Roadmaps for the Soul

...the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul to the old folks home and the college...
Bob Dylan

...was teaching this freshman writing class and started talking about the next paper assignment...said something like I’m not sure what the topic’s gonna be...and, before I could continue with but, it’s gonna be along the general lines of...one of the kids said how ‘bout whatever we want?...and was quickly echoed by other voices in the room...yeah, whatever we want!...whatever we want!...

...I, needless to say, was about to smile and say no...like teachers generally do when students express a desire to do whatever they feel like...but paused and thought for a second or two...then said okay...whatever you want....

...the kids, of course, were thrilled to be granted so much freedom...amazed at what a cool teacher they had....

...a week later, though, when I asked how the project was going, there was an uncomfortable silence...until, finally, the same kid who came up with the idea said this is a lot harder...

...I smiled, said yeah, I know...

Truth is a pathless land...
J. Krishnamurti

Walking With Waves

...thinking, wondering, imagining...lust, love, loneliness...building, dissolving, receding...this, this, only this...*




*...was walking by myself along this beach in south Jersey, from populated areas to a somewhat wilder one by the wildlife sanctuary—sand above the surf line roped off to protect nesting areas for piping plovers, people allowed to walk through but not stop, sunbathe, or swim, since the shy little birds need to run to and from the water, and won’t if anybody’s in the way...seems reasonable enough, so keep up a steady pace—seeing no plovers...(sorry, that’s not one in the picture)...though can’t deny looking probably more than watchful boyfriends like at women in bathing suits...but, more than that, another, less superficial and piggish aspect of mind caught on someone...far inland...wondering if she thinks about me...imagining, hoping...that old song...tip-toeing a narrow course between solitude and loneliness, dipping precipitously, despite such gorgeous tranquil surroundings, seemingly made for peaceful reflection, toward the latter...trying once again to be mindful...and all that...observe thoughts floating by instead of getting caught up in them...gain that awesome sense of wonder found in pondering the infinite in one’s own breath, sun on skin, cold salt water on the toes, even a bit of pain in one hip from walking so much in the sand...for a sudden moment feeling somewhat jarring comfort in the knowledge that, really, I know nothing else...the rest only thinking, imagining, longing...speculation on reality that’s always something else...and not even that ten minutes later...gettin’ all Krishnamurti-like n’ shit....and then, of course, thinking about writing about it, maybe quoting that famous William Blake line, something like “to see infinity in a grain of sand, eternity in an hour”...( having to work by memory even once the walk is through, since there’s no Collected Poems of William Blake nor consistent internet access at the beach house)...though, by the time I got back, reduced it all to the few simple formulae above...wondering if the wave thing’s too clichéd...as well as whether a cliché’s always such a bad thing....or whether anybody’s gonna get what I’m talking about at all....anyway, it works a whole lot better than all this...doncha think?

Getting Personal...

...contrary to the impression some may have gotten from that last post, this blog’s not gonna prostitute itself for hits, gratuitously throwing around keywords like big boobs...kinky sex...or hot throbbing orgasms...so don’t worry...

Oh I just don’t know where to begin...
Elvis Costello

...actually been doing some intense personal writing...off and on...since the trip to Mexico...where somebody told me I should write about the stuff I don’t wanna write about...things I tend to hint at before making a joke about big boobs, kinky sex, or hot throbbing orgasms...

...finding I can only dig into that stuff in pieces...going in, then backing off, then going in and backing off again...sometimes it helps to drink three quarters of a bottle of red wine first...saving the last quarter for afterwards...but, in the long run, that’s probably not the best idea...

Humanity’s hope lies in its capacity not to accept the way its past has played out.
Joel Kramer

...I didn’t really need to be told that...I mean, hell, it’s what I’m trying to get other people to do...dig into their deep trauma and put it into words...capture it in narrative...encapsulate it...put it outside where they can look at it...re-envision...reevaluate...reinvent...

...then, other people’s problems are always easier to confront...and it’s not exactly unusual for the cobbler to wear no shoes...ask anybody who’s spent any time with shrinks outside of their professional capacities....I’m the son of a psychiatrist and a social worker, have had a couple messed up shrinks as friends, even went out with one for a mercifully brief time...I’m not gonna tell ya what she was into...

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.
J. Krishnamurti

...as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing better, if you’re gonna try and help somebody else, than an awareness of just how fucked up you are yourself...to know you’re not one inch above or below the person you’re trying to help....sometimes I get the impression that the addicts I work with see me as more like one of them than one of the staff...and I take that as a compliment...

I Saw Walt Whitman Strolling Through the Park Today

I saw Walt Whitman strolling through the park today...alive as you and me, like they say...along Forbidden Drive...called that—this is true—because you’re forbidden to drive on it...above the legendary Wissahickon Creek....I’ve seen him along there before...maybe up in Mt. Airy, too...though this was more notable because it was right near the broken bench with the inscription from Song of Myself that they got wrong,
I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware that I sit content
adding that that that doesn’t belong at all though somebody—maybe Walt himself...certainly this sighting makes me suspicious—kind of corrected it with a black magic marker....anyway, he seemed content enough...if a bit worse for wear...which you can’t blame him for...I mean, the guy is closing in on the end of his second century...and the Civil War really seemed to take something out of him...

I am nothing, and therefore I am everything, and all energy
J. Krishnamurti

Energy is Eternal Delight
William Blake

Tonight the bottle let me down, and let your memory come around....
Merle Haggard

It’s raining outside, started while I was in the park, and I brought the rain into the coffee shop. The rain follows me, and I follow the rain, and maybe I am the rain. The rain is in my hair and the rain is inseparable from my hair...though my eyes are two suns...sons absent a father brain, wandering aimlessly from place to place, but never lost because knowing always that lost is where they belong....

Coffee is energy. Then, so is everything else...maybe. Energy is in crisis, always. We fuel the wars we fight for energy with energy, though it’s often lacking when I need to go home but can’t get away from this window seat, looking out at the rain. Coffee fails me sometimes, like Merle Haggard with his inconstant whiskey bottle...like anything, really, but it tastes good, at least...and that’s not like just anything.

Walt Whitman wrote about Nature without check with original energy but he doesn’t come into the coffee shop to talk with me about it, at least not when I’m here. Perhaps he’s made his peace with the rain.

Losing Your Head

So...in Yoga there’s something called a sun salutation...or surya namaskar, if ya wanna get all sanskrity about it...which is a series of postures...or asanas...done in sequence in a flowing kinda motion, in tune with the breath...though what those postures are can vary...actually, they can involve all kindsa stuff...though there tend to be a couple of basic parts, at least one or two of which involve kinda looking upwards...y’know, at the sun...and saluting it, kinda...if ya happen to be outside...and it happens to be sunny....

okay, I don’t know what the hell a sun salutation is, though I’ve done thousands of ‘em...including approximately a hundred and eight at a time once, down in Mexico...somehow ending up singing the first verse of a Bruce Springsteen song in the middle of it....it’s a long story...but, see, not knowing even while doing kinda goes back to that whole feeling-oneself-from-the-inside thing that got so badly sidetracked a couple posts ago...kinda like Fantastic Voyage...that book by Isaac Asimov...where this submarine and its crew are shrunk down to where they can float through the internal passageways of somebody’s body...except without the submarine...and it's your own body...am I making sense, now? Didn’t think so....

What is meditation? You don’t know. And that is the basis on which to meditate....“I don’t know.” Do you understand the beauty of that? It means that my mind is stripped of all technique, of all information about meditation, of everything others have said about it.
J. Krishnamurti

When the logic and proportion
have fallen sloppy dead
and the White Knight is talking backwards,
and the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”...
Grace Slick

So, anyway, we were doing sun salutations last night and my teacher suggested that, in the forward bend following that big upward motion described so badly above, the thing to do is to let go of the head completely, just let it drop...which was cool....since, if there’s one thing I don’t do enough of, it’s losing my head...

...not that I’d wanna be without it permanently, mind you....it does have its uses, but it keeps awfully busy...too busy...never stopping, always charging...not forward but in endless serpentine pathways, crashing into its own walls, falling off its own cliffs...struggling up its own mountains, molehills, and mausoleums...as often as not ending up where it began...only more tired and confused....

might be good if I could put it in a box, or have it served on a plate like John the Baptist, or play beach volleyball with it....

maybe that’s what I’ll do next time I’m in Mexico...

or maybe not....

Kind of a Movie Review #4: Religulous

Belief, idea divides; it never brings people together.You may bring a few people together in a group but that group is opposed to another group.
J. Krishnamurti
....just biked home in the dark from seeing Religulous, in which Bill Maher rips on Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, Judaism, Scientology, and belief in general in an incredibly offensive and utterly unrelenting fashion—I fucking loooved it—to find that my new neighbors are seriously smoking up some very pungent ganja to the point that I can’t help smelling it...in my apartment, not just the hallway—again—which, I can report, brings on some nostalgic feelings...put on some Hendrix...but no particular desire to go and join them...seriously, the last time I smoked I thought, man, I’d rather be doing yoga...but, no, in case you’re wondering, the word hypocrite perhaps, quite understandably, blooming on your lips, I wouldn’t have minded if the movie ripped on yoga, too...hell, if you’ve read this blog at all, you know I do it all the time...was kinda disappointed, in fact, that the movie left the whole Eastern spiritual spectrum alone...and I say that with a big namasmotherfuckingte to everyone...and the view, held at least momentarily, that all of our beliefs and practices are pretty ridiculous when you think about it...or, at least, when I think about it...not bad, necessarily, or good, necessarily, just ridiculous...and if we could realize that we might have a whole hell of a lot less to kill each other for...or, maybe not, as that would be a far too logical conclusion for such a ridiculous species as we....

and they also threw this in my face:

they said

uh anyway

you know good and well

it would be beyond the will of God....
Jimi Hendrix

Pieces of Eight

I got eight carburetors and boys I'm usin' 'em all.
Bob Dylan

Yoga for Cynics is feelin’ the love as, just in the past few days, it’s been awarded honors by blogger friends Svasti, Juliet, and Tony the Acoustic Guitar Playing Red Panda, as well as being called upon by Samantha Grace (not her real name) to provide the following list (which also answers some frequently asked questions):

Eight Things You Might Not Know About Me:

1. After getting my PhD, I could hardly wait to be on a plane or somewhere and have somebody say “is there a doctor on board?” so I could reply “yes! I’m a doctor!” A month or so later, I was on a plane, and that very question came over the loudspeaker. I decided nobody’d think it was funny, though. So, I came up with the “can explain Faulkner while you die” thing, which people do think is funny (or at least that’s what they say).
2. I was once called “yoga faggot” in an online forum.
3. Ironically, enough, others have suspected me of going to yoga class to ogle women.
4. Much as I’m into the idea of being bisexual, I’ve sadly never actually met a man I was attracted to.
5. I know lots of places where I can see women without having to twist myself into gurudasana to do it.
6. Besides, as I am sometimes the only male in yoga class, I fill the quite necessary role of providing the low end on OM.
7. The quotes on this blog are mostly from memory, though I usually look up the exact wording. J. Krishnamurti wrote “if you quote some high authority, then you equally stop thinking,” and I agree with that...I mean I don’t agree with it...I mean....
8. No matter how perplexing you might find this blog, you’re still not nearly as confused as I am.

we must stand up and say “eight is enough.”
Barack Obama

Reflections From a Stagnant Pool #1

So long as the mind is seeking further experience it can only think in terms of sensation; and any experience that may be spontaneous, creative, vital, strikingly new, it immediately reduces to sensation and pursues that sensation, which then becomes a memory. Therefore, the experience is dead and the mind becomes merely a stagnant pool of the past.
J. Krishnamurti
Reflections of
the way life used to be
Reflections of
the love you took from me....
Diana Ross & the Supremes

Thoughts written down after late night yoga (a little over a year ago) (edited somewhat, to protect the guilty, as well as to eliminate stuff that doesn’t make sense even to me...though those who get freaked by my weirder posts might consider themselves warned):

The body has its problems, suspicious pains here and there—all over, really, aches, noises, chronic gas. These are the things I can’t get rid of. But everything else—fleeting impressions that swirl around, in and out, but are they just that? Are they interchangeable? They are mirrors of reality, or shadows, at least—not necessarily in the Platonic sense, but resonances. Precious things I can’t let go of....For a friend I’ve known, the outside world seems to be as ephemeral as passing thoughts, though even he tends to suffer and be made self-conscious by it, having to hide away in the booze and weed, sometimes....

Thinking of that Lou Reed line—yeah, I got a million of ‘em—I’d like to have a kid I could pass on to/something more than rage, pain, anger and hurt. I like that, in the sense that the child is father to the man (who wrote that? Emerson?...off to google...is the internet a blessing or curse?) (the porn and kinky chat rooms at times make me think one, but are probably proof of the other) (of course, what comes up first, in the first three or four hits, no less, is that fucking Blood, Sweat and Tears album, but then...Wordsworth, the Prelude):

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Having something to do with holding on to something, inside, that is deeper than the rage, pain, etc. (though he doesn’t refer to those. Then, Wordsworth wouldn’t. He and Lou Reed probably wouldn’t have hung out much, even if given the chance)—a sense of wonder and beauty, here: the very definition of Romanticism, I guess. It’s also what both Stephen Batchelor and M. C. Richards talk about, though: creativity coming from that inner, still, solid place, rather than an escape from this world, a way to create and flower within it.

And, certainly that Lou Reed/Wm. Wordsworth notion relates to the experience I described before, half a year or so after first starting yoga, seeing a then-three year old niece playing twister at the cousins’ place, and realizing that she was, without knowing it, doing a perfect downward facing dog—that’s what you can do, I thought, without thirty-plus years of tension built up in your body. And yet: can it all be released?

...and later, watching Hiroshima Mon Amour—the meeting of parallel lines of personal and political, or the fact that they were never separate in the first place, along with the strange Japanese love of neon—like my just-post 9/11 experience, in the midst of my last great depression, when I was actually, for a moment, there at a good friend’s house, with another friend puking in the bathroom, feeling like here we were all together in it, all in ruins like those buildings: but then, the next day, there I was, and everyone else was back to work, back to normal, and I couldn’t even give blood because there were too many others who wanted to, and they got there ahead of me, so there I was, standing in front of the fucking hospital, thinking maybe I should commit myself, but instead took a bike ride on the Erie Canal towpath beginning just behind there—and then, riding along, I seemed to have almost a vision of a small towheaded child, deep inside, so like what Eliot described, in Preludes of his own—the notion of some infinitely gentle, Infinitely suffering thing—almost glowing in strange yellow mind-neon. And there, and then, feeling a connection to that wounded self, still whole and alive, tears flowing as I rode, glad to have sunglasses on especially when passing a couple of students who would’ve been in class with me then if I hadn’t cancelled—probably it would’ve been okay though, because it was, hell, the day after September 11—and I knew then, seeing that wreckage inside, so like the wreckage on all our minds, but far more ephemeral, that I was going to be okay, even if America and the world weren’t....

Peace, Love, and F... Off!

revolution in society must begin with the inner psychological transformation of the individual.

If I am greedy, envious, violent, merely having an ideal of non-violence, of non-greed, is of little value.
J. Krishnamurti

Here's me, saying peace, love, and...you get the rest, somewhere around 1986, in a dorm hallway at Boston University...a professed pacifist, actively opposed to apartheid in South Africa, Duarte's bombing in El Salvador, the Contra death squads in Nicaragua, destruction of the world’s rain forests, and, in general, sincerely dedicated to working for peace, justice, equality, and looooove between my brothers and my sisters aaaaaaall over this laaaaaaaand...

...as well as intent on making sure nobody fucked with me like they did in high school...much as I seemed doomed to be an outsider...and hated the insiders, anyway...but honed my verbal skills to where I could shred anybody who pissed me off...or even irritated me...finding solace in casual acts of vandalism that cost everybody on my dorm floor their deposits...if any of you are reading this, that was a joke...but doing it all in a way that was socially respectable...because it was clever and funny...that’s one difference between college and grade school...in grade school there’s no need for subtlety...kids act out their issues by calling other kids faggots or shoving them into lockers...in college, you’ve gotta be clever...though, in the end, it amounts to the same thing...the same endless and endlessly hurtful and pointless battle.....

You can’t close the door when the walls cave in.
Robert Hunter

After a while, I left there...dropped out...went to San Francisco to follow the Grateful Dead, then wandered around Europe, then came home to work for Greenpeace in Philly, had a couple minor run-ins with the law before ending up back in school in Olympia, Washington...at Evergreen, those who were weird in other places were pretty much the norm, and those who were weird there would most likely have been committed anywhere else...actually, I suspect some of my friends eventually were...since you can’t stay in college forever.....

I’d rather stay here, with all the madmen
than perish with the sad men roaming free....
David Bowie

Here’s the thing about the Pacific Northwest in the late ‘80’s...just barely pre-both grunge and Microsoft...while, in much of the country, the conservative inquisition of the ‘80’s seemed to finish what the punk reformation started in stomping out any idealistic vestiges of the ‘60’s still smoking behind the bushes...(yeah, I’m mixing historical metaphors all over the place, but it’s fun)...and such efforts got no end of immoral support from ‘60’s idealists themselves whose concern for peace ended with their draft eligibility, who voted for the ex-governor who’d shot at them in People’s Park when they realized he’d be good for their stock portfolios...from Santa Cruz to Seattle, those organic roots sank deep...counterculture becoming conventional in its own ways...paranoia striking deep before growing comfortable and old...as even my old friends from Dead tour became what I affectionately came to term granola fascists...full of love and compassion for all living things...except for other people who didn’t live and think exactly as they did...strangely reminiscent of the Christian fundamentalists I grew up around...and, no doubt, that some of them grew up around, as well...rebelling until they became exactly what they were trying to escape...if with better taste in music, and, certainly, cooler attitudes about partying and sex...but at least you can drink a Pepsi with the fundie crowd without subjecting yourself to “constructive criticism”....

Free your mind, and your ass will follow.
George Clinton

Many, it seems, in the process of trying to free their minds, do little more than create colorful new cages...which isn’t to say that freeing your mind isn’t worthwhile...or that changing society isn’t necessary...in fact, we're probably in the biggest trouble ever if both don't happen on the largest of scales awfully soon...but it may be a lot more complicated than we think....