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.