Tiramisu · 2 July 2009

What does the hidden consciousness look like? Those layers underneath: what neuroscientists call delta state and Patanjali called dreamless sleep.

Are they some vast wordless moon-ocean, a space odyssey, the primordial void described in every creation story from tohu va bohu to tabula rasa? Yes. Something like that. Something has opened in my skull: what I once saw was just homeless men catatonic on the Santa Monica sidewalk. New Age bliss monkeys zonig out at dance. Brain-fried dissertators drinking to oblivion. And, if they’re lucky, a ashtangis dispassionately, disinterestedly given over to the breath after a hard week in the manduka trenches.

Nothing but spent-down selves who could use some coffee or a blue plate breakfast. Nothing but “atoms and the void.” Now I don’t know. I look for eye contact with these wastrels and it’s not uninteresting in there, in the void. It’s huge and elusive. So beautiful.

And sitting right on top of it—the mascarpone layer of the Cosmic Tiramisu—it seems like there is pure fucking chaos. Feedback turned all the way up, wildness that flies nowhere with rushing unreason, or what my alchemy teacher widens his eyes in the back room and calls Big Energy.

I don’t know. I finish practice wanting not silence, as usual, but speed metal and solitude. Race home without malice, without an agenda, without any interest in anything directional much less reason or words, close myself inside for thirty minutes with the windows shuttered and the lights off. This lizard is dense, dark, heavy, fast. I would have dramatized it, freaked myself out, or gotten carried away by it a few years ago. Now I finally get that it’s not even mine, and know enough to give it a container. It’s fine; it's nothing to worry about; it's beautiful. Beyond that, there’s not much more to say.

Next week begins nine days in silence with Shinzen. Hilariously good timing. In keeping with the So Above-So Below theme that won’t go away, I’m doing the retreat much differently this time—in a way that will undermine my tendency to self-hypnotize and spend everything from day three in freaky primordial bliss, doing photoshop tricks on the lightshow that plays on the backs of the eyelids once you finally shut up and draw the curtains for a few days. (Try it).

But… I am more and more suspicious that eyelid fireworks have become just as escapist as those in the Magic Kingdom. Vipassana-for-siddhis is a nice vacation, but if that’s all there is, I may as well cruise down to Disneyland. At least there I can get a popsickle and a suntan.

We’ll see what happens. Shinzen’s map of and through consciousness is a lot more built out than our basically useless version: dharana-dyana-samadhi. (A map made even more useless due to the bizarre misinformation that refined states of consciousness will simply arise without effort or practice. Why claim this if you don't even know? Would hatha yogis take an interest in the intricacies of mind if offered instructions as complex as those we’ve invented for asana the past 50 years?) In any case, his method essentially is hatha yoga as I understand it, just with far more accurate and efficient instructions. I cautiously (!) anticipate a mindfuck of the most mundane, non-trancey, non-“transcendent”, non-special, pretty boring sort. What comes after the mascarpone layer? Oh yeah… a blanket of coffee-flavored heavy cream. Solid, right here now, worldly, awake, unmistakeable… still savory. Presumably....

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Categories: beta state , spirituality

More Equations · 28 June 2009

Summer indulgence: driving all the way across the city to practice with my alchemy teacher in a juicy, complicated space. Sixteen point zero miles in as many minutes—blasting blues rock on the freeway as the cylindrical US Bank Building and its lesser neighbors grow large in the opaque white smog of June. Singing something that wakes up the pelvic floor, I approach downtown from the west as the sun comes toward it from the east, infusing the fog until it glows bright in my eyes. It becomes near-blinding just as I touch the brake and swing north from the 10 to the 110 at the Staples Center. A pretty intense little kriya—why wake up with nauli when you can have sixteen dangerous minutes alone on the Santa Monica freeway?

So… time = distance, shala = kitchen floor, inhale = exhale. The balance of my mantra, SO ABOVE SO BELOW, also reminds me that nothing much is free. What you do = who you are. I do freeway penance in 36 minutes of slow-going on the other side, east to west, sixteen point zero miles of stop and go, listening to Iran news on BBC radio. East is east and west is west, and never the twain shall meet, until…

Practice is incredibly sweet. The space is full of symbols left wide open to interpretation: every time you lose your drsti there’s some other image in your grill, just asking to be incorporated in to the arbitrary symbolic lexicon. The giant photograph of a teenaged SPKJ taking adho mukha in shades of purple: I gaze blearily toward that inverted skull and let it pull 25 long ut pluthihi breaths out of my tired lungs.

Most subversive, though, is the ceiling devised by whatever perverted architects threw this mini-mall together decades ago. Beautiful crossbeams above the main space meet in a perfect X, and if you align your own body with that X you realize the great cylindrical ventilation duct just above it is nothing les than a shiny silver lingam to the strong white supports of the X. One might think Siva and Shakti were missing from the shala’s pantheon, but they’re only disguised as neutral background architecture, laughing down on us as we drift in and out of alchemy on the floor.

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

Equation #1 · 25 June 2009

1 = 1

A = A

Inhale = Exhale

How many ways and times has this formula been offered to me? Sometimes as if it’s a secret-in-plain-view, only known to the half-dozen true flying lizards of Mysore; sometimes as if it’s the most boring ever baby pranayama; sometimes overheard from my own mouth instructing the first samasthithi of a private.

This morning everything was d-e-n-s-e, far more than usual. Weird. Is this what 60 will feel like? A few minutes in, I went inner-schizoid and hosted a full-blown dialogue:

So, J, if you were alone right now, would you make it even a surya further?

No. I would fucking bail. [Sorry, just playing back the tape.]

What if this actually were a kitchen-practice? What is the same? Is it fair to draw the juice for your entire work-out from these others… to consciously use them while pretending to be riding your own discipline oh-so-sincerely?

Ok, so I will put myself in the kitchen right now. Draw a practice up out of its dusty linoleum. Shala = kitchen. So west, so east. Same same same.

Fine then yes, here we are in the kitchen. Making it not different from the shala.

It doesn’t mean don’t be strengthened by the group in the abstract. Just don’t suck these four people’s milkshake. Gurglegurglegurgle. It’s not yours and you don’t need it anyway.

It was a useful little trip: practice was extraordinary. Albeit a little weird because I kept seeing that linoleum and remembering I need to swiff. But extraordinary because air-cushioned.

What makes shala practice = kitchen practice on a dense Thursday is one key. That key is not: pushing, churning it out on a performative, exhale-driven autopilot. It is valuing the inhalation as an equal.

Counting it. Literally. (Why is the default to count the exhale or the little space thereafter?) Today I bracketed the exhale—it knows how to do its thing—letting the inhale come to balance. Instead of dying out on the floor as the others in the room inhaled for me. If in doubt today, I inhaled even more.

It is so easy when I allow myself to know this, something that others have tried to give me but I become too unconscious to do when I get tired. Ridiculously easy.

Oxygen. Who knew?

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

Ammabots · 19 June 2009

They call them the Ammabots. I met the first one, dressed in flowing white with her pupils dilated big as dimes, just inside the Radisson. “Your first time?” I smiled yes. She peeled a blue dot from a strip of paper and stuck it not to my third eye (as I somehow expected) but the edge of my sweater. And then I ascended the stairs in to an incence-filled bot-populated marketplace that seemed designed especially for the hipster Village Voice and Salon writers who would be infiltrating on their funny-cynical assignments. Circus of snark right there, for anyone who would fixate on the level of cultural otherness that is the Amma roadshow.

The exoticist set pieces on the business of east-meets-west have been written already. Hopefully some such accounts of the Amma Show include the part about the red velvet umbrella emblazoned with gold OMs. Amma twirls the OM-brella above her head as she enters the enormous conference room every morning at 10 o’clock. The room holds its breath, bells clang, and an invisible invocateur booms OOOMMM from bass-heavy speakers. My dad has a hollowed-out horn of a bull that he blows in the sanctuary when he preaches the horrible story of Jericho: the amped OM is the same portentous tone and drives any beta state hangers-on straight in to trance. Amma has the beatific gaze down perfect, the large fleshy mass of her sways like seaweed and without question she glows. You’d have to be dead not to feel that aura. Or on second thought, maybe the dead feel it even better than the rest of us.

The day I was there, I was set to meet L and G. G is a retired special forces operator who knows even more than I know about counter-insurgency warfare, but not because he’s read about it in books. He finally left the military in his sixties after some bad years in Colombia, fed up with Clinton-era drug war tactics. He went the next level more badass, and joined the Vajrayana in Tibet. He later settled in So-Cal because it’s where the women are best looking and the weather kindest to his hard-trammeled joints. But his ‘Nam-era hatred of hippies has always kept him from going fully native here. L, a woman thirty years younger than G and five inches taller, is my kundalini collaborator and in her work life some kind of cult actress. Unlike G, she drinks many kinds of Kool-Aid. Yet she is too in the moment, every moment, to be a bot for anyone in particular. She is dialed in to Crazy on her own terms, and knows too well from the receiving end how empty every groupie becomes. She is as open as G is closed, but neither of them is signing up for anything.

I’d talked to them by phone minutes before I entered the great hall, and then there was the commotion with Amma’s arrival. I somehow found myself all the way at the front of the hall, within 20 feet of her, involuntarily entranced. I knelt to touch the floor, find my own inner body in an effort to ground myself against the force of Amma’s astral wind. A rope-bodied man in white robes looked to me with those giant pupils and drew me over to a space he magically created in the crush of seated devotees. Forgetting G and L, I decided it would be a good idea to turn off my phone. 

I sat next to the man as Amma settled in to her throne and the 5-hour hugging juggernat fired up. A little train of chairs was arranged, two by two, from the back of the hall all the way to the saint. Visitors would go to the back of the line when their number was called, sitting in pairs in the last seats. As those at the front of the hug-train received their squash and their chocolate kiss, each pair of visitors would rise and move up to the next seat in the procession. I could see the composure of self and body begin to break up as people got to the last four or five seats before the hug. The actually physical vibration (which several of us mistook for earthquakes in the 4 or 5 Richter range) began to shake them loose, cognition would fate, the body would become slack, sometimes tears would begin flowing. By the time they entered their embrace they were ecstatic mush, and moments later would stumble away dazed, blessed, briefly transformed, forever a little closer to the astral plane.

Holding a number that would not be called for several hours, I settled to the floor next to the man in robes. He glowed at me as I took up a lotus and faced Amma, “Have you ever been to India?”

Aah, the litmus test. Soon the man, a 55-year old Finn called Rishi who has been following Amma everywhere for 13 years, was telling me of his first meeting with his guru. The day he met saw in Helsinki, he knew. But he gazed upon Amma now as if it was the first time, wept and smiled to me as if I were also participating in his inner experience. I told him Amma had been in Mysore when I was there in March, but I skipped it. “ Aaah, it was not your time yet,” he said, and asked my name. I gave it and he looked serious, “So you are a blessed one, a saint as well.”

“Who are you calling Saint, Rishi?”

“Ah yes she gave me this name to give me difficulty. It is my task to live up to it…. You know, she cannot be understood. She is mother, she is love, but also… she is in ABSOLUTE CONTROL of everything here. She is fierce and everyone does exactly what she says. The task is for my tiny mind to manage that contradiction, of total control and pure love.”

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your head explode. Put an end to the vrittis, allright. I wanted to ask Rishi about everything he’d forked over for this deal—the home, sexuality, creative life, personal love relationships, self expression… the energy-blooms of all the lower chakras given away so that he can stay in Amma’s delta-wave forcefield and sustain himself on the one glorious love-emotion with which she infuses it.

But living on mother-love all the time has consequences. You become an emotional if not spiritual infant, do you not? Emotional addiction, trusting too much, taking responsibility too little. The spiral-eyed vulnerability and, well, neediness of the scenester-level devotees to any guru… have you ever witnessed that side of bhakti…?

The connection of Rishi and myself was uncomfortably obvious. Through the portal that is Amma, he was giving his self, jacked to the matrix and pouring himself in. So with all the other bots, creating a caravan across the spiritual desert of planet Earth, hoisting the mother on their shoulders. And to that mother, through that awesome portal of her, myself touching in for a hit of shakti, faith, love, delight. A free hit, as long as I stay grounded and recirculate it in to my own ecology. It is good that the darshan is free… but in the greater energy economy it is not really so free. I go to the see he hugging saint, and to the degree she really moves me I am playing with her fire, taking it and spreading it somewhere else. It’s a little like the tapas-strong thread that snakes around the inside of AVY culture.

There at Amma’s feet, before L finally found me and dragged me to cognitive safety outside the 100-foot perimeter, one of my synapses half-fired off a thought about Mary and Martha. If Jesus were alive now, he’d have a road show at least this well produced. And where would I be? Facing in, taking the blessing like Mary, or bustling around keeping the business of spirituality in order like Martha? As with yoga institutions, insiders pay dearly for that “special association” they seek. Energy and levels of insight are drained off to feed the system, so that the more secure seekers can touch in, take the benefits, and get on a little bit better with their lives.

The benefits of the one-off chocolate kiss are not trivial, though. To see what heights are possible with human energy and consciousness: this inspiration is so great that it almost distracts me from this new little undercurrent of love that's been deepened in me by no effort of my own. 

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Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society

Lizard brain, world soul · 13 June 2009

Dance this morning was up in Hollywood, an intimate den of a place with a soft, forgiving floor and blue-grey light filtering in through the wall of windows. June gloom. The only time you really feel the ocean in the air here, the only season with the ambient drama people in the rest of the world know as weather. The air is wet and salty, and you feel it cool on your face. I love the contrast of this season, the way everyone is a little socked in, like the sky.

In Hollywood, you enter the den-space from a hidden back door, and once inside it feels like an urban fortress—like the Hollyhock House up near Griffith Park, or the Getty, or the highrise apartments in the Westwood financial district. Yet in this studio, the windows look right down on one of the seediest stretches of Pico Blvd. Today the rain was coming in sparse glops, knocking the purple jacaranda blossoms in to the street. I had the feeling of cozy mischief, like I was a child building pillow-forts up on the top of a bunkbed, looking down and out, snuggling together with other little wild ones.

What is the distance between lizard brain and the world soul? About two inches from cerebellum to pineal gland, I guess: from primate wildness to knowing, mass intersubjectivity. Does it make a difference that we come to this with the intent for exploration and play, rather than for orgiastic escape?

Usually it only makes sense to dance in other people’s sacred spaces, not in random performance studios like we did today. We meet at the Masonic lodge or at a de-sanctified church in Venice. It’s not like every other religious transition in recent millennia, in which the new faith comes in and builds its temples right on top of the previous holy site. A lot of these dancers are explict about being “the next spirituality”—the integral cutting edge of ecstasy or whatever—but in one way this innovation is different from every other religious succession. Rather than new colonizers building atop the old, they are just renters—of both meeting spaces and symbols. Building some transcendence out of what they’ve got, and leaving it behind a few hours later.

I am learning from this. That it is possible to take the ecstasy on the road. I’ve been realizing how strongly the taste for transcendence stays with me—everything hangs together better, and knows how to move, when there are regular altered states. Preferably every day. Church used to do that, then it was travel and danger, then it was practice. And now I realize why I'm less understanding of people who don't engage practice in that way... people who use it to check in with a stream of frustration or lack or trauma or play or performance or healthy competition instead of the churchy stuff. I’m not sure this is a problem for anyone—some addictions or habits-of-being are good or at least kind of necessary for a time.

But the variations between my subjective experience of dance, yoga, sitting are no longer confusing--a lot of the same stuff is going on in each because the underlying experiencer (whatever she is) is sort of constant. I'm slowly learning to hold the ecstasy more lightly, allowing that sitting or dancing or yoga not just be self-service entrancement. This has been a hard letting-go, something a teacher might have instructed years ago if I had been open then to that sort of teaching. But then, ashtanga wasn't that kind of practice. We are still stuck studiously pretending that it's not about the mind or spirit or whatever, that the only relevant instruction is about how to get beautiful and (most importantly) correct vinyasas. 

Saturday links-

- Great article (http://tinyurl.com/nfhapo) on the excuses we make for people who seem spiritually insightful but are ethical wack-jobs. Raising the question: if your root relationships are a joke, what kind of practice is that? The argument is that teachers who don’t “do” everyday morality and only play with transcendence are dualist tools. Seems like, given the cop-out discourse of “that’s her projection, not my mistake,” and (more often heard in women) “oh, nothing is really wrong, the situation just triggered my own issues,” it's good to have tools for taking responsibility, and for holding so-called authorities accountable.

- A practice (www.focusing.org) that merges Wittgenstein and Heidegger with the contemplative side of Christianity to produce a series of habits of just looking in to the body to find what's going on. This is what others would call centering prayer, or still others mindfulness, or I would call getting in to the central channel. I can’t believe these people exist and are doing sort of the same thing I do but with a discourse that merges my professional worldview (phenomenology) and good old Judeo-Christian ways of talking. Who should I colonize with it first—the Chirstians or the academics? Oh yeah, neither. It doesn’t work like that now.

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Categories: having a body , integration , morality

New Species · 12 June 2009

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Sex, Pie & Parkour · 9 June 2009

From what I can see, the first layer of my subconscious is about as complex as an episode of the Tele-tubbies. There was the past life regression guy who told me that what’s in there is recollections of my previous incarnation as an alienated medieval priestess who deplores religion, wears blue and silver robes, and walks around in minimalist cathedrals under really nice skylights. But I think he was sucking up, as they tend to do in he divination profession. In truth, what’s in there seems to be a whole lot of brightly colored objects that make me drool.

I’ve been trying to initiate lucid dreams from that place. Rather than fading in teleport-style from a half-dream, my idea is to recognize from within a deep, unshakeable dream that I am in fact asleep and therefore can mold that universe at will. Put a little will back in to the state of surrender, yes.

This is Stephen LaBerge’s method, which I’ve been loosely following since the grown-up acid trip that is a month in the Mysore social scene. It’s not that Candyland is a problem for me or (like many who are compelled to learn lucid dreaming) that I have demons who chase me at night. It’s just that I want to see what is beyond Candyland, and after that I want to with lucidity make all the dreams just STOP so I can find out if Patanjali’s version of Samadhi (conscious, dreamless sleep, right?) is really all that great. Is dreamed stream-entry still stream-entry?

After that, if dream-Samadhi happened to get boring, I’d just go back to Candyland and play. Hmmm… sex or pie? Every unenlightened lucid dreamer’s dilemma.

Or parkour.

But that’s the thing, at the moment. Most nights lately my dream-mind doesn’t understand the notion of “separate self” and thus won’t let me have a body. I’m not even a character in my own dreams, which is great in the moment if a little confusing in the morning. (Which I supposed is what you say after a rave, too.) So: mostly it’s just a disembodied float through Candyland. I suspect it’s not that I’m all merged with the world soul in there. More like I’m not even separated from the primordial ooze. (PTF alert, as with any and every spiritualization of lizard-brain.)

Last night it was purple Mike ‘n’ Ikes floating over a waterfall. They were dissolving in the water and nourishing the grass in a vast green valley bordered on the north by steep snowy mountains. Everything was in a warm golden glow.

Later a wolly mammoth wandered out from an opening in the mountains, swaying down in to the meadow where he ate chewy orange pumpkins whole, storing them in his giant hamster-esque cheeks. There was a lot of excitement about the mammoth.

Later, delightfully, more mammoths showed up and there were pumpkins everywhere. They kept swaying their big hairy heads back and forth like Stevie Wonder.

Then there was a flying diplodocus dinosaur, with a hot-air-balloon-like fire mechanism in its butt. The butt-fire would periodically ignite, sounding off like an air balloon on the rise. The diplo would float off, sort of like the inebriated snake in the old animated version of Robin Hood.

Apparently I got very excited about the flying dinosaur and started yammering about it in my sleep. I told the Editor the creature was floating and using its webbed feet to move through the air.

So go fly with him.

But I don’t have a body…

It doesn’t matter. Just fly.

But I need to have a body and I can’t find it. I’m trying to see my hands… (becoming upset)… I can’t find my body!

The Editor tired of my yammering and left. Meanwhile, back in the dream I was the dinosaur (I was also everything else, including especially the sky), but was also trying to manifest my human body. Why I wasn’t content to be a lucid dinosaur and fly around in that body I don’t know… maybe I didn’t like the fire-butt mechanism and wanted better powers before I went fully lucid. At least that was the excuse I was making in the dream. Maybe I was stalling.

So I struggled to manifest a body, growing an appendaged human on the back of the floating diplo. I think the strategy was to grow a dinosaur-human hybrid beast, then inhabit the human part and separate it from the dinosaur. But before that could happen, I woke up because my back was hurting as if someone was sitting atop me digging in her heels. In the morning I was scratched up between my shoulder blades…. It seems that floating-dinosaur-owl was trying to get nascent-human-owl off her back.

Which reminds me. There were also three monkeys; and they were wearing smooth golden hats. They were sitting on the side of the mountain, tilting their heads to the side and looking out at everything in a quizzical way. What do the monkeys know?

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Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , power of suggestion

How to lose your edge · 5 June 2009

The landlady came to me with a simple request.  Structurally, she is in power. Relationally, I am.  Her hesitation, dissimulation, apologies… her waiting for me to define the situation…  My first thought was: Nice to see I’m in control here! I didn’t even have to try!

She’s only just met me but has the idea that she is responsible for pleasing me. I guess it’s all those years of being a hardass. I was never a manipulator, one who instantly sends out the heat-seeking probe in to another’s psyche, looking for the weak spots. Rather I was just vaguely put off by the world, living in my own visionary bubble of “getting it”—a bubble in to which only a vfew elect would be permitted after having demonstrated their depth.

The landlady owns property and is extracting my rent purely on the basis of an arbitrary class advantage. Bourgeois swine! There is no productive relationship here… only the fiction that this place is “hers” and therefore I owe her for occupying it.

The first impulse is to respond to her solicitude the way that she expects. This is her script we’re acting out. She’s creating difficulty for herself by fearing me; and because she’s opened the door for me to act powerful, it’s natural to follow all the mental-emotional cues. Comply by dominating: be nearly silent, give no positive emotion, withhold information, act displeased. Over the years, she will learn to feel grateful for the slightest kindness from me. She will give me more and more subtle power, in the form of ego strokes and breaks on the recycling bill.

Pretty much my MO in any relationship in which my critique of capitalism comes in to play. Union activist-meets-kundalini gulag. It’s the least we landless masses can do to even the playing field.

But… I’ve been seeing how many interactions feature some unconscious layer of emotional blackmail. Not just the class warfare. Pretty much whenever a alpha is present, she sucks others’ energy, plays up their weaknesses, makes situations all about her own gratification. Are big alphas dominant and charismatic; or are they more like parasites? When someone comes around and defines the situation, is that power... or is it ultimately weakness?

I decided to take a risk with the landlady: I’m being easy. I’m acting as if we are equals on an emotional plane, rather than enemies on an economic one. Not being stupid about it, but also not interacting with trace aggression or emotional/material greed.

I admire people who live well because they are smart, who do not expend energy in tasteless ways or hoard it in tacky ones. These are the people who don’t have to make their way in the world by selling anything, by opportunism, or by being politicians.

They remind me of the old ethic Work smarter, not harder. These people tend to be ultra-clear about what makes meaning in life, and have zero interest in spending time and money in other ways. Nobody thinks to wonder what they’re doing right or try to keep up with them, because these people don’t bother to display their emotional and material wealth to others. They just live well: privately, kindly, and with great taste.

I’m not there. But I’m getting in to a practice of assuming a level of equality with everyone in my life. Doubts about their integrity? Questioning their intelligence? Wondering if they are going to annoy me? OK, fuss budget. Assume equality. By the same token, why assume anothers’ superiority? Why treat them as if their pleasure matters more than one’s own? Why assume we have less to offer? On the contrary, one could just assume equality on the level of personhood, no matter the differences in skill and social position.

So much time in my mind is spent on relationships. What else to humans even think about? Physics? Comic books? Outer space? Mostly, we think about each other. That is why what I set out as an aspirational disposition—assume equality—has turned in to a goddamn practice. Thought by thought. It’s ok though. The hardass racket had gotten dull.

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Categories: integration , morality , self-deception , social theory

Pathologies of Los Angeles · 29 May 2009

People aren’t afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles, actually. They merge like fast little fish made smart by evolution. Especially on the weekends and at night, because it’s no longer about getting to work; and especially in June, when the cool cloudcover from the bay makes for perfect driving conditions. People deplore this town for its car-ness, and the atomizing socio-environmental catastrophe we have created here because we insist on driving. But there is something nobody admits: driving here is great. We go as fast as we like on the freeways at night, listening to trip-hop or bad Britpop, windows down, exiting smoothly on to thoroughfares made for the rich countryside that sat here 50 years ago.

The bad word on the city is that we spend absurd proportions of our income on high-end cars because it’s socially normative to drive a Porsche even before you make it big. That’s true. But also, it’s just nice to have a fast car on roads built for sport driving. At night when it’s empty out and a little bit humid from the gloom, I’ve been taking the long way home on the Sunset hairpin curves, the ones immortalized by the Beach Boys and mortal for many daredevils since. I understand that this way of living is actually a choice to do environmental violence by staying unconscious, but it feels so right! We need new bass-driven ballads for this dirty guilty pleasure. Los Angeles, I need to get over you, forget it could be good like this. I love you for the wrong reasons...

Anyway, Friday evening. Alone after-hours in the art school café, leaning back in a wooden folding chair. The dashing professor for whom I graded Ancient Greece exams years ago just trammeled through on the way to the hilltop parking lot, looking increasingly like Johnny Depp-as-historian-of-the-esoteric. June gloom, eucalyptus, sycamore and pines outside the wall of 20-foot windows before me. This morning when I taught a client about the relationship of the arches and the adductors, asking he root down in to the earth to draw some kind of strength up, he scrunched up his nose and said, “So like… I am getting this… but what would be, like, the next logical step?” Seriously? Ok, forget trikonasana, do you want to learn about a place called the pelvic floor? A few minutes later I heard myself say the words "second chakra" to a soccer jock.

Well, he asked for it. But… here’s another pathology of Los Angeles: the world of anti-form that tries to compete with the world of hyper-materialism. In my mind, secretly I used to call it kundalini gulag. The KG is the tendency in some of us to get hyper-reactive to LA materialism—the worship of cars and youth that forms the spiritual center of this town. In trying to be anti-materialistic, we buy straight in to spiritual materialism, for a yoga that’s all about feeling energetically superior. A practice that’s about coming off as the most psychically gifted, and sexually potent, and “humble” person in the room. Ok. This is still power yoga! It’s still all about proving oneself and being better than other people, just this time on a post-material level. Spinoza said somewhere in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect that there is no one more arrogant than the one who is caught up in his own humility. And this is the essence of the kundalini gulag—a display of humility that barely masks energetic elitism. Too bad you can't have aura contests and chakra-offs down on Venice beach. That would take care of all of this craziness.

I have gone in for some of the metaphysical arrogance too. Caught myself making a harsh joke about the “superficial” OCD factor of Iyengar the other day. Hmmm. Am I starting to believe the pseudospiritual pablum numero uno— that the “world of form” is an "illusion"? That lived experience is “all in the mind”? Riiiiiight.

So I’m thinking some Iyengar this weekend. Hopefully as OCD as I can find. Thing is, the class that works schedulewise is one of the only advanced sessions in the city, and it’s taught by a SCARY little German man who, with his jaunty grin and spiky hair, is just adorable enough to get my guard down before he kicks my ass. But I need to remember that there is nothing adorable about an advanced Iyengar teacher, not even this Mr. C with his funny shorts and strangely beatific expressions. I wonder how mad he’ll be at me for showing up at class with nothing but a lot of the other guy’s yoga under my skin. And under the wings of my kidneys and the eyes of my elbows too.

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

Mysticism Kitsch · 25 May 2009

My favorite motto for the practice is still this one:

Ashtanga yoga—reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Might be just me, though.

I remember when the occult—even occult fiction (the kind where professors work out the secrets of the universe in medieval archives) —was something you didn’t really discuss. I read Foucault's Pendulum, the academic-Templar thriller, the summer I was 21. It was sweltering in Washington; there was a shooting in the Capitol building blocks from my office; and I was taking 2 hour runs every night through the woods where they'd finally find that other intern, Chandra Levy. I bough a burlap bag of rice and lived on that plus the hazelnut coffee at Amnesty International, slept in a bedroll in an empty 4-floor townhouse, and spent afternoons off in the dark domed reading room of the Library of Congress. Clever old poems circle the library ceiling, winking down on the study carrels. The best and weirdest is Tennyson:

One God One Law One Element, and One Divine Event Toward Which All Creation Moves.

I'd believed that as a Christian 5 years earlier, and would believe it again as a kind of atheist 10 years hence, but at the time it just made me wonder what inside politics Tennyson knew that I didn’t.

A gorgeous spitfire Columbian named Carlos Salinas, Amnesty's lobbyist for Latin America, stalked the corridors of my office, swearing up one floor and down the other about political violence. He made his nemesis Jesse Helms—whose hearings I monitored for Amnesty that summer—look like a soft-spoken wuss. One afternoon, Carlos heaved in out of the 102 degree swelter after a lunch hour I'd spent answering phones and reading Foucault's Pendulum.

Fuck! Fuck you! This is the first time you're reading it? Fuck! I am so fucking jealous! I can never go back and read it for the first time! It is the best book in the fucking universe!

This from a guy who usually reserved strong emotion for, you know, highland paramilitaries and the parallel state. I crushed on him all summer, beguiled by his profane passions: hatred of Helms and love of the occult. Eco's book is devious.

That winter I'd visited the Victor Hugo/Knights Templar/Illuminati cult in rural Vietnam; and not long after the Editor and I would go to Toledo's Alcazár, where the evil hooded armor of the Templars stands under glass with other clanking generations of medieval "paramilitaries."

Grail and alchemy lore were so good in those years, before Dan Brown ripped off The Chalice and the Blade and the secret history became the mainstream "history" to the tune of 500 million copies. Last summer I got with Ron Howard, a bozo who really only knows how to make movies about high school dances, filming the ultimate Illuminati blockbuster more or less on my windowsill.

Illuminati blockbuster. So wrong! But I found out Saturday that the final product, Angels & Demons, is less bad than feared. There are limits to what soft, uncomplicated guys like Howard and Hanks can generate—compared to the darker academic-illuminati film pairing of Depp and Polanski. But still. I kind of loved it.

Specifically, I kind of love that this is what has become of the western occult, which up until recently was, even as kitsch, profanity-worthy, nudge-and-wink, back-of-the-bookstore. Now it’s an asexual, market-tested cupcake stuffed with Topeka-safe lines about the compatibility of the church and science.

But Sixteen Candles-meets-esoterica feels like a good resolution to many centuries of obfuscation of the “secret knowledge” of the West. Grail lore, the mysteries of alchemy, D&D… what is this but a big old metaphor-game for the evolution of consciousness?

It’s always been so indecent in the West to come out and talk about it, to admit we could believe in such a possibility. So we made it all sub-rosa, generated a whole history of conflict between faith and empirical research. At least it’s gotten progressively less violent by the century.

Now that the occult game has been fairly debased and uploaded—its “secret” nature semicorrupted—is it even fun anymore? I’m still in. Maybe, in these times, revealing what has been occluded won’t kill it. What Dan and Ron and Tom have done is kitchify, denature and demystify a bit of the myth.

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Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , esoteric shit , evolution , integration , science