Dr. Robert Svoboda and Dr. Scott Blossom will be speaking at Ashtanga Yoga New York (AYNY) in New York City on Saturday June 14th & Sunday June 15th from 1–4pm.

From the AYNY website:
Fire embodies the sun, and is its spirit on Earth. Fire is the celebrant of sacrifices, and "digester" of life experiences. We rely on fire’s good judgment to keep the other Elements in right relationship to one another. These lectures will discuss how best to invoke fire into our lives, internally & externally; how to prevent fires in places we don’t want them to start; how to align our internal fires; and how to keep Tejas predominant, and Pitta subservient.

"Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise."
From the Lakavatra Sutra (The epigraph to The Drop Edge of Yonder)

About three months ago my cyber self came across the Ashtanga Yoga inspired and spiritually genuine musings of Spiros Antonopoulos at SoulJerky.com. As a site whose well-earned no BS take on yoga and all things Eastern came as a breath of fresh air, I quickly made it one of the few haunts on my weekly Web wanderings. Happily, while browsing the site I was hipped to Rudolph Wurlitzer’s latest novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.

Earning its place as the third novel I have read in eight years (I’m a non-fiction guy), The Drop Edge of Yonder easily coaxed me into its Naked Lunch-esque world of Meursault-like (of Camuss’ The Stranger) indifference and brujo koans. An affront to both the stereotypical Western, as well as the post-One Hundred Years of Solitude magical realism crowd, The Drop Edge of Yonder dares the reader to rest comparisons on adjectives like “surreal” and “edgy.” No descriptions hold when describing this book. As such, it comes as no surprise when a woman named Not Here Not There stumbles frozen and half dead into Zebulon’s commandeered cabin. When you inhale more Gold Rush-era oxygen than you’re used to, what else does the world become but the backdrop for stray bullets grazing witches in a Bacchanalian saloon?

But comparisons are sometimes inevitable, and it’s ironic to find so many telling similarities to Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 film Dead Man. What’s ironic is that after humming Neil Young’s beautifully sparse soundtrack to the film while reading the entire book I learned that Dead Man was in fact heavily inspired by the original manifestation of The Drop Edge of Yonder—a 1970s screenplay titled Zebulon that never was.

Learning this little factoid proved to be a small but settling affair that eased my confusion as to why I could not get Johnny Depp’s face out of my head page after page. But unlike relatively safe “Ah ha!” moments one might have in the Obama Age of change and possibility, in The Drop Edge of Yonder where just the scent of your reputation can get you strung up, “moments of clarity” have none of the uplifting effects Hollywood commonly associates with them. In fact, realizations do just the opposite—they drop you face first in a muddy ditch lying next to an unlucky man with a hole in his head. These are the teachings of crazy wisdom gone mad! And here, spiritual lessons have more to do with trusting a lunatic jail mate bust you out of the clink than finding a peaceful tree to meditate under.

And that seems to be the point. Rudolph Wurlitzer, a practicing Buddhist, came of age in the late Sixties literary world of just-post-Beat, where American Buddhism was having a nice rebellious ride across the plains. The West became the East, was the East, and it was not long before Buddhism struck gold in towns like Boulder and Red Feather Lakes, Colorado. However, despite that Richard Gere allegedly noted way back when that the original screenplay this book later grew out of contained all four Noble Truths, The Drop Edge of Yonder is not a book about Buddhism with a six-shooter edge to it. The Drop Edge of Yonder is dirty earth. It’s nineteent century uneasiness with exotic foreigners. It’s shoot a prostitute for lewdness. It’s Manifest Destiny gone insane (as if it could have gone any other way). And as a novel, The Drop Edge of Yonder is a gem. It’s independent, spiritually grounded (deep in the dirt), and about as “If you see the Buddha walking down the road, kill him” as you can get. Enjoy!

Traveling by car is like watching life on a screen, writes Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, his now classic account of a motorcycle journey with his 11-year-old son that is really an inquiry into values.“You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone.”

The secret of motorcycle maintenance—and of living a life that has value—has to do with drawing our attention to the quality of what confronts us here and now. No matter what we are thinking about or doing, according to Pirsig, we can cultivate a double awareness—attentive to our thoughts and the work we are doing, yet sensitive to the quality of what is happening, to what is unknown, open to the whole scene.

This was the exactly the kind of attention I wished I’d had that day on the Metro North train, six months after September 11, when my 11-year-old daughter talked about how she should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth– when she had hinted that she was capable of courage and sacrifice, of a life that was full of value and consequence unlike our contemporary life which seemed (go figure) more like a movie.

Alexandra had needed my presence just then, minus the words of wisdom. These days, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and thinkers in many disciplines are supplying evidence of an innate moral sense, and I knew on some level that day that my daughter had it and that she was reaching beyond instinct towards one of the Large Ideas that people have guided their lives by in every tradition and time, that human beings are born to set out on a quest and that (in the words of the founder of this magazine) “whatever purpose life holds it demands from him the discovery of his own meaning, his own totality and identity.”

Rilke once urged an aspiring poet to look at the world the way children do, from “the depth of their own solitude.” He believed that children can look at the urgent business of the adult world and see it for what it is, hollow and detached from real life. Even when kids are fantasizing up a storm, they have a way of staying close to themselves and connected to what is possible and what really matters. What I missed because I couldn’t muster the energy it took to be fully present was that Alexandra wasn’t talking about escaping but about transformation.

Right after the attacks, there seemed to be a new quality of presence all over Manhattan. One local journalist noted a general “suspension of distraction.” New Yorkers on the subways and streets were making eye contact, acknowledging that we lived in a shared world, surrounded by mystery. It was as if the shock of what happened had jarred most of us loose from our self-enclosed thoughts and certainties. There was widespread acknowledgment that we didn’t know anything about the way the world worked.

“The only thing we know is that we know nothing and that is the highest flight of human wisdom,” writes Tolstoy. Briefly, New Yorkers were wise. But this soon passed.

On Christmas Eve in Grand Central Station, I’d seen heavily armed National Guard troops and police officers surround a deranged old homeless woman who had pushed her shopping cart into the terminal to take shelter from a freezing winter rain. She’d stood clutching a broken doll, looking bewildered as the officers poked through the possessions that were spread out on the ground around her. I noticed one young officer in particular. His stance was stern but he had a pitying, questioning look in his eyes, as if he were watching himself and was incredulous that all that training and readiness to face danger had come down to this. Life can be like this, I thought as I watched him. It can carry us along passively, even when we have the best intentions.

In the days after the attacks, , a stencil appeared on the sidewalks all over downtown Manhattan. It featured a cartoon fist brandishing a rock and it read “Drop the rock,” It was startling to come upon this admonition to evolve beyond retaliation at such a time. Years later, I can see the fist of my own mind was gripping my own views so tightly I couldn’t see the truth when it appeared. The real truth of who we are and what matters is situational, I learned. It is embedded in the unique particulars of the moment. Hope speaks of Middle Earth while riding Metro North.

I have a perfectly good excuse, of course. Fear had rolled over the city like fog, and fear contracts the mind. Everything has a different quality up close, as Pirsig writes. Things stop being things. We see that even painful events have hidden reserves, surprises, truths, even joys that come to us like grace. Fear of a thing–Cancer, College, the Next Terrorist Strike—is another kind of suffering entirely, a sometimes subtle mental disease, a call to arms. I thought I was being open to Alexandra but it was more like I had the safety off my gun and I was ready to shoot.

We want to be aware and present and we don’t want it. We long to be liberated from our separation from others, from our children, from life as it is, yet another force in us pulls against it, insisting on our views and opinions, our selves. Thomas Merton compared the way our ego-centric consciousness splits off from the selfless awareness of Being with original sin. If this is the case, even single-cell organisms–even our own cells–are sinners, because they can discern the difference between self and other, reflexively defending itself against invaders.

Yet it is always also possible to go beyond the mechanical, beyond what has come before. These days, scientific studies are revealing that even genetically identical E.coli bacteria express individuality, behaving in different ways in identical conditions. Even in microbes, the same genes and the same genetic network can lead to different fates.

What does it mean to be open? What does it mean to seek a greater reality, to realize a greater identity? In the first “Focus” essay of the first issue of this magazine, D.M.Dooling writes: “Conviction and quest are not only not incompatible, they are essential to each other. Parsifal could never have asked the right question had he not been convinced about the existence and the primordial importance of the Grail.”

What are your convictions? How do you carry them so that it helps you on your quest? How do you open to the truth when it appears?

The Situationists were a radicalized group of international post-Dada ex-artists and political theorists who in the 1950s and 60s attempted to expose everything from the banality of grid-like city planning to the mediation of reality through images and commerce. One graffitied statement attributed to them reads, “Boredom is counterrevolutionary.” An unabashed declarative such as this has always had a special place in my heart. Yet, lately I have been wondering if an obsession with subverting boredom has led us down a rather boring path itself. Especially when it comes to the commercialization of spirituality, perhaps raising our hands and admitting to an excessive ennui is just what we need to do.

Once there was a time when the person on your block who did yoga was a dangerous person. This was the person who had a little extra knowledge into what’s really going on—the person who walked to the mailbox with an intention matched only by his great posture. And yet, these days it’s almost cliché to say, “I do yoga.” While once a person who claimed to have a yogic practice might have been a menace to the complacent status quo, today all that’s required to take a noon yoga “power hour” is an interest in staying fit on your lunch break.

What’s at stake when spiritual practices become so embedded in the consumer culture that their rebellious roots become overgrown with conformist identities? Does the tradition itself become tarnished, or must “serious” practitioners simply wait for the herd to get bored and mosey on down the line? In Chogyam Trungpa’s seminal text The Myth of Freedom Trungpa discusses the role of boredom in Zen practice. He states, “[Zen] is trying to bring about boredom, which is a necessary aspect of the narrow path of discipline, but instead [for the American novice] the practice turns out to be an archeological, sociological survey of interesting things to do, something you could tell your friends about: ‘Last year I spent the whole fall sitting in a Zen monastery for six months…. It was a wonderful experience and I did not get bored at all’” (Trungpa, 55–56).

Eventually, yoga, like all commodities, will get boring. And what will happen when, rather then bringing about mental clarity, yoga asanas simply induce widespread yawning? Is the fact that so many New York City yoga classes blast pop music and invent names like “Lotus Flow” and “Cosmic Play” just an attempt to keep yoga fresh and interesting so that huge Manhattan lofts won’t become abandoned?

Is boredom in spiritual practice something to be so worried about?

For a number of years I have been practicing a specific type of yoga. Like most people I have talked to, my first experience of taking yoga in this lineage was blissful and invigorating. I left my first class feeling like I had more energy running through my body than I had ever had. I was happy. I was positive. I was a pleasure to be around. I was also, ironically, incredibly bored. Not bored with the practices, they were completely foreign and therefore exotic to me, but bored with the way the teachings of the yoga were presented. It seemed the organization that promoted this yoga lineage was interested in one thing: accessibility. Everything about their marketing is an attempt to make palatable the teachings. Soften the edges, make fuzzy the angles, and water down the language. In essence, make the yoga almost invisible. And yet, the funny thing is, I never stopped going. Very little about the presentation of this yoga interests me, and yet not only did I continue to build a personal practice, I eventually became certified to teach within this lineage.

So what’s going on here? Has boredom won me over? Am I a masochist? Is my sticking with this yoga simply indicative that boredom has become the hottest new trend? Are we entering a new phase where unemphatically bored yogis will be flooding yoga studios begrudging, but in huge numbers, buying yearly unlimited passes? I’ll just stop right there.

For me the term “Christian Rock” has always been synonymous with “bad music.” It’s happy, it’s slightly arrogant in that “I’ve been saved” kind of way, and more often then not it just seems manufactured (think: N’Sync with the Spirit of Jesus running through their veins). But these days I am finding (though I admit I’m slightly skeptical) that as all good well-read twenty-somethings should do, taking an old approach to living and making it radical again is as American as a log cabin in Brooklyn.

Introducing: The Psalters. Think Desert Fathers (and Mothers) with dreadlocks, banjos, face tattoos, and a healthy dose of anti-capitalism and anti-communism while attempting to walk the talk of so many Christian Luddites before them. They travel the world in a black bus and maintain a relatively nomadic lifestyle. They’ve been to corners of the Earth people like me only dream about (most recently picking banjos on the banks of the Tigris) and seem to take literally “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Amen.

However, lets give credit where it is due. The pathways for spiritually inclined people who simultaneously crave an independent approach to music in order to express that inclination have been cleared for some time now. For the past ten or twelve years independent music minded people have been realizing (remembering?) that Jamaican roots music (rock steady, dub, and reggae) is very hip, old timey Appalachian banjo music is pleasantly eerie and refreshingly confrontational, and the best music to sit around a campfire singing to is the music of God (read: all those old psalms you sung in Catholic school if you were a little Catholic boy like me). All of this has coalesced in a decade long resurgence of folk-inspired bands finding homes in the stocked artistic ponds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

But somewhere along the line, punks realized that all these musical movements shared something in common… this music has at its core a homegrown, raw, and independent “Bible religion” so salty you can taste it. AND, the belief is that this Do-It-Yourself style of religion can still be rebellious and empowering. Mix that with a fascination with Christian antinomians (Levellers, Diggers, Adamites, Ranters, et al.), and the fact that Foucault may someday become a household name, and you find yourself wading in a sea of appropriation and discovery—a sea I’m not so shy to swim in.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m still slightly skeptical as to whether the merging of music and religion can remain honest when that honesty rides on the back of self-promotion. For instance, would the Gnostics of old have a MySpace page if they had the technology? Hard to say. But as far as religion and music cohabitating is concerned, this is nothing new. A person could easily argue (and so many people have) that music actually birthed from the spiritual. So when a group of people come together (giving new meaning to the term “band”) to sing the praises of Jesus, nothing should shock us. But what if that group of people tries to actually live the “shed your riches” lifestyle for real, the way all those Christian boy-bands don’t?

So, it’s my hope that the Psalters and the handful of other groups that form this blossoming scene of anarcho-Christianity will have life spans longer than those who have set out before them. However, I wonder if it it’ll end up being just another Cajun-flavored Dorito fad, all image and no substance. We’ll have to wait and see as the proof is almost always in the pudding.

Here’s to hoping it tastes half as good and lasts at least twice as long.

“I should have been born in the Age of Middle Earth,” said my 11-year-old daughter Alexandra as we rode the train down to Manhattan one February day in 2002. “I don’t belong in this time.”

Alexandra had been lamenting like this for weeks, ever since she had seen The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of three screen adaptations of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings by director Peter Jackson.

Life in the Age of Middle Earth was no picnic, I told her. Most of people the people in the movie looked cold and dirty and terrified.

"But I could have been a gentile,” Alex said.

"Good news, honey," I said. "You are a gentile, and in a time and place where you can have medicine and hot baths whenever you need them."

"You know what I mean!"

I told Alexandra I knew she probably meant gentry, the nobles led by King Aragorn who transcended fear and rode out to do battle with the forces of darkness because they loved humanity and the good, represented by Gandalf, whom some people thought was really an angel. She nodded but stopped when I asked her why she didn’t think she could live with nobility in her own life in the here and now.

“Because it’s boring?”

Alexandra had mastered that drawling uplift at the end of a sentence that is meant to convey how lame a question is. She was clearly pushing away from the parental shoreline and heading into the deep water of adolescence. This may have been what spurred me to make my teaching more direct. I reminded her that in the real world, war is hell and violence never the answer.

“Don’t you think I know that?” she asked.

Six months before had been September 11, 2001. She knew. Making the remark had been like watching a glass fall and not being quick enough to catch it. I had always wanted to be the kind of mother who gave a kid the space they needed to discover what was good and true on their own. I wanted to be a “good enough mother,” a benevolent presence who lived by the adage “show, don’t tell.”

Real awareness and real presence are not separate from wisdom and compassion, I knew from experience. I had practiced being present and aware on and off ever since college (which was “way back in hippie days” according to Alexandra), where a professor had called me “a seeker of truth” (as compared to a seeker of a graduate school and profession). Awareness and presence would lead Alexandra to know what is good and true. I was sure of it.

After the catastrophe, fear and sadness rolled over New York like fog. Nobody seemed to trust their own instincts or senses or their own ability to reason or investigate anymore. I became fixated on helping Alexandra sink below all the voices and images from the media, to know that she could always take refuge in the present moment, in the sensation of being here and now.

My intentions were good. I wanted to teach my daughter how to return to the knowledge that life was good no matter what was going on, and that was the problem. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. My mind contracted around the idea of awareness and what I wanted for my daughter so that actually being aware and trusting Alex to express her innate wisdom and goodness were out the proverbial window. It would take a long while before I could actually practice what I preached, about being present for an unfolding mystery.

In the years to come, I would read about extraordinary advances in neuroscience. Extraordinary new brain imaging technology and pioneering experiments would reveal the “neuroplasticity” of the brain–its capacity to change its structure and function in response to experience.

Neuroscientists would explain that the brain is not fixed but a work in progress, fashioned and refashioned from its own idiosyncratic neural connections and capable (at least according to some scientists) of transcendence and the sacred. Researchers in other fields would explore how and why it is that people in all cultures have common moral intuitions, the same instincts for fairness, empathy, and loyalty.

Scientists in many realms are beginning to sound like Buddha (this equation has become so mainstream that even Bob Herbert, op ed columnist in The New York Times, made the point in his column yesterday), insisting that who we are and who we will become is not fixed but open, an unfolding process of relationship with our experience. We come from mystery. We are mysteries. Mysterious and miraculous truths come through us. Mothers know this but we constantly forget.

“This is might sound horrible to you because you’re my mother but I don’t want to have an easy life,” Alexandra said. “I don’t mind being in danger. I don’t mind pain, even.”

On some level, a mother knows that every child finds his or her own way to transcendence and God and what it means to be good or live a good life. For a few years after the terrorist attacks (which for my daughter also included a move from Brooklyn to the suburbs), The Lord of the Rings was Alexandra’s borrowed world, her shell, her sword and shield. It gave form to what was still formless, and expressed what she didn’t yet have her own words to express, which I thought was her belief that she might be capable of greatness, of being great-hearted in the face of the darkness of the unknown.

Alex had watched the final scenes of Fellowship of the Rings with tears running down her cheeks. I had been very touched to see her so moved by an epic spectacle. Where had this capacity come from?

Years later, I would read a newspaper article about an exhibit of Greek and Roman art that quoted a passage from Virgil, and it would strike me that Alexandra was like the Trojan hero Aeneas (even as I read it I marveled at many connections are made through serendipity). In the passage, Aeneas, fleeing the Trojan War, arrives in Carthage and finds a temple for Juno under construction. Inside he finds a painting of the war that so astounds him with its nobility and precision that he starts to cry and, according to Virgil, “for the first time he dared hope for life.”

“It was only a picture, but, sighing deeply, he let his thoughts feed on it, and his face was wet with a stream of tears,” Virgil writes. Some people might find it silly to compare an 11-year-old girl to a mythic hero, but Jackson’s film held the same power over Alexandra that ancient art is said to possess. It elevated her heart and mind. It gave her hope that her own life might hold greater, maybe even cosmic possibilities, and in a dark time.

One day years later, I faced a bitter loss that shook my faith in life. The strangest and most unexpected thing happened. In the depths of my grief and fear, I pictured King Aaragorn with sword held high riding out to meet the darkness and my heart lifted. Who could have predicted? My experience Alexandra and The Lord of the Rings forged a neural connection in my brain that saw me through.

Has anyone else had wisdom or goodness show up in an unexpected way? Let me know what you think.

The editors of Parabola thought it could be fruitful to use this space to chronicle and explore how the themes of this magazine resonate in contemporary life. For many months, we wondered how should we start the proverbial ball rolling, the wheel turning.  And it came to pass that we decided to begin at the beginningless beginning, with God.

The Germanic root of the word "God" and the word "good" are the same, and this root connection exists in other languages as well.  Human beings have worshipped gods as long as they have used language.  I wonder if God and goodness are inextricably connected?    

Plato didn’t think so.  If God had no moral reason for his commands, Plato reasoned, they were just divine whims.  If his moral laws did conform to reason, why not skip God entirely?   But where do those higher reasons come from?  These days, neuroscientists using brain-imaging techniques, psychologists using Web-based surveys to explore the moral intuitions of hundreds of thousands of people from different countries and cultures, and other scientists around the world are uncovering a rich evidence of, if not a gene for goodness, a moral intuition. 

Some suggest that living a good life has to do with connecting this rudimentary sense of  what it means to be good with higher ideas like the Golden Rule, which was discovered again and again through human history.   According to many, including Jacob Needleman in his book Why Can’t We Be Good?, such ideas come from a higher level of thought and represent a finer perception of reality and our possible human role in it than any of us could find on our own.  To truly be understood, however, such ideas must be taken on, body, heart, and mind, not just mused about.

"To care for one’s neighbor is to care for God and to care for God is to care for one’s neighbor," writes Needleman, by way of explaining a Hebraic vision of reality.  There are many neuroscientists who would make quick work of this ancient equation, assuring us that everything we think and feel and do is excreted by our physical brain and nervous system–no God, no free will, no being open or closed to anything higher or finer than ourselves.

When I was young, I was drawn to Parabola because it deepened my questions rather than handing me easy answers.   Now I’m not so young and my faith in the goodness of questioning has grown.  Holding a question rather than grasping at rigid certainties, invariably opens me.  It leads me towards a oneness with the truth of what is and sometimes towards the Oneness that is God. 

What do you think?  Please respond to this and future posts by clicking on the "Reply" link, below.