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.