CTSM 9, 10, 11: Opening to Oneself is Opening to the World · 29 August 2010

Development of Ego

This section of the book “examine[s] the path from beginner’s mind to the enlightened one” – this examination is the foundation of Buddhism.

CT concludes this chapter by apologizing that it’s “not especially beautiful”, but introduces it as an effort to see ego-psychology as it is: “soil good enough to cultivate; we can plant anything in it.” [144] “As sentient beings we have wonderful backgrounds,” [144] even if they are not enlightened or peaceful or intelligent.

“The beginning point is hat there is open space, belonging to no one. There is always primordial intelligence connected with space and openness…. Vidya [is] precision, sharpness with space…. We are this space, we are one with it, with vidya… and openness.” [147]

 “Confused mind is inclined to view itself as a solid, ongoing thing, but it is only a collection of tendencies, events” [145]. There are five “heaps” of identification, perception and belief that cause this confusion. The unfolding of these so-called skandhas is the development of ega.

1^st Skandha, “ignorance-form” – ignoring primordial, open space. “[I]t is as if one of the grains of sand had stuck its neck out and begun to look around. We are that grain of sand, coming to the conclusion of our separateness…. A kind of chemical reaction. Duality has begun [147-8].

This is an intelligent ignorance, made purely of reactions to one’s own projections

2^nd Skandha – After one differentiates from open space, he sets to feeling around for the qualities of “the other” – assessing if elements of the outside world are threatening, seductive or neutral.

3^rd Skandha – “perception impulse”: responses to the information above. This is a “bureaucracy of feeling and perception” [150], organized in to three main reactions: hatred, desire, stupidity.

4^th Skandha - concept. We proceed by labeling everything according to our reactions– good, bad, beautiful, ugly, etc. “So the structure of ego is gradually becoming heavier and heavier” [151]. We use these categories to interpret our weakness as strength, “fabricate a logic of security,” [151] and confirm our ignorance.

5^th Skandha – consciousness. This amalgamates the above with uncontrollable patterns of discursive thought. It is from within the 5^th skandha that we are now studying Buddhist psychology and meditation.

To conclude, CT introduces the captive monkey, who lives in a five-windowed house – crazily poking its head out each “window” of the senses. He is stuck in the house rather than able to play in the undifferentiated forest, where he could swing in trees and hear the wind moving. He sees his house as solid, and gradually moves from a neurotic to a completely insane state of mind, locking himself in to the mental state known as hell.

The Six Realms

What follows is a description of samsara: a “perpetual cycle of struggle, achievement, disillusionment, and pain” [173].

So, we have the monkey, stuck in hell—an “environment of claustrophobia and aggression” [163]. Eventually he relaxes a bit and begins to “consider the possibility of relief” [164]. This feeling of present impoverishment coupled with fantasizing about more spacious, pleasureable ways to be is the preta loka – the torturous realm of hungry ghosts. This is actually somewhat exciting and amusing: the monkey is more interested in being hungry than satisfying the hunger.

Settling in to habitual responses to the world, the monkey “refuses to explore new territory, clinging to familiar goals and… irritations… intoxicated with his safe, self-contained, familiar world…. [166]. Then, he gets very involved in distinguishing pleasure and pain – passionately manipulating the world to achieve pleasure. Then, plagued by illness, age and death, he logically devises a heaven to escape them – perhaps extreme weath, power or fame. “The monkey dreams of ideal states that are superior to the pleasures and pains of the human realm and is always trying to achieve these states, always trying to be better than anyone else” [168]. This is a time of compulsive progress-measuring: obsession with self mastery and mastery of the world, obsession with (“spiritual”) achievement. There is much self-condemnation and fear of failure.

Sometimes fame or whatever goal is actually achieved! If so, the monkey settles in to a self-hypnotic state of concentration and bliss – blocking out everything irritating or undesirable. This is a high state of concentration (implicitly the state of dharana?) – the realm of the gods.

Next is dhyana, a refined, durable state of mental pleasure. A sense of limitless space is achieved by puffing the ego: “The empire of ego is completely extended… [it] becomes a… gigantic beast.” [170]… this is “the highest level of concentration and achievement that confused, samsaric mind can attain.” [171]

But eventually the monkey realizes this is still ego, and is plunged straight back to hell. “The monkey’s aggression is so intense that the environment around him responds with equal aggression and an atmosphere of heat and claustrophobia develops” [172-3].

Hope dawns. Instead of simply struggling, the monkey begins to experience the struggle and see its futility. He laughs through the usual hallucinations. He discovers that when he does not fight the walls of his “solid” house, “they are not repulsive and hard but are actually warm, soft and penetrable” [173].

From here grows compassion – “a soft and noble heart.” The mind of compassion is soft, open and warm.

The Four Noble Truths

(One common distillation of these propositions is: That humans suffer, that suffering comes from clinging, that it is possible to end suffering, and that Buddhism articulates a path toward this end.)

For CT, the 1^st NT is that humans exist in a state of dissatisfaction, dukha. “Somehow, something is not quite right, not quite enough. So we are always trying to fill the gap, to make things right, to find that extra bit of pleasure or security…. Eventually one begins to become irritated by just being ‘me’” [179]. One fears losing the pleasure we enjoy, and desires to escape pain.

CT describes the 2^nd NT as a process of constantly trying to maintain and enhance ourselves.

Yet, realizing that the struggle for self-improvement is itself the problem gives way to a feeling of a “sane, awake quality within us” [181] this sanity is the goal, the 3^rd NT.

But just “letting go” in to the 3^rd NT is only possible for short periods. It takes some kind of practice to habituate to “letting be.”

CT digresses in to a (witty and coruscating) depiction of concentration practices as “mental gymnastics.” Because concentration (i.e. dharana) meditation treats the object of focus as solid, it is ultimately ego-reinforcing. This form of meditation does not deal with the totality of one’s life-situation. “[T]his… is not conducive to openness and energy nor to a sense of humor… [and] could easily become dogmatic [because the thought is of] imposing discipline” [182].

Rather, CT proposes meditation that makes you completely aware of your present state of being and situation. He speaks (without specifics) of giving space and finding gaps in experience.

“The main point is that we have this basic intelligence that shines through our confusion” [189].

“Opening to oneself fully is opening to the world.” [194]

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CTSM 6, 7, 8: pain, warmth, tickles · 13 August 2010

The Hard Way

This chapter repeats the argument that it is crucial to take responsibility for one’s own work, making hard, individual effort (87) and relentlessly unmasking, staying open, surrendering the self-defensive tendencies of the ego. What is new in this chapter is an attitude of religious fervor and use of (it seems) Christian language. CTSM is called a “narrow path” (cf. Matthew 7:13) and described as excruciatingly painful. Explicitly stating the Protestant ethic, the chapter concludes: “The idea is not to regard the spiritual path as something very luxurious….” (104)

[For some of us in this group, I am guessing that the forceful version of the argument will be less credible than the quiet or the systematically reasonable versions of previous chapters. For others, graphic discussion of pain and suffering may be really useful and more honest than anything? I hear a lot of this sort of talk among Vajrayana students. A recent example is Susan Piver’s beautiful, detailed article on the despairs and dramas of meditation practice last month in HuffPo. Sometimes Vajrayana emphasis on keeping it real seems histrionic, or Puritain, to people on the outside. I include this commentary here because the pain and seriousness decrease after this chapter.]

Meantime, the one new thing here is, understandably, a discussion of false heroism. Renegade genius and serious pain are linked. This “heroic” path, which usually involves pilgrimmages and especially ritual purification and body cleansing, gets a person involved in all sorts of austerities and self-affirming discipline. It is a flight from everydayness—one which sets a person up for dramatic highs and lows. Pages 89-90 conclude: “The attitude of ‘heroism’ is based upon the assumption that we are bad, impure, that we are not worthy… We must… be different from what we are…. [I]f we are middle class Americans, we must give up our jobs…. If we are hippies, we must give up drugs…. We think our path is spiritual because ti is literally against the flow of what we used to be, but it is merely the way of false heroism, and the only one who is heroic in this way is ego.”

The Q&A covers topics from the limitations on written teachings to skillful and unskillful approaches to psychotherapy.

The Open Way [ strike The Easy Way ]

In contrast to the “samsaric path of desire,” of achievement and self-improvement (114), this chapter describes the compassion and “dance” that arises later.

There is a phase of practice characterized by a search for miracles and a desire “to be one of the people who has done something… super-extraordinary.” (106) One becomes alienated from family and friends in search of the extraordinary, full of self-concern, and practice gets stale and uninspiring. There is a new search for better practices and teachers. This phase is natural and beautiful, as it was for Tilopa, the student Narpoa finally slapped on the face with a sandal to get him to lay off the seeking behavior and thus let go of its momentum and aggression.

Then something happens. “At this stage your meditation practice is the act of trusting yourself. As your practice becomes more prominent in daily life activiies, you begin to trust yourself and have a compassionate attitude…. [This is not] feeling sorry for someone. It is basic warmth. As much space and clarity as there is, there is that much warmth as well, some delightful feeling of positive things happening in yourself constantly… the continual act of making friends with yourself. Then… you cannot just contain that friendship within you; you must have some outlet, which is your relationship with the world.” (113)

One could instead travel in the direction of achievement and expert-ness, becoming bloated with knowledge, “self-satisfied and aggressive. ‘I know what I’m doing—don’t touch me.’”

But in the other direction is trust, spontaneous joy, and giving. “[Y]ou relate with people, because you no longer regard people as a drain on your enegy. They recharge your energy… you do not feel you are running out of resources.” (115) You can afford to be open instead of working to protect your ground. Because of its essential trust, there is no concern for impoverishment and thus an attitude of generosity. Later other virtues arise: discipline, patience (because non-inspired-ness fades), and ability to see situations as they are. These qualities arise because energy is not being so drained on efforts to maintain the ego.

The end of the chapter includes a discussion of the self-decptive nature of “love,” insofar as love attempts to overcome hatred and darkness, defending light aganst the dark. But love ultimately just encompasses dark and light, good and bad. (117).

The long Q & A covers fear, discusses that compassion is not an emotion but a state of being, and mentions that compassion “ferments by itself. It does not need any effort.” (123)

Sense of Humor

The opposite of humor is the sense of “hard fact” (with which chapter 6 dryly began and concluded). The solemnity of seeing life and spirituality as hard facts, or as a battlefield, actually “relates to spiritual materialism.”

This chapter offers funny stories of monks playing with mice at the moment of realization, dying of laughter, and other absurdities. Seriousness dead-ends in funny. If you “try to impose solemnity… as if everything is a big deal, then it is funny.” (133)

“Sense of humor means seeing… from an aerial point of view. There is good and there is bad…. Then you begin to feel that these little people on the ground, killing each other or making love… are very insignificant… the ironic aspect of their clamor.” (132-3)

Very serious practice, too, is extremely ironic and thus humorous. Trying too hard, with rote solemnity, to have a sense of humor, is itself laughable. So is effort at perfect posture. And ticklishness.

The source of humor is pervasive joy.

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CTSM Chapters 4-5: Hard Intelligence · 13 August 2010

Initiation

This chapter extends the method of cutting-through to any efforts to find a teacher, guru or “spiritual friend.” The first few pages could be nailed to trees outside ashtanga shalas. But maybe all seeking looks pretty much the same: a search for the perfect teacher. Someone wiser, better, more right about everything, more insightful, more popular.

Trungpa discusses the cynicism of some searching, insofar as it’s not attentive to teachers so much as their popularity. One wants to join their club, to get something extraordinary. One searches for a teacher out of a sense of starvation or worthlessness, or maybe to try to buy or steal wisdom. Choosing a teacher out of these motives is not intelligent: “we must approach spirutality with a hard kind of intelligence.”

Said intelligence comes out of one’s own experience; and without it, working with a teacher is pretty lame. If a teacher is to be useful for CTSM, there needs to be a relationship of “mutual opening,” predicated on effort “to expose ourselves” and our self-deceptions. 

Pages 64-66 are specific about how listening to one’s inner wisdom actually works. The "meeting of minds" is described as open and ordinary. 

In contrast, the ego is described as very professional and overwhelmingly efficient. “When we think that we are working on the forward-moving process of attempting to empty ourselves out, we find ourselves going backward, trying to secure ourselves, filling ourselves up. And this confusion continues and intensifies until we finally discover that we are totally lost… because our mind has been so overwhelmed by our own defense mechanisms. So the only alternative seems to be to just give in and let be. Our… smart solutions do us no good, because we have been overwhelmeb with too many ideas; we do not know which to choose, which ideas will provide us with the best way to work on ourselves.” (65)

Mutuality with a teacher is not sacred. It is ordinary. It is nothing. “It is the most insignificant thing of all, complete openness, the absence of any kind of collection or evaluation. We could say that such insignificance is very significant.” (68)

Self- Deception

Combining the discussions of ordinariness, openness, surrender and self-confidence, this chapter begins with an exhortation to drop wishful thinking about onself. Accept yourself as you really are.

Pages 74-79 address students who have had some kind of transcendent experience with a teacher, and the problem of grasping to that experience and identifying with it. This echoes (quite painfully, I'd say) of how charisma tends to be “nostalgized” in many practices, as CT illustrates. One tries to write down everything about the experience to capture and anchor it. One tells guru stories and compulsively clings to tales of “the good old days,” denying the ordinariness of both the past and the present.

Anyone who has experienced past moments of flashing insight is automatically set up for depression. Usually, we deny this when it arises. But depression is bound up with any kind of seeking (80). The force of despair can be very great. Those who only allow themselves to express whatever bliss they contain are enacting a stark dualism, denying the background against which that bliss is felt. (81)

The end of this chapter, like the Q&A section of the previous chapter, gets in to the problem of constantly, compulsively evaluating one’s own experience. This problem is described as “the watcher.” Page 82 describes how the watcher works, and the discussion on pp. 85-86 ultimately reduces it to a form of paranoia.

It’s unclear to me the degree to which the terminology and discussion about the watcher simply refer to compulsive spiritual self-control and self-critique, in contrast to the ways in which this might specifically refer to problems in the early expression of the Kornfield-Goldstein-Salzburg Vipassana paradigm. The latter teachings would have been popping up in Boulder around that time, and their initial problems would later be resolved somewhat. In short, the early Burmese-Thai Theravada tradition ran in to trouble as the teachers started to realize that cultivating witness consciousness was inherently dualistic and that this concsiousness eventually needed to be dismantled in meditation practice. At the time CTSM was articulated, the contradictions that eventually arise from cultivating a witness consciousness may have been a source of anxiety and confusion in this circle--and something Trungpa was using to highlight the importance of "ordinary," non-"evaluative" mind. Basically, I don't know if he was taking a swipe at a rival strain of Buddhism. If not, it's possible this discussion of the watcher applies more generally to any self-evaluation, showing it to generate a kind of infinite hall-of-mirrors regress.

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CTSM Chapters 1-3: Transcendental Common Sense · 7 August 2010

Introduction: Buddhism “begins with suffering and confusion” and then works by “unraveling” them to their origins.

Accordingly, Trungpa introduces CTSM, the methodology, as what one might call a wisdom path – a kind of jnana yoga, we might say. He introduces three main types of delusion—the lords of form, speech and mind—and writes that CTSM and the dharma itself works by cutting through the ego’s “elaborate defenses layer by layer.”

Chapter 1: Spiritual Materialism

The chapter begins with a canny discussion of how one imitates teachings rather than internalizing them—the imitation is adornment of the ego. It is role-play. Such practice is not dharma or self-realization or whatever: imitation and spiritual consumerism is the practice of spiritual materialism (p. 16).

Trungpa uses the metaphor of consumption to describe some students’ spiritual practices. This language is particularly apt for students who fetishize old knowledge as valuable in and of itself, rather than living, practical information. “If we regard knowledge as an antique, as ‘ancient wisdom’ to be collected, then we are on the wrong path” (p. 19).

The passage of pages 16-24 is extremely rich in this regard, and prescient when it comes to what has happened in yoga communities in recent decades. This section most closely characterizes yoga communities that think they have some claim to “authenticity” or “ancient wisdom”: reading it cuts right in to the delusion and fundamental egomania we express any time we claim special access to ancient truths.

While Trungpa makes a passing plea that spiritual consumers at least consume selectively and well rather than turning their spiritual houses in to junk-shops, his ultimate point seems to be that knowledge collection is only a shadow of real transmission. Actual transmission is “always up-to-date… not … an old legend… not passed along as… folktales…. It is real experience” (p. 19).

Chapter 2: Surrendering

“Surrender means… trying to get beyond fascination and expectation” (p. 28) of what practice will be like, what fruits it will yield, how it will feel, and what the teachers will be.

“Disappointment… is the best chariot.”

After introducing the idea of surrender and speaking a bit about what surrender is not, Trungpa depicts some of the delusional, radically non-self-responsible forms of surrender. If one surrenders to the idea of surrender rather than to ordinariness, then all kinds of self-deceiving fantasies result—fantasies on the order of “Guruji is perfect, Guruji can do no harm” et cetera.

I expected this book to be a compendium of ways to feel spiritually anxious, an anatomy of spiritual materialism so relentless that I’d finish feeling that some level of SM delusion was utterly unavoidable no matter what. But, on the contrary, Trungpa puts a lot of emphasis here on the need for spiritual self-confidence. I wonder if he was responding to the same kind of self-infantalizing and self-hatred we sometimes feel as Westerners interested in Eastern spirituality… the fundamental distrust of our own personal and cultural wisdom that often manifests in our relationships to yoga and dharma more generally.

In any case, pages 28-33 exhort students to remain grounded and develop self-confidence. “If we begin to give up our self-criticism, then we may feel… as though someone were taking away our job. We would have no further occupation if we were to surrender everything: there would be nothing to hold on to. Self-evaluation and self-criticism are, basically, neurotic tendencies which derive from our not having enough confidence in ourselves, confidence in the sense of seeing what we are, knowing what we are, knowing that we can afford to open” (pp. 28-29). The main argument of this chapter is summarized clearly in its final two paragraphs.

Chapter 3: The Guru

This chapter begins by noting the central delusion in seeking a teacher—the idea that one can “get” anything at all from the teacher (p. 35).

What follows is mostly the story of Kagyu lineage-founders Naropa, Marpa and Milarepa. Among other great anecdotes, Marpa journeys to India to collect teachings to then bring home and use to enrich local tradition and, in a sense, his own renown. He takes notes on the aspects of Naropa’s teachings he does not understand, but the notes are washed away in a river and he’s left with only the teachings he did not write down because they were already part of his experience. He returns home disappointed (disappointment being the best chariot) but more knowledgeable than he realizes at the time. The teachings are practical – anything not living and practical is of little use and thus little spiritual value.

In passing, Trungpa refers to Spiritual Materialism as “ignoring family or… [one’s] practical relationship to the earth.”

There is some discussion of translating “guru” as “spiritual friend.” Trungpa doesn’t note it, but “spiritual friend” is a common term in early Buddhism, and used to characterize many teacher-student relationships—relationships with a high degree of mutuality, honesty  and respect, not characterized by students’ striving to impress or fool the teacher about their own level of realization (one can listen to Hokai Sobol’s recent podcasts at Buddhist Geeks on this subject).

A lovely passage: “ There are many stories of teacher-student relationships… in which the student had to make long journeys and endure many hardships until his fascination and impulses began to wear out. This seems to be the point: the impulse of searching for something is, in itself, a hang-up. When this impulse begins to wear out, then our fundamental basic nakedness begins to appear and the meeting of the two minds begins to take place” (p. 49).

On p. 56, the Buddha’s dharma is referred to as “transcendental common sense.”

ON FROM HERE:

Let’s continue some of the remaining discussion of this part of the book in the comment thread for the present post. And at the same time, let’s all go ahead and read the next 5 chapters – through to the end of “Sense of Humor.” J

If it seems time, I’ll post the summary of that section tomorrow. Or perhaps we’ll stay in this section a bit longer…

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Cutting Through The Internet · 28 July 2010

Hello. I have an idea.

Being the arrogant book-skimmer the internet has made me, I tell myself that I know what Cutting Through Spiritual Materialsm is about.

But the truth is I’ve only torn through pieces of this book in brooding little fits, usually when some LA or Mysore bliss monkey has raided my house and run off with my faith in humanity. You too?

CTSM is the most famous of many heart-rending screeds by Chogyam Trungpa, whose student Pema Chodron’s work says the same thing, but more nicely.

Trungpa describes spiritual materialism as a neurotic, delusional self-improvement project aimed at adorning the ego. “The problem,” he writes,” is that the ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”

He drank himself to death, by the way. “Mindfully.” And he brought the Vajrayana to the west, helped found Naropa, and built Nova Scotia's Gampo Abbey... the place where my own practice was first sliced open to its delusional core.

Most libraries, public and educational, will have CTSM; and it’s cheap from Shambala or any online retailer. The entire thing is also online at Google Books, thanks to dark activities taking place in the basement here at the University of Michigan library.

Who wants to join me really reading this book? It’ll go quickly because Trungpa’s insults are grease lightning and then afterwards his conspirational, lovey passages slosh right in to the ego-wounds. All in all, reading Trungpa is incredibly gratifying, both to the angry self or the lonely one, but maybe also to the parts of us that are wisest.

I am not just asking those of you I know, though I really hope you’ll all read this with me because I think it will be hilarious and maybe make us remember, again, the ways we adore each other. Let's do this. I’m also asking people who might just be happening by, or who just started reading, and even people—whoever you are—who are reading but somehow feel you shouldn’t be.

Are you in? Please drop a comment or an email. I have no preference about pacing or when we start – could read it all in a week, or do a chapter a month, or whathaveyou. Just let me know what you like.

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Categories: arbitrage , self-deception , spirituality

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

Designs on emptiness · 16 July 2010

Yesterday morning, taking a cup for tea, I’m standing by recycle bins where the old-man-ghost floats at night. It’s warm and still, windows open to natural light and a little breeze.

And I’m playing the kitchen sink transcendence game: leaning on the meaning of life like a stuck baddha konasana, until it goes crack and cavitates down, squishing the immanent and the transcendent right into one long quivering moment. Yesssss…….

There I am adjusting reality when the 30-year-old toaster goes buZZZZZZzzz–pop, the stereo ticks on-off-on-off, and the kettle I haven’t yet touched spikes straight to boiling. I run to the living room, hair standing on end, skin trilling like hummingbird flesh. All the furniture is charged to the touch, maybe because of the water molecules fritzing out in my fingertips.

At eight in the evening, the Editor and I come home from campus and I lie out on the sofa for email-relaxation. A moment before in the yard, it was just another summer night in the Endor village – neighbors creaking in hammocks, fireflies ready to helicopter the flower gardens, plants and mist emanating a slightly otherworldly atmosphere. Then he points out the window and says, “What the hell?” The outside has turned dark orange. “We have to go!” Out in the street, everything is orange and frozen still, there is a rainbow, and at the same time it’s lightly raining. It’s not even planet Earth out there, for a few minutes… then the sky goes back to blue.

Then last night I dreamed that my ida and my pingala decided to make body-doubles. Nestled against each other all over me and twirled together on the double helix of the spine, they are nothing without each other. But in the dream they faced off and showed the right side of my face a sharper and older personality than the left, the left ACL more vulnerable, the right hand more dextrous, the left sacrum-foot always drifting portside on its own. Ida split off and copied itself, so that it could be all ida; and pingala did the same thing. I am not making this up.

Then the two of me turned to my dream and said: We’ve forgotten about Cormack McCarthy for awhile. There are too many butterflies and rainbows here. We need to dream Cormack’s dreams.

No really, I am not making this up. McCarthy is dimestore Elijah—screaming from some hilltop outside of town about how we’re all going to burn. Except Elijah didn’t get his prophecies made in to Viggo Mortenson movies. Last night I saw the two terror images he’s dropped right in the back of my mind forever: humans as braying livestock, locked in a basement in some post-apocalypse future, then slaughtered (fresh, local and organic). And a founding myth even more horrible than the future: corpses skinned and hanging in Texas trees, a warning to new settlers by white men determined to own the West.

So, just for the night, the immanent-historical-ida and transcendent-futuristic-pingala tried out autonomy. They conspired to throw someone else’s nightmares into their breach and expected me not to mind. I minded. At least until I backed all the way out of spirit-space, through liminal half-wakefulness, and entirely in to rational-mind. When rational, I can somewhat decline to host the metanarrative template that is the backboard of all horror and myth.

But yeah. This kind of thing is always going on now; and I guess it’s why my experience here is so intense and interesting. Reality is acting indecisive: it can’t decide where to build its house. Is the foundation going to be made of material (the scientist MO)? Does the whole edifice depend on my mind-knowing (as Owl Whisperer would have it)? Is it all just sunstorms on the surface of Spirit? I don’t mind if it’s all of the above, but the channel keeps changing, and when it does I get these shocks to the system.

This is uncanniness, but nothing like the first round in which I OD’d on continental philosophy at a tender age, losing most of my religion and embracing the void conceptually—with belief and identity. That too was a relaxation process. Even if some days I felt like one of those disfigured old philosophers with their wall-eyes, tangled beards and syphlitic rages, usually at the time I felt liberated by uncertainty, emptiness, and impermanence (the existentialists’ way of talking about the the Buddha's three characteristics of experience - impermanence, non-satisfaction, no-self). Platonists and moral philosophers extol the “consolations of philosophy,” but the payoff for me was disenchantment and bliss, and after that a bit of release from the need to keep theorizing.

The past decade, I have become a sucker for strong method: now this is a comfort. Statistics, comparative-historical inquiry, ashtanga vinyasa, psychoanalysis. It’s clear that they are just cave paintings on the outside of emptiness. Statistics encircles chance and probability; ashtanga is the play of Samadhi; and psychoanalysis… I think of a game of ring-around-the-rosy with the grim reaper in the middle.

Anyway, the comfort is that method solves the immediate mini-problem of action. What do I do with the data? What do I do with my body? What do I do with my ego? But now the shiftyness of reality is physical and mundane: the groundlessness of being isn’t the solution to an analytical problem: it’s the condition of having a self, loving, using the toaster. No wonder all this imagery of ghosts and corpses, dreams that turn dark and leave me for dead. Repetition goes in to the microfears of death and uncertainty—accepted in the abstract but still alive in every refusal of endpoints and silences.

Here’s my sense of it, though I could still be chasing ghosts. Strong method has taken the groundlessness of being, deitalicized it, and is now threading it through my lived experience. Humdrum, humdrum, here we go again today. Losing the hard core of your religion is nice. It makes everything much easier, more honest, spontaneous, and dear. Just between us, I wonder if it’s like that, losing your reality. 

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Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , science

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

Beesnest · 4 July 2010

Bees in the eves. We smashed up their nest, which appeared in the corner of a high gable the same evening I read Nick Flynn’s cycle of bee poems.

Narasimhan says insect homocides describe the margin of violence natural to householding, so there’s no reason to get dramatic about it. But destroying the nest felt cruel, like forced relocation. I thought of the Trail of Tears, which always comes up the first week in July, one way or another.

The bees rebuilt inside the walls. So much for walls.

Now they appear in the bedroom, navigating whatever microchannels the cold uses to find me in winter. If we stop the killing, which I often do because they’re harmless and beautiful, there are a dozen crawling on the globe light by evening. Flynn’s third bee poem, Hive goes:

Once we filled an entire house with it/ built the comb between floorboard/ and joist, slowly at first, the constant/ buzz kept the owners awake/ then louder, until the honey began to seep/ from the walls, swell/ the doorframes./ Our gift./ The had to burn the house down/ to rid us.

I notice it like this this, and don’t fight it, because I am also feeling benignly infiltrated by Owl Whisperer. More than the familiar few ounces’ weight of a teacher on my shoulder, this is like having my over-all boundary of self palpated or even tickled until I feel the whole membrane of me. By bees? Bark beetles? I don’t know, some hive-minded creature. I could experience this as torture, but instead it’s a little bit freeing.

We had a talk about method, Whisperer and I. How much backstory should I give when I introduce a new character or theme? Even though I’m learning to relax in to a stream of consciousness to expose channels I myself can’t see, it still feels rude to drop new material without preface. This is how narcissists and Advaita-people talk, because they don’t recognize the subjectivity of others—because they operate as if their little subjectivity is Consciousness Itself.

Still, I don’t want to fall in to preparing for session. Turns out It’s normal to rehearse a persona to offer to your therapist. Sometimes, analysands do this to try to care for the therapist (care for themselves) on an existential level. Consistency of persona is a gift to others: It’s ontologically gauche to change up your personality midrelationship.

But preparing solidifies my rationales and makes the work too slow. I hate working hard instead of smart. For now, what seems to be most efficient is to put my emoting, projecting, planning, remembering, ultimately defensive and selfy mind at bay for a few hours until Owl Whisperer says the invocation. “Is there anything you’d like to talk about today?” No. I mean yes.

Another strategy. Karen and I have been talking about what to do when you come to a block in relationship. About mechanisms to create space when point of view and negative emotion are becoming solid. What if, just before you turn to stone, you reach in and find some really vulnerable thing? If I get really curious in a moment of anger or (more often for me) extreme impatience, very good information is available. Sometimes just by offering the other person a bit of that information—giving up something true rather than closing off the fight—the interaction softens up.

Anyway. The Fourth of July is like Purim this year. Much of the professorate has family cottages—Martha’s Vineyard, Mackinaw Island, Telluride. But a few of us have other kinds of high summer associations. Today, among PhDs from humbler backgrounds, I will put vegan corn dogs on our tiny grill, and one of the greatest economic minds of her generation will match them with the low-brow no-bake cookies that are Iowa’s idea of a family recipe. There is firebrand sex researcher who’s inherited a Ford extended cab truck that she usually keeps hidden: later we may take it to Ypsilanti for the Camaro Superfest. No irony, no satire. Just a little honest Americana. One day in 360, that mostly unfelt part of me loves to express itself.

When it’s hot around here, the air is so heavy. For now we’ll sit under the trees crunching ice and talking slow until the fireflies and firecrackers switch another Fourth of July over to night.

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Categories: arbitrage

Capsules · 27 June 2010

Hello, basement. The twitter stream for “tornado Ann Arbor” is pissed, with half the town sitting at the bottom of our basement steps tapping smartphones on a sweltering weekend afternoon. It’s the third alarm this month. Feels like the local tornado scout has an itchy siren finger.

This is a weird way to live: always on the edge of spontaneous retreat to the basement—a 10 x 20 foot dirt cell lit by four naked bulbs. I always fancied the idea of prison –an opportunity to simplify and focus, make something out of nothing. Just pushups and poetry, becoming a number. But somehow, without a place to pee and given my alternate plan (to skate all the way to Ypsilanti on the smooth curving path that banks the Huron), the practice of radical acceptance got gummed up. Stupid tornado.

Fussiness. Noun. A habit of foraging for negative stimuli. A closing of the gap between stimulus and response. Cultivated reactivity.

I’ve actually been fussy since Friday. But, you know, I have a lot of atmospheric and astral justifications for this attitude. I’m currently inside a whole Russian Doll of bad mood excuse capsules: high pressure storm system, full moon, eclipse, grand cross.

Funny how one must become increasingly gullible—or sensitive?—to attribute causal power to each successive layer of the surroundings. Personally, my subscrption stops at the moon. From barometer to telescope, I’ll allow that I’m affected by storm systems and—recent years—by lunar cycles. But come on. My theory of action-at-a-distance stops at eclipses and downright scoffs at the planet Mars.

Eclipses and Mars do things insofar as we organize culture so that they do things. I’m not really playing those meaning games even though you could use my experience (or any other) to confirm them. Sorry. Positivist language games are circular like that.

Anyway. When you click with someone, it’s because the two of you share a metaphysical envelope. The beauty is that this epimestological comraderie is something you just sense--it’s all gut, no analysis. People’s deep structures sound each other out though jokes and smalltalk, movements of the face and body, clothes and rhythm.

The secret code I scan for is a light cynicism filtered through mystic love and expressed in multiple disciplines with impeccable grammar. Major shifts in my own identity have to do with a devaluing of this secret code—a recognition that even those few who have it are not more “my people” than the “others.” The erstwhile others being, for example, new age hippies (whose metaphysical envelope is huge, rotted-out, and nearly threadbare—a bum’s blanket) and positivists (whose envelope is barely there, like skin-colored lingerie).

And yet, even though I see through my own secret code, there are about five people who put me at ease in this special way, because they occupy the exact same credulity-space that I do. What’s WEIRD is that these are the only people who enjoy it when I get pissed off. My hostile self amuses them and is my best chance for earning their love. I don’t know why… maybe because my irratibility affirms that the envelope still has an edge. They like that we can share one shelter… or one cell.

Where am I going with this? I dunno. Fussiness, layers of belief, language games, being stuck in the basement waiting for the devil’s index finger to pass over the tops of our trees.

Here’s why I’m seeing the envelopes. It’s the psychoanalysis.

Therapy doesn’t work unless you background its assumptions—if only for that hour on the couch. For very good reason, when I was younger I violently hated those assumptions and the labels they rendered. But now that I’ve provisionally, curiously accepted this language game, I’m finding therapy to be one of the most revealing, difficult processes to undergo. I really want to write about it: both the method and the things it reveals are fascinating. And because the central dynamic is the uncovering of major patterns hidden in plain sight, the process is self-softening and sometimes outright funny. Insofar as I can open up to it, therapy appeals to my basic aesthetic: a fascination with that which is hidden, with the highest reverence for that which is explicitly left implicit. (Such as the values and the faith and the sense of unity across individuality that would make this work worthwhile in the first place….)

I also want to write about therapy because we are all so crazy. In particular, the more we rely on the yoga on to tranquilize ourselves, the more we get locked in our projections. The further we get from society and work and family life, the less feedback we get. But vrittis are different from samskaras. Just because we can calm the former doesn’t mean the latter release… in fact, in a way I feel that the patterns in my psyche have solidified because I spend so much time free from them when my mind is quiet. It’s kind of a setup for what they call spiritual bypassing.

The problem with writing about therapy is that it feels like a violation of my relationship with the therapist, Owl Whisperer. This person is really gifted, setting such a tone of spontaneity and non-reactivity that my talking stops its story-telling and just opens up. The usual irritations of being prompted and seen are softened because Owl Whisperer is mostly androgynous, ageless, disinterested but extremely attentive, and very, very well practiced. We take tangents with confidence that consistency is a limitation, push as often as possible with things I almost can’t bear to hear, and get quiet when we hit an air pocket.

How can someone be direct, even confrontational, and merciless on BS while at the same time holding a space of uncompromising acceptance, compassion and support? This is the kind of results-driven flow that makes sense to a yoga practitioner, but it’s not the same as the yoga. At all. Really, these language games have almost nothing in common because they address vastly different aspects of a human. (Admittedly, though, it kind of doesn't matter that their causal envelopes don't overlap.) The only way to hybridize them, to my eyes, is to apply both processes to the same subject and see how she makes practical use of the mix.

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Categories: arbitrage , having a body , integration , science