The Waiting Is the Hardest Part

Change Only Comes When Demand Meets Supply

Saturday, April 19, 2025

Aho’ Rajanaka,

I hope this finds you well. My principal purpose is was to share registration details for our yearly Rajanaka Summer Camp in July. We’ve been gathering for some 20 years in the Finger Lakes of western New York. (Plant this seed: July 10-14, Bristol, NY, not too far from Rochester.) But I will send details in a separate note today or tomorrow.

Feel free to ignore this Newsletter if that suits you better. We each must come to terms with how much we can attend to before we just can’t do anymore.

It would seem fainéant or worse complicit in the madness if I did not comment on where I think we are in The Madness and with the Mad King.

Of course, yoga can provide the bypass we all would prefer. But we’re not going to give yoga a pass either. We must create something better than before. We need a yoga for living in the world we live in.

If you’re reached your own limits with the news, know that we’re still here and will be here when you’re ready: to defeat the demons we must remind ourselves we’re not abandoned or forgotten or forsaken. Come to some Rajanaka Sessions, any Saturday or Sunday at 5pm, hang with some friends, talk about mythologies that offer up meaning and consider the stuff of life. Write me a note. Send a friend a postcard. (I do love postcards.) Or go and share a smoothie with a pal, just be with each other.

It may be there’s little yet we can really do to prevent the furtherance of this madness, much less repair the damage already done. And the more that is certain to come. Patience and forbearance are not the same as quitting the cause of decency.

Waiting isn’t waiting this out, but it requires waiting for the majority to experience real consequences.

Do take note, yoga has indeed often been about ignoring the world, claiming it’s all ephemera and peripheral to what is somehow really important. Nowadays yoga gets its bypass on with just a good, hot sweat that provides respite and keeps the conversation to a minimum. We’ll do anything pretty much not to deal with the harder truths of worldly life.

Tyranny is exhausting, that is one of its superpowers. Fear, even if it’s not yet personal, takes its toll and the demons never relent because they know what works on us. Our vulnerabilities are not easily made into our assets. For that we will need a better yoga than most of what history has provided.

Bypass should be regarded the majority view if we take the history of yoga traditions, texts, and practices seriously. If you think that’s not enough, that we can offer a revolution in yoga, be prepared: we’re not going to win much applause nor inspire much interest.

Most folks even when they’re privileged or lucky prefer a softer touch---some even know they’re using balm in lieu of truth and don’t think that difference implicates them in lubricating lies. The mainstream media still hasn’t figured out this difference while the propagandists revel in fortunes they once never considered possible.

Truth has always been a matter of silos and repertory because it can be too much to bear. I too consume the news in measured doses these days not only for personal survival but because I think we haven’t yet reached the impact these truths will hold for us all.

Change will happen only when enough folks can’t live in the lies anymore. Frankly, I don't think we’re there yet.

Tyranny makes well-frogs of us all. You know, frogs happy to live in their own well without the slightest interest or clue that there’s a world surrounding them. Until their well runs dry. (Apologies to real well-frogs.)

Elsewhere in yoga worlds, Tantra tries to one-up ya’ on this whole dissociation from the worldly madness platform by claiming you can be in the world without any of those pesky karmic consequences, the usual limitations and conditions of a mortal life. That’s not even fantasy, they claim, you can get on yer siddhi and voilá… you’ll receive an RFK, Jr. sanctioned vaccine against reality. (N.B., this is not likely work against measles, reported now in half of the States.)

The Tantrics promise of Ultimate Power is so powerful you need Capital Letters to pronounce the requisite Vacant Redundancies served up in Word Salad Translated Sanskrit. Retreat into the Consciousness of Consciousness and you might yet feel like they are onto something.

Unfortunately, we’ve already realized that this is no emergent tyranny. Rather, it’s arrived.

We are now witness to what happens when Dharma’s construct of useful fictions, agreements and conventions of “law,” and those not often questioned norms are simply no longer operative.

The current period is closer to the terrified conformity of Stalinism, highlighted by collusive charades of those seeking to protect their privilege and the occasional honest horror story of less powerful persons rounded up, sent to concentration camps beyond reach of the law. Court orders can be ignored by simply claiming they have been met by saying so on TV or the preferred outlet of the faithful, Truth Social.

Once reputable legal firms and free speech Universities should warrant our particular disdain, for they have the means to resist even as the rule of law--- based as it has always been on the fraudulent assumption that it brooks no exceptions and must apply to all--- is exactly what we always thought it to be: a pretext for power to test its limits. Not even your American passport may spare you being rounded up.

Money is power in America and given its concentrations we’re going to need some help to mount meaningful resistance. That may be a hope too Pyrrhic to take seriously. Then what?

What used to be unthinkable becomes the shameful norm. Who is going to stop the tyrant? The Courts? And just how are they going to do that? I would have never suspected that Harvard would become a bulwark of resistance. Miracle or just their sense of self-preservation? I don’t care which. Without their money they are nearly powerless. I’m glad they are willing to do something. If they fail, the whole of American education becomes the handmaiden of this tyranny.

It is going to take forces larger than our individuality to resist effectively. Authoritarianism wants you to treat the tyrant as if he possesses guru-esque invulnerability and inevitability. We must not surrender our collective power as individuals, and this begins with rejecting hegemony over our hearts and minds. You need to think about these things at least once a day, okay?

I’ve lamented a lifetime I didn’t make Nixon’s enemy list but the reality of being a targeted elitist brings no particular joy. We should expect more illegal imprisonments, interrogations, house searches, taken in broad daylight by masked thugs, more people driven into isolation, heartbreak, facing betrayals from employers and stoolie colleagues at work.

It’s hard to rally a nation around ideas and principles without individuals made into emblems of the cause: think George Floyd and now Abrego Garcia. Even then it’s unlikely to cause widespread response until it gets personal.

People don’t respond to empathy the way they respond to this is happening to me. I suppose that’s just another ordinary human failure, but I think that’s what it’s going to take. Lots and lots of this is happening to me, many more than the scores of victims appearing day after day in under the fold news reports softened to appear reasonable.

If the weight of tyranny on the vast majority doesn’t manifest soon there won’t be much left of American ideals.

It's hard to root for widespread failure but our only real hope at this point is when We the People feel the effect of this sociopath leading us to national suicide.

Vachel Havel once wrote,

…it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal…everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

I think we are way past the fiction that the Courts or Congress are going to save us from the Mad King.

Keep the fire lit, protest when you can but understand that there’s more tyranny, frustration, fear, and terror ahead. The propaganda networks will protect the Mad King and his cult will not abandon him---that would be tantamount to admitting their own failures.

As it gets darker, we’ll need to learn how to see better in the dark. Keep close to the heart and know that you are not alone. Know too that the storm ahead is already here. We can prepare further by remaining vigilant, committed to the conversation, and observant.

Don’t exhaust yourself daily. Instead do your part, replenish with learning, creativity, voices of reason and passion, look to art and endeavor to be as Havel taught us living as if we are free in the recognition that change requires us not resign or refrain from hard truths. We must somehow learn to tolerate the madness before we it is possible to manifest the alternative.

The powers that hold us captive will not relent and neither must we. Time is not on our side but neither is it on theirs. Take sides and time will become a refuge for honesty and considering our real possibilities. Don’t buy into a yoga of retreat or bypass. Engage the world, hold the threshold with the mighty elephantine joy for what we can yet be. Rage on, calmly and know that each of us makes for the difference we must all make.

As ever, Douglas

&&&

Weekend Rajanaka Sessions happen at 5pm Eastern on Zoom:

Saturday Hanuman and the Greatness of the Shadow

https://rochester.zoom.us/j/95057662268

Sunday Mahabharata

https://rochester.zoom.us/j/314987250