L U N A C I E S

A Path of Yellow Leaves

2011-12-22T18:19:00.000-08:00

A Path of Yellow Leaves

by James N. Powell

One fair autumn morning, Yelda Basar Moers, a young law student and former journalist for Self, People, and InStyle, was on her way to a job interview when she heard a bloodcurdling scream, “Holy shit!”

Turning her head, two blocks up the street she beheld one wall of the South Tower of the World Trade Center melt into motion. It was, in her words, “protruding out of the rest of its body like slow-moving lava.” Then the tower went into a death rattle, spasms shuddering up and down its entire body, until the structure convulsed and came thundering down in a hurricane of dust. A mushroom cloud billowed upward, and a shock wave of fiery ash and dust raced up the street toward her.

Yelda screamed. Extraordinarily, standing near the roaring epicenter of this fiery avalanche, she felt utter silence.

“This,” she observed “is when that slow motion thing they talk about happened, when some devastating event hits you, and all the actions and movements, words and voices move so slowly that they are all palpable. You can reach out and touch them it’s all so tangible, when at the same time none of it makes any sense at all, and life has been reduced to some absurd play that you watch as if from a great distance—as a silent observer. In my slow motion moment, I ripped off my shoes, clutched them in my left hand, and threw my coffee in the air. The liquid, suspended, now made its way down. My eye caught a splash of red, the lapel of a woman’s blazer. She ran right past me, and I followed. We herded together with all the other pedestrians on that block, all of us sprinting so close to each other that we could have held hands.”

Yelda never looked back at that shock wave of smoke, ash, and pulverized debris chasing her. In slow motion flight, she shut her eyes. Deep inside she felt silent and absolutely alone, suspended in time, watching herself from above as her arms and legs flailed slowly forward through space, her mind horrified with the specter of death, her heart pounding and absolutely hopeless.

Yelda is a Muslim.

As an editor working in the wake of 9/11, during these past few years I have received a flurry of manuscripts penned by Islamic authors attempting to come to grips with that event’s challenge to their faith. Ahmad, a deeply spiritual soul from a long lineage of Sufi saints and scholars, came to me with a manuscript detailing his family’s closely held secrets of Sufi meditation. Ahmad was born in a small village in Pakistan that is now overrun with Taliban. He had to leave the village. The Taliban target Sufis, whom they do not consider to be Muslims. From Fargad, formerly employed by the media arm of the Saudi government, I received an immense work detailing the lack of textual support for terrorism in his reading of the Holy Quran. These and many other efforts that have come across my desk attest to the fact that countless Muslims are not standing complacently by as their faith is being hijacked by extremists. If some have seemed silent, it is only because the depths of disquietude to which they have been driven map a deeply interior journey, a journey in which they have had no other light nor guide than the relationship of their souls with the inner limits of their faith. No matter how bold their thinking, most of their inner struggles have remained within the domain of Muslim theology.

This is why Yelda Basar Moers’s journey stands as the most poignant and daring of the bunch, for she felt forced to leap beyond her faith into something akin to pure philosophy, questioning the very efficacy of belief itself and laying bare the deep yearning of her soul for something transcending religious conditioning, that her heart might open to pure spirit. This is her story.

The first night after the attacks, Yelda and her best friend, Karen, who is of Lebanese descent, searched New York for a place to eat. They found only deserted streets—and an eerie silence—before stumbling onto a Pakistani restaurant. Inside, they were welcomed by Arabic music, kilim rugs carpeting the floors, and Islamic art on the walls. “We felt,” she writes, “that if we could connect with anyone during this time, we figured it would be with someone from the Middle Eastern lands of our past, if even just to greet, and chat, and share. Karen suggested that we engage our server about the day. Where were you when the attack happened? The first plane? The second? The first fall? The subsequent aftermath?

“When we asked our waiter why the streets were so desolate, he didn’t want to talk about it. He shrugged and stepped away from the table.

“‘Why don’t you think he wants to talk about it?’ Karen said.

“‘Maybe he thinks we’ll talk politics?’ I said.

“‘Does he think we’ll point a finger?’ she said.

“‘Because they’re from that world?

“‘We’re from that world too,’ she said.

“But our hopes were left at that. The Pakistani server didn’t want anything to do with us. There was nothing to do but finish our meal and be on our way.

“When we left the restaurant, I hoped that this had all been a dream, that I had imagined it all. What I would have given to see a stream of yellow cabs, or of groups of fast-paced New Yorkers rushing on their way. But for a straggler or two, the desolate landscape was apocalyptic. New York, the bustling city I had come to love—was dead, or had gone into a coma.

“A few evenings later, my mother and I met Karen at Rue 57, a bustling French bistro around the corner from my building on Sixth Avenue. The familiar bright red awning, dark wood floors, wine colored leather chairs, and clustered tables, provided some semblance of normalcy because I was a regular at the restaurant and often dined there with Karen. Upon entering, I noticed a full staff, but no patrons. The hostess seated us at a table adjacent to the street.

“‘I think people are just scared to go out,’ Karen said.

“‘Or maybe they’ve left,’ my mother said.

“‘Do you know that I had to show my ID to get gum?’

“‘That doesn’t make any sense.’

“‘Nothing seems to make sense anymore,’ Karen said.

“As Karen and my mother spoke back and forth, I felt I were being sucked into the center of the room. A maelstrom paved its way through the floorboard, and slowly the rest of the restaurant succumbed to its force, and then inevitably I too was pulled into its funnel. My palms became clammy. My pulse had accelerated to such a degree that I had trouble breathing. A tremor was traveling up and down my torso while at the same time I was losing control of my basic faculties: what I chose to feel and what I didn’t, what state of mind I chose to be in, how I could act. I began to feel my mind and body were separating from each another. My body was involuntarily acting against the wishes of my mind. It was the first episode of what I called the Rumbling, a horrible byproduct of my post-traumatic stress.

“I asked the hostess to bring me a shaken dirty martini. It arrived quickly; perhaps she had sensed my panic. After a few cold sips, the Rumbling stopped. But I was still keenly alert to the sounds surrounding me: the exhaust of the taxi cab, the rattling of forks and knives. I looked at the white table cloth and tried to compose myself.

“My appetite had left me for days so I opted for sushi rolls. Lately, the rice was the only thing I could digest. I’d peel off the seaweed and rice, eating only that, neglecting the filling. The server took my order and turned to my mother.

“‘The Potato Crusted Salmon,’ my mother said.

“‘I’ll have the same,’ Karen said.

“‘I really like it here, the restaurant I mean,’ my mother said. ‘It is the only good place in midtown, really. There is just not much good stuff here even though it is overflowing with restaurants.’

“‘Isn’t that surprising,’ Karen said.

“My insides were going to pop out at any moment, so I couldn’t contribute to the dinner conversation. As I continued drinking the martini, it seemed as if its effects lessened and the Rumbling came back. The blood running through my veins was pulsating so intently that I felt a heartbeat everywhere in my body. I put my hand on the corners of the table and focused all my energy on the conversation before me, trying to take some deep breaths. Ultimately, I felt I was a pilot in heavy, insurmountable turbulence, and I wasn’t sure if I could control the plane and keep it from succumbing to the forces of nature.

“‘I love the wasabi potatoes,’ Karen said.

“‘I’ve never heard of them, are they mashed?’ my mother said.

“‘They are really amazing. You’ll have to try them next time. I think you can get them as a side dish.’

“Darkness set in outside, and my mother’s disposition changed for the worse. Her abundance of smiles and overall beauty (she tended to glow during dinner outings, a social occasion she particularly enjoyed) was interrupted by a type of nausea whereby she now looked down and side to side, wary that someone was watching her. Perhaps she had understood the meaning behind those dim empty streets, for I could tell that she was getting nervous about walking down them even though we lived only two blocks away.

“‘Let’s get the check,’ my mother said. ‘Karen, go home before it gets dark. It’s quiet outside, and there could be crime.’

“My mother had lived through several military coups in Turkey and was accustomed to evening curfews during times where national security was compromised. It was as if it all came to her in a moment’s glance, the memory of those days. They had now revisited her because the picture before her was not so different. The empty streets, deserted restaurants, military patrol, it finally hit her.

“We managed to find a cab for Karen, and upon entering my apartment I passed out from a medley of exhaustion, gin, and vodka. While I lost myself in that welcoming slumber, my mother checked her e-mail. She was uneasy herself and couldn’t get to sleep. After an hour of reading articles on CNN, she got into bed next to me (my tiny studio could only accommodate a sleeper sofa) and shut the light. At the same time as she retired, I felt a surge of adrenaline shoot through from the bottom of my spine to the top of my head that was strong enough to jolt me from my sleep.

“‘I’m not well,’ I said.

“‘What’s wrong?’

“‘I can feel everything,’ I said.

“‘Like a panic attack?’

“‘No,’ I said.

“‘Then what?’

“‘I can feel every organ in my body,’ I said. ‘And can your heart just randomly stop? I feel like it’s beating so precisely.’

“‘Are you worried about your heart?’

“‘No, it’s not just my heart,’ I said. ‘It’s my lungs, my liver, I can even feel my stomach digesting, or maybe it’s my intestines.’

“My mother looked overwhelmed.

“‘I can feel the neurons firing in my brain. What must it be like to feel your brain? Can you feel your brain?’ I said.

“‘Yelda, you can’t feel your brain.’

“‘I don’t know what people say, but I am telling you right now that I can feel my brain,’ I said.

“‘Should we go to the hospital?’

“I felt like my brain was wobbling around in my skull, the mushy mess that was trying to make sense of these experiences, trying to register what had happened. I had to put two hands on my head to make sure it was still there, that I had not lost my mind. I could feel the blood entering and leaving my heart and entering my liver and exiting back to the surface of my skin in a rabid pace. My pulse, I couldn’t slow it down.

“‘Just take a couple of deep, long breaths, and try to just relax,’ my mother said. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?’

“‘No, I get these sudden feelings,’ I said. ‘And then they pass.’

“I pushed the lamp switch off, rested my head against the pillow, and drifted, until something, until a jarring noise interrupted me.

“‘Did you hear that?’ I said.

“‘No, what did you hear?’

“‘I think I heard a sound. It was a weird noise, like an engine.’

“Was it a plane on its way?

“‘No, I didn’t hear it,’ my mother said. ‘I don’t feel good.’

“‘I don’t either.’

“‘When you don’t feel good, you look for solutions, to make it better,’ she said.

“‘What do you think our solution is?’ I said.

“‘This apartment is too small, and the walls are suffocating,’ she said.

“‘What happens if there is a bomb or something nearby?’ I said. ‘How are we going to know about it? Do you have experience with those kinds of things?’

“‘You know what?’ she asked me.

“‘What?’ I said.

“‘I just want to get out of here,’ she said.

“We didn’t sleep the entire night. And in the early morning, we left the city.

They drove to her mom’s apartment in South Florida. There Yelda sat and gazed out over the ocean. Yet, even in this land of relaxation, Yelda found no respite from her waves of distress.

“News updates jolted me out of my chair in the kitchen, just as I was losing myself in the ocean’s voice. Investigators had discovered that some of the terrorists had been living in Coral Springs, less than an hour away from my mother’s apartment. Others had been trained at a flight school in Venice, another nearby city. We also learned that most of the nineteen terrorists had possibly been living in South Florida at some point during their stay in the United States. Even more dismal, the leader who had plunged the first plane into the North Tower may have lived in Hollywood.

“‘Where’s Hollywood again?’ I asked my mother.

“‘It’s about ten or fifteen minutes away,’ she said.

“‘So they’re here?’ I said. ‘Right under our nose?’

“That’s how it would happen. The moment I found myself winding down, another event or threat would surface, and I was back in that same hyper-alert, terrified state I had been in upon seeing the tower collapse.

“That night, the Rumbling was worse than it had ever been. Now that the terrorists were here, there was no safe haven. I now believed there was no such thing as safe, and it was best to stop looking for it.

“I wanted to go to the Trade Center site and help, yet this surge of energy inside of me had nowhere to go. My legs were mobilized, ready to run; my hands were ready to dig. But I couldn’t do anything; I was paralyzed in my helplessness. It was not in my head; my body physically couldn’t move. I called my mother, who came over with zealous speed.

“I began to cry hysterically, trying anything to dispel the terrifying angst that gripped my body. My thoughts began to race to the tower falling, a plane crashing into my mother’s condominium, the walls collapsing, the terrorists invading our building. I was trapped in some kind of horrific film I couldn’t get out of.

“The balcony was next to my bed, and I had a momentary impulse to slide the glass door across and jump outside. It was my only escape. Instinctually, I knew it was the only way I could never have one of these episodes again. Even as my body desired such an outcome, my mind said no, what are you thinking, this is madness. And they were fighting again, the involuntary responses of my body rushing up against the barriers of my mind.

“My mother walked to the wet bar in the living room and removed a giant bottle of gin that she had kept stocked in the liquor cabinet for years. She brought it to my room, poured a tall glass, and laid it down next to me. I could see how hard she tried to be calm, to not react to the pangs of my hysterical state. She held me in her arms and kept saying it’s ok, it’s ok, it will pass. And I kept telling her, how do you know? How are you so sure?

“And then I kept thinking, why? Why am I feeling all of this terrifying angst? I didn’t lose someone in the towers. I wasn’t trapped in one of them. I didn’t have to climb down hundreds of stairs to escape, or get caught in the dust storm. But when I saw that tower come down right before me, a part of me died. Just like the way that building collapsed, a part of me collapsed with it. And I wondered now if a part of everyone had collapsed with it, too.

“Until then I had never felt anxiety, panic, grief, or any loss of control. I had never seen a therapist, or had any mental issues, or suffered depression, or had any mental illness in my family. So why was I losing control? Why did it all fall on top of me like a ton of bricks? Why was this trauma overtaking me like a foreign being?

“The bitter taste of gin moved slowly down my throat, and though I could only drink it slowly, its effect was almost immediate. Lying in a daze, I told my mother to light a white candle, for positive energy, for hope, to clear any negativity in the air, for peace for the victims and their families. She said she didn’t have one, but she’d go buy one tomorrow. The alcohol rushed in quickly, and I was gone.

“The next morning I woke up and I couldn’t pray to God. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t pray to the same God that the terrorists did. I couldn’t say Allah, when they said Allah. I couldn’t sit up, shut my eyes, enter that solemn space in my mind, and begin talking to God by saying bis millahirahmanirahim, in the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. Because in that silence all I could see was the tower, and all I could feel were the incipient timbres of the Rumbling. My inability to pray didn’t mean that I didn’t believe that God existed. I simply felt he was not a part of my life anymore.

“Early in my life, my faith had begun with a simple belief in God. No one had told me to pray as a child, but I began doing it at a very early age. Praying was innate, instinctual, a habit that developed during the evening hours. When the house was still and the light in my room was shut off, I’d sit upright on my bed, look up, and talk to God. I always began with gratitude: Thanks for my dog Tootsie, my very own room, our house, my brother, and my parents, and then I’d pass along my list of requests. I felt the presence of God on airplanes, during takeoff, landing, and those times of intense turbulence. What other force could lift the aircraft into the air and then bring it back down? Of the many times I prayed to God as a youngster, which included these airplane trips, I was always sure to petition, God please make sure you don’t drop the plane. I also turned to him for what I called ‘grade prayers,’ God, please give me at least a B+ on my English test, I would say before sleeping. The next day he would deliver my request.

“I said a few prayers in Arabic, mainly for protection. Once, I even fasted for Ramadan as a teenager, but only for a day, not the entire month as expected. For the most part, I saw myself simply as a God believer, and my prayers reflected that. Though I began each night with a short Muslim prayer, addressing God as Allah, the rest of my words were conversational and in plain English. And it was fine, this little arrangement I had. God seemed to be ok with it, as long as I was utterly faithful in my heart and loyal.

“During my summers in Turkey, from the time I was born up until my graduating year in college, my family would stay at my grandmother’s house, right next to a mosque, and I would hear the call to prayer several times a day. Though I may not have prayed every time, including when it woke me up close to dawn, I’d still sit in a moment of silence and acknowledge the sacredness of the prayer and its purpose to connect to God. The sound, like an Arabic a capella aria, was beautifully exotic to me, and I gathered immense pleasure from listening to it in the early morning hours. It anchored me, and I felt as if I belonged somewhere else, a distant place with roots and stems and history, apart from the country I was raised in.

“As a child, I had a vivid imagination, but God was steadfast and true. Not once did my belief diminish or waiver.

“Until college. In my Near Eastern Studies history class, we were assigned to read both the pagan and Judeo-Christian bibles. It came to me that civilizations may have constructed God for their own benefit: to control their subjects, to instill fear, or to believe in a life after death. My strange new ideas were supported by other assigned readings in anthropology, such as Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which theorized that the human gene is programmed to believe in God to ensure its survival and Darwin’s Origin of Species, which suggested that our innate belief in God is a mechanism that helped us survive and evolve.

“With this over-exploration and study on the topic, I began to doubt God, my God, any God. And with that, a string of unpleasant occurrences befell me: I received back-to-back poor grades, found myself breaking up with my boyfriend and in an unending quarrel with my roommate. My life resembled the pineapple upside down cake that I often ate at the dorm cafeteria.

“A week passed and on a dismally black, rain-infested foggy day, I succumbed to the notion that like that ominous day, I too felt dark, dismal, and lost. The unfortunate events were simply a manifestation of my foolish doubts, and my over-thinking was masking a deeply held faith. God was not something you thought about and analyzed, it was something you felt. So I got down on my knees in my dorm room and asked God forgiveness for doubting him. Miraculously, the next day, things got better.

“But as the days passed after 9/11, and the events registered and processed in my mind, the thought that the perpetrators of this event did it in the name of God and received their force, strength, and direction from him, confused me. So God became complicated, and at best, I could only put him aside. I was on my own now, left in the waters of my trauma, with no guidance from a higher being. Could I kneel again, ask God forgiveness for my doubt, and restore my faith?

“It wasn’t as easy this time. Something was terribly wrong. The connection was lost, and I couldn’t physically kneel or attempt to pray that way I had several years ago. Yet, I needed spirituality, something to believe in, to help me pass the days and quash the Rumblings. I needed someone who could give me truth, wisdom, and who had undergone troubled times, but saw humanity as positive and hopeful. I needed a substitute for God.”

For Yelda, however, this substitute could not consist just of another set of beliefs, another religion, another theology. If she could no longer pray in the name of Allah, neither did she have a taste for praying in the name of Jesus, or Krishna, or Buddha.

“We were living in troubled times,” she wrote, “but so had people in history; surely books of the past offered insight on how to overcome the hardships faced by war or trauma. So while I couldn’t look into myself to find answers because I was too mixed up, and couldn’t connect to others, I naturally turned to books, specifically to one about a man’s life in the woods.

“Walden had the answers. I could feel it. Something instinctually pulled me to it. It sat on the top shelf of the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the guest room. Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s famous nineteenth century memoir of a life in nature was where I turned. Thoreau had built himself a cabin in the woods of a small Massachusetts town and lived there for over two years in solitude, to find the meaning of life. I couldn’t go to his cabin, but I could escape into his mind.

“I looked at Walden again and thought of the numerous times I had read it, nine, ten, eleven times. For me, nothing came close to it. It was my bible, my shrine, my self-help tome, all things spiritual to me. Though Thoreau lived a hundred and fifty years before me, we shared similar views on faith: a strong devotion to God, skepticism of organized religion, and a belief in spirituality through nature. This Transcendentalist philosophy supported each person to find his or her own path in life, intuitively, from the soul, independent of religious dogma. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s dear friend and father of the movement, said that if you stood in nature, you could feel God. He believed there were two places where you could feel the divine, there, and in your soul.

“My complete revelry and appreciation of nature began at an early age, when I collected Audubon encyclopedic books on trees and flowers and spent many afternoons trying to match the lush, tropical vegetation in our backyard with the photos in the guides, nearly impossible to do but for some species of birds of paradise and bougainvillea. Countless hours passed while I watched the backs of manatees surface above the canal waters that butted our property, standing in awe of their slow-moving and massive bodies. I also dragged my mother to trips down the Florida Keys, searching for sand dollars, blue starfish, and coral. But one of my favorite ways to pass the time as a child was to lean against one of our large coconut trees, and read.”

“With Walden between my hands like a book of spells, I thought of its magic, which I had seen for myself during my first visit to Walden Woods. It was in the dead of winter. I was a freshman in college, spending Christmas break with relatives in Boston. One bitterly cold afternoon, my uncle and I veered off the family itinerary and ventured by car to Concord, a town an hour away. A poet, he found my interest in Walden inspiring enough to take me there.

“After my uncle parked the car, we walked some time until we brushed up against the shore of Walden Pond. The potency of a clear sun didn’t thaw our hands and feet, but it did expose the sparkling purity of the water, water that with my bare hands I cupped to feel and smell. The shore was like a beach, the powdery sand clinging to my brown snowshoes. I eyed small ripples coming towards me with the passing breeze, and the pine trees that encircled the pond; they were alive and green. The pond’s expansive breadth impressed me, akin to a miniature version of Lake Michigan. It was probably ten or twenty degrees when we visited the pond that day. I was shivering under a pea coat, but was so transfixed by this pond—some elixir of the divine—that I stood before it for as long as I could. Thoreau said this pond was earth’s eye and that by looking into it the beholder could see his own soul.

“I dreamed only of what life would burst forth from the woods during the summer months, the sunlight breaking through the diaphanous hickories and hornbeams, the squirrels and minks scurrying about, and the glimmering warmth of the pond. I never saw this summertime vision of the woods, but with each instance that I had read the text, that feeling of the sunshine breaking through the leaves, and the sounds of bluebirds, or the purity of the pond, came back to me like a memory I had lived. Thoreau called that pond a lake of light, and with its green and blue hue, he deemed it an intermediate between earth and heaven, sky water. Walden was a safe, spiritual place; now if I could only visit it again, perhaps it could give me some great enlightenment.

“How to deal with the days ahead? Desperate for guidance, I read from the page leafs of Walden slowly, absorbing each word in its passages, a pencil and highlighter in my hand, underlining phrases I had not before, and reading closely the ones I had. I placed myself in the text, following his year, through four seasons, through the transformation of his mind and settlement in nature. Though I searched for nuggets of wisdom, I found myself spellbound by his lyrical musings, his depictions of the lake as a mystical being, his penchant for certain birds, the whip-poor-will, whose nostalgic song, as legend had it, could sense a soul departing, and the wood thrush, whose sweet voice he likened to the divine. The hickory cascading over his cabin was his pagoda and shrine, and the pines were the strings of a harp that chimed in the wind. We need the tonic of wilderness, he said.

“By nightfall I had read half of the book’s three hundred and fourteen pages.

“The next day I continued reading, but without transformation of my shaken up state. While reading I felt whole and calm, but as soon as my eyes left the page, I fell into the same pattern of stalking angst. With the last three chapters, though, a breakthrough arrived. Those chapters came together like a crashing symphony blazing messages of hope and rebirth. It all boiled down to one core principle.”

“Aristotle once said that you will never do anything in this world without courage; it is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor. Thoreau, never, to my recollection, mentioned the word courage in the pages I had read. Nevertheless, it was the word that rang in my ear as I read the last chapter. That was the theme; not nature, not God, but courage!

“It must have taken courage for Thoreau to build his cabin and to live alone in the wilderness. His mission was to discover what nature had to teach us, the meaning of life, and he would not yield until he learned this truth. He revealed it in the final chapter: “I learned this at least, by my experiment, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” To have the courage to live a life that one has dreamed of, to find the path where one belongs, that was his discovery.

“Courage, I kept thinking of that word. What is courage anyhow? Is it the mastery of fear? Is it pushing head first into something whose outcome is uncertain, not only uncertain but terrifyingly uncertain? Is it confidence? Self-empowerment? To think of the word was enough, courage. And when I said it, a swell erupted in my diaphragm, and a confidence to move forward without thinking of the consequences. I kept saying the word and instantly, I felt better.

“I was thinking that a book on nature and spirituality would provide me safety; that nature itself would provide me with a retreat, but instead, it emboldened me. It mobilized me to take action and not remain crippled by my fear of the Rumblings, possible new attacks, or death. What I needed wasn’t a safe place, but courage!

“But what of God? He was still nonexistent. Walden empowered me to be strong and fight the Rumbling forces inside of me. But Thoreau’s words didn’t bring me any closer to God. For now, he would be absent. Regardless, my newfound courage made me begin to question everything. What would happen to the city? Could I have my old life back? Was I on the right path? Was law really my passion? How could I live again in that tiny windowless studio? And could I return back to the site every single day? My law school was seven short blocks away from the embers still burning.

“Even emboldened with Walden, I felt doubts intruding and that things could get worse. It began back in New York, in my Constitutional Law class. The professor stood before the podium, relaxed and calm as normal, he was a chilled-out fellow, and instead of beginning his lecture on the assigned reading, he began talking about 9/11.

“‘Given everything that’s going on now, we should talk a little about the Patriot Act. Is it overreaching? How about Muslims in concentration camps? Does it allow for us to take away their liberties for a national threat? Though we haven’t studied it yet, I’m sure you are aware of the Supreme Court case Korematsu versus the United States. This is the Japanese internment case. The court upheld the government’s actions when they rounded up Japanese citizens and placed them in camps. It has not been overturned. Some say this case gives us precedent to put Muslims in concentration camps. This is a challenge we face. What do we think about this?’

“I chose not to react, or even listen to any comments. I convinced myself that I was hearing it all wrong, and then I engaged in the psychological phenomenon called blocking it out. Plus, the professor’s tone was theoretical; I didn’t buy that he really believed this was possible. He was simply trying to tie the subject to modern times. But then I heard it again. This time, it was not in Constitutional Law, but in my Law and Literature class. Law and Literature! In this class, the professor made it sound far more personal and real.

“We read classics like To Kill A Mockingbird and Herman Melville’s Billy Boy; Julius Caesar was also on the reading list. Today’s class: Bleak House, a Dickens epic about the failure of the English justice system.

“The teacher was an odd fellow, short and stout with a full head of white hair, a large head for his body, and cloudy, outdated bifocal glasses. His steps were deliberate, like a toy soldier as he paced back and forth the room collecting his thoughts before opening his mouth to speak. In his late fifties, he looked like he watched an inordinate amount of PBS specials and found security in a life of reading. When he arrived at our classroom, it was often with a library tote filled with numerous books.

“Today, the instructor seemed angry. His gaze was too penetrating, his mouth gathered together and tense, his already ruddy appearance increasing in pigment as he walked back and forth across the room with his hand on his chin. The restlessness of his thoughts appeared evident to the class, as they followed his movements. He steps slowed down until he finally came to a halt to lecture.

“‘In Bleak House we are confronted with the inefficiency of the Court of Chancery, of a justice system that doesn’t work,’ he said. ‘That of course was a court in the nineteenth century. But what about our present day legal system? With the Patriot Act, the government has much more of a reach in our lives. What would happen, for instance, if we put all Muslims in concentration camps?’

“Did he just say Muslims in concentration camps? Nothing like that could happen as there are way too many Muslims in this country. How dare he say something like that!

“‘But what kind of legal reform could we pass to prevent such an occurrence? To abolish the Patriot Act? Or should we question our justice system for even passing it?’

“How are Muslim students in the room supposed to feel? Is he prejudiced towards Muslims?

“Should I report him?

“I looked around the room and noticed that I was the only one shocked by his discourse. Students were seated, all facing him while taking notes or focusing their gazes elsewhere, with Bleak House on their desks. It was any other day for them. His words caused no chill in the room, but there was a chill up my spine.

“The extrasensory hearing that had been latent for some time returned and the sounds of the cars moving in the street began to bother me. My palms became clammy; I found it hard to breathe or to talk. I wanted to ask my classmate Melissa what she thought, but I couldn’t enunciate any words. She appeared undisturbed by his lecture, and once again, I felt alone in this process—in this new reality of bombs and attacks and concentration camps. A caffeine-type jolt overtook my chest, and then a restless humming, and with hesitation, I understood that the Rumblings had returned.

“Shocked and enraged, I left the class. And I forgot Bleak House on my desk. The fear of not only a terrorist attack, but the fate of Muslims if such an event happened again, overtook me as if the towers had fallen the day before. As Muslims or those of Arab or Middle Eastern descent, would we be both the victims of the terrorists and the targets of the government?

“Time had passed since the towers fell and the country was secure, but this highly educated professional was discussing the possibility of the government taking the rights away from its citizens? How could he even entertain such a possibility, even if he himself was against such a notion? These were not light terms. Muslims, as citizens of our country, were entitled to the same freedom as everyone else. This right was legally given in our Constitution and rightfully declared in our Declaration of Independence. Where had we come to? The entire notion of the free world as I knew it was slipping away. I had never felt foreign in my own country until now.

“Still, I loved my country. I felt so proud to be a citizen of the United States, to carry an American passport. And as a lawyer, I would be a defender of its laws, that’s how much I believed in it. The government had protected us from further attacks, and for that I championed them, but at what cost to our liberty and our citizens? Still, I believed in our nation, that it was good; there was nowhere else I wanted to be, so I hoped for better, brighter days and for these unsettling ones to pass.

“In the end, I didn’t report the professor, but I also didn’t return to the next session of class. I let it pass. The Rumbling passed, too, in the weeks that followed. But the thought of Muslims in concentration camps, of myself in one, never left me.

“It was now the midst of autumn, in late October. While finishing up law school, I was interviewing for a job in a prestigious law film. The trees in Central Park began to transform into balls of yellow fire. Because I lived right on the park, I ran every day in the fall, and the days after 9/11 were no exception. The runs were my only way to manage the stress and to keep at bay the haunting possibilities of our times. Nature, as it did during the days after the attacks, and in the pages of Walden, still gave me comfort, and for that reason, I had an almost primitive drive to immerse myself in it.

“I began on the south loop of the park, and as I ran towards the Bethesda Fountain, I found myself in a pleasant groove, only aware of the music in my ears. With each step, I fell further into syncopation with the beat and timbres of the music, until I slipped into it, my body taking over. I knew the way. I had run it so many times. As the route climbed up, I accelerated and thrust myself forward, swinging my arms harder. My heartbeat revved up, the heat from perspiration pressed up against my back and chest. The run was smooth and good now, easier, as I had broken into it. I was a third of the way through the loop, when in my periphery I caught a flash of yellow. I stopped. I never stopped when I ran.

“I was marveled. All of the yellow leaves of the trees before me had fallen in what seemed like a single day, and those leaves had shed so neatly along a concrete path. A path of leaves appeared, akin to a blaze of light. The concrete road had transformed into a golden path. So many leaves had fallen, from maples, oaks, and elms. The path was just off my jogging loop, to the left of it. It wasn’t one of those major attractions of the park like the Mall, the canopied row of trees displaying statues of famous authors beneath them. It was a lonely, quiet path. A little path, opened up to me, alone. But it emerged with such splendor and hope.

“I could feel the blood pumping through my heart hard, all my senses alert, both from the sensation of moving my body and brashly pausing, and the stunning, almost mystic vision before me. The leaves had ripened and fallen like fruit off a tree. It was an immense harvest of canary yellow, all the warmth, energy, and light of the spring and summer seasons absorbed by these noble leaves. Suddenly I felt like I was no longer trapped in my bare existence, that a secret world had opened up like a sprouting beanstalk in a children’s fairy tale, or a door opening up to a faraway place among wood nymphs, fauns, and elves. I had not seen magic for so long.

“I realized that I was in the church of nature, these trees its preacher, this path its revelation.

“What the revelation was, I was not entirely sure, or not yet conscious, though I knew it existed, that nature spoke to me, to my subconscious mind. Perhaps it was a message of awakened dissatisfaction, an indication that I was not living truthfully.

“I walked slowly along the path, which was elevated, moved up along a hill before it curved outward, to where I didn’t know. And I was curious to what lay beyond. The path was so strong with all of these leaves below my feet. I followed it because I felt it would take me somewhere new. Moving along this path of leaves, I thought about my own path. Where was I headed? Since the attacks, the trauma seemed like a catalyst that had brought to surface what lay buried deep down, sublimated desires and convictions, as well as our new reality. We could have died, but we are alive. We could die tomorrow. Nobody really knew what the terrorist planned to do with our city. Whatever life was here, had to be lived. Whatever true path existed, had to be found. Not in ten years, not down the road, but now. Whatever dreams were made had to be crystallized. Thoreau had said himself, ‘Nature is not indifferent to us which way we walk, that there is a right way.’

“I stepped towards a tall maple tree, my feet cushioned by the grass below, the wind pushing me along, until I found myself face to face with its elongated trunk. I pressed my cheek against its rugged bark and wrapped around my arms around its body. I turned my head up towards the sky, the tree’s parasol of leaves and height showcasing its wisdom and stature. I closed my eyes, holding it steady, and it gave me a momentary sense of peace. I let go and began running again, along the path, until it led me back to the jogging loop. The leaves crinkled below me, and in the final moments of that run, I thought of more about my life.

“Materially, I was so close to getting everything I had wanted: an education, a job. But in my gut, none of it felt right. The path was etched for me, and I was following it steadfastly. What would happen, though, if the path was wrong?”

By November of 2003, two years after the attacks, Yelda had graduated from law school and was working as a corporate lawyer at a large firm. She found, however, that the law firm environment was one deprived of spirituality and humanity. It was not long before she became disillusioned, and with no faith in God. She turned once again to Thoreau.

“That night, I did something that I had not done in some time; I began reading Walden again, from the very first page.

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any other neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond…

“Deeply engrossed, I savored every word, just as I did during the days of 9/11, searching for some guidance once again.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them…Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day…He has not time to be anything but a machine.

“‘Machine!’ I thought. I marveled at how Thoreau’s words resonated with my life. Yes, Thoreau, I’ve become a machine. He recognized the world I had entered and issued a stern warning against it. This world of meaningless overwork and labor was an anathema to a spiritual life, to any life of purpose and enjoyment.

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

“‘Did I really need those $400 Chanel sling back shoes?’ I thought.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.

“If God wasn’t there for guidance, Thoreau was, and together with his words and the spirituality of nature’s presence, there was something wholesome and meaningful that I could attach myself to. That night, Thoreau’s words planted a small seed in my mind. Did I really need all of these things? Wouldn’t it be nice to slow life down? What was the purpose of all of this?

“So I took action. I’d simplify my life. The first step: stop spending. I began saving all of my money like a miser. If I ever wanted to leave the firm, a sizeable bank account was the only way.”

It was not long after that, that Yelda came upon a yoga catalog. “The peach hue of the front page was inviting, like a sandy beach in the distance…The booklet itself emanated a calming energy, and almost involuntarily, I found myself…marching towards the catalog. I picked it up, and after looking at the name on the front, Integral Yoga Institute, I sifted through its pages until I stopped at the Meditation section, zeroing in on a particular course: Meditation I Course, 4-week immersion. Oh, immersion, I liked that sound of that, and the fact that the course wasn’t a one-time workshop.

“The practice of meditation had always intrigued me. I was drawn to the stillness of the practice. I wanted to turn my mind off. To do nothing but breathe in a lotus position. And isn’t that what people did when they were utterly lost, they began to meditate? I thought it was a way that my mind could slow down, everything could slow down and start over. Though the purpose of meditation is to connect to oneself, to access your true self, I sought it as a way to tune into my subconscious. Here, I believed the past, present and future lay together in one big blob. The subconscious was the big compass in life. Somehow, we knew what was best for us, and we were connected to everyone else, a kind of universal consciousness. But our conscious state didn’t allow access to this other realm. Meditation did.

“Classes were held on the upper floors. Rising up the narrow, carpeted stairwell, my feet felt comforted by the plush material and my mind by the silent walls, which were painted in earthy colors. With each step up I fell further into an allaying energy.

“The meditation room glowed with candles lined up against window panes. The weather outside was frigid, so stepping into this toasty room already qualified as a retreat. A mystical symbol hung on the center of the wall, a geometric drawing of circles within one another and a star in the middle. The center design was beautiful, particularly its jewel colors and how the shapes folded into one another. Surrounding it were the symbols of many known religions, the crescent and star of Islam, the David star of Judaism, the symbols of Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity, even the Native American faiths. Neatly piled in a corner was a stack of seat pillows and thickly woven blankets. I took one of each. Natural order reigned over the room, the steady flame of the candles, the pristine carpeting, the perfect circle all attendees formed while seated.

“Our instructor arrived to class in head to toe white. His pants and top were loose, and looked a bit like pajamas. I figured it was a modern monk’s outfit. He sat at the top of the circle, near the hanging symbol, pointed to it, and told us it was called a Yantra. ‘Everything comes back to the one,’ he said.

“‘With meditation, we leave consciousness and journey to the depths of our being,’ he said. ‘We transcend the mind and body to enjoy our true nature. Only when we know who we truly are, can we have peace. And only when we master the self can we know who we are. As the Bhagavad Gita says, he who is disciplined in Yoga, having abandoned the fruit of action, attains steady peace.’

“He looked down for a moment.

“‘Who here knows what this means: abandoning the fruit of action?’

“He looked straight at me.

“I had no clue.

“‘It means not becoming attached to the results of what we do, the gain or loss that we will receive. The scriptures warn us that those too attached to those results cannot enjoy what they do. When things don’t work out, they’ll be down, and when they do, they’ll get more desperate. I would recommend that you consider reading the scriptures as part of your Yoga practice.’

“Wait! The Bhagavad Gita? I didn’t know much about Hindu scriptures, but I knew that was the name of the spiritual text that Thoreau revered in Walden. So much did he hold this text as holy and great that he deemed the literature of his times trivial compared to it. Thoreau received much guidance from these scriptures, and I too was inspired to discover the wisdom that poured from his pages. One day, I would. But for now, whatever wisdom I was seeking was no longer from books. I told myself, from now on, whatever transformation awaited me, it would come from me. Books had served me in the past, but to get my life back on track I needed answers from something higher.

“Our instructor asked us to sit cross legged. Our meditation would begin shortly. He showed us breathing techniques, how to breathe from the back of the throat and how to hold the breath before exhaling; how to make it longer and deeper. I sat, and for the first several minutes I was conscious of my breath. From under my diaphragm, below my belly, I gathered air that rose all the way to my shoulders, up to the back of my throat, releasing slowly from the back of my throat though my nose. I could hear the whooshing sound of the breath as it moved its way back and forth from my throat to my belly.

“My breaths expanded, until I slipped into a space, where I didn’t know. I was fully awake, I didn’t fall asleep, but I left my body. For ten minutes, I entered a peace. I felt heat emanating from my body. I wasn’t sure if it was an out of body experience. I didn’t float above myself and observe the room from the ceiling, that would have completely freaked me out, but I felt I had traveled somewhere. It was a mystery to me what happened. Was it possible that I had entered a different dimension of consciousness? Or experienced an altered state? Or slipped into a subconscious realm?

“I was so intrigued with where I had gone that I began practicing every morning and evening, for twenty minute sessions. On a yoga mat, I sat Indian style, my hands resting on my knees. I shut my eyes, and took deep, long breaths. I gently gathered up as much air as I could, like a giant swell rising with the tide, and then exhaled slowly through my throat, taking comfort in the sound of the air as it moved like molasses through my throat. As the minutes passed, I felt a glowing energy surrounding me; I was wrapped in it. Every day it felt different, but most days it felt like a ball of warmth, and at times I could see it like a golden orb; a sun figure. An immense bliss overcame me; the positive energy of the orb overwhelmed me. I felt safe, I felt protected, I felt calm and peaceful, and most importantly, I felt assured—all the things I had wanted to feel for so long. I wondered what the presence was. And then I began to think, was it God?

“I didn’t know what God was anymore or what had happened to him, but I religiously kept my meditation ritual at dawn and dusk, and continued beyond the four weeks of the class. I didn’t have a guru, I wasn’t in an ashram, I didn’t say om, I didn’t chant, or say shanti, I just sat in my apartment, on a yoga mat, breathing deeply, following my breath for twenty minutes until I’d escape to an unknown place of stillness and peace. Slowly, the heaviness that followed me like a dense fog began to dissipate; I felt lighter. How did I recognize that this presence was God? It was by instinct, or perhaps by memory. Most importantly, I felt connected to the universe. I wasn’t living alone anymore, and having all of these things happen to me. I was a part of everyone. And everyone was a part of me.”

Yelda’s spiritually was further deepened when she traveled to Sedona with her Jewish boyfriend.

“When Native Americans spoke of Sedona, they spoke of the Good Red Road, that path of the return to the spiritual world. The Yavapai believe that the city is where their people were created. The first woman emerged from Boynton Canyon, and a spire of a female figure named Kachina soars over that area. Sedona was so sacred that the Yavapai refused to live in it. They would venture forth into its canyons only for religious and spiritual ceremonies. I had heard of the energy vortexes of Sedona, and that the city was a spiritual center, much like Stonehenge and Machu Picchu, but only when I actually visited it, did I learn that it wasn’t just the so-called New Age packers of the 80s who declared it spiritual. Hundreds of years before, the Native Americans had done so too.

“When my boyfriend Andrew and I approached the city, we were blown away. Blown away. Riding down the highway, Thunder Mountain emerged, a monolith red rock cliff so giant and expansive and bleeding in spellbinding colors of red and gold and beige, that at first, I didn’t even believe it was real. The sheer beauty of it shook me. As we approached our hotel, we noticed so many of these towering red rocks, each wholly their own, spaced apart among the evergreen ponderosa pines and cypress trees. Bell Rock, Courthouse Butte, standing tall and proud and resembling its naCathedral Rock, Sugarloaf and Coffee Pot, they all appeared like individual beings with their own personalities, except that they were massive and red and craggy. Red, the color of fire and blood, how could they not hold life force energy?

“The next morning we arrived at Airport Mesa, a large mound of mars red earth touted to be a vortex site of masculine inflow energy (sites were either masculine or feminine, masculine meaning they enhanced self confidence, taking charge, risks and decisiveness, feminine the opposite aspects such as compassion, intuitive guidance and patience; and inflow or upflow, inflow boosted introspection and settling issues of the past, and upflow allowed one to tap into the universal consciousness, or talk to God through prayer or meditation). As a masculine inflow site, Airport Mesa would foster resolving the past and stepping forward.

“We hiked up the steep trail until we hit a saddle between the hills. I kept turning my head around, desperate to spot a twisted juniper tree. I couldn’t imagine meditating or engaging in any kind of connection with the universe without first seeing one. They were the physical evidence of the vortex force. The stronger the energy, the more of an axial twist in their branches. Instead of going straight down, the lines of growth follow a slow helical spiral along the length of the branch. This spiraling effect can sometimes even bend the branch itself. But the juniper trees scattered about didn’t look twisted. In fact, many looked as normal as a tree could be. As we approached the vortex site (we knew we had arrived because there was a marker at the exact spot), I kept hoping the natural juniper phenomena would appear before me like the tree of knowledge, with a shimmery sacred luminescence of an aura around it. And then I noticed a very strange looking tree.

“It crept out of nowhere with branches curling in like tentacles. There was no trunk, and all of its roots spread themselves out above the earth like limbs. The top of its body was the only part that looked normal. It had spiny leaves, like a fir. Most grotesque were its bottom roots. They twisted on top of the earth and looked like human legs. I had never seen such a tree. It didn’t look like a tree at all, but like a creature out of some fantastical story.

“‘Did you see this?’ I said. ‘You have to agree that this is pretty spectacular. This is the closest you’re going to get to seeing proof of the vortex energy besides funnels of spinning air.’

“‘Maybe all juniper trees are twisted. That may be how they are.’

“‘Look at that tree, Andrew,’ I said. ‘Have you ever seen anything that comes close to looking like that? Trees are not meant to be that twisted up. It’s just not natural.’

“‘Nature can create some pretty funky stuff.’

“Taking our eyes off the tree, Andrew and I switched our gaze to another bold sight—this one before us in a sweeping panorama. The red rock denizens of Sedona showcased themselves, with massive sandstone buttes and steep-sided flat hills, crimson in color, but with the sun, bright orange, yellow and caramel tones melting out of the rocks. We faced the king of all of them, Thunder Mountain, its massive, craggy limestone red surface puffing out like the chest of a proud male frigate bird, vying for attention. Surrounding it were smaller inhabitants, Sugarloaf, Bear Mountain, Coffee Pot and Chimney Rock. They were alive, breathing and living, evident in their rich hematite color, and each with a golden apex, the sun hitting the rocks at its most divine point.

“The dry air of Arizona—I took it in—the balsamic notes of juniper trees, reminiscent of bitter pines. Since it was winter, the air was chilly, fifty degrees, fresh with the morning sun clear in the sky.

“Andrew and I sat on the rusty earth, at the edge of the mesa. I closed my eyes, and Andrew did the same. I was ready to feel the vortex. Would I begin vibrating? Would I sink down in to the funnel of its form, or feel the spiraling motion of energy around a center of rotation? Would I twist like the juniper trees? And what did I really want from the universe anyway?

“As these questions flew through my mind, I began to breathe deeply. I took in a bout of crisp juniper air, felt it move up my diaphragm and expand into my lungs and held it inside for as long as I could, and then exhaled slowly. Instead of keeping my hands on my knees, I moved them to each side of me, touching the sandy soil, burrowing my hands into the earth, and then resting them back on my knees. The breaths got longer and longer until after a few minutes, I began to leave the conscious realm and my surroundings into a still meditative state. Entirely relaxed and deeply rooted, my spine felt as if it reached below my buttocks, burrowing down into the soil, until it was settled like a thick, robust root of a tree. The cool, fresh air hit me together with the lingering scent of juniper. My inner self almost suspended, I had entered an altered state.

“I tried to focus on the intense energy emitted, and to absorb that energy. A universal energy pattern of an astounding magnitude lay beneath me at the vortex site, so I tried to tap into that, opening myself into it, ready for any insight that may or may not flash before me. As I sat in this quiet space, my senses sharp and ready, the scent of juniper and pines was far more palpable, the sound of the cool air decipherable, as if someone was whispering in my ear. The energy was subtle, and I felt comforting cape around me. There was no anxiety here, no worry, for I didn’t have a care in the world. So I sat there for some time, enjoying this peace until an image of the yellow path of leaves appeared, the one I had seen several weeks after 9/11. I wanted to follow it, to be wrapped in those leaves, and for them to take me to a better place. So in my mind, I followed that path like a blaze of yellow light. And it came to me. Of all the things I could ask for, I knew what it was that I wanted.

“When I opened my eyes, I felt as if I had flown away and returned. This was the moment to speak—I treated the vortex site as a portal into the connected consciousness.

“‘Place me on the right path.’

“I faced the red rocks in the distance. If I felt something during my invocation, I would have to say it was subtle and tranquil—but I would never know for sure. The stunning scenery of the red rocks and the mystical presence of the twisted juniper trees were enough of a sight to give way to an otherworldly experience. Part of the magic of the unknown is perhaps just that—it’s unknown.

“Next we drove to Boynton Canyon, tucked away in the Red Rock Secret Mountain Wilderness, a site everyone raved about. Locals said that if you couldn’t feel the vortex energy anywhere else, you could definitely feel it here.

“Our destination was Kachina Woman, a hoodoo rock spire in the shape of a woman, next to a knoll in the box canyon. The figure also marked the vortex site. Many surmised this site was the strongest since it was sacred to the Yavapai. Kamalapukwia, the first woman was created there, and from her, the Yavapai believed, all their people descended. When I looked up to Kachina, at the outset of the trail, her startling resemblance to a woman was remarkable. Her head was almost perfectly sculpted, with a hairpiece, eyes and a nose. She appeared to be watching over the area, a protector. Behind her was a sky of deep cerulean blue. The boulders stood expressive with stature, their red limestone layers showed experience, and time, and wisdom.

“Andrew was emboldened by the immensity of the long stretching canyon before us. Its fortitude impressed him, and he couldn’t wait to get to the spire. Beginning on the Boynton Canyon Trail we climbed up the loose terracotta soil, rising among purple tinged prickly pear cacti and red-barked manzanitas until we took a right on the Vista Trail. We were led to a lush chaparral of green, pines, rolling cliffs, hills, valleys and low growing shrubs. The Munds Mountain Wilderness lay before us, and beyond that, the Mogollan Rim, an escarpment, the edge of the Colorado Plateau.

“As we continued hiking up towards Kachina woman, I began to feel an enormous surge. With each step, pulses of energy emanated from the rocks below me. We nestled against a knoll, on it a marking—Vortex Site. Standing there, the positive charge of energy, the verdant vista before me, the two of us alone in the early morning solitude, I felt a sense of peace, and that peace turned into bliss, and then I began to cry. Tears were falling down my face, and I turned away from Andrew, and tried to stop them. Rummaging through my travel bag, I found a packet of tissues and wiped them away. But as soon as I’d wipe my face, a new bout of tears streamed down, and all I could think of in the silence was that someone was speaking to me. As I stood there, I felt the universe speak to me. It wasn’t something I heard in my ear, but a pulse I felt in my heart and my gut.

“‘Yelda, you’re on the right path.’

“It didn’t matter what I did, or who I married, or even if I got married. I could be at peace even if I were alone. I was at peace if I never had children. I was at peace if I had to adopt. Everything I’d been searching for was here. Stripping everything away—my relationship, my vocation, my status—beneath that was something wholly fulfilling and satisfying, and that was my self. And that was enough.”

More information on Yelda's writing can be found at the following link:

http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/3687216-yelda

a related blog post:

http://slowloveblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/belief-knowledge-and-desire.html

Life Like Water: Steve Jobs, Surfing, and the Nature of Nature

2011-12-03T22:15:00.000-08:00

Minimalism.

When I was in high school it was difficult to hold down a real job, because I was a surfer. Whenever a swell came booming down the coast, I wanted to be in the water. Yet, I needed a little money. A young and golden-limbed Goddess of the Hope Ranch surfing clan took pity on me. The Emperor of Japan had gifted her mother with a tea house or chashitsu (茶室). It had been built according to traditional methods in The Land of the Rising Sun, then disassembled, shipped across the Pacific to Hope Ranch, and reconstructed on the family estate. The young surfing Goddess arranged with her mother for me to care for this neglected incarnation of zen aesthetics -- at my leisure.

The first thing I learned is that even to enter this sacred space, I needed to bow down. The low door, the Golden-Limbed One instructed me, is to help those who enter to remember humility and respect. Once inside, a silent simplicity of bamboo basking in a sun-illumined rice paper glow brought me a sudden feeling of hushed awe: mono no aware, the Japanese would say -- a feeling of the Ah! of things.

In that silent and luminous atmosphere, peppered only sporadically by the call of a bird or the fall of a pine cone, I began to dig in under the floorboards to get at the crabgrass reaching up into that golden light. I respectfully relocated all spiders and ladybugs and other insects outdoors, along with rat droppings and cobwebs and dust. I attended to the numerous small repairs that a tea house sitting idly for years requires. I realized that the structure was so light that if an earthquake should level every other building in Santa Barbara, the little chashitsu would float feather-like over those seismic waves.

As I lay on my back in that softly radiant and empty space, I found myself basking idly in the fragrance of tatami mats and losing myself in various recumbent travels.

Mono no aware, however, expresses not only a feeling of sudden awe in the face of beauty, but the realization that beauty is ephemeral. After a few years, the kind owner of the Hope Ranch estate passed away, and the teahouse was gifted to the Santa Barbara Botanical Gardens, disassembled once again and then reassembled next to Mission Creek, where these days, after extensive renovations, kimono-clad teamasters exhibit the art of tea to appreciative observers.

Sadō 茶道 is the way of tea, the second Chinese character being the symbol for Tao, which the Japanese pronounce dō, as in jūdō, the "gentle" or "easy" way (of throwing an opponent off balance). We will hear more about Tao as this essay continues. Bowing down upon entering the tea house is only one way to show respect. Another is the kneeling position assumed througout the ceremony as well as the silent attention given to the merest essentials of stillness and movement.

The great honor of caring for the teahouse engendered my respect for Japanese culture, and after having a book published by a Japanese university press, I suddenly found myself with many Japanese friends. I found I could learn some more lessons from real Japanese people rather than just from their cultural artifacts--although the Japanese sometimes consider cultural artifacts more important that humans. The famous case is the monk who, surrounded by a wall of fire, swallowed, sword-like, a treasured Japanese painting scroll, allowing it to survive the conflagration.

Japanese, I have found, are fascinated with the United States until they actually hang out here for a while. After all, Japanese are traditionally masters of the aesthetics of the minimal: one pungent haiku can convey more poetic potency than an entire Western epic. So, to their tastes, the first thing they tend to notice is that everything in the US is too big: the country itself, the cars, the houses, and of course our anatomies. Which gets us to the second thing they tend to notice: Americans waste stuff.

At first, any Japanese guest will ever so politely intercede in what she sees as violent transgressions against her deeply ingrained zen sensibilities: (Japanese friend in polite mode: "Oh! Your way of peeling an apple is---so--um------interesting. . ."). Then she will touch my hand, take the apple gently from me, cradle it in the cup of her hand, and patiently tutor me in the art of paring it in such a way that the skin remains nothing but skin.

Observing my inability to generalize this apple lesson to the rest of my activities, her patience will gradually wear a little thinner. I will learn that one tub of water should be used to bathe more than just one body. "You are wasting water!" I am advised. I realize that my American ways are beginng to seem less "interesting." Similarly, I will be admonished to compact my trash (Japanese friend: "You are wasting space!" Me: How can I be wasting space? Space is infinite!").

Apples and space. Consider the ad for the ultra-thin Apple computer above. Anyone in advertising will tell you the Apple execs had in mind the following revolutionay (by American standards) ad campaign:

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which mimics the Chinese, Tao-inspired, one-corner style of painting:

And the VW Bug was not the only minimalist concept of the modernist era. Seeking to liberate architecture from its bulk, German architect Frei Otto studied minimal forms such as tents, tepees, yurts, sailing boats, balloons, kites, birds, plants, crabs, aircraft, seashells, spider's webs, and soap bubbles. Otto observed that given a set of fixed points, soap film will spread naturally between them to offer the minimal achievable surface area. Any child blowing bubbles can, more or less, see how this works. Another thinker inspired by this same über-light aesthetic was Bucky Fuller, who appears in seconds 21 through 23, as one of "the Crazy Ones," in the following Apple ad, featuring a Steve Jobs voiceover:

That structure you see--at first in Bucky's hands, and then surrounding him--is a geodesic dome, the geodesic being the minimal distance between two points, especially on the earth's surface, or more generally, on any sphere.

What does this minimalist design have to do with surfing and the nature of nature?

One answer lies in the way an eccentric Santa Barbara guy related to ocean waves. He didn't even like surfboards, and therefore rode one he had fashioned in his high school shop class--only very briefly. Yet, he somehow stumbled into being one of the greatest geniuses and most influential catalysts in the evolution of modern surfing -- a cult hero.

His name is George Greenough.

At first George was not really considered one of "the Crazy Ones," but was definitely a free thinker. He tended to cut his own hair by placing a bowl over his head and then just start clipping. As a teen he announced his disdain for shoes and has worn them only three times in his entire adult life. That has been pretty easy for him, because he has spent much of his life either on the beach on in the water, pioneering such things as from-the-tube photography, which most film lovers will probalby first have seen in the Peter Weir film, The Last Wave. George often crossed the Santa Barbara Channel in his 12-foot Boston Whaler, the Channel being a swath of sea that has intimidated captians of infinitely more seaworthy craft for centuries.

George has never liked surfing in crowds, and sought out the most isolated waves in the Santa Barbara wave theater, such as Santa Rosa Island's Skunk Point. On good but crowded days at Rights and Lefts, you could find George all alone, surfing a little left just down the coast a few yards from Rights and Lefts. He called it the Kiddie Pool. There, and at far more remote spots, he was pioneering manuevers on waves that other watermen could only dream of.

At first none of them really noticed. Oh, that's just George doing his thing, they would think. They were too busy surfing long boards that looked like the ones in the background of this early shot of Malibu beach, or they were attending to other beach attractions:

These cumbersome surfboards are now called "longboards," or "logs," and were heavy, unmanuverable, and impeded intimacy with the wave. At their very best, they served as platforms for graceful, statuesque poses reminiscent of classical Greek sculpture.

The son of a wealthy Santa Barbara (Montecito) family, George eschewed such surfboards, favoring his own ultra-light homemade surfing vechicles -- knee boards and air matresses -- for their ability to get him into closer, more intimate contact with the most subtle impulses of the wave, especially the tube.

In the clip below, you will see how, like other geniuses of minimalist design, George drew his inspiration from nature -- in George's instance, from the dynamics of the wave: the ever-changing play of kenetic and potential energies and g-forces. In addition, he was impressed with the abilities of high-speed fish and looked to them for design tips. You will notice that when surfing George assumes the same kneeling position tea masters assume in Japanese tea ceremonies. And George will humble his bodily position even further to get deeper inside the tube. It has to do with his intimacy with the ways of the ocean and of its waves. And like the kneeling tea master, George is equally intolerant of inessentials. He surfs with a marked trajectory towards the minimal.

So, while most surfers of George's era were busy socializing on the beach, George really set his mind on one very significant problem: how to have more fun on a wave. He thought so hard about this, that he was considered a kind of surfing contemplative and hermit.

There were countless less-significant problems that George also set his mind to. For instance, the most efficient way to provide breakfast if he was hanging out at the Hazard's shack at Rights and Lefts on the Hollister Ranch.

George would paddle out on his air matress into the still bay between Rights and Lefts and Auggies. There, in the clear water, he could spot halibut basking on the sandy bottom, and he would dangle down a baited line right in front of their mouths. Once he got a bite, he let the fish tow him until it tired, and then, there was breakfast--and lunch.

Another problem George applied himself to was yellow jackets. On hot days at the Ranch, they could get fierce and drive everyone into their cars at the Lefts and Rights beach colony.

Then George would drive up, assess the situation, take the Coke he was drinking, spill some on the sand, and leave a small pool at the container's bottom. The hornets would then dive into the syrup and leave the surfers alone.

His solution to the problem of how to have more fun on a wave was equally elegant. He figured that in order to do so, he must remain in a spot where the energy of the wave does all the work---in the tube or the curl. In order to do this, he needed to be able to apply subtle (minimal) variations to his trajectory. Therefore he needed a surfing vehicle more like a thin, flexible membrane than a stiff and bulky longboard incable of responding to such variations. To dance with the wave in its sweet spot, with minimal effort, George needed a vehicle maximally responsive to his mind and to the wave -- an interface with the same qualities that Steve Jobs sought for surfing electronic waves of data.

Now, in intuiting this need to remain in that energy vortex of the tube by applying the most minute variations to his trajectory, George was doing something universal, something that related his surfing and designs to the most universal principle in nature: the principle of least (minimal) action.

When people wear a path across a lawn because it is shorter than taking the official sidewalk, they are doing the same thing. Steve Jobs was cutting along the grain of that same principle in creating lightweight, intuitive comupting platforms and interfaces. It was the same principle that had inspired Bucky Fuller to create ultra-light and strong structures. In cities throughout the world people search for the fastest route to the workplace, the shortest way to the restroom, the least pricey airline, the most convenient parking spot. Depending on resources and personal preferences we optimize our days with regard to criteria we regard important. Cooks experiment with recipes to create the most delicious meals, politicians adjust their arguments about taxation to secure positions in the polls, and you aim to find the most comfortable position on your couch. In most cases, these are optimizations through incremental modifications and evaluation of the change, little steps of trial and learning, and eventual selection of the optimal solution.

Not only our daily lives reflect our aim to optimize under variation, but Nature itself shows the selection of optimal configurations. A soap bubble minimizes surface area. Electric currents prefer the way of least resistance, water runs downhill around obstacles in its way.

In all cases we have a system with a quantity that is optimized for one of many possible configurations, and the configuration optimal in this regard is the one realized in Nature. Optimization can mean either lowering a quantity to a minimal value, or obtaining a maximal value. That might be you slouching on the couch with your feet on the table because it’s the most comfortable way to spend your evening, or dozens of students trampling their traces in the campus lawn because it’s the fastest way to coffee.

The same idea underlies theoretical physics. For every system we want to describe we have a quantity whose value has to be optimized. The way we find the optimal configuration is to make small changes and to take the configuration that would get less optimal under any change. These small changes are called variations, are denoted with a small delta δ, and the process is called the variational principle. For the optimal configuration, the variation has to vanish.

In fact, if you look around you, you will discover that everything in nature follows the principle of minimum action, that point where other possible variations evaporate into the one that works best.

A video explains the principle:

One finds the principle of minimal action at work anywhere in nature one cares to investigate, for instance, in the structure of trees.

Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci discovered what has come to be known as Leonardo's Rule: that when a tree, which is a fractal system, branches into smaller branches, the daughter branches have a precise mathematical relationship to the mother branch from which they sprang.

For centuries scientists have wondered why.

A French physicist, Christophe Eloy, who studies aerodynamics, how air flows around objects, found that "When a mother branch branches in two daughter branches, the diameters are such that the surface areas of the two daughter branches, when they sum up, is equal to the area of the mother branch." In other words, the surface areas of the two daughter branches add up to the surface area of the mother branch.

Now, from an engineering point of view, if you want to design a tree that is best able to withstand high winds (or most efficiently distribute water to all its cells), it would branch according to Leonardo's Rule. In other words, trees have evolved so that their architecture distributes stresses, and water, uniformly. Such a structure can support the maximal load and distribute water most efficiently. For instance this design allows the tree structure to withstand the strongest wind velocities. Tree architecture withstands maximal stress by using minimal tree volume. Trees, "however," do not exist in isolation. "Tree" is only a concept. "Individual trees" form parts of complex, interdependent ecosystems. Leonardo's Rule and the principle of minimal action may thus also be extended to the structure of forest canopies and even global water flows. This is because river systems, for instance, with all their tributaries, are treelike in design (as is the blood's circulatory system).

In fact, in Chinese thought, the flow of ch'i energy and blood through the body is likened to the flow of water, which flows according to the principle of minimal action.

And the Taoists of ancient China had a name for the principle of minimal action: They called it Wu Wei.

For these Taoists, water was the perfect example of effortless, minimal action. Water always follows the path of minimal resistance as it flows around any objects it encounters. And so for the Taoists, the Tao and life in general are like water. The illumined person, the man or woman of the Tao, flows like water.

Chuang Tzu expressed it like this:

Confucius was seeing the sights at Lu-liang, where the water falls from a height of thirty fathoms and races and boils along for forty li, so swift that no fish or other water creature can swim in it. He saw a man dive into the water and, supposing that the man was in some kind of trouble and intended to end his life, he ordered his disciples to line up on the bank and pull the man out. But after the man had gone a couple of hundred paces, he came out of the water and began strolling along the base of the embankment, his hair streaming down, singing a song. Confucius ran after him and said, "At first I thought you were a ghost, but now I see you're a man. May I ask if you have some special way of staying afloat in the water?"

"I have no way. I began with what I was used to, grew up with my nature, and let things come to completion with fate. I go under with the swirls and come out with the eddies, following along the way the water goes and never thinking about myself. That's how I can stay afloat."
Confucius said, "What do you mean by saying that you began with what you were used to, grew up with your nature, and let things come to completion with fate?"
"I was born on the dry land and felt safe on the dry land - that was what I was used to. I grew up with the water and felt safe in the water - that was my nature. I don't know why I do what I do - that's fate."

The Chinese applied this waterlike flow to martial arts.

The idea is Tai Chi is to remain centered and flexible at the same time. Although one's actions may branch out from the still center, the "surface area" exposed to stillness, when in activity, should be the same as when completely still.

And to dance, among other things:

Following George Greenough's lead, surfers around the world began using lighter, shorter boards, enabling them to negotiate flows perviously considered unsurfable. George was no longer considered an eccentric hermit, one of the "Crazy Ones," but began to be appreciated as a genius who, through simplicity, opened up deeper levels of nature's simplicity.

One logical extension of George's insights: Rob Machado surfing an alaia, an ancient Hawai'ian surfboard design.

and, some modern J. Bay minimalism:

Minimalist design has changed wave-riding, and thus perceptios of the wave, forever:

As you can see in these clips, the evolution of surfing that George inspired has to do with a surfer's felt understanding of waves. This is important, because everything is made of waves. The universe is nothing but wave energy. George gave us the ability to play within wave energy more intimately. Now, physicists will tell you that when they talk about wave energy, they really do not know what wave energy is. Physicists are one tribe exploring into the nature of waves, which is the nature of nature. Surfers are another tribe. Both of these tribes have their stories about waves and what they mean. Surfers feel the same wave of energy that moves the water molecules, moving their bodies. Their stories of the nature of waves are dances.

Try to imagine that there is a very large number of real or hypothetical storytellers all telling their favourite stories about the waves of the universe. They may be in this universe -- past, present or future -- or perhaps they are somewhere else, they may be very different from storytellers as we know them. It does not really matter. Some storytellers will be telling the same stories as others, perhaps with different details, or they may be telling stories that start the same but end differently. There are so many possible storytellers in our imagination that this is not really a coincidence. Some will tell stories that are sequels or prequels of others. Sometimes one story will seem to be the story of what is going on next door to the location of another. Many of the stories will be very imaginative when compared to our limited experience. They may even make little sense to us, but somewhere in the whole collection, any story possible is being told.

And all these stories can be broken down into components such as chapters, sentences and words, or songs, or chants, or even tones, or just sound waves. Those elements might fit together in infinite other ways. So the stories fit together to create whole universes like random jigsaws.

To understand waves you must imagine that the universe is built this way. There are many possible stories and where stories fit together in a self-consistent way they combine to form many different universes. Each of us has a life that is a story somewhere in these universes. We should not expect our future to be completely determined because what we have experienced up to now could fit into many stories with different endings. Even our pasts, and events happening elsewhere in our present, may not be fully determined, yet we are guaranteed a consistent story in the end.

Again, a story is a cultural thing. Different tribes have different stories. In the end, the nature of waves remains mysterious. We do not yet know the full grammar, vocabulary, and physics of waves.

But we can feel waves moving our bodies, and we can dance endlessly to the pulses of that mysterious energy, and in so doing, feel it resonating in waves of sonorous silence within the aether of the heart.

Chaos and Creativity at Esalen

2011-10-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

(Below you will find some thoughts of John Heider, one of the keenest observers of the human poetntial experiments at the fledgling Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. These words form Chapter One of an unpublished manuscript, The Human Potential Papers. ~ J. Powell)

Chaos and Creativity at Esalen Institute

by John Heider

A Little Prelude

Some Music To Read By

Note: In 1967 - the Summer of Love - my wife, Anne Heider, and I drove our BMW motorcycle from New York to California by way of Mexico City. In Los Angeles, we met Ed Maupin who had also written his Ph.D. thesis on meditation. He invited us to visit his home: Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. Such an amazing place! I felt as if I'd come home.

I stayed at Esalen1967-1971. I wrote "Chaos and Creativity" a year and more after I arrived. At that time, I still had one foot firmly planted in academia and expected to become a professor one day.

In this paper, I tried to explain to myself and to others what Esalen meant to me and why I believed Esalen was important.

Chaos and Creativity at Esalen Institute

1968

When I was at the university, my advisors told me to work hard, research my concepts, and run meticulous experiments. I did this, investing months immersed in details. I worried about the perfection of my product. Yet no matter what I produced, someone wiser than myself asked the inevitable "couple of questions." I lived in the battlefield of scholastic skepticism, defending my ideas as if they were my children.

I earned my degree. I had done a professional job. I knew a great deal about the effects of meditation on college sophomores' performance with inkblot tests. Unfortunately, I lost my enthusiasm for my own practice of meditation. And I lost my feeling of adventure in exploring the psychological world. I had traded excitement for professionalism and felt that sadness that comes when adult responsibility drives out the child's sense of play.

By a fortuitous route, I then came to Esalen Institute, in Big Sur California.

At Esalen I was told, "Do your thing and flourish." As a grown-up scientist, this new set of ground rules shocked and thrilled me. It was as if I were five, and the neighbor girl said, all on her own, "Let's play doctor." People at the Institute weren't doing research; they were playing, and no adults supervised.

Those who did meditation meditated. Those who did Yoga did Yoga. Some played with small groups, encounter groups. And some others mixed all three. A meditator might suddenly decide that if a half hour of meditation felt so good, why not try it all night; or better still, why not go off into the woods to fast and pray in silence. And so he would.

No one suggested the possibility that going off into the woods without food or companions might be dangerous. No one cited John Lilly or Jesus Christ on the possibility of psychotic experience. No one asked about measurements or control conditions. The only attitude was: do your thing and flourish. And when the adventurer returned a week later, many people commented on the clarity of his eyes and listened while he told about the hallucinations he had and the myriad somatic symptoms; and when he said that on the fifth day he could speak with animals, no one asked "a couple of questions." It seemed thrilling, but unsystematic and vaguely immoral.

"Research" at Esalen, I learned, was quite a simple matter. If you have an idea, do it. I became very excited by what could be learned about psychology by simply trying things out. Still, I was concerned. I believed that, in some sense, no discovery, however fascinating or unusual, was real unless it had been adequately researched and presented to the scientific community by publication in a journal.

I went to Dr. William Schutz, director of the Resident Program, and suggested that we think of some serious research. He was quite firm. He said that trying to research what was happening at Esalen would stifle what was happening. He called research premature and referred to Heisenberg's Principle.

Certainly I didn't want to kill the goose that laid so many golden eggs, just for the pleasure of dissecting her reproductive system. So I gave up reading and writing, and I placed in abeyance my need to understand and systematize everything even before I looked at it. With a relaxed sigh, I settled in and became a participant in and contributor to the creative chaos.

My surrender was timely. To have attempted to research any single thing would have insulated me from the profusion of inputs. Staff, guests, seminar leaders, visitors, a continual influx and churning of new experience -- my memories are of being bombarded, of being stripped of the protection of books, of day after day doing, doing:

Moving meditation, sitting meditation, sensory awakening, theater games, heat therapy, Zen Buddhist meditation, massage (what is the effect of massage on one's ability to relate in small group situations?), heat-cold alternations, heat-cold alternations combined with hyperventilation, fantasy trips, fantasy trips following massage, fantasy trips following heat-cold alternations when you have been fasting, extended silence, trance states, group hypnosis, confessional games, social nudity, induced emotional outbursts, meditations on Sufi stories, re-birth rituals, Tom Jones dinners, handwriting analysis, body realignment through deep massage, diagnosis by clairvoyance, seeing the human aura, reading the Tarot, casting the I-Ching, sexual enrichment, manual labor, nursing bottles for adults, the experience of falling, grown-ups playing doctor, learning to wrestle, dancing, Gestalt dream work, Tai Chi Chuan, inhaling CO2, children seeing babies being born, death rituals, breathing exercises, group chanting, and myriad combinations, permutations, trials, and errors.

The distinguished guests who came to talk and do their things: Abraham Maslow, George Harrison, Carl Rogers, B.B. Skinner, Buckminster Fuller, Ravi Shankar, John Lilly, George Leonard, Ashley Montague, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Joan Baez, Mary Whitehouse, Joseph Campbell, Lama Govinda.

And the less respectable, but no less fascinating: the Town Fool of Vancouver, the King of Elves, the lady who showed us how to stroke auras, the mediums and clairvoyants, the ecstatics and ministers of strange cults, the mountain gypsies with their soul-shaking music rituals, the artists and hermits, the gold miner from Willow Creek, the expert on natural psychedelics, the self-taught, the explorers, the people not usually heard in the University but so often welcomed at Esalen.

And the staff: The dishwasher who can read your palm; the group leader who was a chicken farmer in India where he studied magic rather than going to college; the baker who had been an addict, a huckster, a circus fire-eater, and, coming to Esalen, became a teacher of small-group process; the motel manager who is a skilled midwife and teaches fathers to deliver their own babies; the Mount Holyoke graduate who came here and invented and taught new forms of massage; the drop-out psychophysiologist, now a profound Yogi: from farms, from the streets, from the wilderness, from jails, from machine shops, and from universities, everyone a teacher, everyone a student, the barriers of formal education dissolved, each doing his own thing and flourishing and adding to the chaos.

At the University, all my professors were cut from the same piece of cloth. So were my fellow students. We had all survived the rigors of academia and professional training. Despite minor differences in origins and upbringing, for the most part we had read the same books, seen the same movies, traveled to Europe, and used Crest.

Coming to Esalen, I came to a foreign country. I accepted as a teacher a bearded gypsy who played drums and ate fire, who had gained his considerable wisdom without ever reading Goethe but as a wanderer in carnivals, jails, and mental institutions. I experienced the same exhilaration and exhaustion as I had when, at age eighteen, I lived in Germany, immersed for months in a foreign language and culture.

Living here, I sit at the crossroads of the human potential movement. For following the 'crossroads theory of culture,' Esalen may be viewed as a busy marketplace or harbor. Here come caravans and ships from all parts of the humanistic world, spreading out their wares and telling of their explorations. A visitor, on any given day, if he cares for the unfamiliar, becomes bedazzled by the color, variety, and chaos of the market. Inevitably, one man's known world is another's terra incognita, if they came by different paths. We are in Singapore; the professor, the pirate, and the magician meet and swap tales. But in another country, at home, none would speak to the others.

To assimilate this cacophony of experience, I found old tricks useless. Taking notes was useless. There was everything and nothing to remember. I was offered no system to guide me, no books to refresh my recollection. I had nothing to analyze. I could only trust my body, my feelings, and prior experience. Doubtless I accepted many false things and enjoyed many illusions.

I learned new principles of learning. I learned the principle of taking another person's trip. For instance, if someone comes to the Institute and says I'll feel thus-and-so if I beat on a mattress and shout, "No, no NO ......," I need not invest energy in answering all possible questions about this procedure. Simply do it. Take his trip. If he is wrong, it won't work.

I beat the mattress and shout. I see others do the same. In a few minutes, I have had an unforgettable experience. I am the experimenter; I am the subject of the experiment. I know immediately whether or not I want to play that game anymore. If I do, I am free to do so; If I don't, I don't have to. I can forget about "NO" and take another person's trip.

And I learned that it is possible and rewarding to go for days and days of intense experience with neither time nor energy to formulate or discuss. I learned to let experience float through me. I lost the need to grab and clutch at memorable highlights; there would be another in the next moment. And by some magical process, by not trying to remember details, memory of the larger patterns became automatic.

And I learned the basis of experiential epistemology: if I don't look, I can't see; if I can't see, I can't tell what's happening; if I can't tell what's happening, I can't act appropriately. So I learned to observe process with some of the skill of the 19th century naturalist.

Once I possessed the rudiments of learning without books, I became more comfortable, I was as full of ideas and eager to try my wings. With so many new concepts and practices floating around, possessiveness diminished. No one here has a patent on the 'right way.' No one was the 'expert,' alone qualified to certify students. It became apparent that no one would shout sacrilege if I wanted to mix together Zen Buddhism and Scientology; no one would warn me that it wouldn't work, because frankly no one had any idea of what would or would not work or even any idea of what "work" might mean. The absence of nay-sayers, prophets of the impossible, give extra-ordinary license to creativity.

It happens every day. One Resident hears of an exercise described by (the Guerdijeffian philosopher) Orage. That afternoon a slightly altered version tried out with the Resident's group. No pilot study is needed. The exercise may then be added immediately to the repertoire and spread through the community; it may undergo radical alteration by others' contributions; it may be summarily dropped. Anyone may play with it; anyone may forget it.

Clearly such crude and casual innovation is pre-scientific. I think of those of us who do it as the "Yankee Whittlers of the Psyche." The Yankee Whittler was the forefather of our current, sophisticated technology. He worked with pocket knife, twine, and scrap wood; proverbially he could make up just about anything, an automatic cradle rocker or a new kind of loom. His descendants, working with belts, pulleys, wheels, gears, cogs, and engines, believed that anything was possible and proved it: Bell, Edison, McCormack, Field, Ford, the Wright Brothers. When the Wrights wanted to fly, they left the bicycle shop and went to Kitty Hawk and flew. No Civil Aeronautics Board was present.

In this sense, Esalen suggests the 19th century Midwest of the psychological-religious-educational world. It enjoys sufficient proximity to traditional institutions to know, at least in outline, of important developments arising within the Establishment. But, perhaps more important, it is distant enough to enjoy freedom from ossified structures and rubrics that might otherwise dictate the limits of the possible. Metaphorically speaking, if some native genius at Esalen decided to fly, there would be no one to tell him that only birds can fly. If he could fly, if he could teach others to fly, he would gain a place in the local Smithsonian.

More specifically, no one at Esalen would seriously contend that the human aura does not exist. No one laughs at the young lady who came here hoping to learn to become a clairvoyant. No one here pretends to know the limits of the possible. The role of the skeptic, the one who invalidates the nascent strivings of another, remains limited and without honor. Today's skeptic risks being remembered as an idiot tomorrow; and tomorrow comes very soon at Esalen. This freedom, backed by the richness of new ideas flowing in, provides the backdrop for local creativity.

The most direct process for innovation is: see it, do it, change, do it again. But do it now. A more formal route exists for exploring and introducing radical or potentially damaging new practices. Such a practice is first tried on oneself, then on experienced friends, then presented to staff or Resident groups, and, only after much experience, presented to outsiders. Gestation time for such a process might last a month, three months, or a year.

For a specific example, consider privacy and the toilet. In our culture, we urinate in private, in a small room with closed door. Our cities do not have the French pissoir. We are slightly shocked to see an infant pissing on the beach.

This urinary hangup is both unnecessary and inconvenient. Many couples use the toilet in front of one another without damage. Last year, Resident couples who did this told about it in group meetings. Before long, it happened that one person simply had to go, just at a critical point in the meeting. So he simply went, leaving the door standing wide. A hush fell over the group; Steven Stroud is a prodigious producer of pee. The Residents laughed and teased, like nervous school children. But the practice became ordinary and unnoticed. The open door became routine. Mutual acceptance of one another increased, and no longer did people contain themselves through the long, exciting meetings, fearing to miss something important.

Within a few months, workshop leaders introduced the open-door concept to their groups of outsiders. They found that in five-day workshops, most participants quickly overcame shyness and regained a freedom lost since childhood. But during two-day workshops, the bathroom door remained closed. Two days seemed not long enough to integrate this new freedom, only long enough to have old values disturbed.

Obviously many Residents and visitors continue to enjoy the privacy of the toilet. But this privacy has become optional, no longer a necessity dictated by involuntary, conditioned fear of self for self.

This silly, simple example of the open-door experiment illustrates another important Esalen freedom: we can make experiments on ourselves and on one another which would not often be felt suitable fare in university or hospital.

When I think of creativity at Esalen, I sometimes think of children in the pantry, adding peanut butter to tapioca. No one reads The Joy of Cooking, and the children who have been taught to cook don't always make the best desserts by any means. The only concern is for taste. Does it work? Is it fun? Would you taste this? Nobody cares as long as the belly ache isn't too bad, and today's recipes, never written down, are forgotten by tomorrow.

For all the creative freedom and productivity, drawbacks are obvious. We enjoy few of the true pleasures of leaving records; there is no history of our pre-science. Esalen belongs to a pre-literature tradition, an oral tradition. It is tacitly assumed that everything worthwhile from the past is contained in the present. Consequently, only vestigial remnants of the games last year's Residents and staff played in their meetings remain alive in this year's group work. No effort was put into either recording our activities or communicating discoveries to the larger community.

In this way, countless passages, chapters, incidents, even versions of the Iliad were doubtlessly lost to posterity and to contemporaries who lived beyond the limited oral network.

The cost of such chaos is high. In an earlier draft of this paper, written some months ago, I described the work of Dick Gill. Dick came from Arizona. He worked here on the massage staff. He attended some body workshops. In the Esalen Style, he irreverently borrowed what he could use, discarding the rest. In a very brief period of time, he learned, practiced, then taught a radically new form of massage. He had combined some energy exercises learned from Dr. Alexander Lowen, some Taoism, and the already innovative Esalen massage. His massages were at once relaxing and electrifying; his gentle touch stroked energy areas, redistributed arousal through dead areas, and had profound effects on muscles and visceral organs deep within the body.

As I wrote in that early draft, "If Dick Gill leaves Esalen and returns to Nogales, Arizona, very likely no one will remember just what it was that he did with his hands to produce such remarkable effects; that was Dick Gill's thing."

No movies, no tapes, no written description remain. And, sure enough, Dick Gill went back to Arizona. Such is the turnover at Esalen that in another year, likely none of his students will remain. Something of his work has been incorporated into that of many other people. But the core is now gone.

Dick Gill did not speak a language intelligible to the scientific community. Doctors in my groups were fascinated by him but frankly did not believe his explanations; they knew that cosmic energy is only a metaphor. Thus there was no communication route to permit this discovery, or rediscovery, to enter the main stream of our culture. In this sense, Esalen remains largely an island, developing a very high culture but possessing neither tools nor will to disseminate its wealth.

It would surely be the end of Esalen to invite a research laboratory to move in with computers and polygraphs and conferences and site visits by funding agencies. That would kill the goose.

Instead some of us would like to establish a 'research field station' of the sort familiar to ecologists, anthropologists, and other scientists who wish to make observations without entirely disrupting the observed. We would like to communicate with more formal institutions the substance of our field notes. And we would like to be able to use here such of their equipment as would enrich our experiential work. In this way, we might further develop the process of bridge-building between our ramshackle paradise, our chaotic frontier, and the older civilization from which we spring and within which we dwell.

In the end, many of human potential experiments at Esalen did not prove very useful. The intensely confrontational encounter groups, for instance, did not endure. One of the wiser, and more abiding presences, however, was Charolette Selver, who with Charles Brooks taught Sensory Awareness, a way of respecting innate human capacities. In the above clip, filmed in Santa Barbara , she is seen teaching at the age of 101. Certainly she was one of the most fully alive persons I have ever known.

Learning Through Sensing

By Charlotte Selver

This article is based on two of the newly published tapes from Charlotte Selver's 11-14-77 class at Green Gulch Farm and 7-31-80 class on Monhegan Island.

I feel a great sense of responsibility. We are offering to you a work which in its very character embraces our possibility of coming as deep as possible into contact with what we do or who we meet. We work on being present and giving what we have. Sensory Awareness is not a technique besides other techniques. We do not teach you any special skills. For us what special skill we have isn't quite as important as how we do something. Let me give you an example: When I meet a person I can just look at her or him, but I can also see this person. That means my ability to react can be aroused by what I see or meet or do or whatever, or it can also stay sleeping and stay on the surface. Another example: Let's say a massage therapist comes to our course and she thinks: "This is now a work in which we go further into touching, and that's another kind of skill which I'm interested in." She is mistaken. Everything we do is being in touch or coming in touch, be it massage or speaking or solving a difficult problem or having a great deal of fun. The question is to which degree I am burning for something, so to say. Am I there for this very situation or person and what are the consequences of this encounter?

The more you build on repetition and division of different fields, the more you misunderstand the work which we are doing. Whatever we do embraces the whole universe, if you want so. The question is how we do it. If it is poor, it's poor. You will feel it, and it will guide you to fuller participation. Because in the moment you feel it is not quite satisfying to you, you are already on the way to more contact. So anything which you would feel is not quite it, leads you more to it. This is one of the most wonderful things which we can be grateful for. That's why I say I feel a great deal of responsibility. Sensory Awareness is not in any way that we do an exercise and are either good at it or not, but becoming conscious of our approach to the world and learning from that. It is important to understand that our sessions are not a lesson that is over when the class is over but the beginning of a process. The question is whether this process is permitted to continue. Every moment offers itself in its own way, and the question is how I answer it. In any given situation we can learn how to come more full-hearted and more open into contact, answering in the way we can already answer. If this isn't understood, the work isn't understood. It doesn't matter whether the situation is easy or difficult. Whatever is coming about needs to be met with the possibilities you have at the moment to greet it. Then you can learn. If you are not present nobody can help you. But if you feel it, then the next move would be to allow that which would make more contact possible. However, very often we are too lazy to allow that or we are too vain; or we have to do it correct in the first place, so we insist that this is right no matter what we feel. When you learn to let go of these old patterns and meet what you feel now, perfectly new, you will be grateful to feel where you hold yourself back. When you permit a pure heart and don't reproach yourself in any way, then you can learn through sensing. You will feel, "Here I am not open." And you would then allow little changes. And you would feel then, "It's still not open enough," and you would again allow a change, and then you would feel, "My, it's too open now." Then you would go a little bit back. It's a delightful way of learning.

This is not about modifying or controlling yourself. You are already beautifully created. Only you can live so that the creation which you are is unrecognizable. One doesn't know who you are, and you don't know who you are, because you are so full of habits and what other people have told you. There's a certain relationship which we have to have with our inner functioning. That of respect and that of wonder. When we are quiet enough and positive enough that we can follow these fine indications inside which lead us to more functioning, we will find out what precious abilities we have which we usually don't use. The organism has these innate possibilities of renewing relationships, of balancing out, of healing, of recreating. This is not what we do, but these are properties of the organism since birth - they are inborn, inbuilt. Only we push them down as though they don't exist. We cover them by layers of habits and ideas, and spoil these very beautiful capacities. On top of that we learn new things which drive us even further away from our nature.

You have to come into a state of curiosity and deep interest for that which gradually may emerge out of the sum of many conditionings. It needs no criticism. It needs willingness to allow changes. It needs respect for something which is your nature but which you have not yet permitted it entirely. You may then feel that you don't want to repeat what somebody else told you to be right. You will know that, "this is what I really have to say." "This is what I really have to do." "This is how I connect with another person." "This is how I approach my task."

No matter how difficult it is you can be present for something and learn from that - all day long, from morning 'til evening. Even when you go to the bathroom you can be fully present for what is happening. Each of your cells could be participating in what you happen to do or whom you happen to meet in the moment, if you really understand the organism as a living entity that is you, if you understand that every cell has mind. Every cell is sensitive. You could say you are all mind. You are all intelligent. (Well, not quite yet but maybe soon.) Even your teeth are mind. Even your rectum is mind. Everything's mind. Wouldn't that be a more animated life? Do you realize it's right next door? From one moment to the other it can happen, you can wake up more. You can allow a new connection. You can try again and again. Persistence is very important. Each time you come a little closer. What we do is not important in a way, although it is very important. But it is important that you see it as an example for everything you do. And as such it is important how you do it.

Related: The Heart of Tantra

WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THAT MOON?

2011-08-29T22:55:00.000-07:00

WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THAT MOON?

A wine bottle fell from a wagon and
broke open in a field.

That night one hundred beetles and all their cousins
Gathered
and did some serious binge drinking.

They even found some seed husks nearby
and began to play them like drums and whirl.

This made God very happy.

Then the "night candle" rose into the sky
and one drunk creature, laying down his instrument,
said to his friend ~ for no apparent
Reason,
"What should we do about that moon?"

Seems to Hafiz
Most everyone has laid aside the music
Tackling such profoundly useless
Questions.

WITH THAT MOON LANGUAGE

Admit something.
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives
With a full moon in each eye that is always saying
With that sweet moon language
What every other eye
In this world
Is dying to hear?

THE HAPPY VIRUS

I caught the happy virus last night
When I was out singing beneath the stars.

It is remarkably contagious -

So kiss me.
___

ALL THE HEMISPHERES

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadow and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new watermark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.
All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting
While stitching themselves together

Into the Great Circle inside of
You.
___

IT FELT LOVE

How
Did the rose
Ever open its heart
And give to this world
All its
Beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light
Against its
Being,

Otherwise,
We all remain
Too
Frightened.
____

THE DAY SKY

Let us be like
Two falling stars in the day sky.

Let no one know of our sublime beauty
As we hold hands with God
And burn
Into a sacred existence that defies -
That surpasses
Every description of ecstasy
And love.
___

FAITHFUL LOVER

The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,
"The sun has been my faithful lover
For millions of years.

Whenever I offer my body to him
Brilliant light pours from his heart.

Thousands then notice my happiness
And delight in pointing
Toward my beauty.

Hafiz,
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?"

And I replied,

"Dear moon,
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often
So I might instruct you
How to become
Who you
Are!"

THE SUBJECT TONIGHT IS LOVE

The subject tonight is Love
And for tomorrow night as well,
As a matter of fact
I know of no better topic
For us to discuss
Until we all
Die!

___

A SUSPENDED BLUE OCEAN

The sky
Is a suspended blue ocean.

The stars are the fish
That swim.

The planets are the white whales
I sometimes hitch a ride on,
And the sun and all light
Have forever fused themselves
Into my heart and upon
My skin.

There is only one rule
On this Wild Playground,
For every sign Hafiz has ever seen
Reads the same.

They all say,
"Have fun, my dear; my dear, have fun,
In the Beloved's Divine
Game,
O, in the Beloved's
Wonderful
Game."
___

AT THIS PARTY

I don't want to be the only one here
Telling all the secrets -
Filling up all the bowls at this party,
Taking all the laughs.

I would like you
To start putting things on the table
That can also feed the soul
The way I do.

That way
We can invite
A hell of a lot more
Friends.
___

BECOMING HUMAN

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
"His great visions of God" he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
"Are these wondrous dreams true?"

I replied, "How many goats do you have?"

He looked surprised and said,
"I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!"

And I spoke again saying,
"Yes, brother - how many do you have?"

"Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two."

"And how many wives?"

Again he looked surprised, then said,
"Four."

"How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?"

And to all he answered.
Then I said,
"You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,
More kind to every creature and plant
That you know."
___

A GREAT NEED

Out
Of a great need
We are all holding hands
And climbing.

Not loving is a letting go.

Listen,
The terrain around here
Is
Far too
Dangerous
For
That.

____

WHY ABSTAIN?

Why
Abstain from love
When like the beautiful snow goose
Someday your soul
Will leave this summer
Camp?

Why
Abstain from happiness
When like a skilled lion
Your heart is
Nearing
And
Will someday see
The divine prey is
Always
Near!

___

BUTTER IN THE SKY

Slipping
On my shoes,
Boiling water,
Toasting bread,
Buttering the sky:

That should be enough contact
With God in one day
To make anyone
Crazy.

___

AN ASTRONOMICAL QUESTION

What
Would
Happen if God leaned down

And gave you a full wet
Kiss?

Hafiz
Doesn't mind answering astronomical questions
Like that:

You would surely start
Reciting all day, inebriated,
Rogue-poems

Like
This.

___

WHY NOT BE POLITE?

Everyone
Is God speaking.
Why not be polite and
Listen to
Him?
___

FIND A BETTER JOB

Now
That
All your worry
Has proved such an
Unlucrative
Business,
Why
Not
Find a better
Job?
___

AND FOR NO REASON

And
For no reason
I start skipping like a child.

And
For no reason
I turn into a leaf
That is carried so high
I kiss the Sun's mouth
And dissolve.

And
For no reason
A thousand birds
Choose my head for a conference table,
Start passing their
Cups of wine
And their wild songbooks all around.

And
For every reason in existence
I begin to eternally,
To eternally laugh and love!

When I turn into a leaf
And start dancing,
I run to kiss our beautiful Friend
And I dissolve in the Truth
That I Am.

___

DROPPING KEYS

The small man
Builds cages for everyone
He
Knows.

While the sage,
Who has to duck his head
When the moon is low,
Keeps dropping keys all night long
For the
Beautiful
Rowdy
Prisoners.
___

ELEGANCE

It
Is not easy
To stop thinking ill
Of others.

Usually one must enter into a friendship
With a person

Who has accomplished that great feat himself.
Then

Something
Might start to rub off on you
Of that

True
Elegance.
__

IF YOU DON'T STOP THAT

I used to live in
A cramped house with confusion
And pain.

But then I met the Friend
And started getting drunk
And singing all
Night.

Confusion and Pain
Started acting nasty,
Making threats,
With talk like this,

"If you don't stop 'that' -
All that fun -

We're
Leaving."
___

DAMN THIRSTY

First
The fish needs to say,

"Something ain't right about this
Camel ride -

And I'm
Feeling so damn

Thirsty."
___

THOSE BEAUTIFUL LOVE GAMES

Young lovers wisely say,
"Let's try it from this angle,
Maybe something marvelous will happen,

Maybe three suns and two moons
Will roll out
From a hiding place in the body
Our passion has yet to ignite."

Old lovers say,
"We can do it one more time,
How about from this longitude
And latitude -
Swinging from a rope tied to the ceiling?

Maybe a part of God
Is still hiding in a corner of your heart
Our devotion has yet to reveal."

Bottom line:
Do not stop playing
These beautiful
Love
Games.
____

I WANT BOTH OF US

I want both of us
To start talking about this great love

As if you, I, and the Sun were all married
And living in a tiny room,
Helping each other to cook,
Do the wash,
Weave and sew,
Care for our beautiful
Animals.

We all leave each morning
To labor on the earth's field.

No one does not lift a great pack.

I want both of us to start singing like two
Travelling minstrels
About this extraordinary existence
We share,
As if
You, I, and God were all married
And living in
A tiny
Room.
___

LIKE PASSIONATE LIPS

There are
So many positions of
Love:

Each curve on a branch,
the thousand different ways
Your eyes can embrace us,
The infinite shapes your
Mind can draw,
The spring
Orchestra of scents,
The currents of light combusting
Like passionate lips,
The revolution of Existence's skirt
Whose folds contain other worlds,
Your every sign that falls against
His inconceivable
Omnipresent
Body.
____

IMAGINATION DOES NOT EXIST

You should come close to me tonight, wayfarer
For I will be celebrating you.

Your beauty still causes me madness,
Keeps the neighbours complaining
When I start shouting in the middle of the night
Because I can't bear all this joy.

I will be giving birth to suns.
I will be holding forests upside down
Gently shaking soft animals from trees and burrows
Into my lap.

What you conceive as imagination
Does not exist for me.

Whatever you can do in a dream
Or on your mind-canvas
My hands can pull - alive - from my coat pocket.

But let's not talk about my divine world
For what I most want to know
Tonight is:
All about
You.
____

I GOT KIN

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,
"Ahhhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and
Rolls."

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.
____

BIG TROUBLE IN THE TIKI ROOM

2011-08-14T21:32:00.000-07:00

A History in Film of a South Seas Wave of Exotica: Surfing

The trobbing of pagan drums, vodoo incantations, zebra-striped women, pagan rites glimpsed through gaps in bamboo, ports of pleasure, Taboo! Tabu! Tapu! Watusa! Babu Enlgish, Polynesian polyrhythms, Tiki bars, beachcombers, Bowanga! Bowanga !

DARK SIDE OF THE LENS from Astray Films on Vimeo.

So, what do you do after you have found the "perfect" wave and the "perfect" lifestyle?

At every global climate summit, the Pacific islanders arrive and scream their heads off that, due to the rampant consumerism of some nations, most of their atolls are destined to disappear beneath the waves.

The rest of the world, however, inhabits a reality in which The Market has become the most sacred of Beings, to be placated at all costs.

As a moral force with deep musical and mythic chops, Pacific islanders are positioned to be a significant political-moral-musical force concerned with indigenous rights and global warming. . .

KAUPAPA

After the 2004 Tsunami I started asking a lot of questions about the world, our environment and about myself. I really felt the anger and rage Tangaroa had towards mankind as we have shown no respect for the ocean and its inhabitants, and for this I feel sad and ashamed. I wanted to write a piece of music that embodied that aggression and power, something that could be felt on many levels. Tangaroa was born.

My dad, Uekaha Taane Tinorau, really brought Tangaroa alive with his haka/chant that we recorded in his lounge in Christchurch, thus becoming the first musical collaboration between father and son. Since then, Tangaroa has opened and revealed so many emotions, so many stories, so many images for me that I had to shoot a video for this powerful piece of music.

There is the story of Papatuanuku (Earth Mother) and Ranginui (sky father) being separated by Tanemahuta (god of the forest) thus throwing us into the world we now know - Te Ao Marama (world of light). The story of how moko (maori tattoo) has come to us as a gift from Tangaroa. The story of being spiritually sick and lost, asking for help and guidance, acknowledging the oppressor, facing your demons, accepting the challenge, and liberating your wairua and spirit to become a better person, a better soul.

Every one will see and take something different from Tangaroa. Some will feel empowered and inspired, some will feel frustrated and challenged, and some will feel nothing at all, and that’s ok as we are all at different parts of the journey. It is up to the viewer in how deep they would like to take it, and if you are like me, then it is all the way!

Tangaroa has become a catalyst for change within my life. It has become a tool to help unlock and understand the past present and future.

- Tiki

Ko Papatuanuku me Ranginui nga matua o te ao

I puta mai nga tamariki nga Atua o te ao

He Atua o te moana

Ko Tangaroa he Atua o te moana

Tu mai te ihi

Tu mai te wehiwehi

Tu mai te wanawana e

Hi ha aue

From the divine heartbeat of Mother Earth and the ever-elusive constant of Sky Father

all descend and all ascend the natural world

The timeless current of tranquil stillness

the harmonic music of ones infinite ocean

Resilient are the vital influences of the universe

Stand liberated by the inner radiance

Be still be silent and all shall be revealed

Na Uekaha nga kupu Maori, na Tamiaho te whakapakehatia

http://tapuatoll.blogspot.com/

Hi

Trader

Trader sailed a jeweled crown

Humanity rowed the way

Exploring to command more land

Scheming how to rule the waves.

Trader spied a virgin plain

And named it for velvet robes

Wrote home declaring,

"There's a place

Where totally folks are free

(Happily completely)

Nourishment fills the prairies and the hillsides

And animals stalk the mountains and the seaside

And fish abound the lakes and birds the skies

Signed sincerely."

Trader found the jeweled land

Was occupied before he came

By humans of a second look

Who couldn't even write their names shame

Trader said they're not as good

As folks who wear velvet robes

Wrote home again and asked, "Please help

Their breasts I see; they're not like me

Banish them from our prairies and our hillsides

Clear them from our mountains and our seaside

I want them off our lakes so please reply

Signed sincerely."

Trader he got the crown okay

Cleared humanity from his way

He civilized all he saw

Making changes every single day say

Shops sprang over the prairies and the hillsides

Then roads cut through the mountains to the seaside

The other kind fled to hide, by and by,

And so sincerely

Cried.

Making it softly

Like the evening sea, trying to be

Making it go

Creating it gently

Like a morning breeze, a life of ease

Eyes that see

Beyond tomorrow, through to the time without hours

Passing the Eden of Flowers

Reason to live.

Embracing together

Like the merging streams, crying dreams

Making it full

Begging intently

For a slight reprieve, a night of ease

Hands to touch

Beyond the sorrow, on to the force without power

Piercing the crust of the tower

Reason to live.

Hoping

Like a budding rose, humbling shows

Making it.

Struggling lonely

Like a desert field, break the seal, make it real

Ears to hear

Beyond the showers, on to the suns of tomorrows

Burning the flesh of all sorrows

Reason to live.

Reason to continue

Reason to go on

Reason to live

Reason to live

Reason to live

The Heart of Tantra

2011-07-09T23:47:00.000-07:00

"The Heart of Tantra" appeared in the January/February 2011 issue of Spirituality & Health.

PDF

"I found James Powell's piece on tantra was one of the most sensible and informative articles I've read on the subject. He did a great job of putting the tradition into a cultural and sociological perspective, and his descriptions of the difference between what is traditionally called 'right-handed' and 'left-handed' tantra were especially useful in clearing up the confusion that many people feel about the very different ways in which tantra is practiced and taught by different traditions."

~ Sally Kempton, author of Meditation for the Love of It

The Heart of Tantra

Most of us don’t realize that Tantra is rooted in a quest for justice as much as spirituality and sexuality.

by James N. Powell

When I was a young student of religions, my first Sanskrit teacher, Nandini, with her ever-mirthful air of serenity lured her entire class headlong into the tangled jungle of that daunting but beautiful tongue. She allayed our fears with her laughing eyes and the tale of a yogi of yore who, wishing to master Sanskrit, prayed so ardently to Saraswati, Goddess of Learning, that she entered his mouth, granting him—in a luminous vision—complete knowledge of the language. Thus emboldened, we felt we could tackle anything. However soft and charming Nandini seemed in every regard, we soon discovered she would adamantly refuse to accept papers on only one topic—Tantra.

That taboo sparked my curiosity, beginning a quest to discover the heart of Tantra. As I attempt now to paint in broad strokes how Tantra probably came about and the many forms it has taken since, I imagine Nandini’s eyes, and how to keep them smiling. And so I ask you to let go of anything you may know and instead to imagine Tantra as a Goddess: so obscure has been her past, so scandalous her methods, so veiled in secret whisperings her teachings, so misinterpreted her ways, and so vilified her lovers, that her nature and beauty remain as mysterious and seductive as the moon.

But at the heart of this shadowy confusion—and one reason a Hindu woman might have been hesitant to open the subject to exploration by a Western male—is that Tantra is rooted in a quest for justice as much as spirituality and sexuality. The various forms of Tantra provided a voice that spoke to the repressed energies and emotions of the women not only in ancient India’s cultural wars, but also to those of our own sphere and era, when women, the feminine, and the Earth are attempting to rise above centuries of subjugation.

Patriarchy and Its Discontents

Many of those in the West who have fawningly embraced Indian spirituality, awaken some fine morning to the realization that religion is partly an expression of social structure, and that they may have unwittingly swallowed—hook, line, and sinker—some values and assumptions of a staunchly authoritative patriarchy. In orthodox Hinduism, for example, the underdogs have long been the fairer sex. The orthodox scriptures consider a woman to be worth one-half a man; they deem women unfit to gain enlightenment and so must be ruled absolutely by their husbands. The ideal age for a wife is, in one scripture, five years; widows were long considered unclean, were not allowed to remarry, and had to shave their heads, wear white, and reside in widows’ homes. Males of the priestly Brahmin class granted themselves the privilege, in their law books, of having sex with women of any class, which would supposedly confer upon these women an unequaled blessing.

As well as gender inequality, traditional Indian culture rigorously separated sex from the ascetic spiritual quest of enlightenment. In fact, the great-grandfather of yoga, Patanjali, lists celibacy as fundamental to the ancient discipline.

Thus, in India emerged a culture of unrepressed extremes: a young raja might gather his five favorite wives about him and make love to all simultaneously, using toes, fingers, and penis, but meanwhile, deep in a forest, a strict yogi might sit in the center of five blazing fires, driving his five senses inwards, his semen drawn up like a flame of rainbow arching high over coal-dark monsoon clouds. Such a yogi is said to have udhvaretas or “upward-flowing semen.” The semen is never discharged, but is thought to be “drawn upwards,” nourishing the entire nervous and hormone systems. The powers and pleasures derived from such celibacy are thought to be enormous. So powerful does a yogi become through meditation that even the Gods become so jealous that they invariably send down heavenly nymphs to distract and seduce the yogi so that he will lose his power. There are thousands of myths in India that tell variations of this story, bespeaking of an immense cultural conflict between the values of spiritual life and those of sexual enjoyment.

The various forms of Tantra, on the other hand, are overwhelmingly pro-woman. They even declare yogic practice a waste of time in a home where women are not revered. Not only did the schools of Tantra appreciate women, but they also honored sex. They spoke not only of the enlightenment of men, but also of illumined women—not only of the enlightenment of the mind, but also of the body.

Tantra also offered a reconciliation of the two extremes: first, the generous and sensuous indulgence in erotic energy, and second, the niggardly hoarding of semen and the accumulation of spiritual power.

Of Gods and Goddesses

The mythic figure most fully embodying and transcending erotic and ascetic dualism is the God Shiva. Portrayed as an ascetic yogi, in meditation he is as immovable as a mountain. He sits amid Himalayan peaks, his body smeared with the ashes of burned corpses. His semen flows forever upwards in a pillar of fiery light extending through the entire universe. Matted dreadlocks crown his head, containing so much transmuted sexual energy that the twisting, blue waves of the Ganges River fall in cascades from them. Like Thor with his thunderbolt, Shiva’s third eye shoots flames generated by the ripe heat of his asceticism. Yet, Shiva is the sexual libertine par excellence. He marries a Goddess, called Uma or Shakti, her swelling breasts smeared with ashes from her eternal embrace with him. Although the couple lose themselves in eternal erotic play, he never emits semen.

Shakti is also worshiped in India. Whereas Shiva represents the infinite field of Pure Consciousness, Shakti is the creative field of feminine energy within every particle of existence. Shiva is inert, and Shakti is his power. She straddles Shiva in passionate abandon, moving in blissful wave vibrations that are the forms of creation.

In-ies vs. Outies

This eternal union of Shiva and Shakti provides a model for Tantric practitioners. And—to greatly oversimplify—there are basically two sects of Indian Tantra, which I will dub the In-ies (concerned more with consciousness and phonemes) and the Out-ies (concerned more with ceremonies and flesh).

The In-ies developed chaste methods of realizing the union of Shiva and Shakti within. Their goal is to unfold the infinite, eternal bliss of Pure Awareness. In-ies meditate using mystical sounds (mantras) and visualizing mystical diagrams (yantras) that form the very body of the Goddess, in order to realize transcendence. So fulfilling is their inner union of Shiva and Shakti that these adepts often disdain overt sex.

The Out-ies, also pursuing Pure Consciousness, can be found engaged in various rituals, such as making offerings to statues of the conjoined Shiva linga (phallus) and yoni (vagina). Some worship lingas of sand on the seashore, fashioned the way a child might construct a sand castle. A dead tree stump; the base of an old, broken pillar; or a pillar of ice may equally serve as an object of worship, lavished with offerings of incense, flowers, rice, light, butter, and milk.

A Ritual of Rebellion

Out-ies also engage in Tantric ritual sex, which can raise energy to its most exalted state. Both partners must be well rested and must have mastered yoga, breathing, and meditation practices. They perform the ritual in solitude, and at a propitious time, preferably on a full moon. They bathe. The female is anointed with fragrant oils. The couple sits cross-legged, one facing the other, surrounded by flowers, burning incense, a ghee lamp, and dishes of wine, meat, fish, and parched grain. Each of these edibles, as well as the ritual sex itself, is forbidden in orthodox Hinduism, so that enjoying them is an act of rebellion against the dominant culture.

While intoning the name of the Goddess, the male partner touches each part of his partner’s body, ritually transforming her into the Goddess. He touches her toes, legs, thighs, vulva, navel, heart, breasts, lips, and forehead. Next he worships her vagina with incantations and offerings of flowers and sandalwood paste. He visualizes the Goddess Shakti and the God Shiva in sexual union, surrounded by a nimbus of light. He makes an offering of flowers to them, then worships his penis with flowers and incantations while breathing rhythmically. The woman holds her hands above his head, commanding him to immerse himself in her fully. They embrace, each sitting in the Lotus Posture, the woman atop the man’s lap, with her legs around his waist. They remain motionless, allowing their energies to rise as they fall deeper and deeper into a limitless ocean of peace. In this embrace, conventional sexual stimulation and genital orgasm are transcended, and the energy that would otherwise be discharged permeates the entire subtle physiology.

The prerequisite, then, if the ritual is not going to bore both partners to death, is an intimate acquaintance with pure awareness and the subtle physiology, through meditation. Couples unfamiliar with meditation will either feel nothing or will get carried away with their habit of creating rising excitation, enter into sexual motions, and experience conventional orgasm. With deep inner awareness, however, sexual meditation leads to an ecstatic state beyond conventional, cathartic orgasm. Such couples learn to live with each other in a radiant state. They learn to conduct intense, blissful energies and to function in everyday life with these coursing through their open, energized bodies.

Both modes of Tantra, the In-ie and the Out-ie, can awaken increasingly subtle and powerful energy fields within the body. These are experienced as a luminous body, a radiant nudity shining within the nude form, much as the electromagnetic fields of the Sun and Earth indwell the physical bodies of those planets. This luminous body has numerous channels through which rivers of energy course continually. The most important of these, the sushumna or “rich in happiness” channel, runs like a gleaming thread from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Along this channel await seven energy-transforming centers commonly represented in Tantric art as lotuses.

In the lowest lotus, at the base of the spine, resides the coiled female energy, Kundalini, beautiful as a chain of lightning. Divinely quiescent, she is coiled thrice around herself and slumbers holding her tail in her mouth. Awakening, she rises, passing through each lotus, which lifts its drooping head and blooms as she awakens increasingly powerful energy fields. Unfolding on this lotus path, one’s energies transcend conventional sexual relations.

Tantra Moves West

In-ie and Out-ie forms of Tantra also evolved in the West.

During the latter decades of the last century women’s awareness and critiques of patriarchal culture culminated in increased equality for women, in broad advances in feminist thought, as well as in practical social, political, and economic achievements for many women. One of the realms women began to explore after centuries of religious, Victorian, and Puritan repression was their bodies—leading to various anatomical In-ie-isms and Out-ie-isms: Freud’s proclamations of the superiority of vaginal orgasms were tossed aside in favor of odes to the clitoral truth, only to be supplanted by an entire genre of G-spot literature, which then morphed into sexologist’s assertions that all of these sensual zones form one vast interconnected web of nerves, thus making hard-and-fast distinctions between them superfluous.

At the same time Western men and women were probing these sensual labyrinths, traditional religious churchgoing gave way to interests in spirituality and alternative approaches to Spirit not offered by the dominant faiths and forms of Christianity. Thus many Westerners found themselves at a cultural crossroads similar to the one that, long ago, had given rise to Indian Tantra. They wanted direct spiritual experience, free of patriarchy, priestly proclamations, and the social hierarchies of organized systems.

To meet sensual and spiritual needs not fulfilled by the dominant Western culture, many Tantric workshops sprang up. Like their ancient Indian counterparts, they can be very roughly divided into Outie and In-ie.

Tantra Workshops

Out-ie workshops are basically about relationships—especially sexual relationships, and could even be called sex therapy in exotic trappings. They attract such seekers as Goddess feminists, yogis and yoginis, priests and priestesses of inscrutable cults, people who describe themselves as recovering Catholics, ecstatics of every persuasion, hucksters, hedonists, couples wishing to deepen their relationships, and singles of every stripe and feather who wish to connect with someone, with Spirit, or with any of the above. They come from cities, farms, and forests, to meet together, but mostly to explore, to pray, to play with each other, and to learn to let experience float through them while probing the horizons of the possible. These predominantly Out-ie workshops create a sacred space for loving—with colors, fragrances, sounds, textures, and tastes to delight all the five senses.

Some Out-ie workshops focus on Out-ie orgasm. An Out-ie orgasm is a conventional ejaculative orgasm, with which most couples may think they are already familiar. Many couples, however, may discover in Gringo Tantra, as in any kind of sex therapy, that their conventional love lives can be vastly improved. Recently such workshops have emphasized anatomy, communication, and goal-oriented G-spot stimulation to “achieve” female ejaculation. This requires that the males develop a kind of black belt prowess in manual stimulation of the vagina. For couples who engage in these Out-ie kinds of orgasms, stimulation is king, making the quiescent, breath-abated connections with Pure Awareness enjoyed by In-ie couples as relevant as an ashtray on a motorcycle.

As in Indian Tantra, couples drawn to In-ie workshops will already be enjoying, through meditation, a profound connection with Pure Awareness. Such couples—and there are thousands in the West—have the ability to relax into a state of deep union through non-goal-oriented, heartfelt connection to Spirit. Their intimacy is not based so much on stimulation, which is largely irrelevant for them. Their bodies become musical instruments resonating to the vibrations of their embrace and to that of the cosmos. These instruments must have no dead spots to dampen the vibrations. Body blocks or tensions occlude the clarity of the vessel. Enlightened bodies are vibrant vessels, open and resonant.

Some In-ies are so profoundly introverted that they tend towards transcending sex altogether, being more interested in mystical phonemes (mantras)—which form the resonant, luminous body of the Goddess—than in human flesh. For instance, the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, a dialog between Shiva and His lover Shakti, has long enjoyed a large following in the West and offers teachings in applied linguistics, Indian style, revealing how to locate the fruit of all knowledge and relationship residing lovingly within the luminous tissues of even one phoneme. Famously translated by Paul Reps and later glossed by Osho, the scripture is now more accessible than ever in Lorin Roche’s (http://bhairavatantra.com) lovely renderings, for instance, the following sutra on the spiritual appreciation of any vowel:

Think of any vowel, they are all delicious.

Savor that sound with reverence,

attend to where it comes from within you,

and where it goes to when it fades away.

Discover what gradualness is.

Learn to relish each minute variation.

As you feel the full range of sound, layer upon layer,

the power of sound

will teach you the power of being.

**

So, what is the heart of Tantra? In the end—which is perhaps our beginnings—distinctions between man and woman, God and Goddess, In-ie and Out-ie, flesh and phoneme, vanish: the coherent brain wave patterns of the babbling infant breast-feeding while tenderly cradled by and in full-body skin-to-skin contact with the mother are the same as those of yogis and yoginis in Samadhi while meditating deeply on a mantra. In fact infants spend much of their first few months of life not only in full-body union with mommy, but babbling such sounds as Aaaaaaaaaaaah, while closing and opening their mouths. If you experiment with this yourself, you will discover that doing so produces the sound of Aum, spontaneously. Infants next explore vowel-consonant combinations, with consonants such as the labial m predominating—producing, for instance, ma, and mama. And when mother responds, infants learn to equate ma and mama with deep longings for the presence of the maternal form—in the same way that, for thousands of years, Tantric yogis and yoginis intoning their mantras have yearned for, envisioned, and merged in radiant union with the Mother Goddess.

-------------
Experiencing Tantra

For Out-ies:

For those wishing to improve their love lives and general health, one of the most important techniques is Aswini Mudra. The Sanskrit word Aswini means Horse, and this technique involves contracting the anal sphincters the same way a horse does. To perform the mudra, sit comfortably, with awareness on breathing. After a few minutes, begin contracting your anal sphincter muscle several times, without straining. Gradually, over time, you can build up to more contractions. This technique is powerful and best learned by those in good health, under the direction of a certified yoga instructor. Those with anal or genital problems should consult with a physician before taking up the practice. Some meditators will know that Aswini Mudra happens spontaneously as the energy moves through the body during meditation.

A variation involves, for women, contracting the vaginal muscles and, for men, contracting the urinary muscles at the same time one is performing Aswini Mudra. This technique is also used by Taoists, who call it the Deer Method, and the Tahitians, who call it ‘amo ‘amo, or the “wink-wink” of the vagina. (They have more recently been called “Kegels” in the West, after Dr. Arnold Kegel.) Regular practice of this exercise can prevent prolapse of the uterus, tone the pelvic floor muscles, strengthen the prostate, and help transmute sexual energy into spiritual energy, stimulating the glandular and energy centers in the body. As you practice, you may feel an inner glow that spreads from you lower spine into your heart and head. Over time, the exercise builds up mental power and inner tranquility. It can correct many sexual problems, including premature ejaculation, wet dreams, impotence, vaginal insensitivity, and so on.

For In-ies:

We can share with others only what we are living, spontaneously, within our hearts. For this reason, in Tantra we make a practice of surrendering to unbounded awareness by exploring increasingly more refined, more subtle, and more powerful textures of any one of the five senses. Because the most subtle of the senses is hearing (followed by touching), meditation on a mantra has long been an essential Tantric practice, whether we enjoy it in-and-of itself, or as preparation for ritual embracing.

Millions in the United States have long enjoyed practices such as Transcendental Meditation and others that use mantras. This daily practice of meditation locates unbounded awareness, removes stress, and cultures the nervous system so that one’s activities are spontaneously more deeply infused with the qualities of unbounded awareness. Millions of others may not meditate daily but may find themselves in spiritual gatherings where the sonic body of the Goddess is invoked through gentle, group chanting, especially of the mantra Om.

Those who have sung in a choir will know something of the merging that takes place, except that instead of singing words with meanings and with beginnings and endings, when group chanting Om, eyes closed, we begin vibrating together with others in an uninterrupted sonic body of pure, nonconceptual resonance: Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

These waves remain resonating, vibrating, wave upon wave—continuing within the space of the heart, even when the group has fallen into vibrant silence.

If the group is a couple, once they have fallen into the space of the heart, they can more fruitfully enter into a Tantric embrace.

If the chanter is an individual, he or she, having entered the silence within the heart, may naturally, in that stillness, cognize a painting, a song, or a line of verse. After all, one Sanskrit term for Poet is Vipra, a cognate of our word Vibration. The Goddess Saraswati will have entered the poet’s mouth.

James N. Powell holds MAs in Tribal Religion and in English Literature. His latest book is Slow Love: A Polynesian Pillow Book. It’s website: http://www.polynesianlove.com/

Related:

To Sleep, Perchance To Dream: Lucid Dreaming and Your Dream Lover

2011-05-06T21:19:00.000-07:00

Your nervous system has the ability to experience not only the three conventional states of consciousness--waking, dreaming, and deep sleep--but also pure awareness: an unbounded ocean of consciousness with no waves, no thoughts, no images, only infinite bliss and silence.

However, if you are like most people, you are probably living your days within the waking state of consciousness. Not knowing the supreme bliss and peace of pure awareness, your mind searches for enjoyment in the waking state and in the dream state. In this search for happiness, your mind exploits as many possibilities in the waking state as you are able, even some that may be unnatural and that may cause you some suffering. Not finding fulfillment in the waking state of awarenss, perhaps you become fascinated with the world of dreams. One can attend many workshops where you will be taught that lucid dreaming consists of being able to do whatever you want within the dream state. For instance, you might be told you can morph into a mermaid or Lady Gaga and take Robert Pattison as your lover. If a dragon chases you, you can instantly materialize a sword to sever its head or mantra to gentle it down, like a horse whisperer.

If you are able to dive deep into consciousness during meditation, however, you will begin to experience the co-existence of silent, inactive, unbounded awareness and action. Although your activities within the waking state will begin to enjoy some support ot this silence, you may find that this silence begins to be felt more profoundly during deep sleep and within the dream state. In deep sleep, you will simply begin to witness sleep from the state of pure conscioussess, which underlies waking, dreaming and deep sleep. After all, if we do not have the ability even to enjoy sleep, how can we really enjoy the waking state? Before you are able to fully enjoy the integration of profound silence in the activities of the waking state, the oceanic nature of your soul will wash up onto the shores of your dreams in the form of waves of dream activities. These waves that do no lose sight of their "oceanhood." They are intimately intertwined with bliss consciousness.

When unbounded bliss consciousness floods into dreaming, it changes the nature of dream activities. For such an individual, lucid dreaming does not necessarily consist of having the ability to assert one's will during dreaming. When the silence of your soul, your inner level of transcendental consciousness, begins creeping into dreaming, you will find yourself in dream activities that blossom into transcendence. These activities will depend on the impressions stored in your mind, your mental conditioning. If you are religious, for instance a Christian, you may find yourself face to face with Christ, his heart an orb of light into which you become absorbed, as has been the dream experience of many Christian contemplatives. If you are Hindu, you may find yourself transcending, for instance, in an embrace with Krishna.

Or you may simply find yourself in ecstasy with a Na'vi huntress.

Such lucid dreaming is not about asserting your will within the dream state, but about surrendering your will, through dream activity--such as an act of adoration or an embrace--to divine transcendence. These happen spontaneously, rather than as an act of will. Such dreaming is more real than what we think of as reality in the waking state of consciousness, because it is so intimately interfused with absolute bliss consciousness.

Once pure unbounded awareness has infused your dream world completely, the nature of desire within dreaming will change. For the unillumined soul, desires in the dream state are simply a mirror of the desires in the waking state. One dreams, but while dreaming only the gross levels of the senses are enjoyed. However, when pure awareness saturates your dreaming, your heart becomes absorbed in the bliss of pure awareness. You heart then feels no need to engage the senses on the gross levels, because compared to the subtle levels of sensory awareness, which are full of light and bliss, the gross levels of the senses are horrible.

Therefore, when your dreams become illumined by the light of your soul, you begin to fathom much more subtle levels of the senses. You can hear, touch, see, taste and smell on levels that the gross levels of the senses are incapable of. If you have a dream lover on those levels of light, that loving and that lover will partake of unbounded, divine life.

When you really fully live illumination within the dream state, then pure awareness will begin washing also into your waking state of awareness, where the same process will take place that took place within the dream state. Walking in the waking world, you will begin to appreciate each impulse of life with the most subtle, powerful and silent levels of your senses. At the same time, your heart is always bathing in the light of your soul. Thus, you will waken to the realization that both waking and dreaming are similar. Compared to the inner wakefulness of soul awareness, they are both dreamlike, insubstantial.

The light of your soul will begin to shine from within if you simply make a habit of putting your attention there. It is there. The possibility is limitless, but how much we make use of that possibility depends on us. Whatever we put our attention on grows stronger in our lives. If you make a daily habit of allowing consciousness to swim in its own unbounded nature, free of all the contents of consciousness, then consciousness will grow stronger and more vibrant in your waking, dreaming, and sleeping life. It is all a matter of where you put your attention.

The key to lucid dreaming, then, is not to attempt to develop lucid dreaming. This point becomes obvious if one reads a book by the current Dalai Lama, Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness. One finds that those with the most frequent and high-quality lucid dreaming are not those who attend lucid dreaming workshops, in other words who are concerned with dreams (the contents of consciousness), but those who devote themseles to the fundamental reality of pure consciousness itself, without contents, which underlies all dream and waking activity.

You will spend about six years of your life dreaming.

Dalai Lama

~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~ ~ * ~

Signs Out of Time: Marija Gimbutas and the Great Goddess Controversy

2011-02-12T06:42:00.000-08:00

The Language of the Goddess

A Conversation with Marija Gimbutas

by James N. Powell

Marija Gimbutas, PhD, was a professor of European Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Curator of Old World Archaeology at the UCLA Museum of Cultural History. She authored more than twenty books, including The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe and The Language of the Goddess.

I interviewed Marija Gimbutas in her home in Topanga Canyon.

In his forward to the latter work, Joseph Campbell writes:

As Jean-Francois Champollion, a century and a half ago, through his decipherment of the Rosetta Stone was able to establish a glossary of hieroglyphic signs to serve as keys to the whole great treasury of Egyptian religious thought from c. 3200 B.C. to the period of the Ptolemies, so in her assemblage, classification, and descriptive interpretation of some two thousand symbolic artifacts from the early Neolithic village sites of Europe, c. 7000 to 35000 B.C., Marija Gimbutas has been able, not only to prepare a fundamental glossary of pictorial motifs as keys to the mythology of that otherwise undocumented era, but also to establish on the basis of these interpreted signs the main lines and themes of religion in veneration, both of the universe as the living body of a Goddess-Mother Creator, and of all the living things within it as partaking of her divinity . . .

Marija Gimbutas believed she had proof of an ancient European Goddess-oriented civilization that lived in peace; in harmony with nature; and with a high degree of economic, social and sexual equality, its goddess-centered art exhibiting a striking absence of images of warfare and male domination.

This culture, she argued, was invaded by aggressive Indo-European nomads from the Russian steppes, The Kurgan or battle-axe Cultures, who worshipped a lightning God, Perun, The Striker, who brings rain to pastures and shapes the universe with His brawny arms and lightning hammer.

And how did He fashion it? He took sprawling valleys, white temples where in dark recesses the Goddess had presided for tens of millennia, whole villages, teeming celebrations, mythologies, artists rejoicing in the supple beauty of their women, dancing limbs circling the fire. . .and He decided to make them perfect.

He shattered them. With no weapons or chariots to protect themselves, they danced in abandon to His music. The throb of lutes falling to the ground, shrieks of women and children shrill as flutes, thuds of skulls against the temple floor, and always the same silent refrain: eyes, as if in worship, upturned, frozen in their final gaze.

Many contemporary feminist scholars, environmentalists, peace activists, and artists trace the source of current social problems to the spread of domination by the patriarchal Indo-European mind-set. According to them it began in the 5th millennium B.C. by destroying surrounding matriarchal Goddess-oriented civilizations and has continued unchecked in war-like waves to current times. If one looks at a linguistic map of today’s world, one will see that Indo-European languages are either primary or the official language of state of most of the globe, except Africa and China.

The domination was not merely geographical: corporate, military, and family structures were taken over by hierarchical, patriarchal, Indo-European values. Just as in the ancient battle-ax cultures of the oak forests and grassy steppes of southern Russia, contemporary males are enculturated to be living embodiments of the Lightning God: thus, we have Zeus-type bosses, generals, and fathers wishing to establish their own realm over which they are the absolute ruling divinities.

Since the popularization of Gimbutas’ work, the notion of the defeat of harmonious, egalitarian Goddess-worshiping matriarchies at the hands of warlike, Indo-Europeans is fast becoming more than scholarly speculation. It is becoming the germinal axiom of an entrenched social, intellectual, artistic and spiritual movement.

However seductive the theory, it is not without detractors. Many of Marija Gimbutas’ colleagues have disagreed with her methodology and conclusions. Furthermore, they feel compelled to make their criticisms more widely known because of the popularity of her theory. In part they fear a replay of the first wave of scholarly interest in Indo-European, Aryan origins, a major force in late 19th and early 20th century intellectual life. When this interest overflowed the realm of scholarship, where wars are carried out in footnotes, and became the subject of politics, where wars are carried out by footsoldiers, the relationship between scholarly speculation and socio-political movements suffered an embarrassing chapter. While Hitler proudly asserted the myth of Aryan racial supremacy, he overlooked the fact that in the realm of scholarship “Aryan” was not a racial, but a linguistic category. Only in the hands of Hitler could it have been distorted to fit existing prejudices and political aspirations.

Marija Gimbutas asserts that the people who inhabited Old Europe before the invasions were peaceful, egalitarian, and valued cooperation over strength. David Anthony, assistant professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y., counters that the settlements of Old Europe were fortified. That they had weapons, including some used as symbols of states. He further cites evidence of human sacrifice, hierarchy and social inequality.

Gimbutas claims to have decoded the code of symbols found in Old European sites: figurines of females are Goddesses, markings on vases and figurines are symbols of the Goddess’s regenerative power, especially her sexual organs. Gimbutas’ critics say that she sees squiggles on artifacts and then jumps to conclusions without any intervening arguments, that the figurines could just as well be dolls of women as of Goddesses. Gimbutas argues that between roughly 4000 B.C. and 3500 B.C. this matriarchal utopia was shattered by Indo-European marauders from the Russian steppes, sweeping in on horseback. J. P. Mallory, author of In Search of the Indo-Europeans, states that the Indo-Europeans may have arrived after the collapse of Old Europe rather than causing it.

Gimbutas remains undaunted by such criticisms. After all, none of her American critics have as much first-hand knowledge of European archaeology as she, and none are able to marshal the impressive linguistic, mythic and folkloric understanding she wields. She has a tendency to perceive criticisms as myopic shortcomings of the discipline of archaeology. Archaeologists are not really so interested in religion, mythology, folklore and language—and she brings all of these into play in order to interpret her findings.

Yet, yearnings for the Goddess may transcend all science. Even sacred science. In the word of an ancient Sanskrit hymn:

Alas, I know not the mantra or yantra, nor do I know the songs of praise to Thee, nor how to meditate on Thee. . . nor how to inform Thee of my distress. But this much I know, O Mother, that to take refuge in Thee is to destroy all my miseries.

Certainly the need for refuge is universal. The young Marija Gimbutas must have experienced this need intensely as she fled her native Lithuania with only her doctoral thesis in hand, having witnessed the atrocities of the Nazis and the Stalinists.

James N. Powell: One thing I have learned in talking with scholars is that the unique circumstances of their personal lives influence their scholarship.

Marija Gimbutas: [Laughter] Ah! Certainly!

James N. Powell: So, first of all, I’d like to know something of your upbringing, any possible influences or gifts it provided you with in your work. Growing up in Lithuania were you a devotee of the Black Madonna?

Marija Gimbutas: In Lithuania there were dark ones. Mary’s place in my heart was very much. Actually, my parents were not believers in going to church. When I was six, seven, eight years old I went to the church, taken by our servants. In May I would go every day to church because I liked the music and flowers. The month of May is dedicated to the Virgin Mary; and that was the most beautiful thing [glowing]. I was very excited to be in that special month. But the rest of the year not at all. Just May, because that was the Virgin Mary month, and there were all kinds of flowers and fragrances, and that, to me, was more important: Nature, the beauty of the Spring. Mary was the Spring Goddess! She serves the same function as the Goddess of regeneration, or fertility, of harvest and all that. So I had such an experience in my childhood.

The Black Madonna? It wasn’t so clear to me that they were black or not black. Usually—its interesting—the face was never white colored; it was dark. There is a connection with the Earth Mother.

James N. Powell: But of course, strictly speaking, theologically, the Virgin is not a Goddess. She is the Mother of God! [Laughter]

Marija Gimbutas: She is the Goddess. In India there is the Black Goddess.

James N. Powell: Kali!

Marija Gimbutas: Yes. Maybe she is related to this same thing. In Lithuania it is not very clear. There is no distinction between white or black. In Italy, I have collected paintings of black Madonnas. The connection is with the color of the soil, with fertility, with snakes.

James N. Powell: You’re from Lithuania. Didn’t you learn a lot of folklore from your parents in Lithuania?

Marija Gimbutas: Not so much from my parents, but from the conditions I had. You see, my parents were very busy medical doctors and scholars, and so what I had around me were servants, and that is where I went to collect folklore when I was a teenager, and later from some people who used to come to Vilnius from the provinces, you know, Southeast Lithuania, East Lithuania. It is a very ancient folklore there, so I was extremely passionate collecting folklore at that time, when I was sixteen to twenty, for four or five years.

James N. Powell: Did you have a model for the passion you felt in collecting stories? Like a nanny who told your folktales?

Marija Gimbutas: Nobody said anything. It was a spontaneous thing. I heard some folksongs and beliefs, rituals. That interested me. Why? I am asking now why? I think it was important for me to know the philosophy of peasants. That attracted me. And also in the family there was a sort of tradition. My uncle was a historian. He collected a lot of folklore. My mother did the same. Then my so-called grandfather (not my logical grandfather, but he adopted my father), he was a great collector of folklore. His collections are published and I keep them to this day, looking over certain publications about rituals, about spirits, about all sorts of things that became quite indispensable when I was writing The Language of the Goddess and other things. So that inheritance was really important.

James N. Powell: Yes, because then it enabled you to bring more of a multidisciplinary, fuller approach to archeology?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes! Just to see how people are content with having arrows and axes—I just cannot have it. I have an allergy with these things. There is so much of that. You open anything, you know, thousands of articles—the same, the same.

James N. Powell: So the role of rote archaeology is to dig a hole and describe what’s in there.

Marija Gimbutas: And you have to be very scholarly and use statistics and all that. And I did that for twenty to thirty years—just that, because I became bored. I just had to remove myself out of the conditions of what I call “the company of technicians.” And some of them are very good. I don’t belong to this group because I am not a technician [chuckles].

Archaeology is like playing the piano. You see, you have to start with something. You have to learn styles. You have to know hundreds of strata, and in Southern Europe and Eastern Europe you have to know all that in order to play. That takes a lot of time. I did that for years, for years, for years.

James N. Powell: But you felt all along the need to offer a more interpretive analysis of your findings?

Marija Gimbutas: Always, always there was that. Of course, I spent a lot of time on this Indo-European problem. It was a sort of a necessary stage, because that was known on the basis of linguistics and mythology. And then when I moved deeper, deeper, deeper, I also continued to question what mythology was telling us, or linguistics. So it became clear that Europe was not Indo-European from the beginning. The Indo-Europeans are a superstratum.

James N. Powell: So what you are doing at this time is not strict archaeology. Have you ever considered just transcending your colleagues’ criticisms by saying you’re not doing rote archaeology but religious anthropology, or even religious studies from an anthropological perspective? After all, religious scholars are encouraged to use informed imagination, informed empathy as a heuristic device.

Marija Gimbutas: Well, for me archaeology is everything together. It is not scientific materialism alone. It is also religion. It is also social structure. Everything is together. It is not only the description of objects. For you can show sculptures to some scholars and to them they will be dolls. But to me, these are not dolls, these are Goddesses. Although there are not only Goddesses represented there, there are worshippers represented also. Some figurines are votive offerings to the Deities. How can they say the Goddess does not exist if there are hundreds and hundreds of temples in Catal Huyuk alone? There are 180 walled paintings preserved. So there is an enormous richness of mythology there. In Europe there are thousands of sites. So only somebody who doesn’t know anything can say that it’s a questionable thing that the Goddess existed.

James N. Powell: I’ve read The Language of the Goddess, and I’ve also read the criticism various people have leveled against your work. It seems to me that you are looking at the whole thing more completely. Where your critics see only a squiggle on a vase, you see a snake because you perceive the interconnectedness of the symbols, their “intertextuality,” the meaning of the symbols that emerges as resonant with many interwoven cultural meanings. For you a symbol takes on meaning in light of previous occurrences or similar occurrences in language, folklore and art—as part of a variety of meanings within a symbol system—rather than just looking at it as an isolated squiggle.

Marija Gimbutas: The Language of the Goddess was begun on the basis of collecting objects from various periods and places in Europe—and just looking at the associations of symbols.

James N. Powell: You saw recurring motifs?

Marija Gimbutas: Recurring motifs, and then I became quite convinced that here it is, something! And I had no idea in the beginning that I should find it. And then this intrigued me, and then I was following more and more and more, and then having one group, then I saw there was another group, another complex of symbolic meanings, then a third one, and so, you know, it was like playing a puzzle game. Then I started to understand what I call “the language of symbolism of the Goddess.”

James N. Powell: What was the first connection you saw? Do you recall?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, birds and snakes.

James N. Powell: The Bird Goddess and the Snake Goddess?

Marija Gimbutas: Maybe this was the easiest for me to see—there were so many bird-headed figurines. I excavated many of them myself, in Macedonia, in Northern Greece, and especially when I excavated in Switzerland they absolutely dominated. And I know, myself, the snake symbolism. Lithuania has so many snakes around. My mother used to tell me about snakes, how she fed snakes with milk. And the symbolism is very strong. So my experience in my childhood had an influence to what I saw first.

Then the symbolism of death a little later on. In Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe there is very little about death. And now in Language of the Goddess there is much more. And now I see that the dominating images are regeneration. Everywhere.

James N. Powell: Yes. Because regeneration is both?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, both death and rebirth. And this is wherever you go—in the temples of the Goddess everywhere are symbols of regeneration. All the Goddesses of Malta are Goddesses of regeneration. With egg-shaped posteriors. It was clearly egg symbolism—and for so long nobody noticed [chuckles].

James N. Powell: New Age religious consciousness in the United States is synchronistic in that it blends music, “witchcraft,” American Indian shamanism, Goddess worship, East Indian spirituality, Taoism, ecological and peace awareness, feminism and many other currents into a somewhat unified, somewhat coherent worldview. This movement draws upon your scholarship to redefine how women think about themselves, how men think about women, how we think about the Earth, how we think about divinity and social justice. How do you feel, personally, about your scholarship entering the stream of a popular socio-spiritual movement?

Marija Gimbutas: This is a coincidence, first of all, it’s a coincidence. I never imagined! I never imagined that I shall have an influence. But it became very interesting to me to see that I was basing myself, you know, on totally different sources—archaeology, folklore. This American movement is based mostly on Indian mythology and other things, and I was never involved in these groups and movements. I absolutely had no time—doing my own work, excavations, writing one book after another—so I was totally isolated from that movement. Although I had heard of it, I was not active.

I am not a feminist in active form (laughs). I am a feminist, of course, from birth, because my mother was a feminist, too, She was the first woman PhD student in Switzerland, so I had this from my very early days, this freedom that I was equal. So I didn’t have to be an active feminist. People now—journalists, especially—think that I am a feminist, active all the time. This is not true. And now, after this book Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, I started to see how much influence I had.

James N. Powell: Many people take you very, very seriously.

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, artists especially. I had a really beautiful meeting with about twenty-five artists. Each of them told me how much I had influenced their work. So I was very happy. I was very happy. So then I started to realize that, indeed, I am making some influence. So it was a sort of a satisfaction that was not expected.

James N. Powell: It’s an amazing coincidence—the coming together of your scholarship and American political thought. It’s like there has always been a Bob Dylan. But at a certain time in history people needed a Bob Dylan—so there was Bob Dylan.

Marija Gimbutas: Yes. All of a sudden I started to feel that I am needed. And until ten years ago, I never had that feeling. Never. I was doing my work.

James N. Powell: Well, I needed you before that—for my Indo-European work! I made many references to you [laughs].

Marija Gimbutas: When I was writing about Indo-Europeans, for a long time I never considered them awful people. But I spent maybe fifteen years writing about weapons! I never look at these books now. I don’t even keep them here.

James N. Powell: And when you read about pre-Indo-European Old Europe you don’t see anything about weapons.

Marija Gimbutas: Nothing.

James N. Powell: You see art.

Marija Gimbutas: And that is it! When I started to study Old Europe I felt I was in my own realm now. My own interest sphere. When I was small I liked to carve objects—wooden. I probably had to be an artist, but nobody noticed that. Nobody. Nobody supported me in that. I was learning piano because it was fashionable. Everyone did. So I did, too. But I wanted to carve. I carried a knife all the time. Cut out a piece of my flesh [laughs].

James N. Powell: Was Old Europe a utopia?

Marija Gimbutas: It was reality! Well, we can call it “utopia” if we want to use the word.

James N. Powell: Was the Goddess civilization of Old Europe Dionysian in the sense of being orgiastic?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, that was still in Greek ritual and was in Old Europe. It had to be. It cannot be proven very well, but I think this is what it was. You can sense it. Because there were no patriarchal families.

James N. Powell: They obviously weren’t too concerned with population control. Were they able to lead such a carefree existence because they lived in an environment where they did not have to compete for food and land? Was the cooperative social structure to some degree a function of low population density—an absence of Malthusian constraints?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, population density was growing. About the 5th millennium it tripled or quadrupled. So at the end there is some competition and the settlements become protected by ditches.

James N. Powell: But before that?

Marija Gimbutas: Before that, no personal property. They were collective units. The religion as I imagine it included collective property. The land was around the village and everybody worked there. And the surplus was probably kept in the temples. Just like in Minoan Crete.

James N. Powell: So there we no real pressures on these villages. They didn’t have to compete with other villages for food or territory?

Marija Gimbutas: No. There was enough land for a long time, for millennia.

James N. Powell: Could that same sort of social structure exist in a more populated environment?

Marija Gimbutas: From what we know, it was functioning from the beginning of the agricultural period for at least two or three thousand years without conflict. But then it coincided with the fact that locally they had more problems. Plus the steppe people arrived at the same time, so then we have a crisis. The steppe people, the Indo-Europeans, had horses. They had weapons. And, of course, they had a different social structure. From the 6th and the 7th millennium B.C. the patriarchy had started with them in Southern Russia, so they were different socially.

James N. Powell: Nomadic people in general are less complex societies than settled agricultural societies. They have less folklore and games dealing with negotiative skills and strategy and more dealing with strength, power and bravery. You can see that in the “barbarian” invasions of China, for instance, as they penetrated south through the Great Wall.

I think one problem underlying the criticism of your work is that your work poses a threat to the whole structure of our civilization, which is based on Indo-European values.

Marija Gimbutas: With weapons, with hill forts, with war. That is a civilization? Only then we call it civilization [chuckle]—when weapons were used. But if there was a beautiful art and another type of social structure, then it was not a civilization. It was “pre-civilization” –or according to the title of one book, Before Civilization [laughs]!

James N. Powell: How about folklore, myths? In the Greek mythology and also in Indian mythology you find that the pre-Indo-European Great Goddess becomes the wife or consort of object of rape of the Indo-European Sky God. She no longer is free, self-sufficient.

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, Hera becomes wife of Zeus—and in my Lithuanian mythology the main Goddess never became the wife of the Indo-European God of the Shining Sky. They were together. Both of them—very important—both of them appeared in the most important ritual, standing, one next to the other. Both are very important. Both are rulers [chuckles].

James N. Powell: Why do you think she retained her independence in Lithuania while in Greece the Goddess was subjugated?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, that’s a good question. The God of the Shining Sky is very well-preserved in Latvian mythological songs. So this God is rather gentle. He is, even though a warrior, such a good-natured male God. He was maybe not so very strong to force the Goddess to marry him [laughs]. Well, anyway, we don’t know why it happened, but both are important.

James N. Powell: In some books, popular, unscholarly books about the Goddess, there is a dichotomy presented: Male-dominated patriarchal religion emphasizes transcendence, spirit. Goddess religion emphasizes the body, the earth, immanence.

Marija Gimbutas: Well, if we want to classify, maybe this is right. But all these Goddess images are not purely bodies. It’s not so. She is a Deity even if portrayed with breasts and buttocks. These are symbols. This art was purely symbolic, and a symbol is already an abstraction. It is not the flesh. So we shouldn’t actually classify that way. Although, Indo-European and Christian Gods are transcendent, more or less, and the Pre-Indo-European, Old European Goddesses are more earthy. That’s true, but not entirely.

James N. Powell: Is the Goddess of Old Europe androgynous?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, yes. Because she embodied in Her all powers of nature, male and female together. They were not separated. There are many sculptures in which she has a phallic head [laughs]. This is Her strength—life stimulation. The Old Europeans were really able to use the sex symbolism—phalluses and female genitals. You turn an object one way, you see female genitals. You turn it the other way, you see male genitals. They combined the sexes in one object. Quite exciting.

James N. Powell: Yes, because if you can do that within yourself, you are complete. But did the Old Europeans know about the birds and the bees? Did they know where babies come from?

Marija Gimbutas: Well, we cannot reconstruct the role of the father for a very long time. Because in religion we see that the father does not exist, actually. The mother is there because from very early times people observed birth, pregnancy. These were clear facts of life. But the role of the father was unknown. Throughout Paleolithic time, the Old Stone Age, at what time they started to understand, we cannot prove. It is difficult to pin down.

James N. Powell: So they just saw a thin waif of a girl one day walking along and then she just gets bigger and bigger, like the moon, or a pear on a fruit tree.

Marija Gimbutas: It’s like a fruit tree. This is why birth was celebrated. And as everybody knows, religion reflects social structure. So if there is a Goddess and no Father God, the social structure must be matrilineal. It’s rather clear.

James N. Powell: Is there an aspect of the Goddess that is your favorite?

Marija Gimbutas: When I traveled to India, I liked Lakshmi and Saraswati, but I really liked Kali [laughs]!

James N. Powell: Well, She is a real feminist!

Marija Gimbutas: In Lithuania we have the same Goddess—Ragana—the Seer. Very important.

James N. Powell: Why was India more successful in absorbing the Indo-European invaders and pacifying them than the Europeans?

Marija Gimbutas: Yes, the matriarchal substratum has a stronger influence in India than in many other parts. In Europe, myth is a hybridization: fifty percent patriarchal, and fifty percent Old European myth—Goddess. But in India, maybe seventy-five percent of the old Goddess religion is preserved.

James N. Powell: Yes, the Goddess religion is big in India, even today.

Marija Gimbutas: You go to India, you see Goddesses. The most exciting thing I experienced in my life was my trip to India. I loved it very much. The existence of the old religion was very exciting for me to see: the temples, thousands and thousands of Goddess sculptures, wherever you can see. Amazing.

James N. Powell: Are there places in Europe, “islands” of culture that still have remnants of the Old European civilization to a greater of lesser degree, that have remained immune to the process of Indo-Europeanization, to the patriarchy?

Marija Gimbutas: There are some. The Basques in the Pyrenees is one. Social structure is still very much matrilineal, even now. Basque religion can be reconstructed as a pure Goddess religion, where they are still worshipping the Mother Goddess.

James N. Powell: And their language is non-Indo-European.

Marija Gimbutas: Non-Indo-European. The Language is believed to be inherited even from the Upper Paleolithic. The same language without any disturbances, say some 30,000 years old. Linguists believe that this language continued for a long time the same as the religion. If we go through the folkloristic materials, we can find traces of the same religion that we find through archaeology, the Goddess religion. Also, in Basque society we have traces of the matrilineal system in the historical records, especially.

If we go back in time, in Scotland, again, matrilineal. And the third would be the Etruscan, before the Romans. These are the main “islands” that are known to history.

Then if we go as far back as Herodotus, fifth century B.C., he mentions a number of tribes in the Aegean area and Western Turkey that are all matrilineal. Until Herodotus, the old system was still alive. Not to speak of Crete. Crete is a matrilineal island throughout the Bronze Age and early history.

Today, if you travel through the islands of the Aegean Sea, from one island to the other, you can see the survivals of the matrilineal system. These societies are ruled by the mother and even the mother is the overseer of the church!

In all the North-European, Germanic-speaking countries, Baltic-speaking countries, Slavic-speaking countries—in all of these cultures there is a lot of survival of the Old European system. If you analyze historical records of legends then you will see that a boy or a prince has to wander out from his family and look for a princess—and marry a princess—to become king, there in the area the princess lives, not in his home! So, what is this!? So, that was still alive in the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th centuries.

James N. Powell: Do you believe Gods and Goddesses are purely sociological inventions, simply constructs of the human imagination? Or are Goddesses actually divine beings? Do Kali, the Virgin Mary, Aphrodite, and the Great Mother Goddess exist somewhere in their respective Heavens and lokas?

Marija Gimbutas: [Thoughtful] First of all, religion is a reflection of social structure. The earliest human social structure was matrilineal because of the natural situation of how children were born. The father was probably not known for a very long period in history. The mothers were raising children and this way the matrilineal system grew. The Goddess was a reflection of the mother image, and the woman was giving birth, and the Goddess was giving birth. Also totems, protectors of families of whatever unit there was—the bird, maybe also the snake—and from these protectresses the image developed also. So there is no one origin, but maybe several.

James N. Powell: Is that all a God or Goddess is, through, just a reflection of social reality?

Marija Gimbutas: Not just a simple reflection, but a philosophical thought—from where does life come? Where do we go? All that was asked. So the woman was creating life.

James N. Powell: But who created the woman? Do Gods and Goddesses really exist?

Marija Gimbutas: For hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions, in the lower Paleolithic objects were divine symbols. They are there already, so they developed for a very, very long time. The Goddess sculptures start around 40,000 B.C. But then we have in the Middle Paleolithic, triangles, etc., which continue in the Upper Paleolithic. If we go to the Lower Paleolithic we find hand axes, triangles. These are symbols! They are miniature in size. They are not tools, they are symbols. They start one million, two million years ago!

James N. Powell: Do you believe that the image of the Mother Goddess arises because of an inherited image within the psyche, such as Jungians believe exists, or is it a cultural inheritance, after birth?

Marija Gimbutas: It is inherited. It existed for such a long time that we cannot get rid of these archetypes. They are in a sense, always here. For many millions of years it was a cultural inheritance. Then the patriarchal people arrived and subjugated the whole continent, little by little. But the images that existed for so long did not vanish. They are still there with us. In our dreams. Even if we don’t have churches where we worship Mother Goddesses—we worship Father God—but in our dreams we have images of Mother Goddesses. Some aspects of Her.

James N. Powell: Do you have an experience of the transcendent aspect of the Goddess? Is she a spiritual being?

Marija Gimbutas: The Goddess can be touched, the Christian God is high up. You cannot touch this old bearded man—or Christ. But the Goddess, she leaves her footprints, but she also has spiritual dimension. If we go back to the second century, The Golden Ass.

James N. Powell: Yes, by Apuleius! In the last chapter, the description of the Goddess is beautiful. That reminds me of Ramakrishna’s experience. In a lot of ways, this debate—does the Goddess exist, did She exist?—is really silly in light of Ramakrishna’s experience. He could not escape Her. Everywhere he turned there She was—this luminous presence within everything, the Mother of the Universe, the Womb of everything, shining twenty-four hours a day. He couldn’t escape.

Marija Gimbutas: The same thing.

James N. Powell: Do you believe that just changing the gender of our object of worship will produce social harmony?

Marija Gimbutas: I would say so. Social structure is intertwined with religion. Already we have a much more balanced society, so change must come. And in religion, women are priestesses even in Christian churches. In some churches here in California we have already women priestesses. So the change is visible, but still this transformation from male Gods to female Goddesses has not gained wide acceptance. The change has started, the transformation has to come. Only then will we have the balance of power. It is very important.

Led (Ledward) Ka'apana ~ Slack Key Legend

2011-01-09T17:51:00.000-08:00

Led Ka'apana, affectionately called Uncle Led, is a living master. He plays many instruments and in many different tunings, so in concert he is often surrounded by a stockpile of them precalibrated to some of the more than a hundred exotic Hawai'ian tunings. Besides regular appearances in Hawai'i , Led tours, always spreading his special brand of goodwill and Aloha to all. After hearing Led, my brother said, "It's too bad everyone in the world isn't Hawai'ian." After all, when you consider all the horrible indignities of colonization, including the racial decimation to which the Hawai'ians have been subjected, it is astounding that some of the very few natives who have survived, pushed off their ancestral lands, can still respond with such demonstrations of Aloha.

Led Ka'apana playing at the Grand Opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, in Washington, D.C. -- winning over an audience not familiar with slack key. He plays a little "outside" on this one.

"Radio Hula" is Led Ka'apana's signature piece. If you compare it to the version below, you will see an example of how he never plays a piece the same way twice, although you may not notice some of the differences in variation unless you play this piece yourself. Lizzie Kahua Alohikea composed the piece back in the 1920s to celebrate the arrival of radio in the islands. Led's uncle, the late, great slack key master Fred Punahoa, created an arrangement of this song for slack key guitar in the 1940s, which Led Ka'apana learned as a teenager and used as the basis for his own improvisations.

Uncle Led, grew up in a musical family. In the tiny black sand bay village of Kalapana, there were few distractions. “We didn’t have electricity, no television, not even much radio,” says Led. “So we entertained ourselves. You could go to any house and everybody was playing music.”

Often everybody was playing music at a backyard party, many of which lasted for days. “People played in shifts, taking over when somebody went to sleep,” Led recalls. “You’d fall asleep to the music, wake up….and the music was still playing. That was the best alarm clock I ever had!”

It was at these family gatherings that Led learned to play in the old style, watching, listening, then imitating. Chief among his teachers were his mother, Mama Tina Ka'apana, and his uncle Fred Punahoa. “Even today when I play, I still picture all the ohana (family) getting together and sharing their songs and their Aloha.”

Although isolated, outside influences did creep into Kalapana. Like most kids his age, Led Ka'apana loved to rock and roll and also listened to country, jazz, and Latin music. When he’d sneak a riff from a guitar hit of the day, like "Pipeline" or "Walk Don’t Run," into his music his dad would tease, “Hey, that’s not slack key!” But nobody ever stopped him, they just encouraged him to “play what you feel and play with Aloha.”

So, for most of its history, slack key was not a concert music, but family music -- something played out on the front porch at sunset. Every family had its secret slack-key tuning, and if you were at a big gathering of families and heard some hot stuff coming from a guy sittting under a mango tree, surrounded by his family, and you walked over, he would simply stop playing, put his guitar away, and that was it.

All that has changed now, and the slack-key masters are fortunately sharing their music with the world. In the piece below, you will hear the great tonal inventiveness with with Led plays.

Led Ka'apana plays most Sunday nights from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Kona Brewing Company in the Koko Marina Shopping Center, Hawai'i Kai, O'ahu. For his full concert lineup,visit http://www.ledkaapana.com/

In slack key tuning, we slack down some of the strings, to get an open chord. As Keola Beamer says, when we do this, "the entire instrument sings: There's this beautiful stuff, sympathetic vibrations. . . In a nutshell, that means we take that guitar and we pluck one string and the rest of them sing along. We're not touching them, we're not activating the string, we're not playing it. But the pressure of the air vibrating around the string generates movement so the entire instrument sings with each note."

Beamer goes on to say that the resonance "is magnified tremendously in these tunings that we use. It becomes a more active instrument because of the mathematical relationship of the actual chord, right? So now you have this platform that is much more alive . . . and that is what the Hawai'ian slack key guitar is. . .that beautiful open sound. There's no sound really quite like it in the guitar world that I know of. You get a great modal tuning thing going and the melody notes have a sort of halo around them because of the sympathetic vibrations. And the bass is beautifully supported with this undercurrent of strength in those low notes. So, the melody instrument has a great deal of character and quality it didn't have before.

"My guitars never, ever get tuned to "normal;" they don't sound good, you know? Because modal tuning are all they've worked in for twenty-six years. They know how to vibrate. How to work. But you change them to "normal" tuning and they can't do it.

"If you're gonna learn slack key, just leave it there, rather than yanking your guitar back and forth all the time. It's difficult to do. . .it's hard on the guitar. And it's very frustrating for the student to try and stay in tune. Just leave it there and see what happens. You'd be surprised how flexible, how comfortable you'll begin to feel about open tunings, to where you've forgot about the "real" way to play guitar" (from Keola Beamer and Mark Nelson's Learn to Play Hawaiian Slack-Key Guitar--a great learner's tool).

Come to think of it, a lot of things are like that: slack 'em down, relax into them, and you get more resonance -- sometimes, even -- a glowing.

Don't think for an instant that Led Ka'apana's repertoire is restricted to Hawai'ian music. Ukes and guitars are really just an extension of his heart, mind, and soul, and he can play anything they can feel and conceive. Below, "Killing Me Softly."

Israel Kamakawio'ole (Iz). Though Hawai'ian, Iz was a Big Man in the Melanesian sense, a leader, or Big Man, who is self-made man and becomes a leader by creating followers, succeeding because he possesses skills that command respect in his society, such as oratory talent, bravery, gardening prowess, or magical, or artistic powers. On the day Iz passed away, the Hawai'ian flag was flown at half mast, an honor accorded to only thee people in the history of the state, and the only time to a non-official. Thousands gathered on Mākua beach as his ashes were scattered. A Big Man also gives sumptuously to others. Iz gave of his music and his heart, which touched the hearts not only of Hawai'ians, many of whom cherish in their hearts a dream of Hawai'ian sovereinty, but of thousands around the world as his music became more popular.

**

Jazz is another language natural to Mr. Ka'apana. Here: "Sweet Georgia Brown."

"Weeha Swing"

Below, Danny Carvalho, one of the best of the new generation of "slackers."

Below, "Radio Hula," as it first was written and played.

If you would like to learn slack key, get yourself any old guitar and this book by slack key master Ozzie Kotani. Ozzie is a sweet guy, who helped me a lot with my playing when I was recoveringing from a bicycle accident. His masterful approach to slack key is subtle and warm. All concur this his book is the place to start for rank beginners.

Thanks for tuning in.

Me Ke Aloha

James N. Powell ~ slack key otaku

Below, "Alekoki," written by W. Lunalilo, who succeeded Kamehmeha as King of Hawai'i.

Young Samoan-Hawai'ian gal fires up some duende-infused Aloha on uke:

Jungle Yoga

2010-12-05T12:32:00.000-08:00

This Interview Appeared in the Nov/Dec Issue of Spirituality and Health

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HEART OF BRIGHTNESS

One Woman's Yoga Odyssey in the Balinese Jungle

As J. Krishnamurti once observed, there exist very few individuals with an irresistible passion for spirit. Very few of us really dedicate ourselves in an uncompromising fashion to whatever it is that calls to us. And when we do attempt to answer the call of spirit, we tend — with good reason — to follow well-trodden paths. We go to universities, seminaries, ashrams, and workshops. What is rare is to leap off the path, guided only by our own dreams and visions. One day, that’s what Uma Inder did. She disrobed and walked nude into the Balinese jungle with a one-pointed intent to reach liberation. Seven years later, she came out with something to teach. This is her story.

When Uma was a girl, nature offered to her a first taste of unboundedness as she raced across the equatorial savannas of her native Africa with her Maasai playmates, the 360-degree limitless expanse of the horizon mirroring for her the vast landscapes of her soul.

Such vistas, like that of the sky, simply do not support our tiny daily thoughts. We look into vastness, and a bottomless softness begins to unfold within our breasts.

The Maasai populated every aspect of Uma’s life in Kenya. When not in school, she would explore in the deeper bush of the Maasai homelands — Amboselii, Maasai Mara, Tsavo — learning their ways of being attuned to the wilderness and wildlife, skills and attitudes that would come to serve her soon enough.

Back in the city, the Maasai taught Uma how to bead — a childhood meditation that would become her jungle livelihood. When asleep as a girl, the wise old man of her dreams was a Maasai man, standing with outstretched arms in front of the hut at the end of a thorny path. In her home, the askari, or “night guard,” was a tall Maasai man with his stick, and under his aegis, she grew up feeling safe.

In Africa, she felt blessed with other teachers as well: her grandfather, who was a strict yogi; and her mother, whom she credits with being the original tantric guru in her life. Uma describes her as “ostensibly a privileged, well-educated Hindu woman who elegantly performed her religious, yogic, and family duties. She was also a free-spirited dynamo who disarmed the boundaries of convention to tell her story of love. Those who watched her — and many were those — fell under her spell as she passionately followed her heart to marry for love; race cars and motorbikes; host legendary parties; charm children, their mothers, and husbands; and swing-dance her way through her very sweet and short life.”

Uma reminisces: “My mother consciously initiated me into my greatest source of power: unconditional love. So much love — I always felt special, invincible. She also initiated me into the very real power of pain. She died young, and in her yawning absence I was pulled deeper into self. There was nowhere else to go. I was left ‘alone,’ from the age of 14, to find my way in the world. Mother dead. Brother descending into suicide. Father reduced to a child through alcoholism. Sister abandoned. You could say my process of identity formation was accelerated.”

Entering the Jungle

Pulled by the force fields of her mother’s absence, yet sustained by the sense of invincibility her mother had given her, Uma ended up in Bali. “I was searching for the teacher I had dreamed of when I was a young girl. I knew he would be a Native Indian type with magical powers. I thought I would find him in Peru, but I was given a free ticket to Bali by my Dutch stepmother, who had plans for me to disappear.”

Uma, then 20, found herself drawn into a lush, vibrant river ravine in the jungles of Bali, a sacred place so populated by spirits that the locals feared to enter. She had prayed for guidance. Then, within the next few days, she found her teacher. A 23-year-old self-styled yogi, he resided in a hut fashioned of bamboo and river stones — without walls, without mirrors, and without electricity.

“He was a renegade, by his own admittance, who had left home at the age of 12 and who claimed that his direction was directly from Shiva. The tradition he claimed to follow was that of pashupata dharma, the oldest tradition of Shiva ascetic monks. Shunned by India’s religious establishment, these wandering yogis meander about wielding iron tridents and stout staffs, their dreadlocks hanging down in unkempt coils or tied up in top-knots, countenances contorted with intense devotion, and with piercing eyes that behold more Shiva than world. They walk about naked, or girth their loins only with deer skin or bark.”

Mutual friends warned that the fellow had a reputation of being a madman. But where her friends smelled danger, Uma sensed something different — something numinous and wildly sacred. She discovered that his image as a madman was something that he had carefully cultivated. She found herself desirous of drinking from what lay beyond that guise of holy dread.

“At first I ran from him,” she confided. “Inevitably, I was drawn back and sucked into a world of extremities that I could only have dreamed possible: extreme beauty and ugliness, extreme erotico-magical entities, extreme ruthlessness, extreme love and fear. It was impossible to escape. My teacher took it further and demanded — as a way of destroying my karmic ties and becoming unfettered on the path of self-realization — that all links to my previous world, including any contact with remaining family, be entirely severed. ‘It’s the sannyasin way,’ he explained.

“We were naked most of the time. It was a practical choice, as each day we would wade across the river to practice on the largest, smoothest rocks and the widest banks. Because we rarely ventured out in public, clothes became quite unnecessary. Generally, we were covered in ashes, our hair grown so long that it hung down and protected us, and we were draped with carved skull malas, mainly as a deterrent. The Balinese natives knew we were there, because for the first couple of years, a village girl brought us food. And the villagers respected our religious path. Our very presence lured some into the forest, but we successfully scared or confused curiosity-seekers enough that we were left alone to our own unconventional devices of self-mastery.

“Students able to see beyond our gargoyle aspect would gather around my teacher from time to time, and in a unified group, our yoga practice would be greatly empowered. The few times that too many would look up to him as a guru, however, he would purposefully bring his own pedestal crashing down to get rid of them. We aligned all our activities with the lunar cycles. New and full moons, we were in Sri Chakra ceremony, and the days in between had a rhythm that followed the movements of the sun across the sky.”

When asked how they coped with the little creepy-crawly critters one finds in a jungle, she replied, “Interaction with insects and reptiles was a practice tool for measuring progress. During seated practice, I developed a way to transform the poison injected into my system from the mosquito, ant, and sometimes unknown invader into an infusion of pure energy. If I remained still, without reacting to the irritation, I was catapulted into greater awareness beyond pleasure and pain. Snakes and Alu [large endangered Balinese lizard] would only appear at the height of a ceremony. We were in communion with Nature. It was a love affair.”

Enlightenment or Bust

I told her of an observation I had made, having been aware of many recluses: “When one is living a relatively ascetic existence,” I said, “it seems there is the danger of becoming as attached to one’s yogic routine and isolation as are voluptuaries to their various modes of pleasure. In the jungle, having formed an identity as yogini-on-the-path, did you have an enlightenment-or-bust attitude, or did you reach a non-goal-oriented state?”

“In the jungle,” Uma explained, “being in rhythm with natural cycles was the perfect counterbalance to an isolated, ascetic lifestyle. It was later, back in the modern world with its air, noise, light, and thought pollution, that there was no longer enough of a support system for the practice of before. Enlightenment-or-bust became outdated and seems, in retrospect, a fanatical, fear-based mission. It fried my nerves.

“My own intense spiritual practice peaked in a series of spontaneous, on-my-back-motionless marathons, where night after night, I felt all my ‘unworthiness’ absolved in pure grace and washed clean in whole-body waves of my own inner light. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’ became my new mantra, and I initiated a natural practice of gratitude for a second chance at life.” She felt she had matured enough spiritually to leave the jungle — and their precious ravine was about to be bulldozed by developers. She moved into the village, where she continued to learn from her teacher for another seven years.

Second Chances

That second chance in life began when Uma, the quintessential hermit, became pregnant.

“I assumed,” she joked, “that I was clinically infertile, so I never expected to have a child, and as a yogini I was rather pleased, in my admitted self-importance, that I could protect my time and freedom to accomplish, without distraction, my spiritual goals. And yet my practices would culminate in an overarching desire to serve a greater purpose.

“I prayed to Shiva and asked to serve. It was on Kanyakumari, a tiny island in the confluence of three oceans at the southernmost tip of India, that I renewed my oath to serve. Within minutes after making this pledge, I met the father of my child-to-be, a practitioner on the same path. His name is Shivananda (“the bliss of Shiva”). Conceiving our child was a rapture of conscious overflow — overflow of existence, consciousness, and bliss offered up into the world.

“Even so, I was terrified at the moment of truth — pregnant; terrified that all I had attained as spiritual merit would go to waste; resistant to continue my ancestral lineage, which was supposed to end in the blazing glory of my enlightenment; undermined that I might appear vulnerable to a man; horrified that the shape of my body would expand beyond my control. And there it was: I was afraid of losing control.

“I had offered my life up in service, expecting that it would look like a path of renunciation. I could never have imagined that becoming a mother, a householder, was the way of service for me. It was like a cosmic joke: ‘Okay so you really, really want to be of service to the highest truth? Then here you go — mother something!’

“‘I am pregnant,’ I said, and the instantaneous tears of joy that slid down my lover’s face was the godsend that flooded my heart and put my fears to rest. And once I conceded defeat, I allowed an abundance of joy: greater depth of sensation in my body; lubricated, super-flexible joints; smooth, silky skin; lustrous locks of hair; and uncensored appetite for goodness.”

Life as a Weaving

“If your life were a weaving,” I asked Uma, “woven together by yourself and Spirit, can you weave for our readers a little tale of how yoga has served as the common thread in your African, jungle ascetic, and motherly forms?”

And she explained, “Yoga was — and still is — for me a way of communing with natural forces and transmuting them into subtle essences inside the human form. The original superhero is a yogi. The primordial yogi was Adinath, or Shiva the Destroyer, and as a young girl I began to worship Shiva as my Lord. This is the thread that runs through my life of yoga: my body-felt relationship with Shiva, as pure consciousness, in a form that is at once human and divine; at once masculine and feminine. I have courted the destructive aspect of this super-conscious force as a means of liberation. I have courted the power in the heart of paradox, and yoga taught me how. In yoga, I discovered that the full measure of energy is cultivated in the deepest surrender to stillness.

“The equatorial plains of Africa and 360 degrees of horizon was my expanded view. The unquestioned sense that I was unlimited was a driving force that lifted me, as a girl athlete, to jump higher and longer and run faster than my tiny musculature could have managed on its own.

“My attraction to the science of Hatha yoga is fueled by the memories of how limitless a human being can feel. In the Balinese jungle, we walked together — my teacher and I — into other dimensions of reality and communed with living entities for which I had no previous context. The yoga we practiced was specifically to condition the psychosomatic system so that we could function in ceremonial space and integrate the experiences, without literally blowing out our minds.

“We practiced both jungle yoga and city yoga. City yoga kicked in once we got burned out of the valley and were compelled to function again in a modernizing world. This practice empowered us to ‘stalk’ the world and not become bound to it. We developed ways to appear quite normal and relatively inconspicuous and used the energy resources from our practice to fuel our precious-metal and gem craft.

“The yoga of motherhood is as esoteric and wild-natured as ever before. Every moment forces me awake to what’s real. Checking out is not an option. Just like night-seeing in the jungle, you feel your way through, anticipating the danger from any direction, before it manifests. My body is honed, sensitized from the wear and tear of natural birth, the baby slings, the marathon breast-feeds, and the rock-and-rolling lifestyle of a toddler. Every truth and falsehood is at once mimicked in the face and voice of my mystical child. And just when I get pushed to the unnecessary brink of fury, we break out into irrepressible smiles. Whatever buttons I have, my baby knows how to push them. Our yoga is the balance of power and love.”

After her jungle experience, Uma traveled to the United States, where she was somewhat surprised to find yoga students arriving in SUVs to practice on little mats in tidy rooms. She graduated from the American Institute of Ayurveda and furthered her Ayurvedic studies with Raam Pandey. She then was trained in the Ashtanga Vinyasa and Bihar yoga traditions. From these studies she knows her yoga philosophy, and with the real resonance that issues from her lived experience of a completely unfettered existence, Uma proclaims, “Yoga is freedom.”

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James N. Powell holds master’s degrees in tribal religion and in English literature. His latest book is Slow Love: A Polynesian Pillow Book. He can be reached at his website: http://www.polynesianlove.com/

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Uma Inder resides in the lush surroundings of Ubud, Bali, where she teaches yoga and Ayurveda, practices traditional Odissi dance, and enjoys watching the laws of nature unfold in her three-year-old. She is the co-founder of KUSH Ayurvedic Rejuvenation Center at Ubud’s Yoga Barn. She also plans to offer an advanced tantra, yoga, and Ayurveda teacher-training course, details of which will be released at schoolofsacredarts.net and on her own website, yogawithuma.com.

Yogi Performing Pranayama

Um Samba Sobre O Infinito

2010-11-16T22:14:00.000-08:00

Marisa Monte

Marisa Monte with Paulinha da Viola and Rafael Rabelo, singing in the old, easy-does-it style . . .

A pause of a thousand measures . . .
Marisa, always at her best in an intimate, underproduced setting. . .

Silêncio por favor

Enquanto esqueço um pouco

a dor no peito

Não diga nada

sobre meus defeitos

Eu não me lembro mais

quem me deixou assim

Hoje eu quero apenas

Uma pausa de mil compassos

Para ver as meninas

E nada mais nos braços

Só este amor

assim descontraído

Quem sabe de tudo não fale

Quem não sabe nada se cale

Se for preciso eu repito

Porque hoje eu vou fazer

Ao meu jeito eu vou fazer

Um samba sobre o infinito

Porque hoje eu vou fazer

Ao meu jeito eu vou fazer

Um samba sobre o infinito

Marisa Monte

A Frog Dating the Moon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXofgJn2OOg&feature=rec-LGOUT-real_rn-2r-45-HM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVABKArg3EY&feature=related

That Swing Thing

2010-11-01T21:43:00.000-07:00

Dorothy Dandridge and the Nicholas Brothers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTTOV4iEwF4&feature=related

For 1940s classic, Orchestra Wives, one of two films Glenn Miller made, click above . . .

Sing Sing Sing

N'Orleans Rhumba Boogie

Krupa Mix

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aC2OUkhdaH8&p=CC40D8AE7157661B&playnext=1&index=3

Dorothy Dandridge and Paul White

Dorothy Dandridge and Nicholas Brothers with Glenn Miller

In the Mood

Jeepers Creepers

Swing Fever

Cootie Williams once admonished Monk to stop playing "that Chinese music."

The Emperor holding court, deconstructing a couple of old standards during Monk Dynasty.

Differance is not a third thing, it is the hinge or swing, or the slash that simultaneously holds the two sides together and apart, connecting them for reflection and keeping them from collapsing into a unity.

劉芳琵琶

Gaga Over God

2010-10-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8LY2VgiikE

Our cultures attempt to inscribe their religious and other values upon us, a language we are steeped in from birth . . .

. . . with a history inscribed with holy words, with zithers, with electric guitars, and with swords and bombs bleeding with ink the color of pomegranates. . .

We Are All Always Already Written

The child is mother of the woman . . .

But what form was our face before our parents were born. . . ?

YOU ARE HERE

Is there a language of immediate perception, free of cultural inscription . . .

a way of seeing and writing freely, with reference only to unboundedness,

rather than back, against our conditioning, merely re-creating its reflection in opposition . . . .?

For The Children

The rising hills, the slopes,

of statistics

lie before us.

the steep climb

of everything, going up,

up, as we all

go down.

In the next century

or the one beyond that,

they say,

are valleys, pastures,

we can meet there in peace

if we make it.

To climb these coming crests

one word to you, to

you and your children:

stay together

learn the flowers

go light

— Gary Snyder, from Turtle Island

Pre-Gaga Lady Gaga

There Was A Time Americans Knew How to Have Fun . . . .Could Dance Like Hell. . . and Then Go Rumble With Hitler and Hirohita

2010-10-07T21:55:00.000-07:00

Dial it UP and dance: Marion Hutton, Tex Beneke, the Nicholas Brothers, Glenn Miller and the gang . . . . . .

Dorthy Dandridge stealing the choo choo show. . .

At last . . .

Those horn voicings . . .

Krupa

Love that Basie exit . . .

http://enidbaxterblader.com/music/enidcovergillian.html

http://enidbaxterblader.com/music/cuckoo.html

And, the winners are . . .

That Moon Language

2010-09-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye

that is always saying,

with that sweet moon language,

what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?

~ Hafiz

Real Yoga

2010-08-06T17:24:00.000-07:00

Tat Wale Baba was a recluse who lived in a cave near the ashram of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in Rishikesh, India.

For such a being, yoga is not defined in terms of various bodily postures. Yoga is being established in the permanent and eternal state of Pure Consciousness unfolded through meditation. Pure Consciousness is a fourth major state of consciousness, beyond waking, dreaming and sleeping. Actually, it makes waking, sleeping and dreaming possible.

Tat Wale Baba didn't write any books.

Maharishi had the highest respect for this God-realized soul, and would invite him to the ashram often.

When Tat Wale Baba first came to Rishikesh, for days he sat near the Ganges river wondering where he would find a retreat that was fully suitable for his purpose. He was intuitively, or perhaps divinely, guided to Manikut mountain. There he came upon an old, emaciated man with very long gata (hair) living in a cave. Tat Wale Baba approached the man and was invited to sit and talk. Their conversation lasted several hours. At the conclusion of their talk the old man left, saying that his time was finished, and that he was going to the Himalayas to take mahasamadhi. He left the cave for Tat Wale Baba to occupy.

Tat Wale Baba at Maharishi's ashram.

As each question was asked in English Maharishi Mahesh Yogi translated to Hindi, then translated Tat Wale Baba's replies.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

TWB: What is the aim of all the beings? It is the attainment of infinite happiness. A life free from suffering, and the attainment of eternal happiness is what we want. Now, we should discriminate and analyze if there is anything in the world that give us permanent, eternal happiness. From the ant up to the giant of the Creator, all are in the field of change, that is, relative values. Infinite happiness can only come from something that is immortal, non-changing, eternal. This, which is the goal of everything, this infinite, is our own Self. And in order to experience that Self which is the basis of all, we don't have to seek, we don't have to search, we don't have to make efforts. It's there, present everywhere. Wherever you are, in whatever reign of time or place, that Self is there - wherever we are in whatever time. Only, we have to take our awareness to that level and that is it. Having forgotten that level of life, we are seeking for that eternal happiness.

That Self is. It is being and it is blissful. Having forgotten that, we now are seeking for it. We have forgotten what we ourselves are and we're trying to find that in the world. As long as we don't enter into that area which is infinite happiness, free from suffering, so long we will not be free from suffering and we will not get into that eternal happiness. There is no happiness of significant nature in the world; the child is gone, and the youth is gone, and the man is old, and even then he is not fulfilled in the world.

When he gets established in the Self, then automatically freedom from suffering and attainment of bliss will be there.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi interjected,"The thing is very important which he says now!"

That which is omnipresent doesn't have to be sought.

It's there already.

Start to be.

That which is omnipresent is not to be sought; only our awareness has to be brought to that level and that bliss is there. You don't have to seek it.

Understand?

Unless we get into that omnipresent bliss, satisfaction is not going to come. If it were to come, it would have come by now through so many avenues in the world. But, it has not. Therefore, that which is the Self is your own being.You don't have to look in the outside. And, it is irrespective of any religious faiths or beliefs; Christians or Mormons or Hindus.

That being is the knowledge itself. Only, you have to know. All these various manifestations of happiness that we experience in the world, they also are the manifestations of the same eternal being that is our own Self. If we are aware of the Self, if we know it, fine. Otherwise, we have to be. And, therefore, it is necessary to bring our awareness deep within ourselves. As deeply as we can bring our awareness to the Self, so intensely we can inherit that which is omnipresent in our day-to-day life.

Having known that Self we will be eternally contented; remaining in the world we will live contentment. And, it's not a matter of detaching ourselves from the world. Only, we have to know It, and having known It, then, all different manifestations in the world will be experienced as manifestations of That. We don't have to detach ourselves. It is just a matter of bringing the awareness to that area, and be, and live It.

Having gained this beautiful, perfect human nervous system, if we have known that element of the Self, then we have really used this wonderful diamond-like gift, this diamond-like nervous system which is capable of giving that eternal bliss.

If it is not experienced, then we have wasted that gift of diamond.

We have taken upon ourselves this human nervous system, not for the sake of petty enjoyment of changing nature in this relative field of change, but to live and be that infinite bliss. And, we will have to attain that thing whether we attain it in this life, or in the next, or in the next. We just can't forego that. Therefore, with the assistance of the guru and the scriptures, better to attain it quickly. Why postpone?

***
Tat Wale Baba's talk was followed by an opportunity for questions to be asked.

***

Student: Can he tell us of his master and the tradition he follows?

TWB: The Self is free from any tradition or nontradition.

MMY (adding his own comment): He is from the tradition of Sukadev. Sukadev was like him, not of this world. Away from it.

Sukadev Narrating the Bhagavata Purana to King Parakshit

As you can see Sukadev also went about naked, aware only of the divine, and had full knowledge of reality from birth.

Student: Can he tell us what kind of meditation he does?

TWB: I am established in Vedanta, and that way we talk about it, and we be.

There is no practice as such.

Student: What do you think about Transcendental Meditation?

TWB: Transcendental Consciousness is the basis of all experience.

Pure Consciousness is That through which we experience.

That is not a thing which one can experience.

And, all this world is in a state of Pure Consciousness, and it is through That that we experience everything.

Pure Consciousness, or Transcendental Consciousness is nothing that we experience.

Through That we are experiencing everything.

That is the basis of all experience, and experiencing.

So enjoy that state.

Student: Is it possible to increase one's capacity to enjoy that state?

TWB: We can increase it to any great extent through meditation.

And as we go deeper, That will shine forth in our life outside.

So, it's possible to increase our ability to be That.

And, that is through meditation.

Brahmacharyi Devindra (l), Tat Wale Baba (c) Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (r)

Student: Does he have any techniques that he teaches his disciples?

TWB: We are sitting in the forest, and when we are sitting in the forest we have some purpose to perform, and with that we are sitting.

If some seeker comes and asks, fine. We give advice. Otherwise, we don't have much time. We are in the forest, and we are in the forest for some purpose. But, if some seeker comes, fine. His doubts are cleared and removed.

Student: Does he think that his way of life helps the rest of mankind or only him?

TWB: All these saints meditating and established in the Self, they are the basis for all this running of the entire universe, and they are the basis of the whole thing, and not for themselves alone. Their good vibrations are influencing societies for their advancement.

Student: Like a powerhouse?

TWB: Like a powerhouse. The powerhouse is in Delhi and the bulb is shining here. It is not the bulb that is shining. It's the power from the powerhouse. It is the saints established in their Self who are infusing life into the whole universe. And, it is they who have found Smriti Purananam (Vedic codes of behavior). It is they who have found the essentials, the realities of life, and have taught to the world various conducts of living; ways of realization of the Self, ways of realization of God, and all these higher states of life. It is they who have brought wisdom home to the world, and they are at the basis of all the increasing prosperity of the world through their vibrations and through their attainment.

Student: How much sleep does he require?

TWB: If I sleep what will happen to the world?

Asleep and awake - the sleep and awake is the nature of the mind.

Sometimes the mind sleeps, sometimes it is awake.

If I sleep, the whole basis of the world would be sleeping and then there will be left nothing.

So, I don't sleep.

If someone sleeps it is the mind.

The Self doesn't sleep.

All these states of waking, dreaming; they belong to the mind. They are not the state of the Self. And, if you speak of my sleeping, I don't sleep because the Self doesn't sleep. If the Self sleeps then the whole world would go into sleep.

Student: Is there any difference between the time that he is meditating and the time when he is not meditating, in how he feels, or his interaction with the environment?

TWB: Meditating for some time, one gets established permanently in the state of being.

And then, wherever the mind goes one is established in that Self no matter what one does here or there; it doesn't matter when one is established in the Self.

And, that state comes after some time from going deep inside and coming out. With this practice one gets established permanently in the Self, and then whatever you do you are not separate from the Self.

Students: Are you living in that state now?

TWB: That which is unborn, eternal, we can't talk about it in terms of time.

In terms of time the Self can't be talked.

Tat Wale Baba, seated in his cave

Student: Does he feel that there is more to attain?

TWB: What is there to be gained or attained?

That which is to be gained is omnipresent, and we are That, and it's already attained.

As long as the mind has been wavering only in the changing relative, so long it was out of sight.

And, when the mind has been concentrated and has attained to that level, nothing new has happened. The thing that was there, it is there.

Nothing new has happened or has been attained.

Nothing!

That which was there is there even now, and was even before.

Only the difference is in the mind; the mind was unaware of That and now the mind is aware.

So, what is there to talk about attainment of further states?

Student: Can he tell us of the love that flows from one's heart once the state is attained?

TWB: One's love overflows.

As one loves himself so does he begin to love others.

Because in that state there is none other than one's Self.

Therefore, one's love for one's Self is one's love for others.

And then, whatever communications are there, they are communications in one's own Self.

The Self is golden.

It is only a matter of taking our awareness to That and then the criterion for That will be that we will begin to display all love and harmony in the field of all our action and experience.

That will be the criterion. When the love increases, that becomes the balance to measure that we are nearing That.

Otherwise, the thing is already there, only we have to incorporate it in our lives.

We have to exhibit more of love, more of happiness.

Expression of That is necessary, otherwise the state of That is already there.

And, we will begin to express more of it when we become more aware of it.

Student: Can we meditate with you?

Tat Wale Baba closed his eyes and we all meditated for about twenty minutes. Then, the opportunity to ask more questions resumed.

Student: What do you see for the future of the world?

TWB: We have to create future.

Future does not have to create us.

And, if we do good things and meditate and experience that Self and be omnipresent, future is going to be good.

If we do not, we are going to create a bad future.

We have to create the future.

The future is in our hands.

Student: Will there be world peace?

The world is within you.

And, if you are at peace within, if your awareness is established in your Self your world is in peace.

And, if you are wavering and peaceless and you are not in tune with your own eternal state of Being then the world is in peacelessness.

If you want to create peace on the cosmic level then you must take refuge in God.

And, if you want peace within yourself, realize the Self and your world will be in peace and you will see that the whole world is in peace.

The world is as you are, and the world will be as you will be.

Student: Are there any shortcuts to purification of karma?

TWB: The shortest cut to the purification of karma is surrender to God, devotion to God, realization of the Self.

And, when you realize the Self all your mind and senses will be purified.

And, when your senses are purified all your actions will be good.

They will be life supporting.

They behave with you as your friends.

And, if the mind is not established in the Self, in the glory of God, then your own senses will become your enemies.

And then, all your karma will pounce upon you as your enemy.

It is the fixity of the mind in the Self that makes your senses your friend, and non-fixity of the mind in the Self makes your senses your enemy.

Senses-enemy means karma, because the karma is performed by the senses. So the karma will be good if the mind is established in the Self and karma will not be good if the mind is not established in the Self.

Practice. Increase your practice to arrive at that goal.

Student: Is it a liability to be a householder and do this practice?

TWB: Householder's way of life is not bad. But, not being able to live up to the standards of this life-style we make a hell out of ourselves in a householder's way of life.

Student: Is it possible to work in the world when we have gained the highest state of pure supreme knowledge?

TWB: There are two ways of life, householder and recluse.

Those who are in the householder's way of life, they by habit are engaged in activity, even having gained that state of supreme knowledge.

And, those who are recluse by nature, they don't have anything to do with the activity of life.

So, they continue to live that way. But, both live that state of supreme knowledge.

Student: Is it possible that one who lives a householder's way of life can then desire to switch and live the life of a recluse? Or, would this cause a conflict?

TWB: The ideal condition would be not to enter into the household.

If you want to become a sannyasi (renunciate), or, if you have entered the householder's life, then share the responsibility that you have taken with the wife and children, and then complete that responsibility.

Get your children educated and be done with the whole thing.

Then, it would be good to waver off from there.

Otherwise, don't enter it, and that will be the more ideal.

Having taken the responsibility it won't be good to shut that responsibility.

~ * ~