With Blasphemy So Heartfelt

Sexy Sadie, what have you done?
You made a fool of everyone
You made a fool of everyone
John Lennon

...so...now that the yoga cynic is a totally professional officially responsible certifiably spiritual liability-insured kinda yoga teacher with an actual weekly Yin class...Sunday nights, 7:00-8:15, mere blocks from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, just across the river from the grave of America's preeminent yogi who probably didn't know he was one, Walt Whitman...that even, purportedly, involves getting paid...hopefully enough to cover said insurance...I might have to start talkin' like one....no more o' that snarky irreverence...in the words of the Buddha...if I remember what was quoted on Facebook correctly...say nothing that wouldn't look nice superimposed on a pleasant photo of the sun setting over a tropical beach on a motivational poster...

Everybody's just a little bit homosexual,

 whether they like it or not.

Allen Ginsberg

...on the other hand, just went to see this singer named Jessica Lea Mayfield...whose songs are kinda like country music that's really noisy and dirty and bad for you....she has an album called With Blasphemy So Heartfelt...and it occurred to me that, while I respect that some of my views are offensive to many people's deeply held beliefs, and, therefore, generally (though, admittedly, not always) try not to shove said views in said people's faces, I think it's not said enough that the offended might consider respecting that those views they consider so blasphemous may be every bit as deeply held by me....that the pious have no monopoly on depth of feeling...

Everyone is in favor of free speech. Hardly a day passes without its being extolled, but some people’s idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.
Winston Churchill

...most liberal-minded spiritual types, including most western yogis I know, tend toward some form of universalism...seeking to embrace all beliefs with the notion that, ultimately, all boil down to the same thing...having something vaguely to do with love, oneness, and/or mystery...and, don't get me wrong, I find that a very lovely, compassionate, genuinely peace-seeking way of looking at things...even if, logically, it's kinda seems to me like looking at a God Hates Fags sign and saying well, if you just ignore the "hates fags" part....

By not holding to fixed views,
The pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision,
Being freed from all sense desires,
Is not born again into this world.
Shakyamuni, the (mythic/historical, as opposed to Facebook) Buddha

...the question, it seems to me, is whether it's possible to see difference and neither recoil from it nor try to reason it away....what if they really don't think and feel deep in their hearts the way we do?...does deep difference necessarily imply hierarchies of superior and inferior, require walls to be built, judgments made,  rocks to be thrown, offense to be taken?...could it be that these vast gaps in understanding are signs of an uncertainty deeper than anything we might think we know, believe or hold sacred?...couldn't we, in the immortal words of the Au Pairs, truly be equal but different?...

Dr. Jay's 2,864th Discourse on Equanimity

...it's not that I don't care about missing the lecture on equanimity, but I'm okay with it...
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(for Frank Jude Boccio....thanks for a great week at Kripalu!)

There's No Such Thing As An Original Sin

...driving Philly’s infamous corridor of angst, the Schuylkill Expressway, with the radio on, heard an old Elvis Costello song...I’m Not Angry....with one line that goes:  there’s no such thing as an original sin...which I’ve always thought was kind of a clever play on words and traditional Christian doctrine...

...sin isn’t a word I use much...associating it, as I tend to do, with traditions in which any baby worth knowing seems to have drowned in the guilty bathwater a long, long time ago, leaving a tub I have little interest in entering....though I do think an awful lot about faults and mistakes...and all kindsa not particularly commendable behavior...mostly my own...

...and, gotta admit, even while basking in recrimination and self-loathing, I tend to look at these little blemishes on my character as kinda special...unique, even...enough that the world might recoil in horror if the charges against me were read in public...

...like, y’know, I’m one badass evil kinda dude...

 

...but, the truth is, it’s the same old tired crap...stuff millions if not billions of people around the world are probably guilty of at this very moment...that’ve been causing problems for a hundred thousand years...not particularly good, maybe, nothin’ to be proud of, some of it best apologized for, with reparations made, in fact.......but that’s all...

 

...like somebody I was helping with her college application essays a little while ago, who wasn’t sure what to say about a period of her life which was notably blank on her résumé...said she didn’t want to mention that she drank herself into jail and rehab...which was understandable...

 

...and yet, I told her, you’ve had a drinking problem....you’re not an axe murderer....half the people on the admissions committee have probably had drinking problems....that it was best be to simply be open about it...

...and she got in....one of those admissions officers even noted how touched she was by the honesty of her essay...

 

...(it should be noted, that, even if you are an axe murderer, that’s hardly a groundbreaking accomplishment....have you cleaved as many heads from necks as Genghis Khan? I don’t think so....so if that’s how you’re planning on making your mark, might as well forget it...it’s been done)...

...there’s no such thing as an original sin....and not need to go through life as if our faults are anything special...