Spiritual Lust · 25 June 2010
The thing with joy is that you lose interest in stupid people.
Where are you guys? You used to make me salivate and twitch, all the way up in to a wonderfully articulate lather, tight the way a boxer’s game is tight. I was so well trained, too: I remember my first real profs, slamming down volumes of Aristotle, Husserl or Ayer on the seminar table like pieces of freshkill, opening class with: “What does he do wrong?”
Reverie is all soft, like the language of Virgina Woolf and Lorrie Moore. Appropriate that their names are filled with double o. Oooh, aaah. Blah.
But last night, after another hypnagogic week in which even tornados ripping through both hometown (Billings, MT) and new town (Ann Arbor) are nothing but awe-inspiring, I accidentally caught some bad advaita in the form of a random podcast. Jesusgod that slime mold of the internet continues to spread, whether I’m looking or not.
Nondualism with heart, from Mark Whitwell to Sara Nolan, will pretty much save us all. But its near enemy is a kind of bitterness pretending to be wisdom, espoused by reactionary kids with closed hearts and terribly weak powers of reason. It’s just aggression passing itself off as ideas.
But what I never realized about bad Advaita until last night – really feeling in to its energy rather than hitting back analytically—is that it’s essentially repressive. It's a crusade against seeking, motivated by a need to discourage others from any hope that reality may contain something more. Bad Advaita happens when kids who fancy themselves liberated because they’ve successfully worked through their sexual or other repression of the prevailing culture then shift their repressive energies to another location. They crusade against spiritual desire. They wield the Vedas, Adyashanti and Eckart Tolle to make people feel stupid or even dirty for wanting more.
Spiritual desire is natural. Not dirty or necessarily delusional. Whether the object is sex or enlightenment, it is possible to be present with lust, rather than merely pulled by it into escapist fantasies. Intimacy with the present moment, when it’s married with wanting, just gets really hot.
It’s ok. Better than ok.
Practice/ All is coming.
Immanence/ Transcendence.
Ascetic/ Erotic.
Discipline/ Love.
Fathering/ Mothering.
Container/ Contemplation.
These are not problems for trans-rational people…except for those still bitter and vengeful over past pain. By discouraged seekers confused by the energy of their resentment and their rage. On the other hand, open-hearted nondualism is totally over the old pain of being sexually and otherwise repressed, so it doesn't have any interest in spiritually repressing others.
The feeling of bad Advaita--of bad yoga--is hilariously dualist. It's the feeling of nonforgiving.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, evolution
, morality
, self-deception
, spirituality
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or maybe bad yoga is like separating the world into camps of good and bad. isn’t that how dualism works. the good are redeemed a la forgiveness. and the bad, well, they just keep on nonforgiving. i rather like that word. calls to mind a new world order fashioned by maya rather than the redemptive aspects of government and religion.
http://www.squareandc.net
Posted by: charusheela · Jun 26, 07:04 PM · #
Mmhmm, funky stuff here, sister.
Posted by: patrick · Jun 27, 06:34 AM · #
And I in the basement AGAIN! Drove up to the house just as the siren started up…. TBT, it’s about 100 degrees out there and 110% humidity. Barometric pressure in the extreme.
Charu, this Squareandc project is brillant. A multi-disciplinary, mystic meta-genius fellow is the former aide-de-Camp to the governor of Karnataka and erstwhile Silicon Valley exec and now he wants to work with entities of any shape and size, from individuals to corporations, to shift their basic organizational makeup? And he can’t spell? And he does his own web design? And he puts "esoteric" in scare quotes? I know he wants to be the next new paradigm, but instead he’s just making excellent art.
Anyway… guess I’m watching ARGMEX now. On my laptop. On the floor. In the dirt. Still wearing my yoga clothes. And wanting a cookie. Meh.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 27, 09:50 AM · #
Also, I can’t stop singing Bad Romance. And the Editor wants us to clean the basement (which I’ve been avoiding for months).
Bah!
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 27, 09:54 AM · #
o owl— what a privilege to be beside MW in a sentence of yours, a nondual conjunction between us—
in the John Daido Loori dharma talk i was attempting to insert here by way of magical thinking, he says ‘personal liberation is a contradiction in terms—’— if you leave out even a single speck of dust you have separated yourself— to become enlightened is to MERGE with the ten thousand things…
that said, cleaning the basement (esp with editor?) might be a great exercise in lusty oneness— there’s bound to be dust and ten-thousand things and strong winds—-
Posted by: Sara · Jun 28, 08:56 AM · #
The basement is now pristine. And I had nothing to do with it.
However, I was doing a bunch of other house-hold stuff this weekend and made the mistake of listening to another piece of bad advaita.
HOLY GOD this stuff really gets me going. The problem is that I’ve discovered this lovely site with lots of original readings from Nisargadatta, UG, and J Krishnamurthi, and a few other good Advaitites, whose work was naturally situated in the larger, highly accommodating discourse of Indian philosophy. But interspersed with the good stuff is naive westerners blathering about their psychotic nondualist lifestyles.
FOR CHRIST SAKES, YOU CANNOT HAVE A NONDUALIST LIFESTYLE.
Naive westerners filter this same idea through own own puritanical, repressed, holier-than-thou, dogmatic Christian mind-structure, and what results is a lot of delusional nonsense spoken in “loving” tones.
Here is a perfect example.
It’s an extremely well-meaning yoga teacher who “feels compassion” (i.e., smug condescension) for any kind of spiritual seeking and “feels really uncomfortable” (i.e. dissociated, perhaps to the point of psychosis) when her personal identity becomes apparent to her. She discusses enlightenment in PURELY CONCEPTUAL TERMS, not experiential ones.
Her mostly theoretical conception of “oneness” and compulsive spiritual bypassing through a game of self-disguising (disguising herself to herself, albeit not to others, who can perceive plainly that she is a human being) have actually made it impossible for her to acknowledge to herself that she lives most of her life in the manifest plane.
I want to lock her in a room with Genpo Roshi and make her do voice dialogue therapy and shadow work all the way to an overwhelming, actual experience of nonduality. Genpo could sort this out – I’ve seen him do it with many pseudo-nondualists. He has what I want to call “reverse pointing out instructions,” compassionately encouraging spiritual bypssers to be ok with having a self.
BECAUSE FOR GOD SAKES! Most of us do have a body, and do speak in language: if bad-Advaita people’s experience of Oneness were at all textured, it would be obvious to them that operating with language and bodies is non-transcendant activity. This particular teacher treats fellow humans as objects and as others even more than most of us do (because she sees them as deluded for participating fully in the immanent, present uniqueness in which they have selves, psyches, and millions of micronarratives that make their lives hang together. Beyond that—thankfully she doesn’t share this view—bad Advaita also teaches that others are mere objects in one’s own mind.
[This is another thing that completely pisses me off about bad Advaita: the reduction of all experience to MIND, in the minds of dumber humans, just translates in to a solipsistic denial of relationship. Instead of understanding sensuous human activity as occurring in MIND, it understands it occurring in MY MIND. “You are just my projection – I only use you as a tool for my own journey.” Basically the world view of delusional Advaitites and two year olds. So not only is this philosophy psychotic (in the technical sense), it is also solipsistic and narcissistic as all hell.]
This teacher (who does not have the solipsism problem because she is extremely kind and service-driven), like other homo sapiens, has an immanent self. But she is telling the biggest “story” of all: the story that she is always only Source—except for in those rare, uncomfortable moments when she sees her personality operating. She sees her particular, historically and temporally specific manifestation of Source as being delusional and dirty.
In this sense, bad Advaita is by far the most dualist life philosophy of all. It’s a flight from immanence, accompanied by a weird disattention to everyday, personal experience and a denial of its very purity and beauty.
CRIMINY!!!! As if having a self is dirty. What a smug psychosis a person can work in to with all this repression, denial and flight toward the light. Big ideas, big confusion.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 29, 05:30 PM · #
or maybe Source got outsourced?
Posted by: Sara · Jul 1, 07:29 AM · #
YES! That’s it. Your comment just made my day.
I can stop ranting now. Provisionally.
I still don’t know why this issue pushes my buttons so much… but the weird thing is that it feels like a sort of spiritual reason, not just some reason of personal inadequacy. (Usually my triggers point to personal inadequacy in some form, but those ones feel different.)
Possible explanations for my desire to deface these people’ websites and shout them down in public fora:
It enrages me to see people condescend to, and actively discourage, students who are working on themselves and curious about the nature of reality.
I’m scared to death of narcissism because in the present day we’re all just on the edge of embracing it. And a “religion” that outright makes solipsism a moral virtue—a moral imperative—just scares the peewoddin out of me.
Bad Advaita is an insult to Source.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 1, 09:14 AM · #