Facebook, Junk Food, Suffering, Compassion, and Robin Williams

The hole I dig is bottomless but nothing else can set me free...

Robert Pollard, I Am a Scientist

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprach Zarathustra

 

...a friend posted something on Facebook about how baffling it is to see people...middle-class, educated...who should know better in this day and age...eating at McDonalds...I told him I could relate...it’s the same way I feel about cigarettes, and people who don’t exercise beyond the effort required to walk to the car or find the remote....but that a lotta people I know feel the same way when they see people eating pizza...(which my friend passionately loves)...(real pizza...not that soy crap)...

Dairy and gluten and grease, oh my!

Dorothy Gale, The Yoga Teacher of Oz

 ...of course, thinking about it much at all makes me realize how little room I have to judge...(to paraphrase Bob Dylan, if the full extent of my unmindful consumption could be seen, the granola crowd’d probably put my head in some kinda earnest, self-righteous, painfully passive-aggressive equivalent of a guillotine)...especially since, with a PhD and a decade or so in the crunchy, life-affirming yoga world, I know, like, waaaay better...

 If I don’t know I don’t know

 ....................................I think I know
If I don’t know I know
                                     I think I don’t know
R.D. Laing, Knots

 ...really, I said, what I think it comes down to is that life is hard....(realizing, in retrospect that I might’ve been unconsciously plagiarizing something Kurt Vonnegut wrote about why we keep destroying our environment even though we know better)...(or maybe it was somebody else, and I’m still unconsciously plagiarizing)...(and so the list of my sins of consciousness or the lack thereof continues to grow)...

...I mean...I’m more than aware that a handful of raw organic kale grown in the backyard garden I’m too lazy to cultivate, in an extremely rural region where with a minimal quantity of carcinogens and other toxins in the rain and groundwater, would be a far better choice on just about every truly conscious kinda level than a cupcake or a beer...and yet, I’m probably gonna both eat the cupcake and drink the beer, anyway, for the sheer momentary pleasure of it...(though I will put a handful of store-bought-and-probably-not-organic-‘cause-that-shit’s-too-expensive kale in my daily smoothie)....just like I won’t spend nearly as much  time meditating as I do getting into idiotic arguments with relative strangers on-line...

...with so many sinkin’ now you gotta keep thinkin’ you can make it through these waves:
acid booze and ass, needles guns and grass, lotsa laughs...
Joni Mitchell

 ...and that’s because, deep down, to be painfully honest, no matter how many positive Buddhist quotes I might like to recite while people are holding poses for five minutes at a time in Yin class about the wonder and sheer illimitable awesomeness of the present moment, it doesn’t seem worth it...with so much despair lurking in the recesses of mind and body, those little things that help us through through the minutes of the day, things we love, even if they don’t benefit us in the long run, can't be so easily forsaken...

...Thoreau wrote that most of us live lives of quiet desperation...(and Pink Floyd, somehow, a hundred years later, appropriated that and called it the English way)....Freud’s death instinct...mean, grumpy old thanatos...often powerful as the life instinct, more upbeat and personable eros...sometimes more...no matter how many ridiculous positive affirmations we in the yoga crowd try to force-feed ourselves when we’re not trying to blame it all on being modern and western and thus trying to shed our modern western skins...(without realizing, of course, that there’s really nothing more modern or western than the romanticism that causes us to think that becoming ancient and the far away other will cure us of our despair)...(and now, it seems, I’m pointing the finger of self-righteous judgment in the opposite direction)....(I’ll stop)...(but not quite yet)...
 
...(here, without further ado, is my own painfully pissed off and horribly self-righteous Facebook post from a week ago, following the news of Robin Williams, dead of chronic despair: If there's one aspect of the yoga world that I absolutely loathe, it's how many people there are—including teachers, yoga bloggers with tens of thousands of "likes," and major revered gurus--who seem to think they're experts on depression even though they clearly know absolutely nothing about it—thinking it's synonymous with being bummed out and can be fixed with positive affirmations or an "attitude adjustment" (clearly unaware that depression might be defined as the inability to take on a positive attitude), or that it's synonymous with sadness, and thus, is something we all experience from time to time and should be seen as a natural and beautiful part of life. No, it isn't. And if you don't know that, you should keep your mouth shut on the subject, no matter how many people fawn on you and tell you how wise and spiritual you are.....harsh, but, if nothing else, it’s my own blood in which I’m writing)...

....ultimately, I think it all points to the incredible necessity for compassion...for all of us...in all of our junk-food eating, time-wasting, un-compassionate, judgmental, self-righteous, sometimes flat-out nasty glory....because of all that, in fact...because we have pain and because we all do what we do, however unmindful, however counterproductive, to make ourselves feel better...right here, right now...

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!)

I'm Not a Buddhist. Am I Still a Buddhist?*

...I find Use Extreme Caution signs strange....I mean, if you’re not huddled ‘neath the covers all day in a fetal position, can your level of caution really be called extreme?...

They always throw around this term ‘the liberal elite.’ And I kept thinking to myself about the Christian right. What’s more elite than believing that only you will go to heaven?
Jon Stewart

...every now and then, I’ll run into former clients from the rehab....usually, they’ll smile, call out my name, maybe give me a hug....except for a couple times, on the sidewalk near a yoga studio I frequent, which just happens to be just around the corner from a methadone clinic....there, eyes avoid me, feet walk rapidly away...ironically enough, telling exactly what they don’t want me to know...revealing through the very act of attempting to hide...

To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
Stephen Covey

...1987, leaning against my backpack on a traffic island outside Rome, my friend and I taking turns sticking our thumbs out, heading down to Pompeii to touch ancient history, admire ancient mosaics, and wander around the place Pink Floyd played....he asked if I wanted to read a book he had...An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, by D. T. Suzuki....thoroughly uninterested in Eastern philosophy, meditation, spirituality, or any of that kinda crap, I was, nonetheless, just bored enough to say yeah, sure....a lot’s happened since then....I meditate every day and recently dug out my old Alan Watts (purchased some time after returning from Europe in ’87 or ’88)...but still have no interest in being a Buddhist...

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,
Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding...
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

...letting go of preconceptions makes things a lot more mysterious...beyond labels, stereotypes, and convenient boxes, each person you meet as wondrously and terrifyingly, inscrutably complex as the paradoxes of infinity....and this, of course, is precisely why we come up with all those labels, stereotypes, and boxes....it’s just a lot easier to check off white black liberal conservative Democrat Republican hipster Buddhist Christian yogi cynic or even yoga cynic than to try and fathom a cosmos...


* ...title originally incarnated, humbly enough, as a comment on a Facebook post about an Elephant Journal article titled
I Don’t Believe in Reincarnation. Am I Still a Buddhist?...

Tidings of Comfort, Joy, and Weltschmerz

The jewel of modern consciousness is compassion. But its worms will become confusion, world-view overload, self-doubt, and paralyzing narcissism. The purpose of Yoga will be to dig carefully through the worms to extract the jewel.
yoga 2.0

Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it.
Stephen Colbert

...wrote something a while ago called Compassion Can Be Complicated...(the title got changed on me)...citing famous Buddhist Pema Chodron on idiot compassion that causes us to do for others only for the sake of making ourselves feel better, without actually helping anybody...

...but things get even more complicated when the goal is to feel worse...(as, contrary to more simplistic views of human nature, is quite often the case)...

weltschmerz {German, from Welt world + Schmerz pain}: mental depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state
Merriam-Webster

...there’s a often a fine line between feelings of compassion for the whole world’s pain and a self-indulgent wallowing in a sense of unhappiness-greater-than-oneself...comfortable rapture in a miserable sublime...between making an expansive sense of compassion part of a personal spirituality and forging religion out of depression...

the notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing
T. S. Eliot

...worshipping an egotistical and infinitely resentful deity fed with continual sacrifices of pleasure...our own and that of those unfortunate enough to be close to us...a simultaneously self-righteous and self-lacerating attitude of how-can-you-enjoy-yourself-with-so-much-suffering-in-the-world...as if refusing joy here will somehow ease suffering elsewhere...

...the dominant idea, I think, even if it’s seldom stated, is that we have very limited capacities for either joy or compassion...that the two are separate, and greedy, and one takes from rather than feeds the other...that happiness necessitates callous indifference to others’ pain, and real compassion inherently involves turning away from happiness and toward our own pain...receiving only a booby prize of self-righteousness...which might, paradoxically, make you feel good, in a way...though, ironically enough, it’s the complete opposite of compassion...(if often mistaken for it, in some circles)...(if you feel strongly about how much more compassionate you are than other people, you’re probably not)...

...if there’s a spiritual mode I can get with, it would have to be one that allows the parallel lines of joy and compassion to merge...a love that, in the face of suffering, grows only stronger...

Not So Mellow...

my yellow in this case is not so mellow, in fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me
Jimi Hendrix

...yellow is the color of the sun and, yes, the color of piss...the color of light, and life...though, yeah, I know, light is really white, in its purest form...but we live in an impure world...even though a banana really is, sometimes, just a banana...

....yellow slapstick banana peels...yellow is the color of my true love’s hair...well, not really, but it’s the color of my hair...at least I try to keep telling myself that, even as it's increasingly invaded with distressing grey and white...so, in that sense, yellow is youth...though also jaundice, and cowardice...and my somewhat cowardly golden retriever, Duncan...walking in the grass, sniffing yellow dandelions, chasing after yellow tennis balls... my good friend when no people were...used to lie in the driveway outside my dad’s office, on the other side of the garage from the house, by the lawn where the dandelions were...one of his patients would crouch there for what seemed like hours after appointments scratching the dog behind the ears and talking to him...my dad said she teased him that Duncan was a better psychiatrist than he was...to which he replied, “maybe he is....”

...yellow, for some reason, I associate with Buddhism...maybe it’s all those golden Buddhas...or the Flower Sermon...though who knows if that flower was actually yellow, though I might think of it that way...or perhaps, I fear, some lingering racist association with yellow people...as if there really were yellow people, or black or white or red people, rather than bogus divisions created out of some deeply yellow fear of the knowledge that we’re all simply shades of some indefinable human color...which may look something like sadness, which I think is also yellow...as, of course, is joy...and candle flames, like I’d see in the windows when we’d sit in silence Christmas Eve at the Quaker Meeting...

...yellow journalism, yellow fever...mellow yellow...yellow corn...waves of grain I’ve seen generally tending, I think, more toward yellow than amber...mustard seed...school buses...yellow submarines...doesn’t have a point of view, knows not where he’s going to, isn’t he a bit like you and me?...daisies...sunflowers...the yellow rose of Texas, whose image seems a bit tarnished at the moment...yellow desert sands...yellowing pages of books and old thoughts...Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Yellow Wallpaper, representing repression and madness....when life gives you lemons make lemonade, but if the lemonade isn’t any good, maybe you can get a soda or something...

...the sun’s out today, for what seems like the first time in forever...though I can’t see it from here...yellow in blue...coming across if you’re not actually looking at it as clarity...but to look directly into it is to go blind...

Seeing Red

...red has always been my least favorite color...seems the antithesis of blue...though purple has always been my favorite, strangely enough, since it’s where red and blue meet...

....red, I think, was my older brother’s favorite color when we were kids...or at least I vaguely remember hearing him say that at least once...and his being red and my being blue always seemed significant, still does, though more in thinking about then than now....red is fire, supposedly, though I’ve always thought it looks more orange, and closer to a yellow orange, at that...but fire engines, nonetheless, which excited me as a kid...one of my earliest memories standing in a crowd watching a fire in center city, Philadelphia...though all I remember seeing were the fire trucks, and smoke...color of anger, certainly...color of spite, color of revenge...my friend who studied Buddhism in Colorado spent weeks meditating in different-colored rooms...wasn’t, as I remember, the most pleasant person to be around during the red week...color of cherries, Valentines, and bricks...color of sunsets, but what isn’t?

...color of lava, certainly...at least I think so, never having actually seen any except in solidified form, at which point it was grey or black...The Red and the Black, a book by Stendhal I failed to appreciate, though there was a great epigraph to one chapter: To think is to be full of sorrow, so should really try reading it again some time...once meant communist, now means Republican...the red rock canyons in Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, also more orange than red...which may be why I’ve always liked orange, even long before I’d ever seen high desert...those craggy canyons, arid orange space-scapes existing already in my mind...or maybe they were my mind...

...Mars...Satan...Hell...but also the words of Jesus in some Bibles...lipstick, while lips, generally speaking, are far more pink...which is another matter entirely...could I write something up about pink without getting pornographic?...probably, but it wouldn’t be much fun...color, along with white, of ambulances...can you believe they charged me over $650 for a two mile ride and didn’t even give me anything for pain since they said by the time they had it ready we’d already be there?...along with blue and white, color of the American flag, and the French flag, and with orange the Russian communist flag...have they changed that?...I remember seeing it up above the train station, having just made it into Yugoslavia, which was all one country then...had to ask a friend recently what country Dubrovnik’s in, which is strange since I’ve been there and she hasn’t...and how strange that was in the Reagan era, missiles pointing and primed in a game of chicken we apparently won...color of the insides of my eyelids when I’m lying in the grass facing upward on a sunny day...

...my favorite sweater, for some reason, is red, though at this point it’s pretty raggedy, so I don’t wear it much...but that’s what happens to favorite sweaters, isn’t it?...read, the heteronym for red is the past tense of read, the heteronym for reed, a kind of plant that sways in the wind by a pond, and is therefore gently active, while read/red is something else...read, dead, spilled on the sidewalk...blood, which is of course the course of life...which confuses things...

...red can make me upset...seems to represent rupture and division...but also roses with their thorns...and blood when they prick fingers...though sometimes I seem to be relatively okay with that...