Yoga Is Dangerous IV: Christianity · 2 December 2007
Yogis everywhere linked last week to Pat Robertson discussing yoga on ABC.
Watch the short video, but here’s the central comment:
[T]hey have some stretches that are part of the yoga regime which are very good for you. But when you get into that other stuff, and you’re into a higher consciousness, and you’re supposed to merge with your spirit in with the ever-present god, and gods everywhere: it’s a form of pantheism.
I’ve been waiting for those links to generate commentary beyond the Look at That! impulse, so I can figure out why you all find Robertson’s words at all remarkable.
Not that I don’t understand gawking at fundamentalism. It is a freakshow at times, but this clip is relatively open-minded. He doesn't fear-monger or say yes to the question of whether yoga "has its origins in evil." This looks like a little opening in the black-and-white mind Christians took on during the culture wars.
It’s not like he misunderstands yoga at all. It is about “higher consciousness,” and “merging your spirit in with the ever-present god.” That’s why he has to object to it, ultimately: it really is hostile to his professed monotheism.
Fundamentalist Christians are always confusing themselves on the monotheism thing. Is that they should worship only one god or that there exists only one god? And what about the Devil? Is Satan an alter-god? Just a placeholder for the problem of evil? A minor angel fallen to earth? Are good and evil equal forces, or is it true that (as terrified Christians chant whenever doubt arises) “God is in control”?
I’ll tell you what Robertson taught in the 1980s: the universe is black and white. Every single action, thing, and thought is either good or evil; and there is a constant spiritual battle between darkness and light playing out beneath the surface of all reality. The world is just an illusion beneath which the true clash of angels and demons—the true contest of heaven and hell—is playing out. If this sounds odd, get yourself a Frank Peretti novel for some light holiday reading and thank me later. You’ll laugh your head off, but that’s the cosmology I’m talking about. Speaking from experience, it’s a fun and romantic worldview.
It’s also primitive and divisive. You grow out of it.
That Pat is not standing up equating Siva with Satan and that he’s giving Christian teenagers everywhere an out—it’s just stretching, Mom, don’t worry about me praising Ganesh or anything—is a beautiful step forward. It falls to Christians to become pluralists—to stop seeing other religions as just varieties of Satan Worship. This is a growing process, but many will go through it before they die.
It's their time. I have escaped that world to ask you to be patient instead of laughing them back into their caves.
Fundamentalist Christians need this. If they can learn to quiet the mind and follow the breath without seeing that as a victory for the dark side, they’ll find their way out of painful delusion more quickly. Because here is the situation: Christian fundamentalists are terrified above all of their own minds. That is the blackest of black boxes, prone to co-optation by the devil, even as “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” Remember, we are the fallen. Earth is the precipice of hell, and we might fall further at any moment.
It’s impossible for me to convey the fear and self-distrust with which Christian fundamentalists live. Because they believe that quieting the mind exposes them to possession by Satan, they live in fear of contemplating their internal states. The person who gave birth to me has tearfully asked me that I never, ever “stop thinking” (i.e., quiet my mind) because nothing could be more dangerous.
The only escape for many is the rare experience of what they would call (n.b.) surrender to god—a state they reach in moments of praise or prayer. The minute those experiences end, though, they will clarify that they have not merged with god but merely given over to “him”—to be “cradled in the arms of the heavenly father.”
Enough of that back-door mysticism, though, and the fundamentalists start to open up. They start to realize that the experience of god is being generated in their hearts and minds, and they start learning to look inward to find it. They start inching in the direction that they have generated culture wars, and authority structures, and reams of scary bedtime stories trying to resist.
Yoga doesn't own the higher levels of consciousness, but it can give a person a break from the world of black and white. Nothing could be more dangerous!
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: arbitrage
, astanga yoga
, beta state
, esoteric shit
, evolution
, integration
, self-deception
, spirituality
Previous entry: Saturday XXXIII: Tohu Vabohu / Next entry: London, Paris, Rome...
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
I really enjoyed that post, took me right back to my RE degree days and the whole philosophy of religion, cool, keep up the good work
Posted by: skelly · Dec 3, 05:58 AM · #
totally agreed on fundamentalism/danger/etc. I think (and I don’t intend as much polemic as will probably emerge here) that there is a clear tendency in online yoga communities to search out ALL things “yoga” that aren’t strictly about asana practice itself, and to enthusiastically point to them and hop up and down, and from this you get odd threads about “Yoga was mentioned on this ABC drama!” and “The opening chant showed up here” and “Madonna made this video…” and so forth and so on. I guess I have no formal judgment on that, but it has a “dude, the football team that claims my city as home is going to the SuperBowl” flavor to it. Some kind of strange “I’ve been (mis)represented, now I get to participate in the comments!” urge or something. Anyway, I’ll check out the PR link, it’s not like he came out with his own brand of “Christian yoga,” after all (now you want to read comments, check out Amazon for those DVDs).
Posted by: patrick · Dec 3, 07:28 AM · #
“Pantheism” is pretty soft, coming from Pat Robertson. Perhaps the many years he has lived in fear of his own apostasy have brought him to lighten up and not see everything simply as black versus white anymore.
Posted by: Carl · Dec 3, 10:56 AM · #
Hee hee. Interesting about the boosterism and the impulse to protect “yoga’s” honor. So far, I don’t feel Praise Moves is at all relevant to or threatening of what I do on the mat. Though it does have a certain car accident-like fascination for me. :)
Yes, Pat has softened. There may be internal reasons for it (he’s, I’m guessing, more into the “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” vibe than the “by grace are you saved through faith” track). But also, he may just have less space now to run around calling people Satanists. (I was taught as a child that even Catholicism was a form of Satanism, especially because Catholics worship a woman, which is of course evil.) Pat’s audience may be disciplining him—staying in power involves an element of knowing what people want to hear and professing it.
Can anyone tell me the word (an adjective) that means “seeing the universe as made up of darkness and light”? I feel like it’s three syllables and possibly begins with an “m” but I just cannot access it today. It’s the adjective that’s commonly used to describe the Zoroastrian worldview, but would also be relevant to Peretti spirituality.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 3, 11:27 AM · #
I saw this video the other day on another blog. I didn’t realize that PR had softened, because I never heard him in the old days. There’s still a lot of fear, but progress is a good thing.
Your take on this is particularly interesting (and relevant) because of your upbringing and your yoga practice—-a foot in both worlds, so to speak.
Posted by: gartenfische · Dec 3, 12:06 PM · #
Would you be thinking of manicheism?
Posted by: Daniele · Dec 3, 12:25 PM · #
Yes! That’s the word I had lost.
You found it even with bad instructions, since it’s actually five syllables; and the noun form is the useful one. Thank you, Daniele. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 3, 12:32 PM · #
adjective form is also useful: manichean
Posted by: R · Dec 3, 01:39 PM · #
Thanks for the information owl-girl. Its very hard for me to relate to these bible-pounders. I really need to cultivate an oceans size compassion for their plight. I know that fear rules them. I also know that their mindless support for the Bush Junta has led to untold and vast suffering on an unimaginable scale. The great cultures of the Mesopotania are now in chaos and threatened with extinction. I harbor enormous hostility for these deeply ignorant people. I had such high and naive hopes for humanity heading into the 21st century and now this midieval backlash of epic proportions. I am also greatly disturbed that the U.S. Airforce which has access to so many nuclear attack codes is so widely infiltrated by Christian fundies who are fanatical beleivers in the book of Revelations. This is just not a recipe for peace and goodwill and at this stage no amount of yoga offers much hope. Would that I were wrong or just paranoid. Lots of samskaras groved out on a very dark record over these last years. The fruition of all this karma will not be pretty.
Posted by: tristan · Dec 3, 07:37 PM · #
One point of view: there are at least three causes and
three responses. The causes: one,our fundamental
non-existence; two, the arrival or incursion of old
age, sickness and death; three, deep confusion about
our relationship to other people or the world.
From these three many will develop an innate anxiety
and attempt to respond to this state, this
unsatisfaction. One response is denial manifesting in
many ways – the proverbial search for the fountain of
youth (yoga butt). A second response is compulsive
activity i.e. addiction or never getting enough of
what you don’t really want or need. Food, sex, drugs,
self-mutilation, exercise (2-3 hours of asana every
freaking day?), hungry ghosts etc..
A third response is fundamentalism (there is one and
only one right way to do this therefore you can stop
thinking for yourself as I have it on good word, or
shall we even say God’s word or the shastras, that
this is how you do it and live it and if you do it
wrong, or at least not like us, well you are f’d for
life and we hate you -as we have been told to do by
powers greater than ourselves – so please move to the
other side of town so we can bomb the shit out of you
and not disturb our orthodoxy and hegemony or at least
don’t practice your “style” of yoga in our presence).
The alternative: an intuitive tolerance for the
inconcievability of all things.
Posted by: e&sj · Dec 4, 12:27 AM · #
My god, ESJ, thank you for taking it there.
I think I’ve said before that when I was young, maybe third or fifth grade, I wrote in my journal after a bad night with my folks: “If you try to be the opposite of them, you will come out exactly the same.”
I’m not the only preacher’s kid I know in academia. Most apostates are very successful scholars because they never stopped being fundamentalists. They just use their education to “rise up against their fathers,” and channel their righteous conviction into a productive animus against their former selves.
Bullshit. That is not transformation.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 4, 10:08 AM · #
Well, I do suppose that if the law of karma were a causal force rather than a metaphor (and internal self-check system), then the Fundies would have it coming. The use of bigotry as a unifying force for their communities is more blatant and categorial than the ways most other groups in America (except yoga cults) use social boundary markers. Hatred for homosexuals and Arabs, and severe repression of women, are central to this culture. And it is SAD. Lots of fear there. I’m not saying it doesn’t piss me off. In fact, on some level I defend the Fundies out of a big sister syndrome: I can criticize them because they are family, but it’s criticism without a kernel of filial love that irritates me—in part because people who criticise from afar don’t understand how deep the fear and suffering goes.
There are a lot of affluent fundamentalists, like my in-laws. But the roots of this culture are the same my roots: rural and poor. These people aren’t responsible for the war: they’re just the tools of the athiest neo-cons. Anyone who lives in a city and has a yoga practice cannot really understand how physically, culturally and intellectually impoverished Red States really are. But the neo-cons understand it, and have brilliantly exploited their poverty by constituting them as a voting bloc. (See Tom Frank, one Marxist cultural critic who actually understands culture and has one sexy, sexy mind).
Maybe I’ll write something about small town life. It’s so different. We of the cosmopolite, we with our mounds of cultural capital, we with internet connections have it so, so good.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 4, 10:41 AM · #
One perspective: so much of the rigidity can come from fear (reminds me of a drop-back a little bit), a fear that most of us have as sentient and conscious beings. The simple fact that we know that we can never know the “real” answers to the unanswerable questions that we are still called to ask can incepiently lead to anxiety and the search for the concrete. “Please God, deliver me from this mind that sees both sides of the coin because it feels so much harder this way, yet closer to the truth -whatever that is”. So, as we all have it (anxiety on our existence) to some degree and differ in our responses to it, it makes compassion the main universal absolute that we can approach. Its like, I get it and you, its a conundrum and a dilemma and a paradox this self-awareness thing and you dealt with it that way and I am dealing with it this way and isn’t that interesting, far out. Back to the old love and understanding of self and other and then the dissolution of that boundry (is that not the the yoga we seek so sincerely, the yoga of as SKPJ says “see God everywhere”?)
And even in my last paragraph, I preach a more correct way of seeing. And so the slope has been set. And if I go on and on, as most of us humans are wont to do, I’ll be sliding down that slope as it gets slippier and steeper and soon I’ll find myself in the dark abyss of intolerance, self-rightousness, arrogance and pride the very things that I thought I was delivering myself from.
Looking deeply, seeing my own fanatical tendencies, my own dogmatic suppositions and superimpositions, my heart opens wider and deeper that it may contain so many more than I ever could concieve. Perhaps thats what old Pat was himself afraid of…
Speaking of which, if you go back 4 election cycles ago, Frank Zappa wrote an amazing song, quite melodic at times, in tribute to Pat. And being that, and it still makes me cry, that Frank died Dec 4, 1993, 14 years ago today it is appropriate to paste those lyrics here.
Theres an ugly little wasel bout three-foot nine
Face puffed up from cryin n lyin
cause her sweet little hubbys
Suckin prong part time
(in the name of the lord)
Get a clue, little shrew
Oh yeah, oh yeah
Jesus thinks youre a jerk
Did he really choose tammy to do his work?
Robertson says that hes the one
Oh he sure is,
If armageddon
Is your idea of family fun,
An hes got some planned for you!
(now, tell me that aint true)
Now, what if jimbos slightly gay,
Will pat let jimbo get away?
Everything weve heard him say
Indicated that jim must pay,
(and it just might hurt a bit)
But keep that money rollin in,
cause pat and naughty jimbo
Cant get enough of it
Perhaps its their idea
Of an affirmative action plan
To give white trash a special break;
Well, they took those jeezo-bucks and ran
To the bank! to the bank! to the bank! to the bank!
And every night we can hear them thank
Their buddy, up above
For sending down his love
(while you all smell the glove)
Jim and pat should take a pole
(right up each saintly glory-hole),
With tar and feathers too —
Just like theyd love to do to you
(cause they think you are bad —
And they are very mad)
cause some folks dont want prayer in school!
(wed need an ark to survive the drool
Of micro-publicans, raised on hate,
And jimbo-jimbo when they graduate)
Conviced they are the chosen ones —
And all their parents carry guns,
And hold them cards in the n.r.a.
(with their fingers on the triggers
When they kneel and pray)
With a ku-klux muu-muu
In the back of the truck,
If you aint born again,
They wanna mess you up, screamin:
no abortion, no-siree!
lifes too precious, cant you see!
(whats that hangin from the neighbors tree?
Why, it looks like colored folks to me —
Would they do that…seriously? )
Imagine if you will
A multi-millionaire television evangelist,
Saved from korean combat duty by his father, a u.s. senator
Studied law —
But is not qualified to practice it
Father of a love child
Who, in adulthood, hosts the remnants
Of papas religious propaganda program
Claims not to be a faith healer,
But has, in the past,
Dealt stearnly with everything from hemorrhoids to hurricanes
Involved with funding for a secret war in central america
Claiming ronald reagan and oliver north as close friends
Involved in suspicous tax-avoidance schemes,
(under investigation for 16 months by the i.r.s.)
Claims to be a man of god;
Currenty seeking the united states presidency,
Hoping we will all follow him into —
The twilight zone
What if pat gets in the white house,
And suddenly —
The rights of certain people disappear
Mysteriously?
Now, wouldnt that sort of qualify
As an american tragedy?
(especially if he covers it up, sayin
jesus told it to me!)
I hope we never see that day,
In the land of the free —
Or someday will we?
Will we?
And if you dont know by now,
The truth of what Im tellin you,
Then, surely I have failed somehow —
And jesus will think Im a jerk, just like you —
If you let those tv preachers
Make a monkey out of you!
I said:
jesus will think youre a jerk
And it would be true!
Theres an old rugged cross
In the land of cutton —
Its still burnin on somebodys lawn
And it still smells rotten
Jim and tammy!
Oh, baby!
You gotta go!
You really got to go!
Posted by: e&sj · Dec 4, 12:29 PM · #
oooh, you said red states: I live in a red state. Yes, to rural poor, or even to urban poor. I don’t mean to (or claim to be able to) pull the curtain open on this whole city, but I live in a good-sized northern-midwest city, and I live on the poor side of it, in a decent neighborhood which is close to several bad neighborhoods. There is poverty GALORE here, and it crosses race lines. The state has a blue “In God We Trust” license plate that you can choose to put on your car, with a flag on it, and I see a frickin TON of those things around here. Every corner has a church and a liquor store. There are generations RAISED in poverty, so there’s a sort of fascinating ignorance of social conditions on the part of those who live in them; how do you get change into THAT? Anyway, I could go on at some serious length.
Posted by: patrick · Dec 4, 01:13 PM · #
Hard core, Patrick. Most people I know have no idea of what you are talking about. The way that all of this interacts with race is a huge topic. :)
By the way, this blog is the Pat Robertson Channel this week. That’s just the way it is.
I love you, Pat. Even if Jesus Thinks You’re a Jerk.
ESJ, thank you for your openness and lightness of touch. That’s an energy that comes in to anyone who relates to you, just a little.
“Please God, deliver me from this mind that sees both sides of the coin because it feels so much harder this way….” That is a nice passage.
I actually don’t feel that way, almost ever. I have what an adviser call an “open-mindedness problem.” But your reflexivity reveals my edge straight off. I have the farthest thing from a fundamentalist disposition, except for when it comes to my feeling toward fundamentalism. An example apropo of ashtanga: nothing depresses me more than the person who goes off to Mysore for a month and comes back trying to showcase her “transformation” in the form of super-rigid adherence to asana rules. It always wears off, but the initial grasping makes me want to throw up. Not because I don’t like doing practice “correctly” (I do! I benefit enormously from practice according to strict vinyasa, some of the time…) but because of the grasping there.
So there you have it. Anti-fundamentalism is my edge. If it’s true that others’ fundamentalism is regressive and based in fear and grasping for identity in the face of uncertainty, what does that mean for my fundamental anti-fundamentalism? This is the place where it is most difficult for me to find compassion.
I’m working on it though.
I love you, Pat.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 4, 01:43 PM · #
ESJ I wish I could concur but I don’t. I see the political correctness there. Of course we all need to develop more tolerance for one another, we all have fears and compulsions. But we also have feelings and thank god there is no shame in that. I was expressing my feeling that the fundamentalist movement as a powerful political entity has wreaked havoc across the landscape over these last 2 decades and that I have hostility and fear about it. There is just no comparison between the degree of unskillful cultism and its effect on society that one might encounter in Ashtanga yoga or an eating disorder or body piercing and the fact that 50 million Americans now beleive in the book of Revelations and 39% beleive in Creationism. For a very good reason T. Jefferson understood the necessity of excluding relgion from government. 300 years of wars on the continent made that apparent. Now America has its first great religious war. And the fundies have been herded like so much cattle to champion this thing.
At what point must a cult or a person take responsibility for its actions? Are they to be excused because they were lied to,manipulated or because they are ignorant,incurious and manichean? These questions deserve consideration. You can’t just say “well everybodys got their issues and besides its all so cosmically amorphous and indefinable”. That feels very disembodied to me.
The whole basis for the Nuremburg Trials was to address this question. Who in the end is frickin responsible? If no one is reponsible because their ignorant or their authoritarian by nature or whatever than we may as well just return to the caves and huddle with clubs and furs around savage campfires.
And yes I do know the fundamentalists and the born-agains. I was raised amongst many of them in a smallish Iowa town. Before the Reagan revolution. Before they were organized politically. Very sweet,kind people who beleived that I was going straight to Hell but I was a kid, what did I care? I never took offense because they were not allowed to cross the political boundary and they meant well. Their intention was close to their heart however much wrapped in fear and superstition it was. But the intention has changed now. It is infected with violent bigotry,hatred,dominionism and the most outrageous of superstitions and it has already fueled mass scale suffering for many innocents.
Posted by: tristan · Dec 4, 07:29 PM · #
Responsibility? Karma?
Or more like anger masquerading as moral accounting, maybe. I feel that both are pretty bad politics.
Good politics? Well, for example, the Thich Nhat Hahn M.O.
Good politics knows that social situations are made up of behaviors, not beliefs. Good politics is practical and it’s 90% forward-looking.
You want to do something about the killing in Iraq? Don’t merely react to the propaganda and go after my cousins the Butts family in Okeechobee, who live in a trailer park and love Nascar and the Bush Family (not joking). Hating on the weak is useless and awfully mean. Rather, go after anybody with the nerve to drive an SUV. Because the war is about behavior within the “world system”—about Empire, about maintaining Middle East domination, and about Oil. Pure. And. Simple.
Posted by: (0v0) · Dec 5, 09:03 AM · #
but my SUV’s a hybrid! :)
Posted by: R · Dec 5, 01:07 PM · #