Philosophy of the Will Session 2

Here's session 2.

Session 2 Readings

And the class itself: All about John Locke, Tabula Rasa, and the beginning of our discussion of Arthur Schopenhauer.  Enjoy!

Hello everyone!  This past Tuesday we kicked off our "Philosophy of the Will" class at Liberation.  It's a charity class, by donation, and everything goes to support First Book, a literacy charity for disadvantaged kids.  Over the next 8-ish weeks we'll explore the development of a particular idea of "Will", as it appears in the thought of folks like Arthur Schopenhauer, Frederich Nietzsche, Freud, Alfred Adler, and even Aleister Crowley.  Sound crazy enough to be interesting?

We kicked off this past week with a discussion of free will, contrasting selections from the writings of Thomas Aquinas and David Hume.  As I mention in the talk, "free will" isn't really what we're after, but rather the discussion began to reveal some important observations of the nature of the human condition and the Will itself.

Below there is a link to the selected passages we read in class (4 pages), and a video (well, audio really) of the class itself. Don't mind the ugliness of the video, it's my first time posting something like this to Youtube. If you enjoy the class and get something out of it, I encourage you to make a donation to the charity above.

Session 1 Readings

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Sahasrara – The Hole in the Top of your Head through which God Enters

Didn’t you know you have a hole in your head?  That subtitle is mostly a joke, but not entirely.  In the old dualism of the yoga system, what Sahasrara represents is the connection to the Purusha, that transcendent monistic consciousness that in Tantra is called Shiva for short.  The other six chakras were concerned with the other half of that dualism, Prakriti, which basically means matter, stuff, and manifest reality.   Prakriti is the mind, body, dirt, animals, and everything except that mysterious and transcendent Purusha.  So, calling Sahasrara a hole, an ‘empty’ space in the sense of transcending matter, isn’t such a joke after all. 

            I’ve been talking about God all week in class, a topic I usually avoid as the word is so loaded in our culture.  It’s hard to talk about because we have all of these purile images of a bearded dude enthroned in a cloud stuck in our head. So try to keep in mind that the ideas below are just ideas, or really the mere sketch of my own ideas about God.

            The joke, if there is one, is really in calling Purusha ‘God’.  In classical yoga and in Vedanta, this ‘Seer’ or Purusha, is essentially considered God.  God is understood in the idealistic sense, in that it is utterly pure, utterly transcendent, and utterly free and removed from the messy-ness of the world.  Like many other theistic systems, God and the world are poles apart, and only one of the two is worthy of admiration, worship, and even attention.  This may not always be said, but it is the subtext of most spiritual systems, including classical yoga, Vedanta, and Christianity.

In Tantra, the system from which the chakras originate, Prakriti, matter, is personified into the goddess Shakti, and it is her, rather than her removed and transcendent Shiva, that is given primary worship, although both are considered part of the same whole.  The world, so the Tantras say, is a divine play between Shiva and Shakti, and we’re like actors in their love-drama.  Shakti, we might say, is given her due.

The Vedantins say that the world is illusion, and certainly this is a demonstrable fact.  The world is not how it appears.  What it really is, physics tells us, is a sea of energy fields, or more abstract yet, a field of probability.  But that’s not what the world is, that just how it appears from one point of view.  Take eating a steak for example.  You might say that the steak is just a collection of carbon-based molecules.  That’s all the steak ‘really is’ from one point of view.  From another point of view it is a delicious meal, even a celebratory treat.  From yet another point of view it represents the cruel murder of a sentient life-form.  Which one is the ‘real’ steak?  All of them, and none of them.

So too with God.  What God is can perhaps only be truly summarized by that ancient phrase from the Upanishads – ‘Neti, neti’ – ‘not-that, not-that.’  To say God is one thing is to limit the infinite, right?  Well, yes, but sometimes limited is better.  It is, for most of us, useless to try to see steaks as molecular constructs, and doesn’t make it more appetizing or morally acceptable.  And if you’re eating the steak, thinking of it as murder tends to hurt the appetite.  If you’re a vegan, thinking of it as a delicious meal creates unnecessary moral conflict.  None of these are true in some sort of objective sense, and we might well imagine that we might say that the truth of that steak is ‘not that, not that’, not a meal, not a murder, not a molecular construct, but something that has its own essence or nature independent.  Not only would this be philosophically suspect (do things have independent essences?), but it would create a ‘knowledge’ of the ‘truth’ of steak that is sterile, bland, and utterly useless to anyone.  We might well say that ‘steak’ is thereby destroyed.

God then, is like steak.  We may intellectually understand that what we call God may represent any number of experiences, ideas, and traditions none of which represents the absolute truth, but only a partial truth.  God looks different to different people, and this is why an understanding of the reflexivity of all God-talk is important.  Your idea of God ultimately reflects something of your personality.  Why did those ideas about God stick with you, why did you resonate with that image or that prayer? Why do you look at the barbaric commandments of the Old Testament and cringe? We understand ourselves through understanding God.

The chakras represent a wonderful way of conceptualizing this.  We can look at the lower six chakras as colored lenses through which we look at the world, and so too at God.  Here’s my (very brief) summary of some of the ways God looks from the point of view of each dominant chakra. Keep in mind, any one organized religion will include several of these, but we all ‘cherry pick’ what we like in those religions, so that’s what we’re looking for.

1. Muladhara – God is the God of the tribe, the “God of my people”, and is usually conceptualized as a parent, the Great Sky Father, or the Great Earth Mother.  God may appear as animal-headed, or as an animal totem.  Animism, personified nature.  God, like a parent, may appear incomprehensible, moody, and an emphasis is placed on appeasing God like one would an angry father.  Emphasis on Taboos, and following proscribed rules.  Can manifest as adherence to the religion of one’s parents despite limited belief or interest. God of strength.  Also, “God is on our side, not theirs” mentality.
2. Svadhisthana – God as a human image, beautiful forms like the idealized Gods of Ancient Greece.  The Gods (often plural, or an emphasis on lesser sub-gods or saints with the power to intervene), are often capricious, vain, and ambitious, meddling in human affairs, often sexually (like interfering Cupid and Aphrodite or that old rapist Zeus).  Mysteries of Sex, divine dramas and pageants, colorful statues and idols.  Inclusiveness of other Gods and forms as being at least potentially valid.  Cult of beauty and youth, Dionysian revels, and a constant search for the new thing or inspiration.  Spiritual dilettantism.
3. Manipura – God as the template for the ego; God as the Sun, the center of the universe.  God as King, with dominion over the world, like a worldly ruler organizing things his way. God as power.  Adherence to divine order and will. God is to be honored, and feared.  He (usually) arranges things in according to a divine order, and that order continues to human things.  Concerns about fate, about roles in society, status, and dignity of the individual.  God is not immanent, but is ‘set over’ the Earth.  Just like a King isn’t the Kingdom, but rules it from above, usually through deputies.  Religions with high value on organization, dogma, and officials.  Catholic Church hierarchy is a good example, as well as the pre-China Tibetan Theocracy, or the Islamic world under the Caliphate. 
4. Anahata – God is love.  This is the major view of our current age.  God is all-merciful, all-forgiving, utterly benevolent, and just an all around great guy/gal.  He/she is also a personal God, concerned with each of us, and one with whom we can talk like a pal.  Buddy Christ, the Buddha, and Krishna are good examples.  Also, the Virgin Mary in Catholicism.
5. Vishuddha – God as wholeness, as all-encompassing.  God is good, but also evil.  God is transcendent, but immanent.  God of paradoxes.  God understood as reflexive.  In other words, an understanding of God as filtered through (or constructed by) the human psyche.  Cultural and spiritual relativism combined with an acceptance of personal karma and destiny. Recognition that there’s a difference between God and our thoughts about God, but also that the later has value.  This is very much the way we’re looking at things in this blog post.
6. Ajna – God understood as transcendent.  The human experience of a totally transcendent, content-less God.  Neti, Neti.  God as void.  God as the ultimate singular underlying reality.  God as the abstract monad.  God as light. 
7. Sahasrara – God outside of human conception.

As we can see, this journey up the chakras and looking at God shows the lower chakras assigning tons of human experiences and ideas (parenthood, sex, love, rulership, etc) to God.  The higher chakras represent a falling away of this sort of projection of our very human psyches onto God, and an attempt to view God as it is on its own.  I like to look at the Crown Chakra as our connection to that deity, or that deity as it stands without projection.  Ajna is our experience of that, as described by such mystics as Patanjali.  

 

            Now, clearly, on one level, God as seen through the root chakra or 2^nd chakra is ‘less true’ than God as seen from the Ajna.  Certainly, the experience of God is less about God and more about our own minds, at least in theory.  But is that less useful to someone whose karma it is in this life to live from that understanding?  If I see God as power, is that worse than someone who sees God as love?  I’m not so sure. 

            To me, the real problem with God from the lower chakras isn’t less in the content, and more in the fierceness in which that content is grasped and taken as literal truth.  The God of my ancestors may be important to me, but as long as I don’t fall into the trap of believing that this is the One True Way for All, there’s no harm, no foul.  To me, transcending the lower chakras doesn’t mean abandoning the great strengths that come from them.  Yoga scriptures back me up on this, emphasizing that any form of deity that speaks to you is a highly suitable object for meditation.  In doing so, we may not only get closer to God, but get closer to ourselves as well.  And that, the masters of the Ajna Chakra tell us, is the real mystery; the two are not so separate.

            Shakti, and her manifestation as the Kundalini serpent coiled in the lowly first chakra, is God no less than her consort Shiva.  Our minds then too, are a manifestation of the divine.  The mind creates our forms of God, and it teaches us about God by teaching us about itself.  Our struggles, our disagreements, and our conflicts are all a part of that divine play, that love-play, happening in us, outside of us, and through us every day.  To me, that is an encouraging (and thereby useful, if maybe not ‘true) thought.  

            So should we give up our limited forms of God? No, so long as they retain power for us, power to move us forward.  That’s the key thing, I think.  When we touch God, he revolutionizes our world like a lightening bolt, whatever form he takes.  If our experience of God is just what we want to hear, we’re getting farther away from Truth.  God is the ever-widening circle that asks us to expand our view of the world.  It doesn’t ask us to forget where we come from, but it does ask us to look to where we’re going.  Kundalini may start as a primitive snake, but she doesn’t stay that way.  She transforms into more and more beautiful forms, and so do we as we rise with her to the crown.

There is no part of me that is not of the Gods!  Jai Shakti, Jai Shiva!

Ajna Chakra - The Upper Floors of the Mind

Moving into the 3^rd Eye, or Ajna Chakra, we leave a lot of what we discussed in the lower chakras behind.  In a way, we can look at working with the 6^th chakra as a separate task entirely, although it is deeply related to what has come before.  When we worked with any of the first five chakras, we were concerned primarily with personality and our individual psychology.  This is a process the tantric mystics called “tattva shuddhi” or the purification of the elements.  These are the elements of the personality, which we call (for convenience) earth, water, fire and air.  Space, the element of the 5^th Chakra, is that which contains the rest and represents an individuated or whole personality. 

For most of us, this is the goal: reconciliation with ourselves, healing, and even the development of a new point of view independent of the ego and yet individual.  Psychology, especially Depth Psychology, has this as its main concern, and it the Jungians who go the furthest with it, describing the strange and wonderful individuation process.  But for the Jungians, this is pretty much the end of it.  Most of the rest of psychology stops much lower down the chakra tree. 

The yogis and saints of all ages tell us about states and stages well beyond this, and that’s what we’re talking about when we get to the Ajna chakra.  These, described in books like the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, are states that require incredible non-attachment and perfect concentration to master.  The sutras tell us that yoga is “the cessation of the fluctuating states of the mind” and that when we manage to stop the mind’s constant chatter “then the Self dwells in its own nature.”  Essentially, the Sutras make a claim that there is a Self beyond the mind, but which, when the mind is active, appears to be those very fluctuations.  We believe we are what we think, feel, or do, but according to the yogic classics, as well as most religions, we’re far more than that. 

In classical yogic metaphysics, there are two fundamental substances.  First there is Purusha, sometimes symbolized by Shiva, which is pure consciousness. Not thought, but the pure awareness which has no content, no aim, and no reflection.  According to the scriptures of yoga, this Self is eternal, independent of time (our time-sense being a product of mind), and forever unaffected by actions or karma.  This Self is utterly without content or mind, as I said, so it is also without personality, or even individuality.  Ultimately, this Self is considered non-different with any other Self.  My Purusha is not different from your Purusha, and in fact can be considered exactly the same thing.  Imagine, for instance, a paper globe with a candle inside.  If you prick holes in the paper, small beams of light will shine out in a different direction.  If you imagine that you in the small sense, your personality is one of those beams, we understand that Purusha is the candle flame, the source of the light for every beam of light, simultaneously.  As one of my earliest teachers once said, one candle flame loses nothing by lighting another.  You may have heard the very common platitude “we’re all already enlightened”.  What truth is in this phrase comes from the doctrine that indeed this Purusha is always free, and never in bondage, although it appears to be when it takes on the qualities of the mind.  It is the mind that is in bondage, or is liberated, never the Purusha. 

            The second substance is Prakriti, which is sometimes symbolized by Shakti, and it includes literally everything that is not Purusha.  The keyboard I’m typing on, the electricity in the computer, the light from your monitor, your eyes, face, brain, feelings, thoughts, memories, and mind.  It is, we might say, the world.  Purusha is consciousness, and Prakriti is what we are conscious of, and the means by which we know.  This Prakriti, while fundamentally one substance, which we call primordial Prakriti, is said to change and evolve into the varied forms that we see.  While there are 24 of these evolutes, I’m going to simplify the system for our purposes and talk about only a few.  We can begin with the five elements which make up the lower chakras – everything we’ve been working on up to this point.  You, the little self, are entirely made of Prakriti.

As we’ve moved up the spine, the elements have gotten subtler, especially when we got into the akasha or space of the 5^th Chakra.  In order to conceive of the space of the mind, or chidakasha, a level of non-attachment is necessary.  If we identify ourself with the ego, or with our desires, the non-ego and our aversions will seem to not be included in the space.  Only if we stop being so attached to the specifics of our personality can we begin to work with the psyche as a whole.  But the psyche is still individual, and in order to get at the 6^th chakra, the ‘third eye’, we must let even that go.

Last week when teaching about the Vishuddha chakra, I likened its inclusiveness to a phrase from the Chandogya Upanishad, but which has correlates in the West as well – satya brahmapuram, or the “true city of God.”  We imagine the psyche as a city, God’s city, not ‘ours’, and recognize that the city has good parts and bad, mansions and slums, and recognize that all of this is part of the city, even a necessary part.  In order to really look at the psyche like this, nonattachment is necessary.  Now, a mandala is the perfect illustration of this idea, and in fact mandalas are often intended to be read a sort of 2 dimensional city.  So imagine that you were looking down at a mandala, like a plan of your psyche.  If the psyche is the object, then what is the subject?  What sees?  Ultimately the Seer, but to the Seer no differences exist, no boundaries, no neighborhoods. No, the Seer sees through something else, a subtle, content-less part of the mind.

There is an ‘element’ of a sorts for the ajna chakra, and it is called ‘mahatattva’ or ‘mahat’ which means the ‘great element’.  It is a stand-in for the mind, and specifically one subsection of mind which we call the buddhi, (not to be confused with the Buddha) or ‘discriminative intelligence’.  Its job is to choose, to make differences between things.  We should try to understand this as the very root of the mind itself, its impersonal substructure common to all human beings. In yogic metaphysics, buddhi or mahat is the very first evolute of the primordial prakriti.  First there is just stuff, a sort of primordial soup.  Nothing is different.  Then a mind comes along and starts to find differences, like, this is ‘me’ and that is ‘not me’, and then ‘that not-me is a rock’ and ‘that not-me is a person’ and so on.  The first basic division is the me/not-me, which creates the illusion of an individual self.  I say illusion because this philosophy considers the self like a wave in the ocean – it’s there as long as the mahat is making it different, but soon enough the mahat desolves and now the wave is again non-different with the ocean.  It is this mahat or buddhi which can dispassionately observe the ‘city’ of the psyche.

The buddhi is considered extremely pure, and when we remember that the previous chakra, the 5^th, was called Vishuddha or “most pure”. This refers to the perfection of non-attachment that must happen in that chakra before we can really enter into the Ajna.  This goes back to what the sutras said about what yoga is really about – quieting the mind so that the Seer, or Purusha, can ‘dwell in its own nature’.  When we have all sorts of psychological twists and issues and complexes, the mind is tense and restless.  The buddhi, let alone the Purusha, is invisible.  It’s like trying to focus on hearing a pin-drop at the Superbowl – it isn’t going to happen.

The solution to this problem is to quiet the mind, to do yoga in its fullest sense.  The eight-limbs of yoga (ethical restraint, observances, postures, pranayama, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and Samadhi) are a direct method towards this goal of stopping the mind, which we call Samadhi.  But this is a gradual process, and as we progress in slowing the mind down (which happens for a long time before ‘cessation’ occurs), we can begin to focus not on the content of the thoughts, nor the affect, but on the sub-structure of thought itself.  We begin to see the buddhi at work, labeling, separating one thought from the next.  We notice that we can witness, judge, and even control our thoughts from some removed place prior to the day-to-day thoughts that make up the rest of the mind.  The buddhi is the part of the mind that has the most control over the rest, and can begin to do the work of cessation, preventing thoughts from arising so that the true self, the Purusha, becomes manifest. 

The Ajna stands in a special place in the chakra system.  The rising Kundalini, that earthy energy, is called Shakti in Tantra, literally the Goddess of Power, or Goddess of the World. She begins the process coiled at the base of the spine in the Root Chakra.  As we move up, it is really her (as our mind) which moves up the spine to higher levels of understanding. Shiva is pure consciousness, sitting remote and unmoving, as if in perfect meditation, unattached and uninvolved.  He is said to sit at the Ajna Chakra, and that chakra thus represents an exact counterpoint to the Root chakra and its Shakti snake coiled there.  Shakti rises because she desires Shiva, and when they meet in the Ajna chakra, Liberation is said to occur.  We must remember however what is Liberated: the mind.  We may say that Purusha comes through the Crown Chakra (although this is a bit literalistic and simple) to meet Shakti (and animating the mind) at the 3^rd Eye.  You may also be familiar with the idea that there are two nadis or subtle channels going along either side of the spine, and a third at the center.  These represent male and female, hot and cold, etc – the duality of nature.  Of course, it isn’t a duality of nature at all, it’s the mind which makes things seem dual; the buddhi separating and comparing always.  These two side nadis are said to stop just below the Ajna chakra, and this represents a cessation of the functioning of the buddhi, which is indeed the goal of yoga.

What happens then?  Imagine a wind rushing over a mountain lake, which makes the surface appear grey with white caps.  Imagine the same lake, with no wind, totally still.  Which reflects the viewer?  Clearly, the still lake will do a better job.  When the mind is still, we may say that it perfectly reflects the luminance of Purusha, of the Self.  It is no accident that the lunar crescent is often used to symbolize the Ajna chakra.  Its two petals represent that duality (also the two eyes) which is overcome by the chakra (and the third eye). It is said that the mystic who masters the Vishuddha chakra gains the ability to instantly understand scripture and to interpret it for others.  Mastery of the Ajna chakra is said to give the mystic the ability to create scripture. 

What must this be like?  Well, if we understand that time, space, and all of prakriti are detected (even created) by the mind, then such concepts will be meaningless when the mind is stopped.  No space means reality is the monad – truly one. This is symbolized by the bindu or monad point, which Hindus often wear as a saffron or sandal-paste dot on the ajna center. No time means that that one is eternal.  No content means we only end up trying to describe it after the fact.  We might say with the Vedantins ‘neti, neti’ no, its not that, not that, because if it’s that, it can’t be this.  The famous phrase sat, chit, ananda, or ‘being, consciousness, and bliss’ is used to describe the feeling that lingers when the mind starts back up again to perceive it, but can’t be said to be attributed to the purusha itself, which remains fundamentally mysterious.

If this sounds really heavy, well it is.  We’re talking about stuff that is well past what words can really get at anyway (being rather limited products of human minds).  For most of us, the practice will not be to try to perfectly stop the mind right now, but to slow it down as much as possible in meditation and try to see how it works, so that maybe down the line we can make a stab at stopping it. 

But as with the rest of the chakras, the Ajna is indeed working in us even if we haven’t fully evolved into it.  It comes across in intuition – a decision seemingly made before thought, an insight that comes from underneath the surface of the mind.  It also represents our ability to concentrate and to think with clarity. 

Overall, the Ajna is the contact point between our mind and our spirit, and represents a tremendous mystery that is still beyond the grasp (or even the vision) of science and everyday life.  It is the entry point for the gifts of the spirit, a place of openness which transcends all of the particulars of individual life.  At the level of the Ajna, “all is one” is not an equalizing platitude of the heart, but a physical, literal fact which can be experienced only by the exceptionally disciplined and self-controlled. It is where apparent difference is dissolved into perfect light. 

Chakra cycle

Its that time again.  In my Sunday 10am classes, we'll be taking a journey through the seven chakras.  Last year I wrote some thoughts on each of the chakras as we went along, and I'm going to repost them here so you can easily find them.  Last time around, I didn't write anything for the last two chakras, so I'm hoping to remedy that this time around.  Expect those posts during the 6th and 7th weeks.  In the meantime, enjoy!

What the hell are the Chakras anyway: Part I
What the hell are the Chakras anyway: Part II

1. Muladhara
2. Svadhisthana
3. Manipura
4. Anahata
5. Vishuddha

OWS 4: OWS and the Tea Party (Conclusion)

At one point, I watched as a news crew interviewed Michael.  They wanted to hear about the anger we all felt, but Michael insisted there was no anger, and surprisingly, I think he was right.  Sure, people are unhappy, but it didn’t feel that way down there.  It felt optimistic, hopeful, and even joyous.  One fifty year old woman I spoke to, a professional who had lost everything when the housing bubble crashed, said that these days she felt safer and happier at the protest than any elsewhere.  Michael said he saw very little anger, but that wasn’t what the news company wanted to hear.  The reporter spoke to her boss and she was told to cancel the interview.  No one wanted to see something about hopeful, positive protesters.  They wanted anger and arrests, pepper-spray and dirty hippies.  As the news shows, if you look for something, you’ll find it, and I’m sure this reporter did too.

            I did see one bit of anger, but it wasn’t from the protesters, but from a ‘tourist’.  A angry man in a suit ended up shouting at the man with the detailed banking proposal on his poster-board sign.  “Where were you when the Tea Party was marching?” he asked, disgusted.  I was proud that the protesters stayed rather civil with him, although he was far more aggressive in his accusations.  Still, he did have a point.  How was this different?

            I saw the above exchange in the first hour I was there, but that moment stuck with me longer than the rest.  The guy had a point.  I thought back to when I first heard about the Tea Party, and I remember being briefly sympathetic.  But it wasn’t long before I scorned them right along with the rest of my liberal friends.  I tried to remember what changed, and social issues were the most obvious thing that caused me to write them off as misguided.  However, other than the stances on social issues (in which OWS comes clearly down in favor of progressive policies), the two movements have a lot in common.  Both clearly stem from a recognition that government by the people for the people is falling apart and that the system has failed too many.  Both were initially popular movements made of regular people.  The Tea Party these days seems to have been mostly subsumed into the Republican establishment, with strong corporate backing, but OWS is still young and may soon find itself in a similar situation.

            I did see one important difference between OWS and the Tea Party – philosophy of government.  The Tea Party views government as an inherent problem; big government is inherently inefficient and wasteful, and private enterprise is efficient and effective.  Government is the problem, not the solution.  OWS seems to agree that government is broken, but it believes that corporate culture did the breaking.  From that point of view, government by the people is a good thing, but impossible in our current climate.  Government isn’t inherently the problem, but is because it’s bought and paid for.  Fix the corporate climate, and government becomes a force for good.

            I see both sides of this issue. I agree that government bureaucracy is wasteful and inefficient, but I believe that this is a matter of scale – look at the sheer waste of government dollars paid to private companies in Iraq and Afghanistan.  However, I (and most of the people at OWS I believe) would rather have a wasteful government healthcare (just one example) than corporate healthcare and insurance.  Why?  Because the government program’s purpose is to take care of it’s citizen’s health.  That’s the bottom line.  The insurance companies bottom line is on their financial sheet.  They are responsible to shareholders, not their clients and it is in their best interest to NOT pay for medical care.  Beyond that, I’d rather have billions of dollars wasted on doctors and medicine than billions in dollars in profit for executives who try to cut costs and deny coverage whenever possible.  Honestly, when it comes to health, I view ridiculous insurance profits as more inexcusable than government waste. But that’s just my own pet issue.

            I’ve heard many people who support the Tea Party exclaiming that OWS is anti-American and anti-capitalist.  No doubt that there are many who could be called anti-capitalist in the movement (or communist, socialist, or anarchist), but I’m not sure it’s as broad as the news would have you believe.  Many people think they’re anti-capitalist, but are actually anti-something else, as they don’t have much of an understanding of capitalism.  I spoke to one man in his 60s, a salesman, who put it beautifully:  “I’m a capitalist,” he said with a note of pride, “I’ve never had a cushy salary job, or paid vacation, or anything, and I’ve worked 33 years in this job.”  What was he against?  “Greed,” he said simply, adding that capitalism is all about making a good product and selling it honestly.  He complained that instead these companies cheat, steal and lie, and then buy political power to protect themselves and insure monopolies. 

            There is a difference between capitalism and plutocracy.  The later encourages monopolies of a few rich individuals and companies.  The number of major banks in this country keeps shrinking as the biggest banks gobble them up.  Competition against them is impossible, just like it is among the telecoms, and big outlets like Walmart that routinely destroy small businesses and turn small towns into their personal fiefs.  Monopolies and plutocracies are anti-competition, and therefore anti-capitalist.  And of course, that makes them as un-American as can be. 

            But it was social issues that really turned me off the Tea Party: hostility to gay marriage, racism, and religious extremism of the Christian variety.  But seeing news coverage of OWS and comparing to the reality I saw with my own eyes, I have to wonder if I was misled.  I have no doubt that much of what scares me about the far right is present in the Tea Party, but I have to wonder if that’s just where the cameras were pointed, much like the young anarchist punks down at Liberty Park seem to get most of the attention from the media.  Clearly, OWS and the Tea Party have very different social values, but both are crying out for fairness, transparency, and accountability.  They identify different sources of the problem, and different solutions.  I still think the Tea Party’s anti-government philosophy and faith in an unregulated market is misguided, but OWS has plenty of its own problems.  But they have more in common – both are popular movements, drawing regular people who don’t actually know much about politics or policy, but see that this country is being taken for a ride.  I don’t think the Tea Partiers see things clearly, but neither do most people down at OWS.  When there’s so much emotion, how can anyone think clearly? Then again, no one elected them – it’s not their job nor responsibility to write laws.  Many have few resources (or none thanks to the job market), and few have much access to the political process beyond choosing the lesser of two evils and pulling a lever every couple of years.  But they know that something has to be done, and like me, they want to help make this country better.  In the final analysis, both the Tea Party and OWS are made up of patriots who disagree, but are patriots nonetheless.

            Protest actions and passive resistance don’t create laws, politicians do, but politicians feel social pressure acutely.  Social pressure works.  Egypt proved that, Martin Luther King Jr. proved that… hell, the Tea Party proved that, helping to steer the political dialogue of the 2010 elections in their favor.  OWS is not an organization, not really.  It’s not a political party.  It’s a symbol, and a powerful one at that, and people are responding.  As the night fell Friday night, I departed, tired, bewildered, yet energized.  Like others I talked to, I found the protest frustrating, inspiring, maddening, and uplifting, all at once.  Like any symbol, it means something slightly different to everyone who experiences it, but that is its power, its strength.  So bewildered was I that I had trouble finding the subway, despite having worked two blocks away from the park for over a year.  On the crowded subway, in the press of tired bodies heading home, I felt a strange sense of unity with the people on the train, even if they didn’t know it.  I looked around and realized that everyone I saw was part of the 99%.

            And so am I.

OWS 3: Analysis

If you’re looking for a 3^rd party option for the next election, look elsewhere.  If you’re looking for a political action group, look elsewhere.  If you’re looking for a liberal Tea Party to help steer the democrats left, look elsewhere.  If you’re looking for a genuine popular movement, look no further. 

            The people of Occupy Wall St. are not pundits, politicians, or professional organizers.  They’re not funded by the Koch brothers or Warren Buffett for that matter.  It’s hokey to say it, but they’re ‘us’.  By which I mean, they’re regular folks, and I feel about them much as I do myself – I wouldn’t vote for them if they ran for office (I’d make a terrible President).  These are not policy makers, so don’t look for a new Banking Bill to be sent from Liberty Square to Congress.  More importantly, I think it would be wrong of us to expect that activists should be perfectly coherent in their demands or to make policy recommendations among protest signs and street theater.  Yet, these people do stand for something, even if only a few of them can articulate it well (ask yourself if your neighbors could do better).  There are as many ideas and opinions down there as there are people, but one idea seems to unite the rest symbolically: corporate greed is ruining our society. They might not be able to say exactly why that is, or quote figures from memory, but they recognize that something has gone wrong for 99% of us, and right for the 1% we’re holding up with our labor and taxes.  To one person, what’s most important is corporate blocking of significant health care reform, to another it’s about corporate sponsored warfare, and to yet another it’s about the numerous issues surrounding agricultural monopolies and genetic modification of food.  Those are just a few examples, but all tie back to the notion that our government isn’t protecting us from a greedy, powerful section of our society, labeled the 1%. 

            I spoke to one young woman who put it well.  I asked her what she hoped would come out of this, and her answer seems to be a common one among the activists.  “Nothing,” she said, but she didn’t mean it pessimistically.  “But it will bring energy to lots of organizations that already exist out there.”  She drew a diagram, a circle at center labeled OWS, and like spokes on a wheel she drew circles sprouting from OWS.  They were small, grassroots organizations, she said, fighting the various problems of our time (and seen as stemming from that same corporate culture of greed).  She labeled a few: education, poverty, and sustainability.  But I heard many others, and I began to see what may really be happening here.  I heard about banking reform, ending foreign wars, getting off oil, corporate accountability, loan forgiveness, healthcare, and many others.  It became clear to me that what united these people is the feeling of powerlessness, the feeling that the government has been bought and paid for, making the varied reforms I’d heard about seem impossible to implement against the pushback of billionaires. 

OWS 2: Getting Involved

After some initial conversations, I was introduced to the guy who had started the coaching table a few days earlier, Michael, and once I expressed my desire to get involved, we escaped the noise for a few moments to grab a coffee at Starbucks. There were several other protesters there as well, and most of them appeared to be emerging leaders of the movement.  All were young, 20s-early 30s, all were energetic, and all were disorganized, but all could appreciate the irony of meeting at Starbucks.

            We talked about ideas of how I could help from afar, vaguely outlining a blogging project that I could get involved in, as well as other things that were needed.  I began to get an idea of how things worked down there, as well as some of the problems.  Clearly there was no shortage of energy or passion.  There were plenty of ideas, too many, in fact, as most ideas needed people to help execute them, but everyone seemed more interested in encouraging each other to work on their own idea, even if it overlapped with others.  There was clearly a lot of wasted energy, and I did my best to insert a few organizational ideas that I felt might help.  After about an hour, a consensus formed, and several projects had emerged: a blog to help tell stories of the 99% (to show that it wasn’t just a bunch of crazies) and help widen the tent, a routing table for intake of volunteers that would essentially work as a sort of Human Resources department, and an “efficiency” team that would try to glue the various working groups throughout the park together.

            You see, the whole thing has become something of an experiment in direct democracy, for better or worse.  The General Assembly is made up of everyone, and anyone can propose an idea. From the GA have emerged various “working groups” dedicated to specific functions.  As of Friday afternoon these were: Internet, Team Planning, Legal (offering free legal council, etc), Sanitation, Medical, Outreach, Media, treasury, education & empowerment, art & culture, kitchen, comfort, direct action, facilitation and open solutions.  Sadly, I have no idea what a few of these were about (open solutions?), but I saw several of them in action throughout the day.  OWS Sanitation organized a cleanup where everyone in an area had to move their sleeping gear for a general sweep up.  As the park’s own sanitation group hasn’t been willing to deal with the protesters, it hadn’t been cleaned for a few days.  The kitchen also seemed efficiently run, if somewhat limited by circumstance (and the no open flame rule enforced by the police).  However, unlike most of the other groups, they posted clear signs listing what foods were needed, and orderly lines were the norm for those picking up everything from pizza (often ordered from out of state supporters) to homemade vegan casserole to breakfast cereal.  Unfortunately, there’s no general quality control, and absolutely no coordination among the groups, and little general direction beyond what anyone was inspired to do at that moment. 

            However, after a few more hours, I began to see that all of this was totally natural.  Much of what had sprung up here was spontaneous and fueled by emotion, not foresight.  The population was largely transient – most people did not sleep at the park, but came and went, some staying for a day, others returning day after day after day.  How do you organize hundreds of people who all have different opinions and skills if you don’t know how long anyone will be around?  Sadly, it was the more permanent population that seemed least equipped to organize things.  Many young and inexperienced in any field, and were certainly not professional protesters, but made up for it only with a passionate ambition to be a part of the solution.  Of course, no one can be blamed for lack of experience – we’ve all been there.  Ultimately, just being there may well be enough, and their passion and ideas may well inspire others with more experience to organize other events.  In many ways, I think that’s the point. 

            In the time since, I’ve remained in contact with those I met on Friday, and am still working on trying to make some kind of blog happen.  Yet much of it reminds me of the same paralyzing disorganization I saw in the park, so I’m not really sure what it will look like in the end.  Still, it’s starting to come together, and I’m not ready to give up on it yet.  I'll post more details when the thing goes live.

OWS: First Impressions

I arrived at ‘Liberty Park’ around noon, and although there were a few hundred people there, there didn’t seem to be much happening, at least nothing I recognized.  As I approached the park I saw the news crews scattered among the crowd.  Absurdly they reminded me of pigeons darting between pedestrian legs.

            Other than the news crews which infested the place uniformly, the “occupation” was much like a series of concentric circles, or layers of an onion. The police had barricaded each side of the park with metal fencing and jersey barriers so protests wouldn’t pour into the streets themselves, but now the cops seemed largely content to just stand around looking bored.  Standing impassively, they formed the outermost perimeter, and although I didn’t spend any time among them, I didn’t see much that demonstrated their opinion of the situation.  One thing I did notice, although it may mean nothing, is that the white-shirted ranking officers were the only police officers who hurried the tourists lingering to read the signs, or really spoke up at all.  The beat cops did absolutely nothing.  This may be a rank/responsibility thing, or it may show something else entirely.

            The next layer in were the tourists; folks who just came (some from out of town, some locals) to look but not participate.  I was surprised by just how many there were, and I got a vague sensation that many of them were supportive, but uncomfortable with joining in themselves.  Instead, they milled about, vaguely circling the outer edge of the park, reading the colorful protest signs being held by the next layer inwards. 

            This outer ring was made up of protesters, most of whom did not appear to be sleeping at the park, with their backs to the park, holding up their signs (especially on the North side of the park, where discarded signs are arranged on the sidewalk), as if projecting their message out into the world. The signs themselves were as varied and diverse as the people holding them.  Some were nonsensical rants against anything from the Illuminati to the Fed, but most demonstrated reasonable, if vague, concerns.  On my first exploratory circuit around the park, I noticed one well dressed man with salt and pepper hair holding an extremely detailed proposal for bank reform.  There was a crowd of people around him, leaning in to read each well thought out line.  Clearly, not everyone at the protest was vague about what they wanted.

            Beyond the outer ring of protesters with signs (and of course, this wasn’t in any way organized, it just shook out this way, like a centerfuge) can be found the beating heart of OWS.  There were piles of sleeping gear, tables and bins full of donated food, an organized kitchen, Info booth, a booth of professional Life Coaches who had donated their time, a library with a few hundred books to lend, an arts and crafts area for sign making, oh, and a bunch of dirty hippies.

            These are the guys that cable news likes to put forward as representative of the protest – smelly anarchists more interested in smoking weed than social change.  Of course, while they certainly stood out, they were not as large a portion as Fox news would lead you to believe.  Don’t get me wrong, there were some people who smelled as if they’d bathed in sewage, but only a handful among hundreds.  Many were on the young side, as is to be expected in any event that involves sleeping on the cold ground (admit it, ye older generations, it’s not as appealing as it once was), but this was not universal.  Some were unemployed or underemployed, and some (like me) were there on their days off.  It was diverse, chaotic, exciting, and entirely bewildering for the first couple of hours.

            There were lots of sights – musicians jamming, artists drawing, and even a few people trying to meditate despite the constant din.  One rather serious looking yogi sat on a raised area of the park in lotus, chanting a mantra over and over.  I got closer, trying to hear the words, but I only caught “ram” before I was forced to retreat due to the rather forceful odor emanating from him.  I had wondered, before I got close, how he managed to score that nice raised area all to himself, but clearly his scent won it for him.  Clearly, he’s not familiar with the first yogic observance, cleanliness/purity (Shaucha in Sanskrit).          It became clear to me that several of the permanent occupiers were people who may have been on the street anyway, and decided to at least make a statement about it.  Many reminded me of the yearly migrants who camp out in Tomkins Square Park.  But again, they were the minority, but they helped bolster the numbers of those who held the park overnight. 

            That said, I must say again that these folks are 1% of the 99% - they are not representative of the movement at all, but they definitely stand out, to me and to the news crews.  After all, throngs of regular people are much less interesting than anarchist freaks. But it’s the regular people that give the movement it’s passion and strength.

            I spent about an hour taking all this in, walking around, listening to debates, before I finally settled on approaching the coaching booth, to see if they could suggest how I could get involved.  The energy of the place was contagious.

            I probably should mention that what I describe above was rather early in the day, just about noon.  As the day went on, the numbers swelled, and what had been a din rose to a cacophony.  By 5pm the crowd had swelled with people getting off work and students getting out of class.  Like some kind of protoplasmic organism, the protest began to bud smaller groups (of mere hundreds) which marched off elsewhere, chanting slogans and flanked by police.  I couldn’t tell if the march I witnessed was organized or completely impromptu.  I suppose it really doesn’t matter.

            (More Pictures from the Interwebs)

Experiencing Occupy Wall Street

What is Operation Wall St?  Suddenly, the protests in NYC are all over the news and similar “Occupy” movements are popping up all over the country.  People are talking about it online and off, and the two most commonly expressed feelings I’ve seen are of general support for the movement or guarded skepticism and vague complaints about the protesters not having a coherent message.  Do they have a message?  Do they have policy recommendations?  Do they have ideas of how to implement change? 

            I found myself suddenly needing to find out for myself.  I scanned the newspapers, but it the spin was immediately apparent, from the NY Times to Fox.  Perhaps unsurprisingly it was a tech/nerd blog, BoingBoing, that seemed to be the clearest, posting videos, unedited interviews, and various unofficial ‘demands’, many of which were later seized upon by official news channels as the general demands of the movement.  Clearly, there was not one set of demands, nor one group even leading this thing.  My confusion mounted, but I felt moved by what I’d read online, and after the demonstration of the effectiveness of protest and passive resistance that we saw in the “Arab Spring” especially in Egypt, I began to hope.  Could this be the beginning of something bigger?  If so, should I get involved? 

            Of course, the only way to find out what the deal is would be to actually go down there, so that’s what I did.  No, I didn’t camp, I just went down for the day, but part of me wanted to move in.  Another part of me wanted to run home and take a shower.  I was there for the whole afternoon and into the evening, and when I got home I was exhausted.  It was just too much for simple yogi like me to take in.  I reflected, I thought, and I decided I should share my thoughts with you. 

            I’ve divided what I’d originally written up into several parts, as there’s a lot to say, and I’ve only scratched the surface. I’m going to try to describe the facts on the ground first and keep the analysis for later.  My apologies if I can’t keep things too unbiased, as I clearly have strong feelings on this topic. 

Vishuddha Chakra – Raise your Voice!

"I come from the imagination
And I’m here strictly by your invocation.
So what do you say—
Why don’t we dance a while?
I’m the how to swing.
I’m the twist and shout.
When you gotta sing,
When you gotta let it out.
You call me and I come a-runnin’.
I turn the music on, I bring the fun in.
Now we’re partyin’, that’s what it’s all about."

                                                     - Once More with Feeling, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

         The throat chakra, called the “Vishuddha” or “pure” chakra, is connected to the notion of our individual voice.  This is the place where we confront, silence, or speak our truth.  But what is our truth?

            When we start dealing with the 5^th chakra and above, the air starts to get a little thin, literally.  We’ve cycled through the 4 elements, and with Vishuddha, the ‘element’ associated is Akasha, the element which contains all the others, which is most adequately translated as ‘space’.  All physical matter is contained in space, and there is always more space than there are ‘things’ in space.  When we leave the air of the heart chakra behind, we also leave behind us the last chakra that our modern society has integrated.  The throat chakra is on the cutting edge of our cultural evolution, and therefore there are fewer myths, signposts, and symbols that describe it.  Traditional teachings on the chakras say that the throat chakra is only accessed by spiritual teachers, who have gained the ability to interpret the scriptures without error.  It is accessed by the purifying practice of non-attachment which I discussed in relation to the heart chakra, and is therefore ‘vishuddha’, purified of material attachments.  

            The above give us few clues, but I think they’re enough to get deeply into what the throat chakra symbolizes.  To me, the primary clue is the connection of this chakra to spiritual teachers and their fabled ability to ‘correctly’ interpret scripture.  I view this as a natural development of the multi-pointed perspective of the heart chakra, and its healthy non-attachment.  As I discussed in my last post, part of the problem with egalitarianism, openness, and lack of hierarchy is death by committee – a lack of direction or singular will.  If all values are essentially equal, choice becomes flattened and no real decision is possible.  Essentially, power (personal or collective) is stronger when concentrated, and the 4^th chakra spreads power equally everywhere. The throat chakra offers an elegant solution to this problem on a personal level, but I’m unable to see its application for society as a whole at this point.  I imagine we’re a long way off from that.

            As we pass through the heart, we begin to understand the world as metaphor, to realize our understanding is one of many, conditioned by experience and our particular time and place.  We learn to try to be objective, to not favor even our own opinions and prejudices as we now recognize them as anything but universal.  We try to be cosmopolitan (literally: a citizen of the cosmos), respectful of difference, and open to all ideas and possibility.  But eventually, we have to realize that to live in such a state is difficult if not untenable.  We cannot act.  Our interpretations are tentative, self-conscious as we have become of our own presuppositions and prejudices.  We loose ourselves in the multitude of equals.  When we step into the 5^th chakra we find ourselves again, but without losing the lessons of the heart and its transcendence over the shallow and petty ego (3^rd chakra).  If the heart chakra is about realizing that each of us is but one wave in a vast ocean, destined to soon enough rejoin that which we never left, then the throat chakra is about reveling in that truth, that for a few moments we a wave cresting in the ocean, with no other wave quite like us; beautiful, transient, and perfect. 

            We all know the expression “you are what you eat” to be literally true.  The physical matter you take in is digested and assimilated.  We break the food down into its component parts, rearrange them to grow or sustain our own physical form.  However, it is true on another level that we are what we hear, read, or experience.  As foods are the building blocks of our body, experiences are the building blocks of our personality.  We are what we read, the lectures and conversations we hear, and yes, even what we watch on TV (certainly a sobering thought).  We take these experiences in, relate them back to the ego, or if we’re unable to ‘stomach them’ we repress them, and finally we integrate the experience into our sense of identity and personality.  Just as no two bodies are exactly alike (even twins eat different molecules), no one has a personality quite like yours.  We are each completely unique, and this does mean that we are also unequal in many respects.  Beauty comes from difference, and uniqueness comes from necessary difference.  The heart chakra teaches us that we are all equal in value, in essence, but the 5^th chakra reminds us of the lessons of the 1^st and 3^rd – equal doesn’t mean the same. 

            In Shankya philosophy (which the yoga tradition is partially based on), there is a basic dualism, but it is unlike the dualism we’re familiar with in the West.  The division is not Mind/Body, as it was with Descartes, but Purusha/Prakriti.  Purusha is the spirit, the eternal essence of each us, manifesting in an individual as (unembodied) consciousness.  Prakriti is absolutely everything else, and can be loosely translated as ‘matter’.  This ‘matter’ also includes the whole mind, which is considered to be a more subtle form of body.  We might say that the dualism is mind-body/consciousness, rather than body/mind.  Consciousness is that which gives light to mind, is the origin of the sense of self, of life – the animating force.  But the mind, thoughts, personality; these are all organizations of matter as unique, concrete, and transient as the body.  The Purusha (consciousness) is the immortal part, but it isn’t individual in any real way.  ‘My’ purusha isn’t different in any way from ‘your’ purusha (we might even question whether there is more than one purusha to begin with).  Our differences are essentially in Prakriti. 

            The throat chakra then symbolizes an awareness of our own unique truth, the authentic representation of our completely individual and unique point of view based on our experience – our Voice.  It is the voice that speaks to the experience of a single wave in the ocean, rather than the ocean itself.  It is, in its essence, a matter of interpretation. 

            Hearing (the sense associated with the chakra) and speaking are both creative acts.  Ultimately, we’re shouting across a vast distance whenever we try to communicate with another.  I know that when I give a talk, every student is probably hearing something different, interpreting what I say creatively through the filter of their own experience.  What they walk away with is a combination of what I said and what they heard, and never purely one or the other.  What I say is the product of what I have heard (experienced) in the past, digested, and made my own.   I’m interpreting before (and often as) I speak, you’re interpreting as (and after) you hear.  Often times, this is unconscious, especially below the 5^th chakra – we assume we heard what was said in the same way that we assume what we see is blue or green or whatever.  We learn to become aware that blueness isn’t in an object, but in our brains, and we can also learn that what we hear isn’t in the words we hear (or read) but in our brains.  Each brain interprets in its own way, based on prior experience.  When this knowledge flattens choice and devalues the self, we lose ourselves in the sea of humanity (heart chakra).  When this knowledge liberates us, allowing us to revel in the beauty of a singular wave in the sea of humanity, we have entered into the 5^th chakra. 

            This new sense of self, ultimately a shift in interpretation, is not like what came below it.  The 5^th chakra is related to the 3^rd and 1^st, much like the 4^th was related to the 2^nd (and 6^th), but it transcends them.  There is beauty in the 5^th chakra, in the individual voice, but it is a voice without ego, beauty without narcissism.  The wave never again is deluded into thinking that it is separate, removed from the other waves,  but it is still in no hurry to rejoin the ocean.  When we live through the 5^th chakra, we recognize the accidents of our lives as forming our personality, and we also recognize that if different things had happened we ourselves would be very different.  I recognize that I could have been female, Chinese, even you.  At the level of the 5^th chakra, we also recognize that we are not those others, could not now be those others. We learn to value our own authentic point of view, but without attachment.  That last is clearly the catch.  We might say its like realizing (in my case) that as broad as my mind becomes, I’ll always be a man, white, and American.  Even with a sex-change, skin pigmentation therapy, and renunciation of citizenship, my perspective would be that of a white American male who changed his gender, skin, and citizenship.  Acceptance of this role is the easy part – after all, we accept these roles in the 1^st chakra – the hard part is understanding that there’s nothing privileged, special, or superior about any of them.  With non-attachment, we recognize the accidental, essentially constructed nature of our entire personality.  Further, we recognize that this includes the vast underside of the mind, the unconscious.  It is a whole, complete understanding of the self, far above the level of the conscious ego.  We begin to see ourselves as Purusha, consciousness shining through one particular constructed mind, with one particular voice, one unique truth, one mission, one point of view;  not superior to any other, but itself part of a necessary whole.

            There’s more, much more, but I’m only going to touch on it here.  Communication, as I mentioned, is across a vast gulf.  Considering how creative we are at (mis)interpreting each other, it’s a wonder that we can ever communicate effectively at all.  This omnipresent miracle of human communication requires one thing to make it effective – recognition.  You recognize what I’m saying as words that have certain meanings which strike a chord in your mind, like a guitar string vibrating when a tuning fork of the same pitch is struck nearby.  If there was no similar idea in your mind, communication would not be happening.  Each of us may be a unique arrangement of experience, but we share many of the same experiential building blocks and that makes communication possible.  The more we have in common, the more easily we can communicate (language is a good place to start, but culture, values, etc, enter into it).  When we consciously access the 5^th chakra, we see these building blocks more clearly, and we can make great use of them.  We learn to recognize and call upon these essential constructs in others as well as artfully arranging them in ourselves.  We can become teachers and interpreters ourselves. 

            I think we as a culture are rapidly moving into this chakra.  This sort of consciousness and the freedom of interpretation it offers are no longer the purview only of gurus and mahatmas.  We’re claiming the responsibility for our own personality, for our own interpretations of reality.  We’re claiming the authority of our individuality.  Clearly, this is no small responsibility.  It is no easy task to claim our self-hood while remaining “pure” of egoism.  We doubt, second-guess, and hold back our voices.  We worry about what other people will think of what we say.  Society, it would seem, would prefer us to remain quiet.  Most of us do.  And then occasionally, there comes along a voice – a teacher’s voice, but not always belonging to a ‘teacher’ – which strikes a chord of deep recognition within us.  These are those people we call a ‘voice of a generation’ or a ‘manifestation of the zeitgeist’.  They call us to transcend ourselves, to learn to interpret for ourselves, to accept and recognize our own authentic vision of the world.  They ask only that we join our voices to theirs in a great chorus of humanity, that we learn to sing.  For me, so much of what this blog has been about has been just that – learning to sing my own song.  I hope you’re enjoying the ride.

            I’ll leave you with a brief exercise to help you think in the 5^th chakra.  Assume for a moment (putting truth-claims aside), that not only are you reincarnated, but you literally chose your birth circumstances.  Just pretend.  Assuming you intended to be the person you are today, ask yourself the following questions:

1)      Why did you choose your parents?

2)      Why did you choose your country?

3)      Why did you choose your gender?

4)      Why did you choose your race/ethnicity?

5)      Why did you choose your talents?

6)      Why did you choose your weaknesses/flaws?

Anahata - Compassion and Mathematics

            Today we step out of the egotic 3^rd chakra, full of fire and will and drive, into the clear open air of the heart.  With this transition we move from a place of difference (I vs. everything else being the primordial instance of difference) into a place where boundaries dissolve and difference vanishes before sameness.  Here we learn humility in the face of the powerful realization of the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of man.  We let go of our ego and open ourselves to the Other in an inclusive embrace. 

            Of all the chakras, the heart chakra is perhaps the most intuitive localization of an experience.  We intuitively connect the heart to love, and when we speak of someone being “open-hearted” the meaning is understood.  But the love of the heart chakra isn’t what we think.  It is not romantic love at all, but equanimity and compassion.  It is the love of the brotherhood of man, first and foremost.  The 4^th chakra is a bit aloof like that, all airy contemplation and high minded (one might say head-in the clouds or pie in the sky) ideals.  Compared to the down to earth 1^st chakra, the watery depths of infatuation in the 2^nd, and the fiery passions of the 3^rd, the Anahata chakra is in the cold, bright, open air of the stratosphere.

            Love is a convenient starting point for understanding this aloofness. Love exists in all 4 lower chakras in some way.  1^st chakra love is love for the family, tribe, of a parent for his child and the child for his parent.  It is conditional in that we love our own children first, and our own family more than other people’s families.  It’s easy to confuse this “selfless” love of the mother for the child with the general compassion of the 4^th (and I do think they’re related), as both put others ahead of the self, but they are very different.  If the mother loved everyone the same way they love their child, only then would it be 4^th chakra love.  We find romantic love in the 2^nd chakra, which is conditional in that the object of our affections must be lovable, which is a matter of personal preference (attractiveness, preferred gender, age, etc). We might easily forget to keep up other relationships when we’re captured by the jaws of the 2^nd chakra’s crocodile.  We are enchanted, and the moonlight of this chakra tends to hide all the faults of the person in question.  This is the love of the “honeymoon phase”, and in reality we find ourselves usually in love with the image of the person, only getting to know them on a deeper level when the initial burst of infatuation wears off.  3^rd Chakra love is love as status – trophy wives, gold-diggers, successful businessmen and politicians who might feel that they’re status is incomplete without a spouse and children.  Love as a vehicle for desire. All three types of love pretty much capture what we mean when we typically talk of love in a non-religious sense.  In that later sense, the Anahata reigns supreme.  4^th chakra love is impersonal, and without attachment to any particular object.  Here we find Christ’s injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself”, Buddhist compassion, Karma yoga, Bhakti yoga, and other “higher” forms of love. 

            I feel like I’ve been talking love to death this week because it is an easy example of what is really going on here in the Anahata chakra.  But the 4^th chakra goes well beyond love.  I think in its essence the Anahata chakra is about abstraction and a sensitivity to inner states.  What I mean by this is that we’ve now stepped out of the physical chakras (lower 3) and into a place where experience becomes independent of physical objects.  Love then, in the Anahata chakra, is not about the person.  Love is not in that person, but in us, and we extend it to others.  Realizing that love is within, rather than in the object of desire, is what allows for real interpersonal love.  When we live in the heart, we experience everyone as essentially equal in value and worth, and therefore equally deserving of our love.  This kind of love is an abstract kind, rather than concrete. 

            We don’t usually think of math in connection with this chakra, but it’s a good metaphor, especially as reason itself is connected to the anahata.  In math, we start by counting concrete objects, but this is not how it is necessarily used in science.  Science uses math to create an abstract representation of nature’s laws, representing relationships between forces and objects.  Such abstractions may require learning certain symbol sets, like numbers and math, to be learned “by heart”.  That last expression is a survival of an age-long association of the heart with the mind and memory. Science in particular is all about transcending the ego - a good scientist ideally removes himself, even his desires, from his experiment, trying to rise above the subjective, even above his attachment to the outcome of his experiment.

            Similarly, thought itself is crucial to understanding this chakra, and higher thought, specifically.  It is easy to describe the heart as “emotional power” as Mia Tuwari does in her books, but I think that this is incorrect.  It seems to me that emotion is largely a 2^nd chakra concern.  What we “feel” with our heart, that lump in the chest, the pitter patter, etc, is the feeling of obstruction, and pressure.  In yoga, we might say that this is attachment, and attachment is ultimately favoring one thing over another, for instance a person we love more than others.  When there is separation, or uncertainty about keeping hold of what we’re attached to (either in the early part of the romance, or at its end), we feel it in the heart as excitement or pain.  My experience is that the physical sensation is actually the same in either case, but the interpretation and emotional coloring is different.  In other words, the emotional difference is not in the heart chakra itself, just the attachment. 

            Difference, an “I” mentality, attachment, these things cause the heart to protect itself, to clench down, as it is a sensitive thing.  As we open the heart more and more in our practice, non-attachment becomes essential.  Non-attachment is a way of insulating ourselves from inevitable pain, a way of keeping equinamity, an even, steady keel in the waters of life.  Without this, an open heart would be in constant pain, as empathy without some distance turns into sympathy pains.  Most yogic practices aim at this distance (we may also say ‘renunciation’), and the yamas in particular are all calculated towards this end.  I’d go one step further and say that most spiritual systems concern themselves foremost with the heart. 

            Most modern religions tend to emphasize the ideas summed up by the anahata chakra, although these ideas may be filtered through the lower chakras in actual practice.  When we read the Gospels, for instance, we find Christ ministering to all people, almost seeming to prefer the prostitutes, poor, and tax collectors over the rich (who, after all, are as likely to get into heaven as a camel to pass through the eye of a needle).  He is criticized for this and willingly pays the ultimate price, crucified with common thieves.  This is a far cry from the triumphant King Christ who makes a later appearance, ruling, judging, and casting down to hell.  The latter is clearly a 3^rd chakra image, one which has been tenaciously keeping its grasp on the Christian imagination.  I think the reason for this is that it is only recently that the 4^th chakra has become anything close to being dominant in our culture.  The symbols have been there for 2000 years, but only with the Enlightenment, with its universal rights of man, scientific method, and penchant for democracy, has it really flowered.  The irony is not lost on me. 

            I think for the most part, the world needs more, not less, “heart”.  Humanity as a whole still displays a despicable barbarism, and much of the non-Western world is still firmly entrenched in the lower chakras.  But as the heart chakra becomes more and more pervasive in culture (and I’d say most of us reading this are extremely familiar with it), its flaws begin to creep into view.  One look at the gridlock in Congress and we can see the problems with democracy.  When everyone has an equal voice, the bigots, fanatics, and just plain stupid have an opportunity to shout down progress and spread hate.  I’m not advocating a retreat from freedom of speech, nor suggesting that we should have a strongman or 3^rd chakra king.  Far from it.  But there is something that happens when everything and everybody is equal – the world becomes flat, and ultimately the same.  We learn that we need some of those boundaries, even if we begin to suspect that they are illusory.

            The 4^th chakra in public policy simultaneously celebrates and annihilates difference.  It demands a level playing field, social justice, fairness, equality, and freedom from physical intimidation. It also seeks to uplift the downtrodden, the oppressed, and may appear to be more concerned with the Other than the Self, and this is both its strength and weakness.  When we educate ourselves into the 4^th chakra we recognize ourselves in all others.  Education is an important part of this development, as that is how we begin to place our own ego, our tribe, our concrete ways of viewing a non-concrete reality, in a greater context.  Learning another language helps us to realize just how limiting all language must be.  Learning history places us in context, and we stop seeing Armageddon hiding around every corner.  Comparing religious beliefs makes those exclusionary beliefs seem ridiculous and shallow.  But at the same time, these realizations may leave us hanging “in mid-air.”  We may learn to respect other cultures, humbly recognizing that our own judgments are constructed from our own cultural experience, and not “true” in any objective sense.  We become careful to avoid forcing our views onto other cultures, now sensitized to the bigger picture.  We see the world as a beautiful plurality of points of view, but at the same time removing the value judgments that help us to orient ourselves in the extreme multiplicity of points of view.  We see more options, more possibilities, and more choice.  We may even reject the ego itself. 

            Where does this lead us?  It can lead us to justice and fairness and essential equality.  It definitely brings greater freedom.  But it can also make choice impossible, because choice ultimately is favoritism, a discrimination (a word reviled by the 4^th chakra), and emphasizes difference.  The chaste 4^th chakra yogi cannot allow himself to be in a sexual relationship because it disturbs the equanimity of the heart – when we love one person more than another, we cannot love all equally.  Democracies become deadlocked, or worse, subject to the mob.  When the latter happens, it means that 4^th chakra equality is hijacked by those ruled by the lower chakras, leading to a degrading of culture to that level. This is the battle we’re fighting right now against the Tea Party, and the anti-intellectual and anti-secular factions.  In foreign policy, when we are trained to look at all cultures as equally valuable, it becomes harder to criticize barbaric practices such as genital mutilation and other human rights violations.  Essentially, when we’re unbalanced towards this chakra, life becomes ‘rule by committee’.  We may even, in the process of concern for others, lose sight of ourselves, and our own needs.  We may give too much, devalue ourselves too much, and in nourishing others, fail to nourish ourselves.

            Ultimately, balance in the heart chakra is what is important, as it is in all the others.  This chakra becomes a problem only when it becomes the only way we view the world.  The problem isn’t in what it represents on its own, but its lack of completeness.  Without a strong ego, our 4^th chakra will give until there is nothing left of us.  Without romance, life can feel lonely, no matter how many ‘spiritual brothers and sisters’ we may have.  Without the hard reality of the concrete earth, i.e. without application in the physical, science and religion both become mere airy phantasms.  But the solution isn’t just about looking back and down to the lower chakras (although that is also important).  The final solution to the problem of the 4^th chakra are found in the 5^th chakra, where out of the selfless service and humble recognition of the equality of all beings comes the Voice of salvation – our own Voice.