After the Authors

I had a dream last night that I was a character in Stephen King's The Dark Tower series.  Those who've read know it's partially a story about the relationship between an author and his characters.  My dream placed me at the end of the book, where I had to say goodbye to King as he left the world of the books and returned to Maine.  I knew that, despite any attempts I might make, my narrative was complete, and my story was done.

At some point, the authors of your life will leave you behind.  Or you will leave them behind.  Some difference, no difference.  It could be a girlfriend or an organization or a practice or anything.  She will stop taking your calls or they will inform you that you services are no longer needed or you will no longer be able to do the asana.  It is inevitable.  Entropy comes for everyone.

And when you wake up from the nightmare, you realize that you have no author, or that everything is your author.  Some difference, no difference.  The story keeps going, and what you think is an ending is just a really sad part of the book.

Or a really happy one.  Maybe if enough of your authors disappear, you can stop living narratives and start living reality.

Moving With Intention

Ran Prieur linked to a comment the other day on the myriad of ways we distract ourselves from the present.  For the comment author, productivity was his distraction.

"I have a strong dislike against "wasting time." I don't like myself when I spend time on nonsense. And so I fill all of my day with "constructive things." My walk to work is filled with podcasts, the time waiting for the food to bake filled with news articles. While eating I entertain myself with shows or Ted talks or whatnot."

My distraction of choice is not so high-minded.  I like to mess around on the Internet.  I can't even be bothered to read a quarter of the articles I skim.  I tweet and post to message boards without taking any time to consider what I am reacting to or formulating my own arguments.  I flit from thing to thing without fully engaging in any of it.  I am fully present for none of it, and the comment made me think that this pattern of behavior compromises my happiness.

My new intention is to move with purpose through both the "real" and virtual world.  I am not at a place where I could fully unplug, nor do I want to.  What I can do is to try to make sure I am fully present for everything I do in front of a computer.  If I am writing a blog post, I need to concentrate on that blog post, and not rush over to Twitter or Okayplayer or wherever.  No.  Be with the blog post.  Be fully with the blog post.

And, yeah, for those moments where I can't even remember why the computer is open, I'm going to try to close it.

Letting Go

To let one's self go to the currents of the world is the path to liberation.  To stop trying to force the world to be what one wants it to be and to surf on what actually is can free us all.

And for a recovering overachiever at Step One, it is completely terrifying.

Yoga Is Yoga Is Not Something Else

Maybe you've seen them: the fawning profile of your favorite yogalebrity that grinds to a halt when the author asks said yogalebrity how her personal practice is surviving the rigors of traveling and teaching and such.  The yogalebrity gets very, very wistful and admits the days where she puts in two hours of asana practice per day are over, but she assures us we need not worry for her.  You see, she's found a NEW way to do yoga.  Now, her teaching is her yoga.  Her community service is her yoga.  Her photo shoot to convince you to buy an eco-friendly mat and send your current mat to the landfill is her yoga.

It's all nonsense, of course.

Yoga is yoga is ONLY yoga.  The only problem with that obvious statement is that it, too, is all nonsense.  Yoga is made up of eight limbs, so to do say one "does yoga" is completely devoid of meaning.  One might say that she practiced pranayama or asana or observed the yamas and the niyamas, but those phrases are aggregations as well.  To say one "did" any of them is completely empty.  The only thing you can practice is an individual thing, not a category.  You can't even do downward dog.  You can do THIS downward dog.  The one you do in the moment.  The one in the now.  Your next downward dog will be something completely different that is united with the previous downward dog mostly by linguistic convention, not reality.

Yoga bleaching is real, and the worst form of yoga bleaching might be when one tries to substitute something else for an element of yoga.  The practice of individual asanas confer a set of benefits that, by definition, can come only from the practice of asana.  Meditation, and nothing else, confers the benefits of meditation.  A thing is a thing, and nothing else is that thing.

Feel for the yogalebrity.  She knows she is not practicing asana as she once did, and she misses it.  Her attachments have gotten her all twisted up, and the tragedy is that she need not be.  She has made her choice, and her choice is just fine.  Other things are worth doing!  Other things, like teaching and traveling and making enough money to not live in a van down by the river, offer their own rewards.  If a mature adult weighs the rewards associated with an activity that necessitates she lessen her asana practice and finds that they outweight the costs, we should celebrate such enlightened decision making.  Many paths to the top of the mountain and all, but lying to one's self about what one is and is not doing is a sure way to steer directly into oncoming traffic.

If You Were There, You Are There Now

I brought a case of the blues back with me from vacation.  Amy Schneider's class tonight helped a great deal.  I wasn't at my best, but I made the conscious effort to not let the blues stop me but to integrate the blues into my practice.  I worked with the blues, rather than against it.  I decided to be softer and more fluid.  It felt great.

Still, in savasana, the blues planted doubts in my head.  The blues said that I'd never reach the states of awareness that I wanted to reach, or even make it back to the states of mind where I felt I was making real progress in the past.

But, see, the blues fucked up when they mentioned the past, because I know enough about theoretical physics to be dangerous.  Theoretical physics sees time as a dimension like space, which opens the door for time travel and other, more interesting ideas.  Grant Morrison introduced me to one of my favorites, which is, if we were all fifth dimensional entities that could look down on the four dimensions humans perceive, we could theoretically point to different areas in time, and we'd see that all moments in time are actually part of the same thing and could really be said to be happening at once.

So, if that's the case, every moment in my life is happening right now.  The time years ago in Florida where the universe manifested itself to me as interlocking golden light that makes up everything is happening right now.  The time in savasana where I realized that God is real is happening right now.  There's no beginning or ending to anything, which means that if I have ever had a transcendent, spiritual moment in which I glimpsed higher existence, I can have it right now, if I just open myself to it.

And since we're all one thing anyway, if I've had such moments, you can too.

Needless to say, savasana got really, really trippy after that.  And really, really good.

Meditation Overload

I am in the midst of an identity crisis that cuts to the core of who and what I want to be.

Do I want an end to suffering?

Do I want to awaken?

Or do I want to transcend the limits of human perception and trip the light fantastic?

The first wonderful experience I had in meditation came about two years ago, thanks to Grant Morrison and his wonderful little book called The Invisibles.  Morrison sold me on the idea that there was a hidden world just outside of the reach of the every day that humans had and could access, if they'd just dive far enough into the weird and wild, where all the good stuff resides.  The fan website Barbelith led me to Condensed Chaos, which is as good an introduction into the principals of magic as I can imagine.

One of the first things an aspiring magician needs to learn is how to achieve the gnostic state.  Basically, you close your eyes or look into a mirror or a bowl of water and just...let you mind go, wander, play.  Don't forbid yourself from seeing anything, and you might see everything.  When I stopped worrying about whether what I was seeing was real, I could see a lot more cool stuff, a lot more meaningful stuff.  I saw myself as Gandalf retreating to my castle of ice.  I met my spirit animal, the grey wolf.  I journeyed deep into the heart of death and found complete peace there.  I learned so much about myself, and I felt I was moving forward.

Books got me on the gnostic path, so it's fitting that a book should have knocked me from it.  Magic had shown me glimpses of the whole world, but I didn't want a piece of the world.  I wanted the whole thing, and Buddhism Plain & Simple seemed to offer that.  All one had to do was let go of everything superfluous and just...wake up.  Awaken to ultimate reality.  Right now, because there is only now.  The key wasn't to let your mind wander but to stay present in the moment.  If one could understand right now completely, without hope or fear of anything else, one might actually wake up, and then one really could see everything.  As I learned just a little bit about Tibetan Buddhism, I saw a lot of stuff floating around like bodhisattavas that matched some of what I saw in gnosis, which only furthered my belief that Buddhism was big enough to encompass magic and a lot of other stuff.  I felt I was moving forward.

With the beginning of yoga teacher training, I've encountered a third organizing principle for meditation.  Yogic meditation seems to want to calm the fluctuations of the mind, not for the sake of awakening, but just because.  Because it will make you better, fuller, more content.  I confess I've thought the least about this type of meditation and that it appeals to me the least.

Frankly, all that the yogic ideas behind meditation have done is bring to a head a situation that had been developing for quite some time, which is that I've officially hit meditation overload.  Too many chefs have spoiled the broth.  I'm confused.  I don't know whether to seek calm or enlightenment or visions from another dimension of reality.  Too many ideas are competing for the time I spend in lotus.  I don't feel like I'm moving forward.

In the long run, I'm not too concerned about where I am.  I'm not going to stop meditating, and I recognize that even the best journeys have times spent at pit stops, lost, or stuck in a ditch.  I believe Steve Hagen when he says that all we need to do is show up and meditate each day, and the practice will teach us everything we need to know.  Ultimately, I think all of these paths have one final destination, anyway.  The Buddha and the great magicians and yogis of history are all chilling at the top of the same mountain together, calmly sipping mushroom tea and tripping off the world in all its glory.

I get all that.

But that doesn't mean I'm not frustrated now.

The Sky

We only think of blue skies as tranquil, but I tend to think the sky is always tranqu and storm clouds as intruders in the sky.  There's some essential skyness that exists separate from those clouds that retains its tranquility even as the clouds race across.  The sky accepts and embraces the clouds but does not let them disturb its essential skyness.

Probably because the sky is empty and completely full and complete at all times.