A lot of chitchat recently out there about Mysore and the West. I haven't been to Mysore, so I'm not going to write any overt comparisons, because I can't. That ought to chill out the fanatics both pro- and con-, whom I visualize as a sort of knife-wielding gang, ready to pounce, like banditos in a Sergio Leone film.
So get lost.
Seventh series. None of the parents in my yoga room have bare, craven striving. They have sort of a curiosity, a wishfulness to get a posture or finish a series or to pledge themselves to some imaginary "good enough," but they lack a real craven egoism that says "I AM WORTHY."
Put differently, they don't imagine themselves to be more than they are; they wonder, they can walk into the impossible, but that is not the ego that does that.
I think that this is largely (and I'm sure you know exceptions, I can think of a couple) an effect of seventh series: it opens your heart NOT in the sense of making you a sappy star-gazer (although that also happens), but in the sense of opening what I would call your Ego-Heart (you might say those two are opposites, but I've seen heartedness serving ego in my own life, so I combine the two here in a duality of EgoHeart/NonEgoHeart specifically so I can then alchemize the binary--you'll say, why do the runaround? I'd answer, because I'm writing, not acting, and the language of the "truth" of "open your heart" is not a language, and thus, the very medium of writing requires me to alchemize the illusions on which writing depends, in order to get to that "truth" which never was linguistic in the first place: can you dig it?).
I'll give you a minute to get through the meta- there.
The EgoHeart opens, and it separates Heart from Ego, and this is what I actually believe that "open your heart" means. In fact, I didn't experience this as a "heart" thing at all, but simply a sort of loss of the ego's body-identity. So "open your heart" for me, means more like "clear the ego out of the heart chakra." The nature of the heart never changed in this, it was very much that "polish your mirror" metaphor from the Sutras.
And it was in this respect that parenting was the great death of "I," but only an egoic I, and even though I knew that, perhaps, intellectually, the felt experience of it was real death. This is why I would urge people to be careful with their well-intentioned manifestoes about "burning the ego" or "beating the ego." You can't do that if your ego is still "you," because it'll hurt and you won't like it. But if you are NOT your ego, I don't see why you want to beat or burn it in the first place.
The first person you learn to be compassionate for (again, in my experience) is that ego, that "I." As your heart opens, gets clear of the ego, the first thing you feel is the tremendous pain, fear and tears of that ego, as it loses itself. And my ego fought me like a very small child, with pushing, anger, gestures of "go away!"
This is the similarity between a person undergoing this "heart opening," and a two year old: largely I was NOT the person pushed, but the person pushing. Ego disintegration caused retraction, through decades of intellectual aging, but through hardly any "emotional time." I didn't re-become an emotional child but realized that I've hardly evolved from being one in the first place.
Nothing in the West forces you to grow up, in emotional terms: I know that most of what I got as emotional "advice" (to the degree that there was any) was "get over it" and "deal with it." Even now, my emotional practice, by which I mean those tearful and cathartic and painful asana practices which come and go, is all about feeling. Feel what's true. Let it be expressed as quietly or loudly as it wants, feel it, and then it all gets better.
"But how do I USE it, how do I LEARN from it" is such an ugly self-help question.
Why can't it just be there and have that be cool?
Resist the urge to hit someone, even if that someone is Western culture's body hatred or something else like that, some systemic idiocy. Idiocy is something you shine a light on, said BKS Iyengar and probably a whole stack of other peace-minded people. This is EXACTLY the same advice I give my kid.
So what does seventh series have, maybe, in common with extended Mysore practice (and I mean, in India)?
Somewhere not long ago someone said, "Keeping a strong and sexy marriage is teaching me everything I could learn in Mysore," or words very closely to that effect. If you're my regular readership and you read in the regular places, you've seen that conversation (a couple of you were part of it).
That sentence is prompting my question, so again, you "pro and con fanatics," this IS NOT ABOUT INDIA, so FUCK OFF PLEASE. Thank you.
The rambling opening section of this post is talking about heart-opening, softening and humanizing the edges, which seems to be something that Mysore experiences also bring, particularly to authorization-craving.
I don't really care about asana achievements, and that's in large part really solidified by all the pain. I try to "keep" the yoga as a part of "old me," so that I don't have to "lose" everything, and then the yoga itself becomes the clearest, purest tunnel down to absolute pain, emotional truth, nowhere to hide. And then it wasn't about keep it/lose it, but feel it, the pain of the FEAR of the loss, the ego shrinking, pulling away, growing ever smaller, ye gods the PAIN of being that ego. But the yoga wasn't about being the ego, it was about feeling the pain all the way. This wasn't loss, it was the pain of a felt loss, and eventually, it was the pain of someone else's felt loss, that I felt nonetheless. And then it had to be about multiple bodies or else insanity.
So the yoga was never about the ego, not about losing it, not about gaining it. People mistake this, I think: for example, being stopped at a posture certainly whittles the ego, and people will say, the yoga is working on my ego, but really what's happening (if you ask me) is that the yoga has stopped being readily available for the ego's grip. A wisdom one could hope for, is the idea that it's the ego's grip that is painful, not the stoppage of posture-gaining. And then a second but not secondary wisdom would be that the ego's grip is STILL painful even in getting a posture or another series, the ego's grip is ALWAYS painful. And that's when you learn that the yoga isn't about the ego.
A tertiary wisdom to be gained there is that, eventually, nothing is about the ego. This is what I think "everything becomes guru" means.
Of course, the ego can adorn itself with anything, hold onto anything. This is why Trungpa's ...Spiritual Materialism is such a key book.
But to return to our question, is THAT what a Mysore practitioner learns, can learn? Is that how a Mysore trip and a seventh series practice can teach the same wisdom? Note that no substitution is implied here, I'm using what might well be a problematic sentence ("strong and sexy marriage teaches the same...") to work a comparison I can't say I'm qualified to make.
Speaking of said sentence: I'm failing to keep a "strong and sexy marriage," no? It's complicated: I maybe think I'm failing, but she does not. At one point she said that raising a child together is intimate, which I took to mean that this is our sum total intimacy, as engaged and as fulfilling. If that were true for her, that'd be awesome. We already know it's not true for me by a stack of miles, but that's fine, we also know I have samskaric business in that corner of the world and so nothing will be crystal clear or easy.
One could think of sexual activity as ego-indifferent, the way that yoga asana practice is ego indifferent. Pauses here, certainly work over the ego the way that stoppage at posture gaining does (or at least I think it's similar).
What if, since my asana wisdom came from pain in the asana practice (emotional pain, release, confrontation), I were to think of sexual experience as PAINFUL? Not in a kinky sense or a Surrealist sense, but in the sense in which the Sutras say, "to one of discrimination, all pleasure is an experience of pain," or more personally, in exactly the way that the asana practice is sometimes emotionally painful.
Do I not WANT those days, did I not learn to sort of crave them even if to have them over with, to welcome them when they showed, for resistance creates more pain, not less?
So not pain as a type of punishment or disincentive, but pain as a LEARNING PROCESS in which I learned to feel more clearly and molecularly, what is actually happening. And thus, not pain at all, but close attention AS TAUGHT BY PAIN. The wisdom of pain, if you will.
This is what I think that a proper (by which I mean, "not a stupid") practice of the Kama Sutra offerings would create: too often we throw our minds out the window when pleasure is involved. A wise foodie can walk the line between relish and gluttony, but risks fetishizing experience, certain combinations. A sexual "foodie" risks all the same things. But a practice of the Kama Sutra based on deferral and duration: this seems to me able to create presence and molecular awareness. Not a quick "intoxicatory shot" of pleasure or one brief meal of delight or eight minutes of joy, but hours of close connection. A general and very much CONTROLLED ride. A typical Western "Cosmo" panic about spontaneity and joy is totally misplaced here.
So not pain, but the wisdom that pain teaches: "This isn't pain, this is reality. Stop white-knuckling your identity and you can feel the real."
Can PLEASURE be treated that way? I see no reason why it cannot.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Monday, March 19, 2012
Samskaras II, Pain and the Vision of the Ego
For the "action" sequences of the Kino workshop (Saturday's Primary and Sunday's Mysore class) I was in substantial pain. Lots of sobbing, lots of pauses, very "David and Shelley" ala June 2011 when I was a month out of the loss of my father.
This was fine. I lived through the Primary, got some great emotional release, and let my sore shoulder not do most of the Arm Balances for Everyone workshop. Felt that my physical practice was totally shattered beyond recovery. Self-pity, but predictable, and wisely, I did not write. Not until now, when it's all long-over.
The Mysore practice was also incredibly painful, emotional/physical, more like koshas, more accurately: annamaya, expressing pranamaya, manomaya (energy, emotional bodies). Work stress, too little practice, too much worry, too much search committee, grading stress, long-held grief, all of that. Tons of shit.
I called it a practice at Marichyasana B, which I was up to, while most of the room (doing Primary) was at the final postures. Slow, painful, expressive practice. Kino came up for final backbends as I was hanging back. I told her I usually can do up-and-back but not today, and she said, "We'll go up and back, then we'll cross." Cross means cross arms and hang back then go for the Chakra Bandhasana (ankle grab). Ok, so be it. I figured if I die now, it'll be OK.
Most comfortable backbends ever. Hands way back, almost to edge of rug, so not big dropbacks, but successful and painless. Big, and I mean really huge, finger-creep Kapo-style creep toward feet. Push fingertips into floor, press up for five. Again, no pain, nothing, no agony. She's smiling, as always, and then the squish, and that's that.
Redefined my idea of the practice, the shattered-ness. Made it all about the pain itself, not about "me," not about "mine" in any sense other than that the pain was mine, but I knew that. Everything became self-evident, destiny disappeared, nothing stated, nothing lost, just the present, thanks.
*************************************
Sutras talk. The final event on Sunday (this was the 11th). I went and taught and lost the first hour of it, but that was great, good class of seven (even on Mysore morning). When I walked into the room, Kino was talking about pain. The story that I remember was that she was sitting in meditation one morning in Mysore, pre-practice, and suddenly had an SI joint shift, just sitting, and then pain. Pain even in "ekam." Pain all over. But she said, since this pain came while I was sitting in meditation, it was SATTWIC PAIN.
Sattwic/sattvic (depends on if you're South or North Indian). But there we are again with the gunas: tamas, rajas, sattwa. The material from which Prakriti (as I move at will between Yoga, Samkhya and Vedanta, because my own reading mixes those at will also) is made. The material also from which you and I are drawn, along our samskaric (habitual) lines.
Kino is better in speech than she is in writing. She's written about samskaras and about pain, but I far, far prefer her in person, speaking. There has been some (to be honest, and what am I if not honest, even when you watch me lie to myself, I know no better) serious bullshit said in the yoga world about pain. "Should you work through it?" "Pain is part of your practice." Things that are open to bad interpretation, things said clumsily without the presence of a human to also provide the tone of speech, the warning, the storytelling, the wisdom. Print is lies, not to be too Derridean about it.
ANYWAY.
Sattwic pain, Kino told us, can be worked through, is a gift. But rajasic pain, like when you overcrank into a posture, that's to be respected, treated. So the pain you have in practice, IF YOU ARE PRACTICING DEVOTIONALLY, is sattwic pain. And THAT qualifier means everything.
This means you MUST be honest with yourself, to know if you are taking a sattwic practice, a rajasic practice, a tamasic practice. My painful practices had tamasic qualities: low energy, high gravity, pain, but they also had sattwic qualities: wait until you can breathe, inhale, be pleased to be able to bend at all. And my pain was transient, came in waves, transited through, was over. Cathartic pain.
But this was something Kino did NOT say in writing, this bit about "sattwic pain" and devotional practice (although she's also written I think quite brilliantly on devotional practice, and my own post with that title is my third-most read post here ever, so that's interesting, perhaps).
Devotional practice: forgoing ego, achievement, practicing pretty much for ANYTHING that is not you. Day by day, doing the system, no matter what your given practice is. If it brings tears, you do it anyway. Devotional practice.
Pain during a Devotional Practice is sattwic pain, which is a gift. This was the case she made, and discovered that this was a sort of opening in the hip, which when the hip moved a certain way, made new postures possible. Now, I like this story, but I would NEVER advise a student to do something like this. "Well is it sattwic pain?" I can only think of MAYBE one student who's capable of answering that question. It's a self-knowledge thing. And as always, I think that most of the blogosphere isn't capable of that sort of self-knowledge yet, doesn't have it yet, thinks pain is a question, can't estimate if they should keep practicing "through" pain or not. "Through" is the wrong preposition there. One should never, to my mind, practice "through" pain. Perhaps "around" it if possible, or "outside" it or "under" it or something like that, find a way that isn't that way, but not "through." Unless, of course, it's this "sattwic pain" story, in which case the pain is a gift. This is a dangerous and wonderful thing that Kino told us.
**********************************
She began telling us about negative samskaras. On the 11th. This was within a week of my big post about negative samskaras, and the best way I can put it is that listening to her talk about them was like having a voice INSIDE MY HEAD, like when the Elf Queen talks to Frodo with telepathy:
"WELCOME, Frodo of the Shire! One who has seen THE EYE!!!!"
That sort of freaky shit. Kino told us that a negative samskara is like the story you tell about yourself, with all of your important events and betrayals, your whole narrative, and you eventually burn the negative samskaras in the fire of tapas, which is both the fire of discipline (devotional practice) and the fire of the asana practice itself (digestive fire). Stoking the fire of devotion is what fuels the flames that burn whatever's on the stake, and what's on the stake is your own self-story, your aggrandizing negative samskaras, your habits, your selfhood, your long history, echoing through time with the same shapes and habits and mistakes and beliefs. And LET IT BURN. Let it burn and mourn it and let there be tears and fear and terror and lose yourself and then feel better; you never needed that thing anyway.
She didn't put it like that: I've channeled myself well into whatever it was she said and can't separate the two.
But LET IT BURN in that devotional fire, she said that over and over. I nodded throughout like a guy giving witness at a Baptist church. You could almost hear the callers in back: "Come on! Say it!" and such. If you've never been to a non-denominational church of that sort, with witnessing and laying on of hands and people falling over and men crying in their suits and the guy just nodding and repeating "Uh huh! Come on!" then you've missed out. I used to go, when I was 20, to a church of this kind in New Britain, Connecticut, mostly African-American crowd, delicious and inspiring performance, preaching, witnessing, falling over, snacks and conversation after.
And I thought, THIS is what a teacher does. Sure, an adjustment's great, but THIS is how you spot someone who can teach you something.
There's no question at all that the Sutras talk was the best part of everything.
*******************************************
J and I have had, as usual, some edginess the last few days. I can't anymore remember precisely how this went, in chronological order of dialogue, but I write best when I disregard the externals anyway, let them fall into the rolling wheel of intensities, out of time.
It was about our search committee (I'm on said committee, she's not) meeting with the Dean today and J's critiquing my fashion choices this morning, because how you look affects how authority figures feel about you (this was her argument).
I received that the same way I received that advice at, say, 14. I believe the phrase that went through my head was, "Fucking shove it."
That was the morning; the afternoon before I went to teach the 7:15 yoga was about J advising me to do even more conference stuff, even after I got a panel accepted at a regional conference, because my third-year review (which will happen about a year from now) will need more padding. My feeling was that I'm working my ass off sideways this semester (and really, that can't be debated), and so I was in no mood whatsoever to have her tell me to do EVEN MORE work in order to "make the cut," and she can feel anger radiate off me, like heat. I got very, very, VERY angry with her, and didn't say anything, but she took the boy outside and they began playing in the grass, keeping a quite polite distance.
I processed this after the yoga, waiting for the last of my students to end rest and call it a class.
My diagnosis was this: I want more humanity, more non-work conversation, more friendliness, so I'll need to foreground that so that I can get it.
When I told her that in the evening conversation, she said, "Well when you talk to me about work, I'm going to talk to you about work, because my job is to advise faculty on how they can best optimize their positions."
This took me aside a bit: had I talked to her about work? AHA, I'd complained about the intensity of the semester's work, and her answer was not EMPATHY (which I wanted), but ADVICE about how to best HANDLE said workload.
Immediately I realized that she hadn't been hostile, she just hadn't given me WHAT I WANTED. And then the world unravelled.
Work and home aren't opposites; one isn't "human" at home and "something else" at work; home isn't (as we've known for three and a half years and counting) where the sex and joy are; work isn't supposed to be where any of that is anyway; I have identified my "I" (ego, but the I that I mean when I say, "I") with the anti-SOCIAL (as I would have called it) and home with J used to be the anti-social, but now it's the socialized, which in a word, is what I've always meant when I have complained about her valuing work and family not just a lot, but TO MY EXCLUSION. I have meant, TO THE EXCLUSION OF "I."
In short, I saw my ego again, separate from "me."
"A negative samskara is your life story, your idea of who you are."
Here is some of where "I" was founded and what "I" came to value (and I'm using quotes not for suspicion but to indicate my I-voice, my ego-voice, which I've been discovering that I don't even need; who needs an actor when you can act just fine without one?):
The negative samskara I was talking about last time came into bloom with puberty. I'm not quite sure why that is, but that's when all of its characteristic tension showed up. "I" started, by desiring relationship and finding it impossible: adolescents of both genders made no sense, there were no rules that made any sense, and everything was hypocrisy and randomness. "I" decided that this was "the social" and that it was a lie. Basically, "fuck people." However, "I" is also an extrovert, and so values people, but decided only to value people who were "real" or "onto the real," which was as we now well know, an imaginary paradise where people stated their actual desires with full honesty and then were granted (or not) those desires with again, totally clear honesty on the part of all parties.
"I" measured all social life by this standard: in answer to my description of this complex, J said, "Well didn't that make everyone insufficient?.....or Unattainable?" And that's EXACTLY what it produced, so I said, "Yes! Precisely!" and she said, "Time to get a new system."
I tried to explain to her that this wasn't my current system, but my new realizations, with distance from the "I" ego, of HOW MY EGO SYSTEM HAD OPERATED.
Alienation leads to idealization leads to the unending insistence that humanity MEET THE IDEAL STANDARDS and that leads to perpetual disenchantment and that leads to more alienation and the cycle repeats. Infinitely, and in all "my" relations.
The climbing, the sex life, the sweat and joy, of 2003-2008 all fit this social/antisocial binary. "I" work on the dissertation (social) and then go climb walls (anti-social, embodied, "true") and then go spend a sweaty weekend of joy with J (anti-social, embodied, "true") and then go back to work (social, commodified, et cetera) and then ping-pong between the two.
All joy for "I" is anti-social joy, anarchic joy, embodied anti-confusing joy.
A big incoherent (and yet skillful) mix of Guy Debord, Kafka, Nietzsche, Hesse, Dada, Surrealism, Bataille, European art cinema, and everything else "I" have been so into for so long.
BUT NOT PARENTING.
The great binary shatterer. The sword that is too sharp to be wielded.
And this is what I was saying last time: parenting gave me, and continues to give me, distance from my "I" ego. To the point that I can see it all armored and "bricked in" (as Chogyam Trungpa would have put it, the monkey who is surrounded by walls on all sides and cannot escape and doesn't know why) over there away from me.
"The child gives birth to the man," J said.
She is so totally lacking in this big ego-universe that I've lived in my whole life. No wonder we have fucked-up communication which only once in a while bursts into TOTAL WONDER like this.
I saw the same pattern, this "social/anti-social" which duplicates itself as "conformist/nonconformist" or "realism/Dada" or "Mann/Hesse" or "Descartes/Nietzsche" or a hundred other things, actually SAW it repeating through every relationship I've ever had, every job choice, every money situation, every value system, every confrontation with everything. Ever.
Negative samskara. Hugely, weirdly cosmically beautiful. Gigantic, so big.
I can BURN THAT THING? Whoa.
And I can light it up just by BREATHING? Double whoa.
This was fine. I lived through the Primary, got some great emotional release, and let my sore shoulder not do most of the Arm Balances for Everyone workshop. Felt that my physical practice was totally shattered beyond recovery. Self-pity, but predictable, and wisely, I did not write. Not until now, when it's all long-over.
The Mysore practice was also incredibly painful, emotional/physical, more like koshas, more accurately: annamaya, expressing pranamaya, manomaya (energy, emotional bodies). Work stress, too little practice, too much worry, too much search committee, grading stress, long-held grief, all of that. Tons of shit.
I called it a practice at Marichyasana B, which I was up to, while most of the room (doing Primary) was at the final postures. Slow, painful, expressive practice. Kino came up for final backbends as I was hanging back. I told her I usually can do up-and-back but not today, and she said, "We'll go up and back, then we'll cross." Cross means cross arms and hang back then go for the Chakra Bandhasana (ankle grab). Ok, so be it. I figured if I die now, it'll be OK.
Most comfortable backbends ever. Hands way back, almost to edge of rug, so not big dropbacks, but successful and painless. Big, and I mean really huge, finger-creep Kapo-style creep toward feet. Push fingertips into floor, press up for five. Again, no pain, nothing, no agony. She's smiling, as always, and then the squish, and that's that.
Redefined my idea of the practice, the shattered-ness. Made it all about the pain itself, not about "me," not about "mine" in any sense other than that the pain was mine, but I knew that. Everything became self-evident, destiny disappeared, nothing stated, nothing lost, just the present, thanks.
*************************************
Sutras talk. The final event on Sunday (this was the 11th). I went and taught and lost the first hour of it, but that was great, good class of seven (even on Mysore morning). When I walked into the room, Kino was talking about pain. The story that I remember was that she was sitting in meditation one morning in Mysore, pre-practice, and suddenly had an SI joint shift, just sitting, and then pain. Pain even in "ekam." Pain all over. But she said, since this pain came while I was sitting in meditation, it was SATTWIC PAIN.
Sattwic/sattvic (depends on if you're South or North Indian). But there we are again with the gunas: tamas, rajas, sattwa. The material from which Prakriti (as I move at will between Yoga, Samkhya and Vedanta, because my own reading mixes those at will also) is made. The material also from which you and I are drawn, along our samskaric (habitual) lines.
Kino is better in speech than she is in writing. She's written about samskaras and about pain, but I far, far prefer her in person, speaking. There has been some (to be honest, and what am I if not honest, even when you watch me lie to myself, I know no better) serious bullshit said in the yoga world about pain. "Should you work through it?" "Pain is part of your practice." Things that are open to bad interpretation, things said clumsily without the presence of a human to also provide the tone of speech, the warning, the storytelling, the wisdom. Print is lies, not to be too Derridean about it.
ANYWAY.
Sattwic pain, Kino told us, can be worked through, is a gift. But rajasic pain, like when you overcrank into a posture, that's to be respected, treated. So the pain you have in practice, IF YOU ARE PRACTICING DEVOTIONALLY, is sattwic pain. And THAT qualifier means everything.
This means you MUST be honest with yourself, to know if you are taking a sattwic practice, a rajasic practice, a tamasic practice. My painful practices had tamasic qualities: low energy, high gravity, pain, but they also had sattwic qualities: wait until you can breathe, inhale, be pleased to be able to bend at all. And my pain was transient, came in waves, transited through, was over. Cathartic pain.
But this was something Kino did NOT say in writing, this bit about "sattwic pain" and devotional practice (although she's also written I think quite brilliantly on devotional practice, and my own post with that title is my third-most read post here ever, so that's interesting, perhaps).
Devotional practice: forgoing ego, achievement, practicing pretty much for ANYTHING that is not you. Day by day, doing the system, no matter what your given practice is. If it brings tears, you do it anyway. Devotional practice.
Pain during a Devotional Practice is sattwic pain, which is a gift. This was the case she made, and discovered that this was a sort of opening in the hip, which when the hip moved a certain way, made new postures possible. Now, I like this story, but I would NEVER advise a student to do something like this. "Well is it sattwic pain?" I can only think of MAYBE one student who's capable of answering that question. It's a self-knowledge thing. And as always, I think that most of the blogosphere isn't capable of that sort of self-knowledge yet, doesn't have it yet, thinks pain is a question, can't estimate if they should keep practicing "through" pain or not. "Through" is the wrong preposition there. One should never, to my mind, practice "through" pain. Perhaps "around" it if possible, or "outside" it or "under" it or something like that, find a way that isn't that way, but not "through." Unless, of course, it's this "sattwic pain" story, in which case the pain is a gift. This is a dangerous and wonderful thing that Kino told us.
**********************************
She began telling us about negative samskaras. On the 11th. This was within a week of my big post about negative samskaras, and the best way I can put it is that listening to her talk about them was like having a voice INSIDE MY HEAD, like when the Elf Queen talks to Frodo with telepathy:
"WELCOME, Frodo of the Shire! One who has seen THE EYE!!!!"
That sort of freaky shit. Kino told us that a negative samskara is like the story you tell about yourself, with all of your important events and betrayals, your whole narrative, and you eventually burn the negative samskaras in the fire of tapas, which is both the fire of discipline (devotional practice) and the fire of the asana practice itself (digestive fire). Stoking the fire of devotion is what fuels the flames that burn whatever's on the stake, and what's on the stake is your own self-story, your aggrandizing negative samskaras, your habits, your selfhood, your long history, echoing through time with the same shapes and habits and mistakes and beliefs. And LET IT BURN. Let it burn and mourn it and let there be tears and fear and terror and lose yourself and then feel better; you never needed that thing anyway.
She didn't put it like that: I've channeled myself well into whatever it was she said and can't separate the two.
But LET IT BURN in that devotional fire, she said that over and over. I nodded throughout like a guy giving witness at a Baptist church. You could almost hear the callers in back: "Come on! Say it!" and such. If you've never been to a non-denominational church of that sort, with witnessing and laying on of hands and people falling over and men crying in their suits and the guy just nodding and repeating "Uh huh! Come on!" then you've missed out. I used to go, when I was 20, to a church of this kind in New Britain, Connecticut, mostly African-American crowd, delicious and inspiring performance, preaching, witnessing, falling over, snacks and conversation after.
And I thought, THIS is what a teacher does. Sure, an adjustment's great, but THIS is how you spot someone who can teach you something.
There's no question at all that the Sutras talk was the best part of everything.
*******************************************
J and I have had, as usual, some edginess the last few days. I can't anymore remember precisely how this went, in chronological order of dialogue, but I write best when I disregard the externals anyway, let them fall into the rolling wheel of intensities, out of time.
It was about our search committee (I'm on said committee, she's not) meeting with the Dean today and J's critiquing my fashion choices this morning, because how you look affects how authority figures feel about you (this was her argument).
I received that the same way I received that advice at, say, 14. I believe the phrase that went through my head was, "Fucking shove it."
That was the morning; the afternoon before I went to teach the 7:15 yoga was about J advising me to do even more conference stuff, even after I got a panel accepted at a regional conference, because my third-year review (which will happen about a year from now) will need more padding. My feeling was that I'm working my ass off sideways this semester (and really, that can't be debated), and so I was in no mood whatsoever to have her tell me to do EVEN MORE work in order to "make the cut," and she can feel anger radiate off me, like heat. I got very, very, VERY angry with her, and didn't say anything, but she took the boy outside and they began playing in the grass, keeping a quite polite distance.
I processed this after the yoga, waiting for the last of my students to end rest and call it a class.
My diagnosis was this: I want more humanity, more non-work conversation, more friendliness, so I'll need to foreground that so that I can get it.
When I told her that in the evening conversation, she said, "Well when you talk to me about work, I'm going to talk to you about work, because my job is to advise faculty on how they can best optimize their positions."
This took me aside a bit: had I talked to her about work? AHA, I'd complained about the intensity of the semester's work, and her answer was not EMPATHY (which I wanted), but ADVICE about how to best HANDLE said workload.
Immediately I realized that she hadn't been hostile, she just hadn't given me WHAT I WANTED. And then the world unravelled.
Work and home aren't opposites; one isn't "human" at home and "something else" at work; home isn't (as we've known for three and a half years and counting) where the sex and joy are; work isn't supposed to be where any of that is anyway; I have identified my "I" (ego, but the I that I mean when I say, "I") with the anti-SOCIAL (as I would have called it) and home with J used to be the anti-social, but now it's the socialized, which in a word, is what I've always meant when I have complained about her valuing work and family not just a lot, but TO MY EXCLUSION. I have meant, TO THE EXCLUSION OF "I."
In short, I saw my ego again, separate from "me."
"A negative samskara is your life story, your idea of who you are."
Here is some of where "I" was founded and what "I" came to value (and I'm using quotes not for suspicion but to indicate my I-voice, my ego-voice, which I've been discovering that I don't even need; who needs an actor when you can act just fine without one?):
The negative samskara I was talking about last time came into bloom with puberty. I'm not quite sure why that is, but that's when all of its characteristic tension showed up. "I" started, by desiring relationship and finding it impossible: adolescents of both genders made no sense, there were no rules that made any sense, and everything was hypocrisy and randomness. "I" decided that this was "the social" and that it was a lie. Basically, "fuck people." However, "I" is also an extrovert, and so values people, but decided only to value people who were "real" or "onto the real," which was as we now well know, an imaginary paradise where people stated their actual desires with full honesty and then were granted (or not) those desires with again, totally clear honesty on the part of all parties.
"I" measured all social life by this standard: in answer to my description of this complex, J said, "Well didn't that make everyone insufficient?.....or Unattainable?" And that's EXACTLY what it produced, so I said, "Yes! Precisely!" and she said, "Time to get a new system."
I tried to explain to her that this wasn't my current system, but my new realizations, with distance from the "I" ego, of HOW MY EGO SYSTEM HAD OPERATED.
Alienation leads to idealization leads to the unending insistence that humanity MEET THE IDEAL STANDARDS and that leads to perpetual disenchantment and that leads to more alienation and the cycle repeats. Infinitely, and in all "my" relations.
The climbing, the sex life, the sweat and joy, of 2003-2008 all fit this social/antisocial binary. "I" work on the dissertation (social) and then go climb walls (anti-social, embodied, "true") and then go spend a sweaty weekend of joy with J (anti-social, embodied, "true") and then go back to work (social, commodified, et cetera) and then ping-pong between the two.
All joy for "I" is anti-social joy, anarchic joy, embodied anti-confusing joy.
A big incoherent (and yet skillful) mix of Guy Debord, Kafka, Nietzsche, Hesse, Dada, Surrealism, Bataille, European art cinema, and everything else "I" have been so into for so long.
BUT NOT PARENTING.
The great binary shatterer. The sword that is too sharp to be wielded.
And this is what I was saying last time: parenting gave me, and continues to give me, distance from my "I" ego. To the point that I can see it all armored and "bricked in" (as Chogyam Trungpa would have put it, the monkey who is surrounded by walls on all sides and cannot escape and doesn't know why) over there away from me.
"The child gives birth to the man," J said.
She is so totally lacking in this big ego-universe that I've lived in my whole life. No wonder we have fucked-up communication which only once in a while bursts into TOTAL WONDER like this.
I saw the same pattern, this "social/anti-social" which duplicates itself as "conformist/nonconformist" or "realism/Dada" or "Mann/Hesse" or "Descartes/Nietzsche" or a hundred other things, actually SAW it repeating through every relationship I've ever had, every job choice, every money situation, every value system, every confrontation with everything. Ever.
Negative samskara. Hugely, weirdly cosmically beautiful. Gigantic, so big.
I can BURN THAT THING? Whoa.
And I can light it up just by BREATHING? Double whoa.
Saturday, March 17, 2012
So, Is There Mysore-Style Ashtanga in Indianapolis?
I heard rumors, after the Kino weekend (the 9-11 of this month), that sometimes teachers will search online for Mysore-style in Indy and not find it and then decide that we are not a destination. These are rumors.
BUT
If you're a teacher who's just done that, and you've landed on this post, here's my official answer, with more detail than you'll find anywhere else.
SORT OF.
There is "sort of" Mysore-style here. In most ashtanga classes in the city, particularly those taught by whom I would consider to be the major teachers (and those are Carol, me and Amanda), students will do what I call a "Mysore/Led blend," which means that some students will already have memorized, and will do, time permitting, perhaps as much as a Primary-plus-some-Intermediate program. Others, who are newer, will be led.
What we have is Mysore-style STUDENTS. We do not yet have a 6/day Mysore-style PROGRAM, although there is a Monday morning Mysore-style room in one studio and a Monday night Mysore-style room in another studio.
Let me use my own room as a demonstration of how and why:
I teach a class simply called "Ashtanga," at 12:30 on Sunday afternoon. Up until February 2011, classes had been maybe 1-6 students, and I would lead everyone except the brave soul or two who, just from repetition, would move ahead of my lead, and then fall back in, when s/he got lost.
In February 2011, suddenly my yoga room kicked up to a dozen people (in fact it hit eighteen, that month, one day) and it has stayed that way ever since, except for around July 4 and Spring Breaks in March and so on. Very reliably somewhere around 14 people, I'd say. And as those larger numbers developed a more regular crew (maybe a dozen real committed regulars?), the regulars began to memorize and to "do it themselves," with my guidance, and I just couldn't find any other way to run the room. So I split it; some Mysore-style (sort of) instruction over there, and then led class, over here.
This type of split instruction is now the standard, and the regulars are finding that they need more regular practice to advance further in the yoga, and so we are avidly seeking a where, a how, a when, and a whom.
Land in this community and teach us, and we will come.
Admittedly, Kino had rooms of 35-40ish people here in every workshop session (and that INCLUDES a Mysore-style class) but those were people from Indy, Illinois, Ohio, and even Kentucky. Still, does not just the fact that Kino and Cityoga pulled that kind of membership, make us some kind of nexus?
We are looking for a way to crack the eggshell of a real Mysore-style program, but the seam just hasn't appeared yet. It's coming. Come here and help us find it.
BUT
If you're a teacher who's just done that, and you've landed on this post, here's my official answer, with more detail than you'll find anywhere else.
SORT OF.
There is "sort of" Mysore-style here. In most ashtanga classes in the city, particularly those taught by whom I would consider to be the major teachers (and those are Carol, me and Amanda), students will do what I call a "Mysore/Led blend," which means that some students will already have memorized, and will do, time permitting, perhaps as much as a Primary-plus-some-Intermediate program. Others, who are newer, will be led.
What we have is Mysore-style STUDENTS. We do not yet have a 6/day Mysore-style PROGRAM, although there is a Monday morning Mysore-style room in one studio and a Monday night Mysore-style room in another studio.
Let me use my own room as a demonstration of how and why:
I teach a class simply called "Ashtanga," at 12:30 on Sunday afternoon. Up until February 2011, classes had been maybe 1-6 students, and I would lead everyone except the brave soul or two who, just from repetition, would move ahead of my lead, and then fall back in, when s/he got lost.
In February 2011, suddenly my yoga room kicked up to a dozen people (in fact it hit eighteen, that month, one day) and it has stayed that way ever since, except for around July 4 and Spring Breaks in March and so on. Very reliably somewhere around 14 people, I'd say. And as those larger numbers developed a more regular crew (maybe a dozen real committed regulars?), the regulars began to memorize and to "do it themselves," with my guidance, and I just couldn't find any other way to run the room. So I split it; some Mysore-style (sort of) instruction over there, and then led class, over here.
This type of split instruction is now the standard, and the regulars are finding that they need more regular practice to advance further in the yoga, and so we are avidly seeking a where, a how, a when, and a whom.
Land in this community and teach us, and we will come.
Admittedly, Kino had rooms of 35-40ish people here in every workshop session (and that INCLUDES a Mysore-style class) but those were people from Indy, Illinois, Ohio, and even Kentucky. Still, does not just the fact that Kino and Cityoga pulled that kind of membership, make us some kind of nexus?
We are looking for a way to crack the eggshell of a real Mysore-style program, but the seam just hasn't appeared yet. It's coming. Come here and help us find it.
Monday, March 5, 2012
But What Do you Do with a Samskara When You Find One?
Indeed.
Samskara (borrowing from the Yoga Sutras) is a habit, a repeated behavior. Some commenters say you can build "good samskaras" like long-term yoga asana practice.
One of the things I find compelling is that samskaras require me to plunge deep into all of the related terms, concepts and beliefs. For example, this sexual samskara I named last time, isn't (in my experience) from my current life. It's not from the Catholicism or the adolescence or the bad marriage (although any of those could, if we were speaking about me in a more Western system like psychoanalysis, be at the base of the compulsion which said samaskara demands).
In the Western view, this compulsion would be bound to repression probably (at least that's easy) and perhaps linked to early adolescent curiosity or to parental sexlessness (if there'd been such activity, I would have found evidence of it).
But that's somewhat boring, don't you think? And then psychological work or self-help-work would enable me to "overcome it" and "be a productive member of society." I'm already a productive member of society.
Now, in the Eastern view (and quoting one concept from the Yoga Sutras is, I admit, not at all the same thing as "Eastern view"), a samskara invites one to believe in or at least entertain the notion of reincarnation, and thence of samsara, the cycle of rebirths, and thence karma, actions, and thence, seeds of action sown, habits acquired in past lives, samskaras. One is, according to some commentators (and I'm often thinking of Gregor Maehle when I say "some"), INCARNATED based on samskaric energies, as if the samskaras are the LINES of your current figure drawing, and then you are, like all of Prakriti/creation/existence, incarnated from the gunas, our friends Tamoguna (inertia), Rajoguna (activity) and Sattwaguna (wisdom).
So what can be done with a Samskara? Let's say you know there is one, or can find one, or have come to believe that something is samskaric, has drawn your figure, has incarnated you energetically. What can you possibly do with that knowledge?
Most often when I am tempted to write about sex stuff here, it's about the exact difference in priorities between me and J currently, and I know those differences quite well. Now, such a narrative would probably be really informative to our imaginary therapist up above, but it does little to tell me or you anything about samskaric elements.
Other times, I am tempted to write about the nature of the compulsion, because it's quite different from what the West currently calls "sex addiction." Said addiction is, as far as I understand it, the idea that the patient can't achieve long-lasting satisfaction in any relationship or from any experience and must constantly move from partner to partner and experience to experience. Sounds like a made-up condition to me; any state college will provide hundreds of examples weekendly.
The compulsivity that I feel isn't about partners or experiences, it's about the qualitative nature of the experience, what the experience is (I feel) CAPABLE OF. And so this is not about some position or some numerical combination, it is about the potential of sexuality on pretty much a METAPHYSICAL LEVEL. Put short, it is as if my desire for enlightenment/heaven/plenitude is linked directly to my desire for interpersonal deep connection, and transgressive sexuality (remember, I was raised lay-Catholic, so all embodiment is transgressive by definition) is the link between the two.
Western language would look at that, see the Catholicism, see the transgression, see the riff on the mind-body problem, and then say that I'd internalized Catholic forbiddance, eroticized it, paradized it, and come out with a perpetually unachievable vision which leads to eternal frustration because it's unrealistic about sex, about humanity, AND about metaphysics. This is why the compulsion doesn't lead to a massive partner count; instead, it measures virtually all partners as failures and insufficient. And that's probably accurate. IN Western language.
But consider that a samskara in Eastern language, then it is a lifetime pattern created by the sprouting "seeds" of past karma, and currently incarnate in the three gunas as my present life. Gunas, however, can be managed; they make up the food we eat and the incarnation of everything with which we interact. Karma in the form of action exists in all actions we take: asana practice, interpersonal relations, and so on. In this worldview, I can AFFECT the samskara through action, through meditation, even perhaps through food choices, and certainly through choices in company. The primary flavor of this samskara for me is rajas, activity. The drive to GET TO THAT DEEP CONNECTION. Drive, desire, rage, rajas. But it also has tamas in it, stillness, inertia, refusal to engage. Every once in a blue moon, it has sattwa in it. Calm moments, reminders that there is something native about this, the absence of the desire to constantly be swallowing the next dose of action. Never satisfaction, but moments of contentment. But the nature of this samskara is to see fleeting satisfaction as incitement to desire, never as contentment. Rajas ever after, never santosha. That is what it urges, always.
In the Eastern version of this, santosha/contentment is a place that can be inhabited; the challenge is that this samskara demands constant motion. In the Western version of this, I have to surrender my imaginary paradise so that I can rejoin humanity (although it's damn tempting to imagine some mountain village where my cult lives, and we all have a ton of LSD and eternal carnality until, you know, the FBI burns down our complex or something).
The essence of this thing is that I'm refusing to enjoy what I've got, because I can imagine greater satisfactions, but those greater satisfactions aren't HUMAN anymore, they are superhuman. What is the point of trying to incarnate myself in the superhuman?
But see how bottomlessly trite it would have been to simply say, "I need to enjoy life as it is" or "I need to just be happy for what I have"? See how vomitously repugnant, how violently intolerable, that kind of trite life summary would be?
And even in the depth of my hate and disdain for language like that (and I summoned it on purpose, very much so), there is a demand that I be Dramatic, that my life be Important, that my Quest be Noble. Crystal clear.
"Attention! I am hereby suffering from Noble Frustration! Page, fetch me my sword and shield and let us write a novel!"
This, too, has to be accounted for.
That's why parenting is the Great Counterpractice.
Parenting introduces a positively terrifying level of everydayness into my existence. There's no nobility in it that can be established without camp: who should I be, the guy who was up two hours with a fussy but not sick kid? The guy who changes diapers? The guy who jumps off the plastic footstool with his kid because "we're jumping now"? The guy who reads train books to the compelled child? The guy who plays crossing signal while the child runs to and fro making train-chuffing noises? Yes yes, you'll say this is everyday hero-dom, and that's probably safe to say, but there is no TRANSGRESSION in being a parent.
I'm always tempted to own that word; it is my WEAPON. I become MYSELF when I transgress, and that Catholic background is endlessly productive for this. Because I internalized (Western view again) Catholic body-hatred, ANYTHING that I do that's embodiment (climbing, breathing, being ALIVE generally) can be seen as transgressive. Transgression powers up the ego, makes it feel strong, vengeance-dealing, against the old repressions, the long absences.
But how is rolling a ball to-and-fro across the living room, or giving a bath, or telling the kid about a vision of a black steam engine crossing a snowy road in Michigan, transgressive? It isn't. And most of parenting isn't, at least I can't think of a moment that is. And then parenting also comes with much less climbing, much less yoga, much less sex, much less embodiment (by which, here particularly, I always mean anti-Catholicism). The ego starves, grows pale, frays, grows fragile, breaks, cracks, begins to die, and freaks out. I've never been so concerned with the terror of mortality as I have been since I became a parent. And not "because I don't want to leave my child," but because I understand my own frailty now, I can't grab mortality and wield it like a rhetorical sword against Christian eternity and smash my fucking enemies in the face with it. Mortality has become HUMAN, FLESHED, VULNERABLE.
So this single samskara comes with ideals in me that contain all of my rhetorical overreaches, past my own humanity. It is the desire for everything that I can never have, not in San Francisco, not anywhere, nowhere human on earth. I sometimes say that I don't chase other partners because every relationship would be a failure, every relationship would wind up being disappointingly mortal, the energy always runs out, the depth is never sustained, someone always gets busy or sick or too tired or too preoccupied.
So parenting teaches me how to have a sex life (and not much of one at that, but a human one). It's frustrating, but more and more, life is not about this, but about changing what in the Eastern view would be called "destiny." I think it was Vasistha (this is probably in Maehle somewhere too) who said that for one of true determination, there is no destiny (no predestined karmic destiny). One can undo one's karma, like Milarepa apparently did (although he was still killed, apparently because of his own accumulated bad karma).
For all of its sexualization and neurosis, this samskara isn't about sexual behaviors or preferences or positions. It's about my great wish not to be human.
Not to be mortal, not to be frustrated, not to be daily, not to be mundane, not to be awake in the middle of the night comforting someone else. Not to feel, not to fear, not to be anxious, not to be in the moment, any moment.
Not to be human.
And the answer, in a sentence? Not join a threesome, not bring out the cuffs, not find a new orifice.
Be human. Be there. Be there now, be there then, be there.
Samskara (borrowing from the Yoga Sutras) is a habit, a repeated behavior. Some commenters say you can build "good samskaras" like long-term yoga asana practice.
One of the things I find compelling is that samskaras require me to plunge deep into all of the related terms, concepts and beliefs. For example, this sexual samskara I named last time, isn't (in my experience) from my current life. It's not from the Catholicism or the adolescence or the bad marriage (although any of those could, if we were speaking about me in a more Western system like psychoanalysis, be at the base of the compulsion which said samaskara demands).
In the Western view, this compulsion would be bound to repression probably (at least that's easy) and perhaps linked to early adolescent curiosity or to parental sexlessness (if there'd been such activity, I would have found evidence of it).
But that's somewhat boring, don't you think? And then psychological work or self-help-work would enable me to "overcome it" and "be a productive member of society." I'm already a productive member of society.
Now, in the Eastern view (and quoting one concept from the Yoga Sutras is, I admit, not at all the same thing as "Eastern view"), a samskara invites one to believe in or at least entertain the notion of reincarnation, and thence of samsara, the cycle of rebirths, and thence karma, actions, and thence, seeds of action sown, habits acquired in past lives, samskaras. One is, according to some commentators (and I'm often thinking of Gregor Maehle when I say "some"), INCARNATED based on samskaric energies, as if the samskaras are the LINES of your current figure drawing, and then you are, like all of Prakriti/creation/existence, incarnated from the gunas, our friends Tamoguna (inertia), Rajoguna (activity) and Sattwaguna (wisdom).
So what can be done with a Samskara? Let's say you know there is one, or can find one, or have come to believe that something is samskaric, has drawn your figure, has incarnated you energetically. What can you possibly do with that knowledge?
Most often when I am tempted to write about sex stuff here, it's about the exact difference in priorities between me and J currently, and I know those differences quite well. Now, such a narrative would probably be really informative to our imaginary therapist up above, but it does little to tell me or you anything about samskaric elements.
Other times, I am tempted to write about the nature of the compulsion, because it's quite different from what the West currently calls "sex addiction." Said addiction is, as far as I understand it, the idea that the patient can't achieve long-lasting satisfaction in any relationship or from any experience and must constantly move from partner to partner and experience to experience. Sounds like a made-up condition to me; any state college will provide hundreds of examples weekendly.
The compulsivity that I feel isn't about partners or experiences, it's about the qualitative nature of the experience, what the experience is (I feel) CAPABLE OF. And so this is not about some position or some numerical combination, it is about the potential of sexuality on pretty much a METAPHYSICAL LEVEL. Put short, it is as if my desire for enlightenment/heaven/plenitude is linked directly to my desire for interpersonal deep connection, and transgressive sexuality (remember, I was raised lay-Catholic, so all embodiment is transgressive by definition) is the link between the two.
Western language would look at that, see the Catholicism, see the transgression, see the riff on the mind-body problem, and then say that I'd internalized Catholic forbiddance, eroticized it, paradized it, and come out with a perpetually unachievable vision which leads to eternal frustration because it's unrealistic about sex, about humanity, AND about metaphysics. This is why the compulsion doesn't lead to a massive partner count; instead, it measures virtually all partners as failures and insufficient. And that's probably accurate. IN Western language.
But consider that a samskara in Eastern language, then it is a lifetime pattern created by the sprouting "seeds" of past karma, and currently incarnate in the three gunas as my present life. Gunas, however, can be managed; they make up the food we eat and the incarnation of everything with which we interact. Karma in the form of action exists in all actions we take: asana practice, interpersonal relations, and so on. In this worldview, I can AFFECT the samskara through action, through meditation, even perhaps through food choices, and certainly through choices in company. The primary flavor of this samskara for me is rajas, activity. The drive to GET TO THAT DEEP CONNECTION. Drive, desire, rage, rajas. But it also has tamas in it, stillness, inertia, refusal to engage. Every once in a blue moon, it has sattwa in it. Calm moments, reminders that there is something native about this, the absence of the desire to constantly be swallowing the next dose of action. Never satisfaction, but moments of contentment. But the nature of this samskara is to see fleeting satisfaction as incitement to desire, never as contentment. Rajas ever after, never santosha. That is what it urges, always.
In the Eastern version of this, santosha/contentment is a place that can be inhabited; the challenge is that this samskara demands constant motion. In the Western version of this, I have to surrender my imaginary paradise so that I can rejoin humanity (although it's damn tempting to imagine some mountain village where my cult lives, and we all have a ton of LSD and eternal carnality until, you know, the FBI burns down our complex or something).
The essence of this thing is that I'm refusing to enjoy what I've got, because I can imagine greater satisfactions, but those greater satisfactions aren't HUMAN anymore, they are superhuman. What is the point of trying to incarnate myself in the superhuman?
But see how bottomlessly trite it would have been to simply say, "I need to enjoy life as it is" or "I need to just be happy for what I have"? See how vomitously repugnant, how violently intolerable, that kind of trite life summary would be?
And even in the depth of my hate and disdain for language like that (and I summoned it on purpose, very much so), there is a demand that I be Dramatic, that my life be Important, that my Quest be Noble. Crystal clear.
"Attention! I am hereby suffering from Noble Frustration! Page, fetch me my sword and shield and let us write a novel!"
This, too, has to be accounted for.
That's why parenting is the Great Counterpractice.
Parenting introduces a positively terrifying level of everydayness into my existence. There's no nobility in it that can be established without camp: who should I be, the guy who was up two hours with a fussy but not sick kid? The guy who changes diapers? The guy who jumps off the plastic footstool with his kid because "we're jumping now"? The guy who reads train books to the compelled child? The guy who plays crossing signal while the child runs to and fro making train-chuffing noises? Yes yes, you'll say this is everyday hero-dom, and that's probably safe to say, but there is no TRANSGRESSION in being a parent.
I'm always tempted to own that word; it is my WEAPON. I become MYSELF when I transgress, and that Catholic background is endlessly productive for this. Because I internalized (Western view again) Catholic body-hatred, ANYTHING that I do that's embodiment (climbing, breathing, being ALIVE generally) can be seen as transgressive. Transgression powers up the ego, makes it feel strong, vengeance-dealing, against the old repressions, the long absences.
But how is rolling a ball to-and-fro across the living room, or giving a bath, or telling the kid about a vision of a black steam engine crossing a snowy road in Michigan, transgressive? It isn't. And most of parenting isn't, at least I can't think of a moment that is. And then parenting also comes with much less climbing, much less yoga, much less sex, much less embodiment (by which, here particularly, I always mean anti-Catholicism). The ego starves, grows pale, frays, grows fragile, breaks, cracks, begins to die, and freaks out. I've never been so concerned with the terror of mortality as I have been since I became a parent. And not "because I don't want to leave my child," but because I understand my own frailty now, I can't grab mortality and wield it like a rhetorical sword against Christian eternity and smash my fucking enemies in the face with it. Mortality has become HUMAN, FLESHED, VULNERABLE.
So this single samskara comes with ideals in me that contain all of my rhetorical overreaches, past my own humanity. It is the desire for everything that I can never have, not in San Francisco, not anywhere, nowhere human on earth. I sometimes say that I don't chase other partners because every relationship would be a failure, every relationship would wind up being disappointingly mortal, the energy always runs out, the depth is never sustained, someone always gets busy or sick or too tired or too preoccupied.
So parenting teaches me how to have a sex life (and not much of one at that, but a human one). It's frustrating, but more and more, life is not about this, but about changing what in the Eastern view would be called "destiny." I think it was Vasistha (this is probably in Maehle somewhere too) who said that for one of true determination, there is no destiny (no predestined karmic destiny). One can undo one's karma, like Milarepa apparently did (although he was still killed, apparently because of his own accumulated bad karma).
For all of its sexualization and neurosis, this samskara isn't about sexual behaviors or preferences or positions. It's about my great wish not to be human.
Not to be mortal, not to be frustrated, not to be daily, not to be mundane, not to be awake in the middle of the night comforting someone else. Not to feel, not to fear, not to be anxious, not to be in the moment, any moment.
Not to be human.
And the answer, in a sentence? Not join a threesome, not bring out the cuffs, not find a new orifice.
Be human. Be there. Be there now, be there then, be there.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Can I Do This in a Paragraph?
Now, the short answer is "no," because I can't often restrict myself to ONE paragraph. But I'm going to make it an exercise. Here's some groundwork for the thing: Tuesday morning last week I had a hard emotional-release practice (after one of February's VERY few Primary series practices that Monday night) and I got crystal clarity about how my relationship with sex stuff both generally and specifically then, with J, goes. Part history, part interpersonal, but really clear vision. Then this afternoon, playing with the boy and Play-Doh, I got the rest of it.
One paragraph:
Part of what makes me up (and I'm talking gunas here) is some kind of sexual samskara stuff; that's where a huge portion of my ego pain is, has been, and perhaps will be. Frustration, drive, anger, fear, like the whole Planet-Dagobah-training bit. "What's in there? Only what you take with you." In this incarnation? Long periods of frustration, focus, intellectualizing, processing fear, obeying it, defying it, achieving satisfaction, finding that satisfaction is inevitably unsatisfactory. Currently, a relationship that asks for a "simple sacrifice" of intimacy, but with a partner who doesn't realize how samskarically painful that "simple" sacrifice is, and therefore how "unsimple" it also is. "I didn't realize how big your ego was," she said, and I wanted to say, "Look, if you see a man running down the street with his hair on fire, the last thing you should call him is an egomaniac." But because this is perhaps THE problem, it is also THE solution. Read whoever--Sutras, Zen, Ingram, CTR, doesn't matter--and you see that realizing the ego as a costume is how you find enlightenment. So do kid care instead of climbing, bending, sexing, sacrifice what my ego says is my Whole Identity, to this day by day householding ordinariness? THAT IS THE PATH. And it's not EVEN the path. It's LIFE. The bottle of milk is the Guru. KAPOW!!
One paragraph:
Part of what makes me up (and I'm talking gunas here) is some kind of sexual samskara stuff; that's where a huge portion of my ego pain is, has been, and perhaps will be. Frustration, drive, anger, fear, like the whole Planet-Dagobah-training bit. "What's in there? Only what you take with you." In this incarnation? Long periods of frustration, focus, intellectualizing, processing fear, obeying it, defying it, achieving satisfaction, finding that satisfaction is inevitably unsatisfactory. Currently, a relationship that asks for a "simple sacrifice" of intimacy, but with a partner who doesn't realize how samskarically painful that "simple" sacrifice is, and therefore how "unsimple" it also is. "I didn't realize how big your ego was," she said, and I wanted to say, "Look, if you see a man running down the street with his hair on fire, the last thing you should call him is an egomaniac." But because this is perhaps THE problem, it is also THE solution. Read whoever--Sutras, Zen, Ingram, CTR, doesn't matter--and you see that realizing the ego as a costume is how you find enlightenment. So do kid care instead of climbing, bending, sexing, sacrifice what my ego says is my Whole Identity, to this day by day householding ordinariness? THAT IS THE PATH. And it's not EVEN the path. It's LIFE. The bottle of milk is the Guru. KAPOW!!
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