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!

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.