"Walkin' on this stuff is hard walkin'..."

Sunday, November 24, 2024

Events of the last three weeks have been sobering, distressing, I’d like to say in defiance of credulity, but I think it true and sad that we could see it coming.  What happened was not beyond our fathoming, which is why the outcome is indeed so horrifying.

As Porkypine says to Pogo Possum, “The beauty of the forest primeval gets me in the heart.”
“It gets me in the feet, Porkypine,” says Pogo.

Porkypine then responds, “It is hard walkin’ on this stuff.”

“Yep, son,” says Pogo, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

Yep, it’s been a hard walk through this forest of feelings and facts these past few weeks.  We’ve much to consider about ourselves and what it might mean to say that we’ve met the enemy.  That’s hardly a pleasant thought but sometimes what’s true isn’t much pleasant---more about that in a moment.

I also confess to having since taken something of a mental health break from the news but not from the facts or their implications.  Yoga is never about disengagement; it is about creating reengagements that bring value to our intentions and actions.

Gratefully, I think, we are kind to offer each other the dispensation to step back a bit when we need to, not in retreat but to reclaim and replenish.  The primeaval forest can take its toll. 

We’re sometimes less generous to those who speak truth to power in ways that can be construed as defeatist, despairing, or even cynical.  It can be construed as complaint or tedious and we just don’t want to hear it.  We might prefer defiance or the projection of an unsinkable idealism and that soon-get-back-to-work hopefulness that resonates with Emersonian self-reliance.  We almost certainly will prefer an inveterate cheerfulness to co-pilot our determination to stay airborne. You know, “Fly  on, Little Wing…”  

One of my favorite features of yoga traditions is the insistence on candor and refuses pretensions of victory in the face of calamity. 

In mythic terms we see the gods facing down the demons, finding themselves at their wits end, beleaguered and defeated, asking for help, and turning as something of a last resort to the Lord of Yoga, Yogeśvara, none other than the Great God Mahadev, Śiva.  But the gods are quite aware to whom they are asking for help and how Śiva may well respond.  The often-irascible Śiva can seem artless, too direct, querulous, ireful.  He can seem unresponsive or indifferent.  Śiva’s interpreters make him out to be imperturbable, as complacent as he is disimpassioned no matter the circumstance.  Śiva’s lesson, the philosophers tell us, is his example: be without concern, the ultimate truth is above it all, so too are you.  (You’ve likely guessed that this is not the only interpretation possible and that I am having none of this one.)

Śiva retreats to the cave of the heart or to the mountain redoubt of Kailasa in a diffident, astringent disdain for matters he recognizes to be odious and uninviting.  The gods may be desperate for good reasons but he remains impenetrable.

His philosopher commentators go on to assure us that just as he is above it all by assuming the immovable posture of serenity, so too he is beyond the actual reach of the horror.  He’s not just mentally detached but physically immune or at least indifferent because that is projected to be the higher state of affairs.

We too can achieve this sublimity if only we practice their yoga, his yoga.  Good luck with that, I say.  Have at it.  I think there is another, rather different reading of this Auspicious One who the legacy of Rudra’s fury, the wise Śankara, the becalmed Śambhunatha.

In the Śiva mythos, as the world burns it’s not uncommon to see him indifferent to the plight, the madness, the danger and cruelty, almost as if he were saying, “you got yourselves into this mess, now you deal with it,” or “that’s karma, you were expecting otherwise?”  How could we think this would turn out otherwise when there is so much freedom to be abused in a world made of power, not made of goodness or some other wishful purpose? 

Śiva never teaches it is a moral or just universe, only that these things are possible, things to be created, sustained but which must be renewed because they will just as certainly dissolve by entropy or neglect.

Śiva never expresses malevolence, and never a trace of schadenfreude.  He takes no pleasure in the tawdry, the coarse, or the savage for the sake of some kind of sadistic joy.  He’s not petulant, detached, or heartless but may in fact may well be sparing us his well-warranted wrath.  Why torture us with a deserved churlish antipathy?

Our philosopher friends agree nearly unanimously that he represents an ideal of freedom, freedom from such transient frivolities of human making and freedom to act with impunity relieved of the burdens of worldly concerns.  But frankly, I find these interpretations, however ubiquitous, to be distasteful and certainly unhelpful.  Does yoga really invite bypass as our best response, as the truer and truest state of affairs?

Rather I think we find Śiva in meditation, not blissfully immune in Patanjali’s kaivalya that dissociates successfully from embodied change, not privy to some Advaitin nondualist realization that provides indemnity from the whirlwind of his experience as if yoga’s purpose were to spare us the world in blissful release.

Instead, Śiva may well be meditating with intention and purpose, regrouping the scattered missing, extra, and broken pieces of a shattered world where expectations have been as unrealized as potential and hope.

Honestly, I have little patience left for yogas that purport to solve our worldly angst by promising soporific absolution in some or another beatific state.  This kind of claim to liberation is downright dehumanizing.

But perhaps that is their point: to take us from being merely human into unconditioned condonation.  This makes the “spiritual life” little more than retreat from reality by claiming that reality isn’t nearly as real as the fantasy of blissful subsumption or exemption.  If that’s your jam, have at it.  We all need ways to cope.

But for my part, I prefer something more mortal because this limited form of consciousness that is our lives might well be the real and only blessing.  Call that heresy too---it surely is from the standpoint of 99% of the bondage-to-liberation traditions---but I find the mythic Śiva without a trace of spite nor sullen, always never hateful or absent venomous retribution.

Rather, he is vexed and affronted by what has befallen us all.  He is offended by stupidity and especially by indolence.  Our ordinary faineance is offensive enough but when our laziness becomes normalcy, when we prefer dreamy apathy because the world is exhausting and there are sufficient distractions or responsibilities to present alternatives, then Śiva assumes a guise of acquiescence, as if to say, there they go again.  When the going gets tough, humans retreat into happiness, into pleasures instead of meaning and the difficult prospects of creating the good.

But I submit that the Great Yogin is wholly impassioned even as he sits poised and unruffled, albeit offended and riled by our choices.  He does not seek retaliation much less the adoption of a comparable obscene cruelty, the sort that is being proposed and invoked by the demons who have assumed power and have sufficient authority to create their dystopia.

Śiva is unbending in his own resolve but understands too that his own temperament may not be well-received.

If he raises alarms, speaks to the facts, addresses the seriousness of the situation, he may be dismissed, ignored, and disliked.

If he assumes the guise of placidity, he may be condoning withdrawal and spiritual diffidence as if that were a solution.

But I submit he is instead being economical with his fury and provident with his anger.  It is best to be sparing and shrewd when rage reaches boundaries that inspire rash or reckless response.

Śiva is taking stock---of himself, of the world, of what to do next when the demons may actually have the upper hand.

Surely Śiva is crusty, but he is no clod; he prefers working himself into private dander to any public performances of disapprobation or demonstrable chagrin.  The Yogin wants to think about his umbrage before emerging to act, a more purposeful use of effort because ingenuous revulsion is too easily misunderstood just as it is too much to inflict on those you love.

Put more simply, Śiva has not dissociated from the world nor forgotten how much there is to love about life.  He is not dour or depressed (well, maybe he is) but certainly he is determined not to forsake the facts or deny the difficulty of accepting the truth.

There’s not much room left in him for buoyant, Panglossian positivism or assurances that somehow it’s all going to be fine, that we’ll get through this.  Śiva when he speaks may mince no words but knows that may be neither helpful nor popular, so instead he turns to calm, choosing to become the eye of the hurricane.

I once asked my teacher Appa if he ever took a day off.  He smiled at me and said, “Off?  Does a fish take a day off from water?”  To swim in the sea of troubles may require us to find what calmer seas remain or to seek the safety of the school, good company that provides compassionate care.  We may need to tuck in behind the pillar while others keep watch.

But the Śiva within us remains watchful and engaged even when appearing remote or solitary.  We must not forget that Śiva never chooses for loneliness or self-isolation, he is ever in the company of his beloveds.  Śiva without Śakti, as the poet tells us, is but a corpse.  Śiva knows the value-added project of an intimacy that protects him from himself.  

Yoga gives us room, room to be ourselves, room to take time to heal and recover because the greatest of yogis eschews desolation for a more modest concealment, one that is meant to spare others what is best spared.  When we can’t handle the truth, it may be best to dance.

Śiva’s dance is ever in his own tandava, the state of self-possession.  The dance he performs is only what appears for others.  This is no acting-out so much as it is a statement of intentions and feelings not to be fully comprehended or controlled, be that by others or himself.  Śiva knows there is always more than meets the eye.

But Śiva means to exact no willful harm, engender no self-pity, which is another reason he is called Śiva, literally the Auspicious.  This Yogin does not deny his conditionality but attempts to live with it, all of it, even the bits and broken pieces that can’t be found, that may be lost in the shadows.  Even as he sits in repose, he dances inside.  This generative, creative act of meaning has the purpose of engaging a deeper dissolution with the conversation that begins in the unconscious.

If we are to reenter a world that has endangered decency and subverts even ordinary comity, we must take the time to go to the darkest corners of our soul and ask ourselves what we really want, who we can be when we decide to act in the world.

&&&

Work and family provide important if not always convenient ways to justify our less ardent civic commitments but when even the most cursory glance at the news makes you wince and writhe, you don’t need excuses to return to your life with as little of “that” world as possible.

I feel right now as if my heart and mind are a resiling pinball in a machine being rattled and reeled by vengeful bedlamites.  And just when you think it couldn’t get any more insane you are reminded that it hasn’t yet even really started.  “Ack,” you say like Bill the Cat, and then, then it’s time to make dinner, do something joyous, just’fergittabout’it as far as possible if only to keep sane.

The sutra declaring that NOW is the time to study yoga seems more prophetic and imploring than it has ever been merely inviting or demanding.  We’re going to need some of that serene indifference (vairagya) and awareness (buddhi) that both keeps us in the game and prevents us from becoming its casualties.

In Sanskrit, being awake (verbal root /budh), as we see words like buddhi and Buddha, means alert and aware and capable of judgment, discernment, and understanding.  If this kind of candor and clarity becomes the new “woke” we might well stand a chance.

Passivity will not serve, abdication is to choose powerlessness, but before we can act meaningfully, we need to awaken our powers of understanding and receive the facts as they present themselves for our discernment.  We would prefer just to feel good then to take up the better.

The truth is not to be mistaken for the pleasant, as Katha Upanisad reminds, which means our task of understanding and meaning might not feel like anything we’d like to feel.

The Upanisad (2.1.1.) reads:

śreyaśca preyaśca manuṣyametastau saṃparītya vivinakti dhīraḥ |

 śreyo hi dhīro'bhipreyaso vṛṇīte preyo mando yogakśemādvṛṇīte ||

Both the good and the pleasant present themselves to the mortal person; the conscious-person (dhīrah) examines and distinguishes them well; for, the conscious-person prefers the good to the merely pleasant; the ignorant person chooses the pleasant for the sake of the body.

Now we’re getting closer again to the meaning of yoga.

In the Gita (2.11), Krsna makes an enigmatic statement admonishing his friend Arjuna to act but not indulge in lamentation or complaint.  He says in Sanskrit,

aśocyān-anvaśocas-tvam prajñā-vādānś ha bhāșase,

which is to say, “You grieve for those who do not warrant your grief though to you speak wisely…” 

Traditionalists explain this to mean that the wise see the immortal soul that can’t be slain, much less tainted by the world or even corrupted by individual depravity.  Thus, they maintain, there is no real reason for Arjuna’s lamentation, he cannot slay their immortal souls, it’s their karma that must be addressed.  Arjuna might even be doing them a favor by sending them on. 

I confess to have little interest in this interpretation even if it has textual merit.  This is no time to invent a metaphysical reason for carrying on by resorting to unassailable religious claims of immortality when what we need are mortal solutions.

Instead, we might ask: what if Krsna is talking about more than an unslayable immortal soul.  What if he is asking for a serious consideration of the facts.  What if he is asking that we take the venality we see and the demoralization we are experiencing and admit to the harm it is doing to our own hearts and to real people more vulnerable than ourselves?  What if he is inviting us to be clear-eyed, to recognize what is being proposed and will be done by those who would exact their nihilism upon us all--- and how this would bring even worse to those more vulnerable? 

We’re then invited to understand better the facts---to speak even more wisely, as he puts it---not to shrink from such painful, disturbing truths but to face them. We do not wish to become anything like the cruelty we condemn but by accepting what has come to pass we can create a more honest assessment, a more genuine response.

It may seem glib here to revert to the fictional Alfred Pennyworth for a bit more of this hard truth story but it’s never a bad idea to garner wisdom wherever it may originate.  Alfred tells Bruce Wayne how people can become corrupted and lost to a criminal who entreats them with phony promises and then a bit more about the motives and depths of criminality itself.

In their desperation they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand… some men aren't looking for anything logical, they can’t be reasoned or negotiated with, some men just want to watch the world burn.

The Tibetan tradition is also helpful here, albeit in an ironic word play that both describes the task before us and furthers the process of awakening.  Buddhism describes the saintly aspirant and incipient Buddha, the exemplary seeker as an arhat (also arhant, the difference in spelling is a grammatical “weak” versus strong ending, which does nothing to change the meaning.)

In Tibetan the term for the arhat is dgra bcom pa (དགྲ་བཅོམ་པ།), which translates literally in Tibetan as "foe-destroyer."

The Tibetans are reading two Sanskrit words here: ari, meaning foe or enemy, and the verbal root /han, to destroy.   But this Tibetan translation is in truth a linguistic back-formation.

The Tibetans have misread the actual Sanskrit etymology and construction.  It’s unclear if they are doing this on purpose (as is often the case with Tantric-style deliberate violations of the rules, especially when it comes to etymologies) but, as we shall see, this translation or mistranslation is also an act of some genius.

The “correct” etymology of arhat/arhant is from the Sanskrit verbal root /arh, to be worthy, to be capable.  Thus, the arhat is the “worthy one,” one truly “capable.”  The arhant has shown their worth, made plain their capabilities and achievements, become a demonstrable example of what is worthy and possible when we bring the whole of body, mind, and heart to bear on the human condition.  The Buddhist adept is being declared an awakened and accomplished seeker because the arhat is thus capable, worthy of the task and should be recognized for demonstrable achievement.

Early Buddhism has the historical Shakyamuni declaring his colleagues awakened arhats and is also regarded as such.  In Pali language sources, to be an arhat is nearly equated with being a buddha---and whatever distinction there may be in meaning becomes an interesting, nuanced conversation for future Buddhists.  Thus, in grammatically correct Sanskrit there is no “foe-destroyer.”  Or is there?

Much will depend on who and what we think is the foe to be destroyed.  From the Sanskrit arhat we learn that to become a better yogin of understanding, a more thoroughly committed, engaged critic and respondent to this shared world we must become worthy of our abilities to awaken the mind and heart, to bring them into action.

We must work to discern the facts, sort out the arguments and claims, address feelings and not deny the irrationality or the cruelty before us.  It is to know that the “enemy” we meet first is our own ignorance or unknowing, that this enemy is made as much of our denial and aversion to conflict, of our need for the irenic when the world is insisting on disturbance and pain.

The arhat is worthy of the task not to ignore the enemies of indolence and ignorance but to engage them as the warrior determined to bring them to heel.  We may not defeat or dissolve these foes, but we may be able to make them more obedient, more within our determined efforts to manage.

However, we can take this further.  The Tibetan Tantric Buddhist sense of “foe-destroyer” refers not only to the foe within that would deny us the truth about ourselves but to the fact that the world may indeed include foes to the truth.

To revert to the Sanskrit and once again to Krnsa’s conversation in the Gita, there are those who have not chosen their worth or brought forward their capabilities for honesty, for decency, for truth.  Such evil is brought on by perhaps more than we can reckon but it is no less real: their selfishness is their all in all and it must not be allowed to rule us like the One Ring.  In short, we misunderstand the world when we don’t take seriously enough the dangers and discomforting truths before us.

What is warranted is not our pity or our grief for those who would willfully bring cruelty and dystopia, nor for those who condone by feigning unknowing or by actual ignorance of their leader’s acts.  What is warranted for our part is a yoga, an engagement determined to look inside deeply, even to our darkest corners, and to consider all that is outside even when all we have is the glomming light of day.

We’re going to have to take the foe seriously enough to see ourselves vulnerable of becoming that which we detest and that which we must oppose.  Our opposition must not retreat into soothing quietism but rather reflective, responsive sensitivity and sentience.

We’re going to need to become more like the outraged Śiva who does not deny his disgust but rather registers it so deeply as to make it an ally, an asset, a project of reflection and inspired response.

We’re going to need the Upanisad’s vital distinction between the good and the pleasant so that we can appreciate the difference between that which is merely pleasant and happy and that which is toilsome with meaning and asks that the good be more that what makes us happy.

We’re going to have to have the conversation of Krsna on the battlefield that reminds us that nihilism must not win, that the immortal cannot save the world from itself and so we must care about the mortal world.

Then we are going to need to assess our worth and our capabilities, like the arhat in Sanskrit who does not attempt to do the impossible but grows possibilities.  We must be more capable as we determine what is more worthy. 

At last, we must consider the Tibetan’s foe-destroyer, both in terms of our own ignorance and righteousness and as that foe who indeed appears in the world as those who would abuse the gift of freedom, of life to others in the name of their own success or claims to superiority, to satisfy their pleasures.

It’s a lot to ask of ourselves.  We’re going to have to make an effort to bring these teachings of yoga into our lives for ourselves, for each other, for a world that could stand to learn more from them.  What is the point of yoga if it is not to ask: and what will it take to become who we truly want to be?

Walkin’ on this stuff is hard walkin.  We're going to need a yoga worthy and capable of this forest of feelings.  We’re going to need to take to heart the hard lessons, we going to need examples and exemplars of yoga. We can become that. You can become that for yourself and for those around you. Be that yogin you want to be.