February 14, 2015 by princemyshkin

Ginsberg Theology

Needless to say, a gay Jewish man on acid comes to the conclusion that there is God in everything. If you haven’t ever read the Paris Review 8 “Art of Poetry” interview….

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4389/the-art-of-poetry-no-8-allen-ginsberg

Anyway my first thought was this was what I was born for, and second thought, never forget—never forget, never renege, never deny. Never deny the voice no, never forget it, don’t get lost mentally wandering in other spirit worlds or American or job worlds or advertising worlds or war worlds or earth worlds. But the spirit of the universe was what I was born to realize. What I was speaking about visually was, immediately, that the cornices in the old tenement building in Harlem across the backyard court had been carved very finely in 1890 or 1910. And were like the solidification of a great deal of intelligence and care and love also. So that I began noticing in every corner where I looked evidence of a living hand, even in the bricks, in the arrangement of each brick. Some hand placed them there—that some hand had placed the whole universe in front of me. That some hand had placed the sky. No, that’s exaggerating—not that some hand had placed the sky but that the sky was the living blue hand itself. Or that God was in front of my eyes—existence itself was God. Well, the formulations are like that—I didn’t formulate it in exactly those terms, what I was seeing was a visionary thing, it was a lightness in my body … my body suddenly felt light, and a sense of cosmic consciousness, vibrations, understanding, awe, and wonder and surprise. And it was a sudden awakening into a totally deeper real universe than I’d been existing in. So, I’m trying to avoid generalizations about that sudden deeper real universe and keep it strictly to observations of phenomenal data, or a voice with a certain sound, the appearance of cornices, the appearance of the sky say, of the great blue hand, the living hand—to keep to images.

So then, the other poem that brought this on in the same day was The Little Girl Lost, where there was a repeated refrain,

Do father, mother, weep,
Where can Lyca sleep?

How can Lyca sleep
If her mother weep?

“If her heart does ache
Then let Lyca wake;
If my mother sleep,
Lyca shall not weep.”

It’s that hypnotic thing—and I suddenly realized that Lyca was me, or Lyca was the self; father, mother seeking Lyca, was God seeking, Father, the Creator; and “If her heart does ache / Then let Lyca wake”—wake to what? Wake meaning wake to the same awakeness I was just talking about—of existence in the entire universe. The total consciousness then, of the complete universe. Which is what Blake was talking about. In other words a breakthrough from ordinary habitual quotidian consciousness into consciousness that was really seeing all of heaven in a flower. Or what was it, eternity in a flower … heaven in a grain of sand. As I was seeing heaven in the cornice of the building. By heaven here I mean this imprint or concretization or living form, of an intelligent hand—the work of an intelligent hand, which still had the intelligence molded into it. The gargoyles on the Harlem cornices. What was interesting about the cornice was that there’s cornices like that on every building, but I never noticed them before. And I never realized that they meant spiritual labor, to anyone—that somebody had labored to make a curve in a piece of tin—to make a cornucopia out of a piece of industrial tin. Not only that man, the workman, the artisan, but the architect had thought of it, the builder had paid for it, the smelter had smelt it, the miner had dug it up out of the earth, the earth had gone through eons preparing it. So the little molecules had slumbered for … for kalpas. So out of all of these kalpas it all got together in a great succession of impulses, to be frozen finally in that one form of a cornucopia cornice on the building front. And God knows how many people made the moon. Or what spirits labored … to set fire to the sun. As Blake says, “When I look in the sun I don’t see the rising sun I see a band of angels singing holy, holy, holy.” Well, his perception of the field of the sun is different from that of a man who just sees the sun sun, without any emotional relationship to it.

February 8, 2015 by princemyshkin

Discipline

I wake up at 5 a. m. every morning to do yoga. People have said that this requires discipline, but that word strikes me as objectionable and false in this context.

Growing up a musician, I was constantly presented with the word discipline. What it meant as a child was forcing yourself to do something you didn’t want to do. But later it became clear that this was a childish view. Clearly I love music. It is not that I don’t want to do music. It is rather that so much practice time is sometimes difficult to reconcile. Most people cannot imagine what it is like to spend 6 to 8 hours every day practicing. This begs a different meaning for discipline.

For Westerners discipline is usually wielded like a sword of righteousness. It is entirely egotistical. A disciplined person loves his discipline and disdains those that live in sloppy disarray.

In my practice there is no room for the ego. Indeed the Vedic teaching are focused on freedom from the ego. Patanjali’s yoga was one of the first attempts at realizing the Vedas in a way that people could embrace. Instead of discipline – the word is never used in any translation – the Vedas offer 6 “graces”. Together, these comprise what I substitute, in my heart , for discipline. (Summaries are from Shankaracharya, The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom)

1) Restfulness – a steady intentness of the mind on its goal.

2) Self-control – the steadying of the powers that act and perceive, each in its own sphere, turning them back from sensuality.

3) Withdrawal – the raising of the mind above external things.

4) Endurance – the enduring of all ills without petulance and without self-pity.

5) Faith – an honest confidence in the teaching and the Teacher.

6) Meditation – the intentness of the soul on the pure Eternal, but not the indulgence of fancy.

This ego-less approach is very difficult for the Western perspective. The fist question the Western student has is, “wait – what’s the goal?” The answer that Dogen would give is that you can not possibly understand the goal, even if it were expressible in human terms. This is where Dogen uses the word Faith – it is faith in the Teacher: that your Teacher knows what to teach, having inherited from the thousands of years of Teachers, the path to this goal.

Back to music – what is the goal of music? In America, the goal of all those hours of practice is probably Money and Fame – among the “graces” of the Capitalist Church. But discipline with that goal will produce mediocrity. A very great film, coincidentally about the cello(ish), is Tous les matins du monde. It has been very influential to me, in terms of my understanding of “discipline”. Here is the iMDB summary:

It’s late 17th century. The viola da gamba player Monsieur de Sainte Colombe comes home to find that his wife died while he was away. In his grief he builds a small house in his garden into which he moves to dedicate his life to music and his two young daughters Madeleine and Toinette, avoiding the outside world. Rumor about him and his music is widespread, and even reaches to the court of Louis XIV, who wants him at his court in Lully’s orchestra, but Monsieur de Sainte Colombe refuses.

One day, nineteenyear-old Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu) shows up at Sainte Colombes door, requesting that he be accepted as a pupil. In spite of an impressive audition, the Master rejects him, to the great disappointment of both Madeleine and Toinette. In a short but cold and biting pronouncement, Sainte Colombe tells him to go to play at the Court, where his undeniable talent will be most appreciated, but he, Marais, will never know what real music is all about, and what it means to be a musician: You make music, Monsieur, you are not a musician.

For me, this suggests the related word “discipleship”, instead of discipline. You go to your shed in the garden each day to practice, through no power of your own, no ego. Instead, you are called to the shed, to do the work you have been gifted with. It would be impossible to explain this as a kind of “goal” to someone else. This is why discipline may be loud, but discipleship may be quiet. St. Paul says, in the first letter to the Corinthians

In fact, preaching the gospel gives me nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion and I should be in trouble if I failed to do it. If I did it on my own initiative I would deserve a reward; but if I do it under compulsion I am simply accepting a task entrusted to me. What reward do I have, then? That in my preaching I offer the gospel free of charge to avoid using the rights which the gospel allows me. So though I was not a slave to any human being, I put myself in slavery to all people, to win as many as I could.

I have also heard the word sacrifice used in relation to discipline. I take issue with this, as well. In the Western sense, sacrifice is again, tied to the ego. People would not do sacrifice if it were kept a secret. If they drag the cross up the hill, they do so only with a crowd of onlookers. Sacrifice in this sense implies the loss of something great. I see no loss in the few hours of sleep I might have had. I see no loss in the sleep I lose to quiet my baby’s fears in the night.

Instead, I see only gain, feel only enrichment

September 19, 2013 by princemyshkin

Kingdom Come

Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done – on earth, as it is in Heaven.

Christian don’t really understand this passage – it is locked in an antiquated style of English, with far too much reliance on a level of grammar that has gone lost in our times. It means:

Let your Kingdom come, let you will be done – let this happen on earth, as it happens in Heaven.

Thus, Christians are tasked with making the Kingdom of God happen on Earth – that is, here, now, where we stand. Make Heaven happen on earth, In this way, Jesus has the same “good news” as Buddha. Both were reacting against religions (Hinduism and Judaism) that preached enlightenment AFTER death. The radical message that both preached was – don’t wait! Get enlightened now! Before you die!

In the Kingdom, All are enlightened. To be enlightened means to see as God sees – that all Things are only one Thing, that all bodies are actually one body. And this is not a metaphor. When we see as God sees, we see not as “through a glass darkly”, where individual shapes move about, darkly, ominously; rather, we see a visual field, we hear an aural field, within which we can choose to distinguish individual elements, or not. Of course, there are phases we must go through to get to this sense of awareness: the first phase is to feel a sense of love for everything. To love as God loves. As J.D Salinger writes:

“I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all, Teddy said. It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.”

And this is what Nietzsche meant by “Übermensch”. Shaw unfortunately was too arrogant to try to understand German when he mistranslated this to “superman.” Indeed, it is easier to understand this word if you are from California: if someone says “Über schwag”, it means “of the highest quality; at the point of highest development”. So, an “Übermensch” is not above human – just really, finally, a human – no longer a beast. It’s not a question of evolution. it is a question of growing up, all the way, into a full understanding of who you are in relationship to where you are.

And so, we seek to live daily on a higher spiritual plane. The first step is to forgive. The second is to love. The third is to forgive because you love. The fourth is to forgive others, because there are no others – they are we. And so, the fifth step to finding the Kingdom is to love others as you love yourself. The sixth step is to practice – to discipline yourself to think this way all the time, so that it becomes automatic; it becomes “easy”. The seventh step is to make it – to live, to help us all live. The eighth step is to clear some space out, so you can space out. The ninth step is devotion – pary at all times. The tenth step is surrender – breath out, let go.

June 28, 2013 by princemyshkin

This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength

Nayam atma balahinena labhyah – This Self cannot be gained by one devoid of strength
– Mundaka Upanishad iii:2:3
This mantra has always appealed to me, made me feel good when I think about it, say it… I think I like it because of two reasons:
the phrase “this Self” strikes me as personal – not pondering over some metaphysical conundrum, but rather something from myself, like my ear or my leg.
there is also the feeling that the writer of the mantra is writing from experience – a long trail of experiences, which were not easy.
I think about when my guru recently described someone as “strong, strong.” The person she is describing is, indeed, a strong , strong yogi. He looks it. There is no doubt. But I immediately thought, “not ever so strong as you.” Because the strength fired by passion is what the mantra is referring to – clearly. We all know that, seen from far above, the strong man is indistinguishable from an ant. Indeed, proportionately, the ant is much stronger. But both Man and Ant can be brushed off the surface of the earth by the eyelashes of Satan (I use this name because it invokes fear in many people, from diverse cultures.)
Because the strength of the Upanishad mantra is that strength needed to combat the greatest power in the human universe – fear. Fear of This Self. When you are alone, are you alone? No. You are always trapped with You. It is in utter aloneness that humans feel the most wretched, nauseating fear, and this is because they do not recognize the frightening being that surrounds them in this aloneness. It is us. “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Incidentally, my dad used to read me Pogo, incessantly, insistently. He wanted me to know something. “We have met the enemy and he is us.” What the mantra is saying, however, is that we do not run from This Self – we must gain it. Tame it? Embrace it? Yes. I think so. And for this, we need that special strength. Do you know what it feels like?
Because you have to feel it once, before you can recognize it. It’s likely not one of those alternative strengths that someone has preached to you in the past, like “moral strength” or “strength of character.” No. Indeed, this strength feels exactly like physical strength, only, inside you. It feels like the cows are tied to your arms, and pulling you apart. But, you feel the sinews wrap around the pain and the force, and counter it. We who practice Ashtanga and Yi Jing Jin feel it in our practice, once we have surpassed the deceptive feelings of physical strength.