Awakening: Compassion, Contentment, Etc.

...saw a group of young guys...looked like college kids...a block or two down Sansom Street from where I live...standing on a corner taking pictures of themselves and laughing...a second look showed what was so funny....a homeless man lying unconscious on the sidewalk, and they, arrayed in their brightly colored polo shirts, tennis shorts, and unexamined privilege, taking selfies with him...

...from my bike, across the intersection, I wanted to yell you stupid assholes!!!!...just to let them know that somebody passing by didn't think they were nearly so clever as they thought...to just maybe make them think about what might be wrong with finding amusement in the suffering of those less fortunate than themselves...possibly thereby awakening apparently dormant compassion in an admittedly roundabout and perhaps contradictory way...but didn't...

...wondered what someone more enlightened than I might've said....not that it was hard....no doubt, there could be all kinds of gentle ways to start a meaningful dialogue, and I'm sure that if Thich Nhat Hanh or Nelson Mandela had been there, that's just what they would have done...

...but...in order to do that, myself, I realized, I'd have to awaken my own sense of compassion...for them...and as it was, couldn't think of any way of doing that short of knocking their heads together...

...maybe the point here is that sometimes you need to work on yourself first...one's own angry, cynical, yet still strangely idealistic self that can't stand the thought of people finding fun in an unconscious homeless person, even though worse things happen every minute...and one might in the moment like to make worse things happen to them...

Sunday morning, and I'm falling...
Lou Reed, Sunday Morning

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning

 

...I just dunno...right at this moment, I'm trying to practice contentment...sitting here on a late Sunday morning in the threadbare but ever-comfortable Ikea chair in a filthy apartment in my (clean) underwear, listening to some really really good music, reading and writing stupid shit on Facebook, and alternating between a tall glass of room-temperature water with lemon (the yoga crowd says it's good for me) and some tasty hot coffee (in Sanskrit, they call it prana), having been too lazy from the past couple days' bike rides to get up and ride across town for morning sangha practice...grateful there's nothing much that absolutely has to be done today except to figure out what I'm teaching in my 7 pm Yin Yoga class this evening...and pay some end-of-the-month bills...but eyeing the three books I've started reading in the past couple days (not even mentioning the novel I'm ever-so-slowly writing)...kinda wishing I had a smart, sensitive, beautiful girlfriend with whom to share an endless lazy brunch, but....recognizing that it's all okay...really not bad...not bad at all...pretty good, in fact...practicing that...

The Yoga Cynic Speaks of Rivers* (and “Real Yoga”)

It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees
They’re puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs of joy and peace,
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on...
Joni Mitchell

I am the river, and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.
Javier Marías

...was in the café, post-meditation, imbibing that special kinda prana known as coffee...when this guy at the next table started talking about yoga...specifically, real yoga****...

...if you feel the need to brag about your practice, it’s probably nothing to brag about...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 451:968

...how great, generally, his practice is...how any real yogi is vegetarian...how much better ashtanga is than other kinds of yoga... how much better ashtanga yoga is than sitting meditation...since, y’know, anybody can sit in a dark room*****....somewhere in there, I turned my headphones back on...(one o’ those yamas or niyamas has gotta say something about eavesdropping)...



* apologies to Langston Hughes...**

** and, yeah, I know, apart from the quotes, the post really doesn’t have anything to do with rivers*** (that’s not even a river in the picture...it’s the Wissahickon Creek...though it did get pretty river-like last summer when it flooded)...

*** or maybe it does....whaddaya want me to do?!...explain my metaphors to you?!...

**** real yoga (noun): the kind of yoga I happen to practice. (antonym: whatever kinda yoga you happen to practice) (courtesy, the Yoga Cynic’s Dictionary)

***** leaving me thinking that, given how much difficulty I’d experienced sitting in a semi-lighted room for forty-five minutes, struggling with drowsiness, a laundry-list of physical discomforts, and a, one might say, river of past, present, and future troubles, a mere hour or so before, I may just barely qualify as anybody...******

****** which, now that I think of it, could mean I’m on the threshold of transcending individuation and a realizing ultimate oneness with the universe....have to look that one up...

Not Enlightened Yet

I can’t be good no more...
honey because the world gone wrong...
The Mississippi Sheiks

...John Milton said they also serve who only stand and wait...but how ‘bout they who sit around getting in utterly needless nasty arguments with complete strangers in the comments under youtube videos?....

...had a bit o' road rage on the way to yoga class today...yeah, it’s happened before...this time in a car...somebody making it nearly impossible for me to merge, and I, quite unmindfully, flipped her the bird....then noticed she was driving a hybrid with all kinds of mellow, socially conscious bumper stickers, like that one with COEXIST made up of symbols representing the world’s major religions...and she seemed to be taking all the turns I was...occurred to me she could be heading to yoga class...possibly even the same yoga class I was...which could be uncomfortable....figured maybe I’d break the ice with something like actually, sister, the middle finger is an ancient Hopi symbol that means “the radiant earth crystals of my heart imbue you with their healing love energy"...and maybe she’d be really moved by that and we’d go out for herbal tea, vegan stir-fry, and the latest documentary about drinking water...

I had read everything I could find about enlightenment. But the more I read, the more despair I went into because these texts had nothing to do with me and my problems. Enlightenment? I just wanted to wake up without wanting to kill myself.
Ana Forrest

...some yogis have a real problem with that particularly potent and aromatic form of prana known as coffee....I point out that they didn't have it in ancient India...if they had, Yoga Sutra 1.1...atha yoga nushasanam...translated into the English dialect unique to Philly and Jersey as: yo, let’s do some fuckin’ yoga...would most likely be preceded by Yoga Sutra 1.0...first we drink coffee...

Decaffeinated

Coffee is prana.
Patanjali*

Since every pleasure’s got an edge of pain,
Pay for your ticket and don’t complain...
Bob Dylan

It’s been a week since my last cup of coffee...and you were wondering why this blog’s been so quiet?**

...then, I’m probably quitting the whole yoga thing, anyway...been reading so much about how healthy it is...which is a problem, since I'm currently working on gettin' me a new health insurance plan...and...unlike most people, who end up paying far more than they ever get back...making the insurance industry so profitable it buys senators and congressmen like yoga folk buy expensive crap with Om symbols on it...I wanna profit from the arrangement...

...so, from here on, my health is the insurance company’s problem...no more yoga, no more meditation, no more fruits and vegetables...organic or otherwise...no more biking (except in busy traffic...without a helmet...preferably drunk)....might even change the name of this blog to Sitting in Front of the Tube Eating Ho-Ho’s, Smoking Cigarettes, Drinking Cheap Booze, Snorting Crystal Meth and Letting the Insurance Company Pick Up the Tab for Cynics...but, it occurs to me, that might be a tad redundant...


* yeah, I know, that’s not in your copy of the Yoga Sutras...that’s ‘cause it’s an exceptionally rare out-take, available only as part of the outrageously expensive digitally re-mastered limited edition Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: the Complete Sessions deluxe boxed set...along with a few alternate takes (Sutra 1.1: “let’s party”) and the legendary, unexpurgated, Vedic Times interview with Patanjali...in which he admits he was joking about celibacy....***

** not to mention that this particular post is, let’s face it, not up to the usual quality standards...loose though they are...really not much more than an excuse for that cheesy Patanjali joke....I recommend skipping the rest and checking out my far more inspirational Thanksgiving post at Elephant Journal...or going back and reading that last one, which was pretty good: One Breath at a Time....namaste & all that...

*** wha??!!... You think I’d make this stuff up???!!!

Hello, Cleveland?

...I’m thinking about reading some blog stuff at this open mike at a local coffee shop this Saturday*...............................you heard it right...that's:

*****YOGA FOR CYNICS—ABSOLUTELY LIVE!!!!*****

...which means, yes, the cozy anonymity and serene dignity of the yogi blogger’s staid, quiet life, typing away and silently meditating like an aesthetically sensitive urban anchorite, a mystic radical subsisting on prana, stale bread, and the sad solemn songs of the heart in his dusty, book-lined, cheap incense-scented garret...lost, forsaken, repudiated for the tantalizing allure of footlights...the empty glare and ever elusive satiety of fame and glory...

...and who knows where things could go from there...

...screaming fans, endorsement deals, and giant bowls of M&M's...(minus the brown ones)...promoters, bodyguards, and ostentatious sunglasses worn indoors...a life of outrageous, excess, tired tour buses, trashed hotel rooms, jaded groupies, and absurd quantities of booze and dangerous drugs...the hopelessly compromised artist's desperation in trying, at first, to hold on to lofty ideals and integrity in a crazed whirlwind of contracts, parties, frenzied dissipation, and increasingly expensive habits...squandered talents, supermodels, private jets, and paranoia...teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old...fulfilling an endless round of contractual obligations, only now and then wistfully remembering the days when it meant something more than than a vain struggle to maintain a decadent lifestyle worthy of a Viking chieftain or Borgia pope...

...sounds cool...in a way.................maybe I’ll skip it...



* the High Point at Allen’s Lane, West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Samadhi, USA, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 PM