.

The hull was quickly sold to the Cleveland Cliffs fleet. Her new owners cast about for a suitable name. But nobody could think of one.

Then a member of the company's Board of Directors read an article about India in the Detroit Free Press. The article made mention of the Kali Yuga, a Hindi phrase which the newspaper translated as "the Age of Iron."

The Board thought this would be a fine name for an oreboat. So a champagne bottle was swung, and the newly-christened Kali Yuga slid down the ramp into Lake St. Clair for her shakedown cruise.

Trouble was, the ship's American owners misunderstood the meaning of the phrase Kali Yuga. They thought it referred to the Iron Range boom in the USA's Upper Midwest. In actuality, the phrase Kali Yuga refers to the last epoch in the Hindu cycle of world-ages.

In the Vishnu Purana, time is divided into four distinct world-ages. First comes the Satya Yuga or Golden Age, lasting the longest. Then the world enters the Treta Yuga, a less civilized and harmonious period, which is followed by the Dvapara Yuga, an age in which humankind has grown more violent and decadent still. Right before oblivion comes the fourth age, the Kali Yuga, which lasts for 400,000 years.  A better translation of the phrase Kali Yuga would be "the Age of Chaos."

The oreboat soon lived up to her name. Although no sailor ever died an accidental death aboard the Kali Yuga, the vessel experienced some weird paranormal phenomena.

While downbound on Lake Huron in August 1897, the Kali Yuga encountered an impenetrable fog. Crewmen taking a break on the Texas deck were startled by a sudden sound--the barking of a large and very angy dog. The barking and snarling, followed by a bone-chilling howl, sounded as if they were coming from the fog a short distance, no more than 100 feet (30 meters) away. But the Kali Yuga was in mid-lake at the time, at a point about 15 miles (25 kilometers) northeast of Presque Isle, Michigan.

In June 1899, crewman Bob Sandover had a most unnerving experience in a night fog on Lake Superior. While working alone on deck, Bob saw what he thought was a "double" of the Kali Yuga on the placid lake only 33 feet (10 meters) away. Through the roiling mists, the "other" deck looked identical to his, and his doppelganger mimicked his every motion.

Gripping the rail, Bob shouted, "Who are you? What are you doing out there?" The doppelganger stood erect slowly and faced him. Bob gasped. The "other" sailor was his identical double in every detail of facial feature and dress. The only difference was the double's eyes, which radiated an aura of menace.

By way of reply, the double squatted down and appeared to be writing something. Then he lifted a square piece of cardboard with a hastily-scrawled message on it: Get off that ship! The double's lips curved in a sinister smile. And then he and his Kali Yuga shimmered and vanished.

When the ship docked at Detroit, Bob Sandover promptly quit and found a berth on another Great Lakes steamer. Never again did he set foot on the Kali Yuga.

And there was another curious fact about the Kali Yuga. She could never keep to a schedule. Season after season, she invariably showed up late at her destination. Her owners appointed one captain after another, but the Kali Yuga never quite shed her reputation for a tardy arrival.

In 1900, Captain Fred L. Tonkin of Painesville, Ohio took the helm for the summer. This time, "the Kali Yuga was long overdue" but "she showed up all right. She had been caught in a gale o' wind and had lost her rudder."

And then came 1905, an ominous year in Great Lakes history, highlighted by "a gale of November" that sank dozens of ships and provided Duluth with her all-time most famous shipwreck, the Mataafa. So many ships went down in that gale that the final fate of the Kali Yuga has been virtually forgotten.

On October 19, 1905, the Kali Yuga pulled up to the iron ore docks in Marquette, Michigan, on Lake Superior's south shore. Once again, Fred Tonkin was her skipper, and her chief engineer was Charles A. Sharpe of Cleveland. There were 16 men aboard and one woman, the cook.

"The weather had been bad that fall. Lots of the older schooners and steam barges were wrecked that season...Nobody worried much, however, as she (the Kali Yuga) was one of the strongest and best wooden steamers on the lakes, and well-kept, too."

Early the next morning, October 20, 1905, the Kali Yuga weighed anchor and steamed away from the ore dock. As she sailed past Marquette's distinctive red brick lighthouse, Sharpe came to the pilothouse and pointed out an unusual sight to Captain Tonkin.

There, on the stony beach, stood a dozen Anishinabe men and women, all dressed as if for powwow in bead-worked black velveteen clothes and ceremonial headdresses. They all looked pretty grim as "the medicine chief (today we say spiritual advisor--J.T.) carried the eagle staff and chanted."

"Who are those Indians?" he asked. Captain Tonkin, who had often sailed the upper lakes, answered, "Chippewas. Here to see us off, I gather." (Editor's Comment: My guess is, the Anishinabe spiritual advisor had a vision of what was to come, and they went down to the shore to invoke "the One Above's" blessing on the doomed ship.)

There was a stiff wind, and the seas were high on Lake Superior. But the Kali Yuga reached Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan safely and passed through the Soo canal and entered Lake Huron.

"The skipper of the Frontenac told later of seeing her about four that afternoon some seven miles (11 kilometers) off Presque Isle Light in Lake Huron," not far from the scene of the "barking dog" incident. "The master of the L.C. Waldo also reported seeing her about dark (6:45 p.m.--J.T.) between Middle Island and Thunder Bay Island." A gale was blowing, "and it kicked up a terrific big sea."

Because of her reputation for tardiness, "no one was unduly alarmed when she didn't show up exactly on schedule...They figgered that maybe she put in for shelter somewhere along the east or north shores of Lake Huron."

"Her sister ships of the Cliffs fleet searched hard for her. Her owners sent out tugs after the wind let up to scour the lake for signs of her, but no good. They all came back with nothin' to say. No wreckage, no nothin'."

The Kali Yuga "was lost on Lake Huron in 1905 and never a trace of her was found...She didn't ever show up, and nobody ever knew where she went down, nor why."

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Categories: esoteric shit , sound

Field Recordings · 25 November 2008

Somewhere in the suryas, I heard a sparrow trapped in our rafters. No…on second chirp I located the little guy in the eves outside, just opposite a old white cube of a speaker mounted in a corner. My teacher caught me grinning, later, on an even bolder little birdsong, as I moved in to some form or another.

Half a practice later I noticed a vendor calling out her wares down in the street. Just like Nicaraguan Sunday morning—the bread lady with her fly-covered pico pastries; the anciana with head-balanced basket of market fruit bellowing out peaches—meloooocotoooon— so clearly you hear her 10 minutes away; guy with the sausages bringing up the percussion section with his salchichichichicha.

Wait.

No street vendors on the richest corner in Los Angeles.

And what happened to the gayatri mantra, usually coursing so softly under the sound of the others’ breath?

By the time I found savasana there was a freaking din going on, a bunch of put-put motors that could have been mo-peds and a gravelly roar as if the garbage truck lost its muffler or some very large tractor lost its way en route to a local mansion-demolition.

Real time sounds of a Laksmipuram morning, it turns out, recorded some years ago when my teacher set a microphone below a shala window during practice.

This kind of thing could go wrong very easily. But this teacher has good taste. He fades to the background except for when he doesn’t. Can get away with dropping a rose petal on my forehead in Savasana—gutsy and easy to do very badly—because it’s actually my favorite scent and I don’t even notice the source until the petal falls into my lap when I roll up to sitting. He never intrudes on my practice except for, say, on a day he sees from my passing Vira 1 (of all things) that my psoas (of all things) is a tiny bit tense (how could you see such a thing?) and could use some unexpected but unobtrusive, suddenly-invented adjustment to trick it into release.

Good taste is bold, but not gratuitous. Direct and open, sure of itself. How many artists can hold back from over-adornment, from dominating physical or sonic space, but also will take conceptual and aesthetic risks?

In their own context, the hollers of street vendors or growls of auto-rickshaws may not always be so beautiful. But I suppose that in some peoples’ memories they are so. For me, the intimate association with others’  associations was sublime. And the India-related sublimity was only possible because primed by years of appreciating ambient music. Stacking two contexts aurally within one space, with half the ambience being self-consciously artificial… I actually don’t have words for the aesthetic perfection, the transcendent this-ness, of the experience.

A lot of students missed it altogether, letting the foreign sounds mix with those of two Oaxacan men lugging a planter across the slate patio and Mercedes SUVs honking at one another on the quasi-country highway below. For those who did notice the auto-rickshaws and street vendors and mufflerless trucks, the reaction was dramatic—from irritated to ready to catch a flight to Bangalore tomorrow.

For me, I can only understand it as art, because otherwise the delight I took in the creativity… and the music I found in the ambience… well, it’s stupid if it isn’t art.

If there is a place for sublimity in the space of practice, I’m not sure what aesthetics illuminates it—I suppose some metaphysic of quality or dialogic merging of the experiencer and the experienced. I usually shy from the idea that the thisness of physical practice can enter the realm of pure art, but shit. I dunno. Experience that just is, that plays catch-and-release with transcendence instead of grasping for it; play that sees this moment radically another way on the basis of otherwise worn out forms. I guess if moments of practice can be aesthetic experiences—with a sublimity that’s so far beyond scrivenerly formalism… well, I guess I’m finally getting comfortable with the idea that practice might be sometimes art. I’m shocked to find myself here.

Line drawing by Rita Taraborelli. She works mostly in other media and says her drawings are just for fun, but I love them. She’s new to ashtanga, so I’m wondering how the practice will relate with her muse. Rita’s photos and her website.

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Categories: arbitrage , having a body , sound

No mountain · 17 November 2008

Durvasasana is Pattabhi-drste, if I’m in range. I’m myopic, so this only works out on days I go for front row contorting, near the photograph centered up on the wall. (We are non-territorial people—different spots on different days as flexibility ethic.)  Today I was up close, a little to the left.

Toss in to eka pada—left leg standing—inhale up—look for it. Rascally guru: three feet to the right of where my craning neck would prefer.

I’m standing there on the left leg with the right foot behind the head, comfortably incarnating a ridiculous evil flamingo, but also listing to the right because reaching to gaze upon the photograph.

At which point all the following information jolts in:

an image of PJ’s open palm slamming the empty wall before me,

a bellow of “THIS IS GOD!”

and the comic twitter of Donovan singing “then there is no mountain, then there is.”

I guess it’s my Christian subconscious that has the sky opening up, birds being released, divine bellowing from on high and hands sort of writing on the wall, but on its face it was all very 1970s for a moment. Remnants of the acid I’ve never dropped loosening from my spine in a tender moment.

But that is a real story, you know. PJ losing his temper years ago, smacking a sweaty shala wall with open palm, bellowing: “THIS IS GOD!” Nondualism, you idiot westerners. It needn’t take a lot of explaining.

Caught between the photo and the adjacent wall slammed by the phantom hand, I realized: what do I need some photograph for in this moment? Some outer witness to witness? Duh. Dial back to the left, gaze to the wall, see god to the echoes of aurally hallucinated panflute, exhale release.

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Categories: astanga yoga , sound

Leavings · 10 November 2008

I’ve been not writing here, letting the hourly blog-sized thoughts walk on by. They are like deer. I like them, with their immature spots and testing-the-waters uncertainty, but when they whisper off again they deposit a steaming little turd to remind me they were here.

I miss the Beartooth mountains. Because I did not make it home this summer, I’m that much more aware of how little time I spend in forests, distinguishing elk turd from deer in the trails up to the tundra. I shrug off the REI fleece geeks who think of backpacking as “fun,” in part because of the one-with-nature elitism the “outdoor adventure lifestyle” entails. And in part because in my experience backpacking is what you do when walking is the only mode of vacation transport you can afford. My dad was a wilderness guide before he started preaching, and doesn’t see much difference between the two vocations: he feels God is more accessible in the mountains than anywhere. It’s finally dawned on my how much my practice, in the beginning, was about finding wildernessy oneness in the city. About packing that aporia of powder days and starry campfire nights wherever I went—to the point where I now see as trite the peak experiences that cannot happen without external promts from actual mountain peaks.

But I don’t know. When I remember the delight and peace that rednecks get from nature, the part of my research that’s about environmentalism becomes metaphysically interesting. Yoga is metaphysically interesting on its face. No contest. But as this dimension surfaces in my research, taking analytical writing from turd-size to book-size makes more sense. Even if books feel so 20^th century and my idea of long-form now is a 60-minute podcast.

So yeah, it’s been a week of devotional music—Hildegaard and Arvo Part—and lying on the earth. I stayed until the end of practice yesterday, rather than slipping out early like the rabbit late for a very important date. Sundays form 8:30 until class ends at 8:45, to teacher issues the only spoken “do as I say” instruction of the week. The command: relax. Savasana is deeper when there’s an outer ego to conclude it and you can let go of the anticipation of bringing yourself out. At the very end we chant the closing prayer together, just minutes before my father gives his the closing benediction to his freaky congregation a time zone to the east and more than a thousand miles to the north.

May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord turn his face upon you and be gracious to you. May the light of the Lord shine upon you and grant you peace. Have a good week.

For now, in this new time, my intention on Sundays is to let myself hear that blessing filtered through the Sanskrit. And to receive it for what it’s worth.

A lot of people have experienced SOME kind of resolution of opposition the past week (predictably, I see this least among the academics: they want to experience this only on a rational level, only as an epochal improvement in the strategic tableaux). Take a duality any duality—whatever is the one that has hurt you most in days of Bush. For many, it’s a sense that Americans are exceptional oppressors: now it’s ok to embrace the scoundrels. For most, it’s the black-white hypocrisy that generations of fear and segregation have kept alive: now, the “all men are created equal” line rings more true. For others, it’s simply an end to internecine warfare in the Congress: now is a time to reason together. For me, I’ve had to look the sexist ignorant Frontier in the rimless-lensed eyes and recognize there is a place in this country—albeit a vanishingly small one—for that way of being. Palin-hate makes some sense because she’s trying to tell us how to be women (though the hate is paradoxical coming from those women who choose against history to re-institute patriarchy “by choice” under a man's name), but only if we actually need to defend ourselves against that. Suddenly the threat she poses to our selfhood is revealed as a vulnerable backwater joke—so why not let the backwater be? It works well for some, and those in transition, who still weirdly wish for a little patriarchy in their lives, should especially understand that.

Recognizing that Frontier ways of being will never again overpower me, and that those folks are still vital on their own terms, I’m suddenly a little more comfortable with the old forms of devotion that the Frontierspeople take for granted. Nature, music, and old prayers that never, ever felt real to me before now. I’ve had to block that out my whole life, and fight it in order to have a self. That has given me energy and self-willed critical intelligence. The urgent need to evolve away from that, the drive to transform, carried me many miles from the wilderess.

But now I wonder if I might be secure enough to be strengthened by the wilderness/Frontier in a different way. With a subversive inclusion into my cultural repertoire of the nature-worship, the old time gospel songs (god I think I might love that shit!), even the scriptures. The last are etched into my memory—I thought for years I’d succeeded in forgetting them but the yoga belies the accomplishment: the scriptures are buried there in rhythmic, otherworldly KJV verbatim, surfacing one by one as I push back the veil. I almost have no choice but to re-own it all, so thank god I feel like I live in a world where there’s much space for mutts and where contradiction is not really contradiction. It’s just fuel for movement, and paradox for stillness.

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Categories: evolution , integration , sound

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

'Til we grow beards get weird and disappear into the mountains--- · 29 July 2008

Something about these crazy arm balances, I tell you. I went into the hip-hop archives of the Owl House CD shelves Sunday, and drew out The Eminem Show. I cannot endorse this record because it exhibits high levels of misogyny, pandering to children, preening rhymes so obviously non-spontaneous he probably copped them from a songwriting dictionary (but who doesn’t), and, sort of, the dreaded cultural appropriation. Also: it’s good. Sorry, embarrassing; but yes. I thought about stemming my habit on Monday, but it’s been the Show all week here. In my fragile 5:40 am state, it’s true that I can hew to the lowest common denominator.

The record was already two years old and tired four summers back when I was learning the first series. But I stayed in a similar can’t-quite-change-the-record groove for days on end at exactly this point in late July that year, and it worked. The rhythm was a little different: the Editor and I would go to campus around 8, and for two hours I’d write notes in preparation for my upcoming field exam in Economic Sociology. At 10:10 I’d sneak back up the parking garage, and secret through the backstreets of Beverly Hills listening to that record loud like a white university-schooled fool while the middle-aged men from Michoacan and San Salvador trimmed trees and hauled grass clippings at the curbs. I’d cut back to Wilshire at Comstock, where the country club forces you back into the big arterial, and hit just a couple of lights before landing at a now-bought-and-decommissioned (thanks, YW) beautiful little studio in the heart of downtown Beverly Hills. Park in the free garage on Beverly drive and take a manduka and change of clothes from the trunk, in time to be on the mat with hair braided up at 10:30.

Interesting that these are still my practices—Econ Soc, astanga, driving my Civic—and that a return to this place in the annual cycle shows me how much it is the same person now and then. Also, the country is weirdly the same one that the record—with its backwards E evocative of financial crisis and much to say about clueless White America and horrible wars and dirty Dick Cheney—addresses: will we throw everything away as manaically as we did in Fall 04? It took the dense evocations of Eminem’s bad but good record to see me and us in this light again. What’s different? Some edges softer and some harder, I guess, a shift in sense of humor and ideas about this and that. Maturity in some areas, loss of orthodoxy in others. Oh, and an even more obvious alternative come November. On both levels, this year’s shift in context will be a little dramatic. The four-year cycle is concluding.

In aught four the Eminem show ended when I parked the car for a week and flew to another city for the annual disciplinary meeting. Same this year. When I come back, it will almost feel like fall.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , sound

Crim, Again · 20 June 2008

A client offered keys. She lives in Venice and the home studio is a silent wooden nest for my 108-beaded Saturday solstice mala. It ain’t Stonehenge, but the space sure is pretty.

I feel like a hippie, having you know I have a thing for the solstice, but I promise my enthusiasm for the longest day of the year long predates the yoga. Yonder up the 49th parallel in the land of my birth (Big Sky Country, Montana), there’ll be no more than 5 hours of shuteye, with the long days pulling the sweetcorn up knee high by the Fourth of July. Or more like chest-high these days, thank you Monsanto. Glad I no longer live in the flightpath of either cropdusters or testflight B2 bombers, thanks.

Here in godless LA we get a close to 7 hours of darkness tonight, but I’m still sun-stoned and loving the light. Did I mention the Editor tends to have business in South American archives? Winters in Buenos Aires or Porto Alegre… would I be an unbalanced person if I double-dipped the longest day and ducked out of the yule?

For now, everybody in town is having a party this weekend and I actually feel like doing something about it. Some dancing, party or two, breakfast with and old friend. Tonight, Billy Wilder and backrubs. 

By the way, can somebody tip me to fast new summer music (electronic, hip hop, dub, bachatta, rock?) before I start taking the new Bonnie Prince Billy all seriously or succumb to these nagging memories of Jane’s Addiction, Danzig or (further back) the Beach Boys?

I’ll come down out of this feeling eventually. I do keep meaning to write about food and feet behind the head. Those thoughts have got to go somewhere.

Completely random Saturday links:

*Laksmi is normal, 8limbs and all.

*Fun with gender. Nagging isn’t female, it’s just what you do if you’re the less powerful one in the relationship. Excellent use of comparative- sociological method.

*I stopped reading the NYT and the smartmags. Which sucks. But this is what ABD looks like.

* Via Julian Walker's good blog, Andrew Harvey talking about how huge the shadow really is and how much it's in the body. I haven't listened yet, but will probably get to it during the usual Sunday night kale-washing ritual.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , sound

Mellow Gold, Steel Trap · 13 June 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Categories: self-deception , sound , spirituality

Music For Airports, II · 7 June 2008

I held off from saying what I needed to say about dance for the earlier post to make sense. I did not clarify that I was talking about the kind of dance you do like nobody’s watching. The kind that maybe you do drunk at weddings, in dark bars, and definitely in unadvertised meetings of openminded healers in deconsecrated churches and temples in Santa Monica.

I don’t write about this because even if I can dance like nobody’s watching, I can’t write about dance like nobody’s watching. The truth is I’ve been dancing free-form every Saturday since October. It’s SO revealing. About modern spirituality (whatever that might be), about embodied practice, about the boundaries of self, about what’re the point and the possibilities of contemplation. About how groups form and how people really communicate. There’s just a whole anthropology of this little supercreative edge of culture waiting to happen. It's also in some ways old as it is new, like Susan said in the last comment.

This morning when I arrived in the huge old temple space, they were playing Music for Airports and for the few minutes before I stopped thinking about outside things I remembered the drive across the Golden Gate from Marin two years ago, after a first Vipassana retreat. That is music for breaking a long silence, in my experience. The theory of the Five Rhythms is that one of the tempos of life is stillness… this also makes MfA a good place to begin.

A woman was weeping in the corner and my friend Fred, a psychotherapist in his mid-60s, was holding her hand like a brother. Nobody was at all uncomfortable or self-conscious about her emotions; and nobody tried to resolve them too quickly. For the first 30 minutes the still tones of MfA would come up over and over under much faster music and some people would notice and slow way down. Me I felt good to mix in the associations I have for that music with more chaotic, high-energy kinds of experience. To find the Music for Airports when everyone around you is knocking on the door of the big kuckoo. As corny as that sounds. Both rhythems are just techniques for letting go.

I think I’ll stop trying to talk about any of this now.

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

SLIII: time to be small · 10 May 2008

Friday night I lay under the bath and listened to the echoes in the pipes and the footfalls in the outside corridors. Resonant under the hot eucalyptus water I was asking to seep into my trapezius and left levator scapula. I was out late and all excitable on Thursday night, and after I finally went to bed the left l-s, which has been touchy all week, cramped so hard it woke me in pain. Weird and so awkward, and it’s slow to release no matter who puts their hands on it or how quietly I ask it to let go. 

Notes to self: Fifteen months ago I shifted my atlas on the axis jumping into a bad tripod, and the sub-occipital ache and loss of cervical rotation the following week made me become protective of alignment in the neck. In finishing, I rarely put my head to the floor in sirsasana, and in the tripods of third I take most of the weight in my shoulders and hands. Great for cervical alignment, but oven time this overdistribution of work into the levator scapulae, traps and even the scalenes has grown a little harsh. A teacher asked me to step into forearm balances rather than jumping, I realized that in doing so I reverted back—in a good way—to using the base rather than the neck for support (makes sense: when I practiced by stepping up was back before I’d developed this intense mode of l-s/trap/scalene work). At this point I will learn to work inversions more from pure balance than weighting the base with so much contraction. I ask students what they need their traps for in standing postures as a kind of inquiry-based release mechanism; and it’s time to ask myself why I need them in arm balances. Meantime, the poor battered l-s is pulling my medicine ball head back and to the left in the stupidest way, causing an enormous energy drain, awkward lane changes, shameless neckrub solicitation, and a little Advil habit.

Under the water listening to the pipe symphony, and with my ear to the floor at the Masonic Temple listening to the dance of the accelerated culture, I feel small. Brian May, the queen guitarist who became an astrophysicist, was on the radio talking about the sublimity of contemplating his own smallness—how much more awesome to think on the stars above than himself as a star on a stage. I will bury myself in the bath; go to the weekend's parties without thinking so much about it; and see old art with our brilliant visiting friend Indiana that- belongs- in- a- museum Jones. Let the guitar lines from Interpol’s song play in the back of my mind day after day. Who says Angelenos are afraid to merge? I am looking for opportunities to feel small, because it is beautiful. Besides, there may be limits to the old strategy of breathing in to the muscle and asking it to release… oddly I feel that this time leaving the body might be a better release strategy than burrowing back inside.

Links: Brian May interview, NYT on building new habits.

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Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , sound

Who are the virgins? · 29 April 2008

This post follows up on questions about my reference in Monday’s post.

Like I said, the virgins keep coming back. But it’s a good haunting now. Nothing sinister.

When I was small, they were phantoms of doom. The original story, from Matthew 25, is that they were ten. Five were wise, kept their lamps trimmed and burning like in the gorgeous old spiritual that turned into a blues song: Blind Wille Johnson version, Billy Childish version.

(The way the idea of waiting for the judgement plays in to the writing of this song I do not know, but the minor chords and the keening that come through the blues version—if not the dry, domesticated hymn I sang as a kid—make me imagine it was first sung in the fields of Dixie… pointing to a whole new, and better, idea of apocalypse. The tiiime is draaawing niiiigh….)

Unlike the wise virgins, the foolish five let their lamps go out. When a “bridegroom” comes to them he takes the wise five, marries them, and takes them behind the door. But he says to the others, who had let their flames go out: Verily I say unto you, I know you not.

Or more specifically: go to hell. So the straight interpretation of the story is obvious. Watch out because the judgement day is coming and if you don’t keep working out your salvation with fear and trembling you won’t get to have sex with Jesus like you know you want to. (Jesus is always having sex with the church in the gospels, and the clean interpretation of this is that it represents spiritual union of God and his community on earth). Given all this sex, maybe the judgement day version actually isn’t cut and dried like the mainstream church would have it...

In any case, all I care about anymore is the lamps and the flames they keep. Flame is “spirit,” whatever that is, all over the world all over time.

For example, staying with the Judeo-Christian tradition, here’s something wonderful from a book I do not like (Proverbs 20:17 KJV):  

The spirit of a man (sic) is the candle of the Lord. Searching all the inward parts of the belly.

...The fire inside?

...Keep your lamp trimmed and burning.

...Stay awake. 

That’s all it means.

I never thought of this simpler, more beautiful understanding of the virgins until I encountered Tolle talking about waiting as a kind if being present. It’s somewhere around page 60 of The Power of Now (which, please, is not the most amazing spiritual manifesto by a loooooooooong shot, but is interesting and a kind if inspiring so far as it goes). The satirical imp Tolle writes that the lamp’s flame is merely awareness in wait for the bridegroom of enlightenment.

Even that is more interpretation than I need, though. 

The spirit is the candle of the “Lord…” Searching all the inward parts of the belly?

“Spirit” isn’t something “out there” though when I think of the lamps now… it’s just awareness. Which is just the spark that is here if I bother to tend it. So there's not much of a story hanging on to the little flame image anymore, even if the virgins keep coming back by association.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound , spirituality

More PDA · 27 April 2008

So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.

The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.

So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.

When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.

In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.

I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.

I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.

But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.

Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.

This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , sound

"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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

What Today Was Like · 14 April 2008

Slept in til 5:15 when the Editor whispered me the time. Twilight and bird sounds were filtering through the large open windows to the porch—both for the first time since late last fall. Oops! Light out? Oh…, it’s not really late.

Feet to floor, enjoy the feeling of having calf muscles for the first four steps: the way they pull at the attachment, a crescent-suture around the curve of the heel. Sip water in the kitchen, where the smell of warmed-over paint—the aromatic sign of summer inside this place—is back, just slightly. Nauli, trying to rustle off the weird sleepfulness that means it’s Monday.

Torpor. The Monday effect: regardless of what combination of sleep, hiking, asana, kriya and (always exhausting) esoteric shit happens inside the weekend, ever since I quit taking a flow class Saturday mornings Mondays have been special. The universal Monday lag that continues all the way in to the first hour or so of practice. Preparation for aging, I take it.

Pick up email because I’m a little worried about a friend who has been struck by love and talking to me (of all people?) about how women supposedly relate. (Why do humans fall in love?) No word from the thunderstruck inspired one, but something from my 9:00 private: Husband is sick, can we reschedule?

Thank you yes! I mean..., Fine if you must. I try to respond neutrally so as not to congratulate anyone for skipping practice just because I’d rather work a bit less today. But I feel thankful and go talk to the E in his sleep for a minute before I trip out the door.

Shakira’s on the Latin pop station and her Honduras- roadtrip- reminiscent warbling suits me fine, so I don’t switch to the cheesy blues-pop that’s waiting in the stereo for the drive down Santa Monica Blvd. It’s actually a little too light out by 5:55 for my taste, and when I pass the hospital construction zone the crew is mostly across the street and disappeared into the recesses of the site. Them off to work, and me too late for the grins they usually give as I stop for their long parade through the crosswalk, when they remind me silently that ashtanga is anything but work. Tomorrow, up a little earlier to catch those two edges: the dawn and the more-serious-than-me 6:00 crew.

At practice, the Monday effect is in full force, especially for those who yesterday practiced led with the one who passed through and treated us with that weird conspiration ritual, complete with a lot of extended hail-Patthabi chaturangas. I light a candle in front of some brass statue, and at least it’s still dark enough for 15 minutes of ganesh shadow-dancing on the wall.

By the time that effect wears off I am still creaking through the Bs, eluded by ujjayi, and interrupted by the pesky thought that even a morning like this is beautiful… and is something I might want to read about years from now if I ever bother to archive the owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , sound

Saturday XLIX: Inner Dark · 11 April 2008

A secret reader sent the owls. How much does this delight me? Thank you. They brew a good daily sencha, too.

Also exciting: the Black Keys new record is hot! Yes. Even without headphones, I respond well to the rhythm and attitude of the Akron blues. It is even helping me get my mind off of Jack.

You know I have been madly devoted to Jack for the right reasons all along. But these smug, preachy-ponderous, oh-so-disaffected lyrics on the recent Raconteurs record. What are you saying, my Pasty Prince? I just wonder if you’ve been this way all along but I haven’t seen it. I’ve been blinded by your piano riffs and your swaggering hips.

As usual, the The One Who Will Not Be Named guides my listening. The OWWNBN threads my drive time with new sounds and, measuredly, fleshes out my understanding of the history in delicious ways. I am Potter Stewart—I know it when I hear it—to his Aristotle—types, kinds, classes: he sees all the patterns and shares as much as I can take of what he knows. Which isn’t that large a fraction, given my limitations.

I am mostly done with consuming culture, but only beginning to appreciate sound. This is big. Music is a big deal.

Anyway… I am the editor this weekend. I freelanced a lot of research and editing the first years of grad school, and still read final drafts for a scholar in Beijing and one in Tel Aviv. Today it’s the Jewish historian, who works on FDRs generous aid and asylum for children of the Holocaust and contrasts this with his refusal to do anything about simultaneous lynchings in the South. God that’s a hard side of FDR to see.

You might know, if you're close, last year I had a lot of dark weekends. Dark, I tell you. The different relationship to time on those days, the non- practicing on Saturdays, the dissertation-induced neuroses that threaten every PhD candidate… maybe these were part of what put me into disconsolate, angsty negativity. Because there are emotional-intellectual sources of that suffering, but also practical sources. What is different a year later, when weekends are perfect? Without trying, I’ve habituated some really nice routines—the esoteric stuff I’m hesitant to mention, plus concerted long sleeps. That's just about regulating my energy. But too, there’s this sense that the present era, which I love so much, might end soon. How could Saturdays and Sundays ever be so good without these specific routines, these specific people, this one place? Without my own life now? If these weekends were mine forever, and this little sadness for its eventual end were not in me, I am not sure I’d be quite so happy.

Links? Still doing this? Just three.

● Soros on what we’re in for. He predicted this in a book a decade ago, but says the conditions are even riper this time. And he’s more than a financial writer—his perspective is historical and sees the whole economy, not just the credit crunch. (Review.)

●This isn't The Road (phew), but it's what I'm finally taking from my nightstand-pile and reading this weekend.

● By the way, I keep forgetting to introduce you to Eliza. Eliza is a therapist-bot. I will leave it to you to sort out the implications.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

It's Friday · 21 March 2008

To bring it around to where it started on Monday...

(a riddle.)

Oh Katie solved it immediately. Just wanted to make sure you all were, in fact, listeners of The Cure.

 

 

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Categories: sound

Acrostics · 17 March 2008

B elief
I s
B lasphemy
L ovingly
E ncoded

C rossing
O ver
I nto
T he
U nderworld
S afely

These are from Daniel Higgs’ 2007 book, Atomic Yggdrasil Tarot. No wonder this Cd/Book drives reviewers to eloquence. Here’s his label, Thrilljockey: Higgs has wedded his music and his visual art into a singular being, meant to be encountered as a conjuring force similar to that of the tarot experience.

As any proper druid with Wikipedia knows, in Norse mythology, Yggdrasil, aka the World Tree, connects the nine cosmological worlds…. Passing into Christian folklore, the tree is said to connect heaven and earth. In his relentless pursuit of the indivisible, Higgs travels up and down this spine and hatches a new transubstantiation of sound and image into life-form.

                      ……………………………

Anyway, the implication is that you’re implicated, like a caustic acrostic spelling out your name. I wrote one for Vanessa, and one for CP. Maybe some more to come...

E verything
A fter
S econdseries
Y oga 

K osmic
A narchy
R arely
M akes
A mends

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Categories: esoteric shit , sound

The Internet is Made of Words and Enthusiasm... · 17 March 2008

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Categories: sound

Language Games · 17 March 2008

Every woman is a poet when she is in love.

Plato said that. But I translated it if you knowatimean.
 

Wittgenstein said that. But I paraphrased it because this is no time for exactitude.

It is time for wordplay. I am thinking of tongue-twisters, limericks, haiku, acrostics, palindromes, alliterations and old favorite lines. Whatever words stick in the head.

At times I have kept lists of the words I love best, and as of today I am beginning again. I don't even know, what words do I love now...:

        antediluvian, blithely, concord, daft

Hated words is more difficult, but for sure:

        blowhard, dumpy, moist, secrete

The list will need to be organic to my life. It's more a know 'em when you see 'em kind of thing, for me. But it's good to start with a seed list.

What are the words you love or despise?

Later this week: acrostics, the six-word autobiography, I don't know what else.

Yoga not serious. Poetry serious.

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Categories: integration , sound

Digital Provocation · 27 February 2008

For emotional provocation, a girl with a piano is most powerful. A piano was my self-expression during the terrible years—high school—so maybe that’s got something to do with it.

But anymore, the strongest mood-shifter (mental state-shifter) for me is electronica. The Editor, bard to the core with thick icing layers of rock and jazz, protests: “It’s a wall. No movement in it. It is music that tells you to stay still.” 

Yes, sort of. The monotony of digitalism is part of what sucks me in. All that space between the data shortens the distance between 0 and love. Shit, I mean 0 and 1. In a way it’s subversive when beeps render you bliss, but in another way it’s almost easier.

The experience is like this: I want to waltz to its monotony. Interpolate my body in to it while my heartbeat/brainwaves just do what the monotony tells them to do. (Somewhere here there's a connection to Karen's jazz practice... but for me practice music, if any, is devotional cornball stuff: the triggers to downshift and become rhythmic in that context seem to be more about supercalming content than about BPM/form.)

Zero/one. Form/emptiness. Yadda/yadda.

Specifically, yesterday I finally stopped listening to Hot Chip (who sing about bodhi trees--not burning trees!). A really nice wakeup record, in all its moods. Now there are post-digital, yet similarly Enoesque, musics in my stereo: and I don’t know if I should cringe at the signposts in the lyrics or just take it as a indication that we have a little bit more than 1 and 0 in common.

Robert Wyatt (Comicopera, Be Serious):

I reall envy Christians. I envy Moslems too. It must be great to be so sure as a top Hindu or Jew. And I don't believe in willpower; self-expression's such a fraud. I mean how can I express myself when there's no self to express? Be serious! Put a sock in it. Then put a lid on it. Do us a favor.

It's a little more convincing when it's sung.

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Categories: beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Serious Fucking Alchemy · 17 January 2008

Can I say that?

Yes. Breakfast with the ineffable again this morning. Probably, it is always this good but my mind forgets to note it.

Oh who am I kidding??? This is special. Serious. Fucking. Alchemy.

How many days in a row are we going to hit paydirt like this, kids? Are you wondering the same?

Yeah, you give up the digging of a thousand shallow wells. Choose a method and just mine it mine it mine it like a dirty methodical little drone…, and now and then you hit a vein like this.

Think you can take it to the bank? Want compensation for your efforts or your surrender? Want to buy in? Riiiiight. Not packaged for resale. It’s here and it’ll be gone soon. I’m too much my teacher’s student to hold it or him or us tightly, and this only increases the joy. Like contemplating death increases your living.

The room is packed to the point of a waiting line, because everyone in fifty miles whose value of practice edges out her compulsive need to be right (hello: what is that hangup about except self-sabotage? It’s ok, we all get in our own way; but we don’t have to keep doing it forever) is on a mat in that room. Post-political practice space, right here for the making. Get in! Carpe manduka.

Many days, there is no assistant. A few who have been at this thing a little longer will give a neighbor an adjustment in supta vajra or pachimo. I’ve been doing a pretty strict counted practice this week, and this highlights strongly the relationships that facilitate my rhythm and those that do not. One companion, I can come to the top of a vinyasa, shift over for his supta vajra, breathe him through it and take one step to the mat without ANY shift in mental state. He doesn’t reach for any talky talky connecting, doesn’t put some kind of lowly beta-level awareness on me. And I come back to the top of the mat just like I’d added a posture—supta vajrasana B—between chakorasana and bhairvasana. Two others on that same train in the immediate perimeter, but another who hasn’t quite caught on. I love her just fine, but if the greater good is to contribute to the collective rhythm that supports the alchemy, I have to let her wait for the teacher. Because his awareness, given which he’s doing and what he’s done, is less fragile than mine.

I got in the car and this was on the stereo, loud. (What I get for blaring Back in Black, from the Unholy Los Angeles Driving Mix cd my brother made a while back, because I thought it a good way to toast RP this morning. Or at least so it seemed on the jaunt from bathroom floor pranayama to the door of my car, as the CDs live in a big cramped bookcase in the hallway. And it did work nicely for cruising Santa Monica Blvd in the dark, though I did frighten a homeless man at a stoplight. Anyway I took the highroad--Wilshire--back here to the working class fringes of Santa Monica, trumpeting Prince's version of the apocalypse and definitely in a state unfit for operating a motor vehicle.)

That’s a lot of apocalyptic Americana from twenty years back. But AC/DC and Prince never knew the shift in consciousness would look like this. This quiet, this early in the morning, and as much about working hard as it is about letting loose.

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

About Alice · 15 January 2008

I was not kidding the other day. By the way. About Alice Coltrane.

Bebop piano as a child; a young life all in jazz; then an India Period that never really ended. She founded the Vedantic Center of Los Angeles and produced a modest discography of sharply blended, yet beautiful, new age/ jazz/ indian/ soul harp-sitar-tambourine. A brilliant life. 

And an anchor to many. Here is her grand-nephew talking:

For a long time it’s been difficult to come to terms with her death. She was such a big presence for all of us—she really held us together. But not we’re all readjusting and gradually finding it easier to talk about her again. Slowly, we’re starting to bring her up in conversations and telling stories about her again. When the time is right and everyone is comfortable just remembering her for the special person she was, I’ll finish [the documentary I am making about her]…. As far as my relationship with my art is concerned, though, we never really talked about music much. I mean, she knew what I was doing and she always expressed and interest, but really she was much more of a spiritual mentor to me, someone who gave me guidance and insight because that was always the biggest part of her own life.

Here is the truth about the way women are remembered, the way we are reviewed and recommended and talked about and seen: it’s about a woman’s associations. Her connectedness, her ability to facilitate transformation, to collaborate, to create togetherness. With a man, what is remembered is all drive and ego and accomplishment. I wish we’d memorialize more in the middle. Most of the obits of Alice lead with her husband, follow with her bandmates, and around paragraph seven get around to something about Alice herself. Embarrassing, that extremism. And yet Alice was one who contained traditions, who connected people. It’s good, after all, to be remembered as a goddess.

So I’ll mention that of course her appellate name came from being wed to John; and that the speaker above is Flying Lotus. Her grand-nephew and an hypercreative, synthetic Los Angeles hiphop artist who will soon be large. I like him very much, and love that his feel is all Alice in hip-hop. The quotation is from Wire magazine, Nov 07. (Owl-House subscriptions ceased upon advancement to PhD candidacy: The Economist, The London Review of Books, The Yoga Journal. Subscriptions maintained: Veneer Magazine, Wire, Namarupa.)

For Christmas, the One Who Will Not Be Named gave me transcendence. I mean Transcendence. I will check out the IP situation on this record and do a reader giveaway if it’s not robbing some trust or foundation. I shouldn’t be listening to this record alone, with so many transcendence-hungry, Culver City-loving, Vedantic-friendly, jazz-listening, covertly chanting, secretly sitar-loving people in this thread.

If I ask for your address, you’ll know why. Or maybe you should just begin now.

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Categories: arbitrage , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

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

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

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

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

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

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

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

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

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

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

Saturday XXXIV: Gridlock Hero · 7 December 2007

There’s this phenomenon. The December Congestion. Santa Monica gridlock in all directions, starting when darkness edges in at 4 and holding out until 8—every weeknight from about the 5^th through the 23^rd. You can’t go anywhere. Sidestreets are solid taillights in red. Flying over we must look like a colony of fire ants frozen in time. I just want to go inside and pull the blackout curtains or something.

Or go to SF. Is the holiday lighter up there? I’ll be in Union Square and surrounding from Thursday through Sunday. Any suggestions for the visit? I like a good salad, hipster coffee shops with free wireless, and something intense (I mean activity, not waffles) on Saturday mornings. Business trip that is really pleasure.

After: Portland/Seattle. Pleasure trip that is really business. Hmmmmm. First, maybe some art this weekend. Shepard Fairey is doing his first ever gallery show, which I definitely will be skipping. But this person, Francis Alys, might be amazing.

Also, I keep listening to the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi record while I am sitting around staring into taillights. The lyrics are talking about waiting on a moment, and about surrender, and about battling the evil machines. It’s like the Bhagavad Gita for urban girls. Maybe.

I should probably switch out the CD before I start getting all heroic or something.

● The owl persona got ruffled up about politics this week, here and there. Yeah. I’ll own it. Heartfelt apologies if my directness was at all hurtful. Here is the thing: when some say they are on the left, they mean they disfavor the present regime and want to dis-identify with it. (Boomeritis?) When I say it, I mean I want a practical, everyday politics of social class. I mean an enduring conceptual leftism with egalitarianism in its veins. Not a screw-you politics of opposition. So sometimes we are going to disagree.

● By the way, in case your email is being screened by the feds, here are some emoticons to help you go undetected. Funny.

● Faith healing at Disneyland.

● The Dawkins and friends’ conversation about God continues in Edge. Pretty good. Sciency, though. Jonathan Haidt argues the following and several others respond.

I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimees terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups…. [E]very longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

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Categories: markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXXII: Stop Owl Commodification · 16 November 2007

I found the ecstatic grassroots movement I've been imagining. Uh oh. But I’m not going to tell you about it. Except to say it involves a secret society and does not involve naked yoga.

Returned to morning practice this week, which included Thursday contortions next to an intriguing New York ashtangi poet met through this medium. Somewhere between post-practice Fred Segal and Real Food Daily brunch, I realized I'd been charmed. Sometimes RL is so much better.

I have to admit morning practice and the rhythms it creates for me are what I love best, even though I have adored the evenings this fall. I’ve done six weeks of all 5:00 practices, milking the habituated morning energy spike for dissertationly purposes. Gradually over the weeks this has shifted my energy eveningward, and the mornings have slowed. The experiment has showed me so much about my choices in energy-distribution: between relationships, work and practice. About practicing to give energy to my life rather than letting practice be the main event. I’ll try to write more about this before it is gone.

● I am kind of excited about the little movie about bob dylan this week.

● Speaking of sentimental wonders: a re-realease of songs a decade old at the RJM Digital Archive. He never used to talk to me back in the days when he was making these recordings. I was generally pissed off and what people called "intense" while he was ethereal and lovey. Tendencies which have tempered on both sides. But one December afternoon after my shift at the library desk I passed him under the pine trees and asked for a cassette. Listened throughout the Christmas break, out there driving a Dodge truck on icy Montana roads. Up to the ski area for days alone on Red Lodge Mountain, and down to the bars in town for nights with my old nemesis—the only other one of us rural kids who escaped, albeit in her case to a worser fate. That’s where these songs go for me.

● What else? Well, here is some trouble. Some good discussion earlier in the week. If you come around, you better listen at least as sharply as you soapbox. We are so done with recycled opinions and 2004-era rants.

● Oh, and whoever sold my address to Yoga Pura also gave it to Anthropologie, whose catalog just arrived.

I tolerated it this summer when the outer hipstosphere switched from swallows to owls as their cute-but-disturbing bird of choice (ho hum). But now there are owl candles, an owl purse and (yes, Tova) an owl apron in the Anthro catolog. I mention this by way of saying to those of you who might be tempted: I don’t actually like owls. Please no owl things for the holidays. (Unless it's something really good, you know.) Otherwise, STOP OWL COMMODIFICATION.

That’s enough linking. I don’t care what else was being said in the world this week.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXX · 3 November 2007

On this date in 1976, a 28-year-old C.E.J. drove a white VW Beatle through the snowed-in cornfields of Yellowstone County, past the feedlot with the cattle billowing steamy breath in the cold, five miles down Airport Road past the hilltop cemetery, around the corner and down past the country doctor’s house into Laurel, MT, a railroad town with the highest national rate of alcoholism, if not poverty and Evangelicalism rates to match. She parked at the high school, home of the Laurel Locomotives, and hauled herself inside to the voting booths set up in the gym with their levers and their curtains. They cut her to the front of the line.

I like to believe she voted for Carter, but the truth is it was probably Ford… though the negation, as they say, was in her belly.

Later that day she had her first baby, and took it home to her fireplace-heated, century-old Ranch house under giant cottonwoods on a rise above Canyon Creek. And the two of them would pretty much stay there in that grove, safe and doing nothing but cooing and eating and rolling around in front of the fire or out under the trees, for the next three years.

Thank you, Mom. I’m sorry I don’t really remember it.

I was increasingly together this week, relatively clear in mind and action. Please let it be an emerging trend. And I practiced a little harder than usual. By Thursday the edges were finally pretty well burnished and I thought somewhere in standing, “Is this what it takes to get to surrender?” It feels nice to be spent like that on a Thursday, spent in a Friday way.

But then right at the end, without putting any particular try into it, I made a convincing UKK-B for the first time since GT knelt down and talked me into it in August. Hello. I wonder if that is a regular part of my world now? I told the Editor that I had a feeling UKKB was really miiiiine and he said not to be a pose-whore.

“That’s not practicing yoga—that’s just doing a couple of moves you can do.”

Moves. Hee hee. We’ll see what happens Sunday.

Today, birthday things. All day. First some links.

●New issue of Veneer is out. 

● I’ve always felt Sigur Ros were cheesy and trying too hard to sound “beautiful.” But just a second. Maybe it’s just that they can’t help it. Here is a trailer to some film they made about their home. Beautiful. Otherworldly. They are screening tonight and playing an acoustic set. Think I'll go.

● I received this record (Sally Shapiro, mysterious Swedish disco princess!) as a gift this week. Sad disco, nostalgic synth. I like its moody precision, and like how it accompanies a night drive on the freeways of this decrepit city. Here’s a video of one of the singles.

● Via Souljerky, David Lynch and Donovan are hyping a new university where TM training is required. With a lot less style and too many words, here’s the same arbitrage happening at UCLA. Good discussion in the second article of the history and practice of MBSR.

● Very intriguing. Techsattva is a podcast that wants to "make sense of several systems of thought at once.... By denying the completeness of any one system, Techsattva hopes to... get a view of connections that exist between them." Wonderful intention, but we’ll see if they can do much with it. The recent show is on the subjectivity of neuroscience. About time. Includes a discussion of the implications of new neural feedback (like biofeedback, but more finely tuned) for meditators' state awareness and state maintenance. Nice.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , science , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXVIII · 21 October 2007

Night before last I dreamed Alastair Crowley was watching the Editor and me from a second-floor window across the street while we played with sea creatures in turquoise tidepools. Crowley was wearing a billowy black cape and trying to look scary, hunched over like the grim reaper. Poser.

In the dream, I told the Editor, “Alastair Crowley’s up in that window, watching us!” And he replied, “Don’t tell me that—I’ll have dreams about him!”

Guess Halloween is coming. I just ran across a poem I wrote on Halloween a decade ago. Very dark. I remember writing it in my head while on a run along the train tracks after class, before an evening of waiting tables and before getting smashed in an old downtown Victorian overrun by us disaffected Philosophy majors. That is what happens when 20-year-olds read Sartre and write poetry. Good thing I stopped.

Rachel and I are seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company tonight. God. Being a little sharper on  X-men than on Chekov, I actually got the tickets out of excitement to see Magneto on stage, thinking “The Seagull” must be some obscure thing by the Bard. But no, it is Chekov. Only Rachel could help me understand that this play is no drama but just a wicked, wicked joke.

I’m going to do some Kundalini this morning and then secret down to the beach with the in-line skates that mysteriously showed up in the campus mailroom with my name on them. The departmental staff made me open the package immediately ('cos last time I received a non-Amazon box, it was cookies). That was embarrassing. By this token, I’ll understand if you want to disassociate from me when you learn I partake in either Kundalini or inline skating. Though you should probably lighten up and do some kriyas.

By the way. After much deliberation, it is Big Sur for Thanksgiving. It appears I’ll be stranded between equidistant (and I do mean distant) yoga in Mountain View and Santa Barbara, but correct me if I’m wrong. Any recommendations for what to do (the baths at 2 a.m., maybe, or afternoon snack at the Post Ranch?) and what to read (Henry Miller?) are welcomed.

Saturday links.

? Speaking of deliveries and of autumnal feelings, this record came in the mail for the Editor the other day. Beautiful. Nonsensical. So nice. Listen to the sample track embedded in the linked review. For the rest, though, send Bon Iver (this is a self-release and it sounds like he’s stuck up in a cabin in Wisconsin) some dollars. Right after you go back and pay Radiohead for that download you forgot to settle up the other day, weasels.

? Here is a clip from the recent Mindfulness and Psychotherapy conference at UCLA. Thich Nhat Hahn opens and then Jack Kornfield speaks about Burma. This related short interview—on warrior traditions in various faiths and the possibilities for activism rooted in Buddhism—is more provocative. “It’s one thing to be calm in a peaceful mountain monastery, and quite another to act calmly on a festering street corner in East L.A.”

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Categories: esoteric shit , having a body , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXVII · 12 October 2007

Minimalism, recently.

I’d say avant, but that would be obnoxious.

AF moved into a sleek LeCorbusier this week. I keep accidentally imagining myself there. But the flights to Chas de G are just stupid, and I’m supposed to be doing what DJ (the dissertation journal) says.

Reading My Paris as consolation (check it, U).

With Gui Boratto.

Eating Red Delicious. Which taste like something for once. 

Bad moon day on Wednesday. Moon days piss me off. I’ve been trying not to mention that.

Meanwhile, the secret planche is starting to show (phase one; oooooh Tristan—what you trying to do here? But thanks; and the bboy is something else). Take note if you are a 14-year-old boy or a female ashtangi. Related: I am showing a new interest in pressing up to handstand. Elusive. But it turns out I can hold an inverted L all day. Useless.

Also related: return of the desire to tattoo the arches of my feet. I know, I know. Guess it’s the collective unconscious talking. Sort of loudly.

Incidentally, there is no collective unconscious. Been ridiculing Jung’s bad metaphysics in the evenings. Can’t be helped, considering the October occult reading taking place in the Owl House.

However: I will be nesting alone in Eagle Rock this week while a dear friend plays CMJ. It is a writing retreat. Raising the question: to schlep to Santa Monica for practice, or moonlight closer to the temporary digs. Jury’s out.

And obviously, yes. There is a disturbance in the  force. I mean the collective unconscious.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , sound

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.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Ornette · 27 September 2007

Ok. Holy Shit.

It was decided that I should be edified. By a sort of direct experience of free jazz, which in its recorded form can make me irritable. Ornette Coleman and his drummer son Denardo and three bassists played here, the premiere of Sound Grammar; and I figured that twenty years from now when I get around to appreciating free jazz, I’d be glad I’d seen it.

Seriously, it was amazing. What do you say? Ornette walks on stage looking like a brittle old stick in the shape of an upside-down saxophone, head permanently bowed and hands clasped. Iridescent turquoise suit and big white shoes. He is 77 and I hear he passed out onstage at a festival over the summer. The only thing he said all night was at the start, telling us to follow the note, but that the note would be the beating of our own hearts instead of the sound they were playing.

Corny. Except I think this is the best way to describe what happened next. Ornette took up his alto saxophone and undid all the dark thoughts I’d been thinking about old age since seeing my diminished grandmother week before last. The intensity, mastery, emotional clarity. And sweat. He actually is genius, not the sentimental shadow of past genius.

I was exhausted afterwards.

After our friends had gone, the Editor tried to explain something about the unplayed rhythm in the music, the irregular pulse along each 16^th or 32^nd note or something. I looked up and said I wished I had the concepts to appreciate it on that level, but I just didn’t perceive a pattern.

—Yes you did. You were moving to it.—

—Oh.—

—I  thought you wouldn’t like it but after you started moving I realized you’d think it was the same as yoga.—

Whatever that means.

Here is Ornette in the NYT last year:

The music he likes is simply defined: anything...  that is not created as part of a style. “The state of surviving in music is more like ‘what music are you playing,’ But music isn’t a style, it’s an idea.”… Mr. Coleman draws you into the chicken- and- egg questions that he’s asking himself…. Many of them are about what happens when you put a name on something, or when you learn some codified knowledge. Though he is fascinated by music theory, he is suspicious of any construct of thought.

Links: Free Jazz, Ornette’s Permanent Revolution, Seeking the Mystical Inside the Music

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , sound , spirituality

Shadow Visitor and an Addiction · 6 September 2007

A migraine woke me at four in the morning last Saturday, three days into silence. The headaches started two years ago and I take them like the scrappy little Rocky Mountain pioneer my dad raised, but this time the entire tone of the thing was different. Intense. Hard-edged.

Guess that’s what it feels when you have zero options for migraine-distraction. Not even mental options.

I could feel the thing’s specific location in the physical brain, and the pain was both more intense and less horrible—the latter because this time I wasn’t angry at it for interrupting my day. What did I have to interrupt?

I usually take control by creating distraction. It’s a competition for which one of us—me or it—will determine the day’s activity. I win if I get on with it, even if I move around like the hunchback of Notre Dame and have to call my brother for sympathy. When I start losing, I fortify my position with Excedrin. Other women in my family bypass this stupid struggle and automatically drug up the first day of the month. They’re smart. But it was the men who taught me how to relate to my body, so I’m stubborn.

By 9 am, I had spent five hours in the fetal position, exploring the sharp edges of the pain but afraid to just go into it and know it fully. Hello, fear. That resistance was building up all over my body. The sensation was coming in waves, but the fear just kept getting harder and thicker brick by brick. No way was I going to sit my body upright and take my attention to the center of that space behind my right eye.

Admitting that, I hunchbacked down the hill to the kitchen, and asked if there were any caffeine on the premises. Yes, contraband was available, said the big angelic chef, but would I like to try some ginger tea first?

Here is what I thought: I want DRUGS, not SYMPATHY! Said: Thank you. I will sit over there.

She cut up a whole root and boiled it. A half hour later, still hunched over a table, I told her that I was probably hallucinating, but I could feel a blood vessel in the front of my head dilate and move the pain around. She said I wasn’t hallucinating.

I still didn’t have much awareness of anything except the place behind my eye, but after the ginger took the fear out of the pain, I felt interested in checking it out. So I went back to the cushion and mildly hallucinated for the rest of the day.

God it was trippy. Enough physical “pain” to keep me oblivious to the outside world, and so much inner entertainment that I got lost in it. For hours.

When I’m quiet enough not to need the anchors of breath or mantra to keep my insane mind from writing novels, I like to watch the light play on the backs of my eyelids. But this time it was a whole show. A little hawk or comet or dandelion fuzz—some kind of flying shadow—appeared and swooped all over. A shadow dervish. I had wild dreams that night—so much for Patanjali’s dreamless sleep—and then the dervish came back the next day and stayed until evening.

Sitting there out of time, watching it, had nothing to do with nothingness. There was a stable emotional tone of absorbed amusement. It didn’t feel profound or important: it just felt fun, like an innocuous game.

I didn’t want it to end.

Which must have been obvious, because on Sunday night an instructor climbed on the dais, before the pair of Buddhas (a dark male one and light female one) and said teasingly, “Well aren’t you good meditators! Let go of the sitting posture. Let go of the activity of medititating. Just be mindful. Just get up and leave.”

I went to bed scheming about how I have to do a month-long or more. And laughing at myself for the reaching: literally, this time, a reaching for nothingness. Is that why we invest all this time in sitting practice, for the bliss payoff? Maybe we’re just addicted to a mental state—and contemplation is just our method for getting there.

I don’t know. If my deepest motives are just so much spiritual materialism, though, I’m not ready to dismiss them as bad unholy desire. I am hungry for insight and pleasure. In love with the journey, seduced by the grail quest. All of it. Badly.

So I get attached to mental sates. If I didn’t, I’d have quit the astanga practice years ago. At least you can’t make too much trouble when you’re in a trance.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , power of suggestion , sound , spirituality

Sharpen Your Nerves · 4 September 2007

Last Thursday morning, Isaac Brock appeared to me floating in a cartoon cloud and hissed: “Sharpen your nerves!”

Then he cackled and grinned at me with a mouthful of teeth filed down to points. Screamed: “Sharpen your nerves! Ahh haa haa haa!!”

Fine Isaac. I’ll stop being a lazy ass, sitting here on the cushion layering interpretations on my immediate experience.

But I wondered: what if you took notes on a meditation retreat, to snag some of the really good interpretive thoughts before they flew away? Would it make it easier to let thinking go?

Turns out that no. It would keep your brainwaves a little spiky, because you’d need to whip up some focused discursive thought in order to write. And yet what you did write would be stupid and empty later.

I know this because the next day I tried writing a few things down. Stupid things.

Here’s from the notebook:

“There are turkeys! Large!”

“Wanting to hug everyone. Must practice non-hugging. Do not molest.”

“Ghee. God we’re weird.”

Now I’m surprised I had to preserve these words, and others which are dumb enough I won’t even transcribe them.

It makes me wonder if the deeper moments of awareness and sensation I experienced during the week week, moments which seemed tinged with the ineffable, were actually vapid nonsense. Probably. But just in light of my present state of mind. Trying to interpret, and evaluate, that state of mind with this one is problematic.

What’s salient there is trivial here; and the contrary is even more true.

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

Earthly Forces, Living Lightly · 3 September 2007

Oh it’s hot down the central valley, and just flat and bright and heavy as I drive back in to LA. (Beneath a banner in the East Bay: “Stop Driving the War.” Good goddam call, I concede.) Six hours on four cylinders and Eno & Fripp 1975 (graduating from MfA), and into this weird scorched world where gravity is a serious force. I'm thinking of the molten magnet inside the planet.

That’s a transition allright. Konk me upside the head with an iron skillet off the stove.

But not in a bad way. Heh.

The hidden Marin valley of the past week was something else: smelling like wet sage in the morning and burnt sage in the afternoon, with deer outside my window to wake me for practice, wild turkeys as big as me (but not as goodlooking, I thought when I was thinking), tiny little lizards splayed out fearlessly in the 6 pm warming hour. The sky at night was darker than I’ve seen in too long, and after I stopped needing much sleep (talking takes much out of me in a normal day), being out with such large stars and the droning crickets was pretty close to opposite of midday LA in a heatwave.

The Editor rented Fierce Grace and we fired up the AC and closed all the shades and caught up after a week without tickles. The film together with something DZ(M) said reminded me of this.

We can see that there are ways of inhabiting our roles without making quite so much of them. It’s really not necessary to take out lives quite so personally. “The man [sic] who knows the relation between the forces of nature and actions,” Krishna says, “sees how some forces work upon other forces, and he becomes not their slave.” Your body, your mind, your personality – that’s all just part of nature, it’s all just lawful stuff happening. Why are you getting so uptight about it? Let it be harmonious with its lawful manifestation, and don’t struggle against it so hard. Live your life more lightly, more impersonally; don’t get so caught, so trapped in your melodrama.

Ram Dass, Living the Bhagavad Gita (p. 63)

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Categories: beta state , evolution , having a body , integration , morality , sound , spirituality

The Slacker Meditates: Some High Points · 27 August 2007

                                DAY 1: STATIC

Candy saaaaays…

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

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

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

What do you think I’d seeeee?

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

If I could…

I knew the Velvet Underground was a mistake this morning.

Walk a-wa-y from me…?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

              DAY 3: OBSESSION WITH IMMEDIATE ENVIRONMENT

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

…And lunch will be even better…

Whose shoes are those?

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

Are there really not any sexy people? Really?

They have heirloom tomatoes down in the kitchen. Tomatoes…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Guru's Segway · 26 August 2007

Sitting in the MOMA café two Fridays ago, thinking about Helvetica, when the yoga people call. I’d left voicemail at the Dharma Mittra center days earlier, asking if they’d take a west coast irregular at the long Saturday night intensive. Thought I’d received the silent no, and meantime had made plans to be at the Puck Building (interestingly enough) on Saturday night, for a reception that would collect my favorite score of sociologists.

Mmmm. Priority conflict. For about two seconds. I clearly enunciated all my credit card information to the caller, confident the hipsters at the next table were less smart than they looked.

Next night, old men on the street in Gramercy Park were doing approachable old-man things, but rather than ask for directions I trailed a giant purposeful yogi a half-block north, moving quickly. Very many good tattoos fresh enough to refer to this phase of his life rather than (like mine) one previous, but both earplugs and dreads so large that he’d been working on them awhile. He was warriorish, and suggested I was in for a break from Santa Monica diamonds and matched Lululemon. He took the stairs two at a time, which I couldn’t follow without making a racket. And besides, I stopped at the first landing to check out the guru’s segway.

Then climbed in to a long thin room full of summer evening light and vegetarian sweat. People were politely staking claims, tucking glasses and cell phones into a bookcase full of Danskos.

Mister Plugs and I were early, but the last two of maybe 40 to arrive. I was glad for that, setting up at the back of the room where’s there’s a solid floor, rather on the front 2/3 that is covered with faded rose shag that could be as old as me. Right above my mat, 15 feet up, was a disco ball in an angular skylight. Ad-hoc feng shi.

To the right (beyond a tattooed over-50 man who had a strong war-veteran-ness about him and who would make repeated comments about my hamstrings as we worked toward yoga nidrassana) was an altar featuring Jesus, Aurobindo, Yogananda, and I think Hanuman. (Nidrassana-man would feel far less lecherous hours later, when the whole thing deteriorated into an ecstatic-chanting, posture-striking mess of bodies.) I only tend to care about altars if they contain a candle I can use to balance. But this altar interested me because it brought parts of my neglected heart together: never has the Jesus-Yogananda association been so clear. This would be the first time that my old relationship with the Jewish carpenter would seem at all relevant to my yoga practice.

The large window out over the street was crowded with more of this hindoo-hippie detritus of what Dharma Mittra (Dharma? Mittra?) later said was his forty years in this space—during which his first segway, and before that 14 bicycles, have disappeared from that stoop on the stairs. (All of this karmic payback for horses, and perhaps one elephant, he stole in past lives. He is glad to give up segways to settle his score.) In the window, plants only a mother would love, glass ornaments of rainbows, dusty candles, and a giant metal OM looking down oven the intersection at 23^rd and 3^rd.

We crowded in on the pink shag, looking up at him and up at the OM, and made the intonation for a very long time. Across the street a young man pulled off a tie (on a Saturday?) and dress shirt, and I thought of Edward Norton in Fight Club. Did this young capital- lackey know what he was getting in to when he rented the place? We OMed and OMed. I thought about the cardsculpture stacks of citrus fruits at the stand down below, wondered if we were creating a comedy streetscene by dislodging them.

Then, drawing in a little closer, I started to see the people around me: 30s, professional, uptight, white. Possessing triceps. I fit right in.

This was not what Mister Plugs had led me to expect. No surprise it would take this group a while to open up to the ecstatic yogachurch Dharma Mittra wanted to conjure.

But here it is paragraph ten and I haven’t even set eyes on the man’s face yet. We haven’t even taken the first sun salutation (or the second, in which he’d nonchalantly instruct us to take pincha from downward dog). 

Looks like I am recounting this at the pace to which I have to slow down in order to remember it, now that it’s more than two weeks past. I’ll try to speed this thing up and offer a proper workshop review. Later.

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , having a body , integration , power of suggestion , sound

Pirates of the Air · 23 August 2007

If you’re going to be exacting, be exacting about the breath.

Fourth day of Mysore with Petri the Pirate. He doesn’t teach to poses so much as to the breath—although he finally busted my cheating supta urdvha pada today, for the split second I drop the toe as I roll past the elbow (locking my eyes, whispering “You have to DECIDE! The toe is YOURS. Decide every day. You WILL NOT DROP IT”), and when I took my own ankles in a backbend, “Tomorrow you do yourself, without me holding.” Here’s to the power of suggestion. Phhhhhhhhhhhht. But anyway, most of what we’re doing is exacting my vinyasas. Basically, this involves adding an extra exhale in a few places, and attempting to inhale-UP! out of most postures.

In theory, the extra breaths should make practice easier, but as it is, knowing he’s listening far more than watching, I’ve placed my attention even more on the breath than usual this week. I love practicing this way, and with this kind of awareness from a teacher. But somehow in this process I’ve lost a sliver of inhale, shortened it to match the exhale (whereas usually I'm a hair long on the inhale), so over the course of a 140-minute practice I slowly edge into the red. Some inhale-retention might be due later.

Half an hour after rolling out of rest, and my wrists are still atremble on the banks of my keyboard. Breath superslow, deep and greedy.

I have consumed an unbelievable 64 oz of water in the past 40 minutes (how is this even possible?), and am finally, as a result, feeling grounded. In savasana I practiced a bit of yoga nidra where the body becomes heavy, drawn into the ground like a block of lead, and then becomes light, weightless, air. Hearing Jasmine Riddle, from a secret hippie-magick cassette I found in the obscurest of university archives (and is now, eyebrow-raisingly, a regular line on my far-from-private library record) as she warps soundwaves with her warbling chant of “heavy heavy, light light.”

What’s with that about conquering gravity in the third series? I’m a long long way from such things, measuring by my urdvha kukkutasanas, but today there is such an spacey lightness that I’m not going to get a whit done until I refind the earth. Matthew Sweeney noted in a podcast recently that astangis tend to overemphasize lightness, I suppose to the point that we of the subculture becomes rootless and unsteady.

I just downed another 10 oz of lemonwater.

I think I’ll read a stack of book reviews before I try to do anything semi-important with my brain this morning. Tomorrow, primary series, close to the ground and counterbalanced with great inhalations.

That’s enough vinyasa talk for this owl.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , sound , 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.

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Saturday XX · 28 July 2007

Today I caught an early kundalini yoga class in time to get to the beach before the heat. I’ve been a little sour lately, if you haven’t had the misfortune of a direct taste; and I carried a seed of skepticism into class although I like the teacher very much.

Now really, if you need hocus-pocus to spark that energy, you are wasting your time.

Yeah. So the class was great. We did a bunch of stupid-looking kriyas that lonely, naked Indian men in caves probably made up out boredom and dementia. Most of these tricks involved holding awkward shapes and performing a loud, rapid “bellows breath” from the belly. Then we took savasana, which was the deepest and most deathly peaceful I’ve experienced in ages. Then we chanted something about how the universe and its creative force are awe-inspiring and wonderful.

I’ve taken enough random yoga to be able to let go into the weirdness, so got into this easily enough. These practices are about playing with energy (presuming you know how to find it in the first place, which might be a large presumption). It’s just about the subtle body: tension, force, lightness, breath, and the way that your relationship to gravity changes when you find certain deeper muscles and colonize them from the involuntary into the voluntary sphere. Subtle body isn’t mystery: it’s just one level less obvious than asana contortionism. I loved that the class was all play, whereas my experience of asana practice is equal parts energy creation, expenditure, and release.

There’s power in the breath, and the way it edges up against and creates tension in the pelvic floor, the diaphragm, and the muscles of the throat. Sometimes I forget.

Tomorrow the living guru of astanga yoga turns 92 and the Mysore rooms will be empty. To build on theme of letting go into looking stupid, I’m seriously considering renting in-line skates and hitting the paved beachwalk first thing tomorrow morning. (Let’s not argue about this: we all know that rollerblading is lame.) I think I can be confident that most people I know will sleep in, and I’ll be relatively anonymous in my awkwardness. Vande gurunam.

Not so much on the linking this Saturday. Just a few from earlier in the week.

? You likely already saw this, along with the Filipino prisoners dancing Thriller, but: the rural farmlife version of Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Funny. Will Oldham’s open-hip gyrations confirm what I’ve been saying since his last visit to LA: the guy is doing some yoga.

? The NYT’s quaint American Road Trip series visits the Shambala Mountain Center and gets way too moony for good journalism. By page two, the entire “news article” genre has deteriorated into formless, depressive goo. Kind of endearing.

? Joseph LeDoux does an interview in Salon about the key processes that underlie consciousness, how the brain regulates emotions, and the relationship of music and memory.

[E]ven if we solved the problem of consciousness we wouldn't understand how our brains make us who we are.… [M]otives like the desire to succeed or to obtain power are not simple reflections of consciousness. Dick Cheney probably thinks he's a good guy.

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Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , science , sound

Music For Airports · 19 July 2007

The windchimes rustled in practice this morning. They’re soft and deep, and slow. Very Music for Airports in tone. (Their maker must have intended that—it’s too perfect to be coincidental).

They probably rustle often, but we don’t always have our window cracked like we did today, and I’m not always aware of sounds besides the background whispers of a teacher and the diswasher-like drone of the ujjayi chorus.

Today, the breeze touched the chimes little just as I entered tittibasana, ringing a subject-verb-predicate into something like my front-brain. Tell V. your method. This one’s for her.  Can you practice a posture as homage to someone—besides sages and wild creatures, that is? Anyway, I came home to email from V. asking for advice on just this matter, so clearly the chimes were telegraphing the same.

Music for Airports is a guilty pleasure for me. Guilty because corny, together with the rest of early ambient; and a pleasure because after about two seconds of listening I lose all self-consciousness about genre and cultural meaning and all that. A year ago, after a week of vipassana, I drove north out of Marin and pushed play on track 1 just as I made into the clouds that were hanging on to the Golden Gate. I hadn’t said a word in days, and figured the sound would ease the transition into Sunday morning Mysore practice on Divisadero. Really, the record is beautiful, and might have been written exactly for an empty morning drive in clouds across the Golden Gate, when you haven’t spoken or even much cogitated for ages.

I was the first one to arrive at Divisadero by a half hour, so broke the seal with some Sanskrit in a big empty room. Later C arrived and, to my horror, went to the CD player. No no no no noooo: please no music for yoga.

She played Music for Airports. Practice was amazing.

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , sound , spirituality

Saturday XI · 12 May 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Saturday X · 28 April 2007

? Flickrblockrs. Funny kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday IX · 22 April 2007

So, some links for this weekend after all.

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

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

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

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

? Beware, dirty yoga men.

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

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

? Clips from Yoga, Inc.

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Letter to NPR · 8 March 2007

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

 

Dear NPR,

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Saturday Morning · 10 February 2007

A while back when I lived in the tropics for a year, in a fiberboard and corrugated zinc sort of lean-to, I thought about luxury. Because I had all kinds of it: unlike my housemates, I had a laptop computer, occasional dinner in some excellent restaurant, the option for hailing a cab on days I didn’t feel like a 90 minute walk home through dust and crushing sun. A careening 15 minutes in a 1983 Lada, in that context, was far more meaningful than a jaunt these days down Sunset Blvd in somebody’s Porsche. Luxury isn’t absolute: it arises out of contrast. The ethical implications of this make me squirm, but anyway. 

Saturday morning is not like the others, and so I revel in it like crazy. I get up after the sun, scrap the esoteric breathing shit, don’t bother like usual to pack 2 meals and 4 bags of books and clothes for the day, and clean the house and my in-box until 10. At 10, the minute the despised Click and Clack come on the radio, I make for my friend J’s vinyasa class, which after six days of Mysore is a long cool iced tea. Now that I look at it, housecleaning and late morning vinyasa flow maps exactly on my (unkind) stereotype of the uninspired Brentwood housewife life. But god is it nice one day a week. 

Cleaning my in-box includes a couple of hours picking up links that have been sent me during the week, reading the smart mags and the not-so-smart ones, and a blogroll. This week, I’m going to try posting the notes I’d usually send to different sub-sets of you, to see if that’s useful. If I post something that’s 5 days old and so stale in internet time, it’s because when I read/listened to it this morning, I liked it anyway. Cheers. 

Princeton ESP lab closes. “How do you get peer reviewed when you don’t have peers?”

 

Jenny Diski explains Second Life to the over-30 set. I love her writing.

 

On neuroplasticity, or changing your mind to change your brain. No surprise to you fans of habits-and-will student John Dewey, or to yogis. (Skip the first 30 min.) 

 

Lethem on The Ecstasy of Influence in Harper’s. Read it as his typical looky-here cultural omnivorism, or an exploration of the boundaries between self and others.

 

Say Everything. NYM sociologizes the generation gap in privacy. Similar theme.

 

MIA video.

 

Buddhist geeks. Sort of promising.

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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. 

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Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion , science , social theory , sound

Neglecting the Didjeridoo · 29 January 2007

Tonight made my fifth or sixth walk home from campus with The Knife, and I think some of the tracks – Pass This On, Silent Shout –are sufficiently in my body to go into heavy rotation for the morning drive. God this is a good band; and I don’t mind putting myself in overlap with Pitchfork’s (and probably everyone else’s) 2006 top ten to say it. 

It’s nice to get to the point of comfortable excitement with them, because I’ve been with Talib Kweli, Bjork (just Human Behavior, a perfect song) and the poppier TVOTR for many weeks, and it’s passing over from pleasantly zone-invoking to played-out. 

“When you practice a lot, you start to become very discriminating about what you expose yourself to—the food you put in yourself, the violence you’ll watch on screen, the music you listen to,” says a hilarious ISKON-punk-rock-hemp-ass yoga teacher so comfortable being himself, and so adept with the harmonium, that he delights me. (The notion of reacting strongly against bad nutriments contrasts, in a sense, with the Theravadan take that getting quiet dulls the edges of both your attractions and your repulsions—but said ISKON man is happy with dualism in many forms.) 

Anyway, to the annoyance of many, I know this bit about increasing discrimination to be true. It’s not pretentious moral fiat, but something that comes up from your viscera, as your nervous system gets sensitive. You can’t help it. You’re tuning in, for as big of a Leary hippie or Pantanjali junkie that this makes you. You don’t like talking about it. 

Admissions having been made, practicing a lot has also induced a new appetite in me for bad music, particularly between 5:46 and 5:55 on week days. In the dead of one morning last winter, the vipassana instructor who opened our practice space caught me in my car, in the dark, being loud with Missy Elliott. Then we went inside and I did my usual thing of not talking to her because I was, you know, in my space. Really inappropriate.

I should be refining my appreciation of the Steven Halpern legacy and didjeridoo solos, letting the rhythms take me straight into beta state during the 9 minute drive to practice. But somehow, and wrongly, this is so much more easily done with things like blues rock. Don’t Run Our Hearts Around by Black Mountain: love it at 5:46 sitting at an otherwise deserted stoplight. And I can’t even talk about the White Stripes without twitching. 

Lengthening your brain waves isn’t mysterious once you get a handle on your own inner rythms, like any good raver, marathoner, zen monk or fiction-writer. You love going there, and you create triggers to summon the first few steps of the descent. However, that the uneven syncopation and crass instrumentation of blues rock makes it particularly good for me is perverse and often baffling.

I’m concerned that it might just be my feelings for Jack White.

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Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , sound