Sweltering in the swamp cooling computer room - computers go way slow, another of the slight jolts in being welcomed back to India. I'll start this post but might not get so far as the bus is leaving in a bit and I did want my third shower in less than 24 hours before leaving Delhi.
6/21/05
Summer solstice at 16:45 PM LA time. Increasing clouds. Getting sleepy. I arrived at LAX bumper to bumper. With Andrew in the back of the car raging about the absence of lockers at LAX and Ronny on the phone to Bex about baby bottles not on board. "Ignorance like a fox" he chuckled. Good this way. Snarling traffic, do you really have to be there 3 hours ahead of time? What happened to that 70's hour window? Curses, I am totally weighed down thistime - 2 big bags are stuffed with lap tops, and gifts (flinchingly seeing my bags thrown about). My one prideful moment of packing extremely lightly 2 years ago is way over now. These are the adrenaline times. When practice crumbles and sleep is no where in sight, the heart flutters and you are walking bones to the checkin counter, wondering if anyone else feels like you? The guy next to me runs off to buy his family of four chicken mc nuggets. Daddy, chicken mc nuggets, yes please! I flash to the stats from Super Size Me. Oh my it is packed today. The first of many lines to get onto the plane. First the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) weaving between poles. Large boxy suitcases on wheels. My carry-on is pre-wheels. Big guys, latino women in supportive back braces swing the luggage behind a wall for inspection. Can't touch it after that, can't even lock it up or wheel it to the counter yourself. post 911. What a moniker. Post 911. Post emergency? We have changed.
So many people in the world now. So many styles. So many wheeled on carry on luggage. So many lives. Air travel is common place. 500 people share hours together. Getting served. Some yell they haven't been served properly. One family is told their suitcase is too heavy - so there they are re-packing in the middle of the hall, the husband and wife yelling over the din...trying to place the blame on one another. The chicken mc nugget quotient intervenes...pacify the kids, stuff em with this substance and shut everyone up.
I feel great fortune to be going back to India yet I am cranky. You wouldn't know it - I'm a good faker...It's just that I haven't had a proper practice regime in weeks. My head has been a big list - I've become a creature of structured insularity. To thrust me into budging mode is against constructions or concepts of aging and some type of sedentary grasping.
The cabin lights have gone on. Couldn't understand the pilots' garble but we're close. Flying with the full moon the entire way. Rush to Pilgrimage, flashes of yoga poses in Pune, crammed in seating at HHDL's teachings, seeing old robed friends. Resurfacing gratitude for all the friends I said goodbye to yesterday...never alone.
Even Mom called. "No, I wouldn't say you're tenacious. Jill is tenacious. You're just reckless." Never fish for a compliment with her. Yet she knows what the weather is like in India, and how I should prepare to leave early for LAX. Hasn't told Dad but will avidly read this blog. Getting my head examined by Lord Buddha.
Speaking of, India is now being touted in Thai Airways magazine as the place to 'Walk with Buddha." a large picture of a Buddha statue from Ladakh falls under the caption, "in a world full of questions, where do you go for an answer? On a journey into yourself - visit the land of the Buddha - Incredible India."
23:50 Flying to Bangkok
12 hours to Osaka, a pause to disembark, get back in line and re-ascend the plane, like cattle. This pilot likes to ride the turbulents and I'm so tired I finally succumb to the minor jolts. The prior flight had my stomach in intermitten knots and deep fears of plunging into the Pacific - had me really studying the life jacket demo - who has time to snap that belt around one's waist? And in recent air flying past, have planes split in half because of turbulents? What's it like to plunge 32000 feet? I should ask David J, my skydiving friend who threatens to give me a jump for my next birthday present. Am I ready? All kinds of disturbing thoughts to keep me from resting...I'm cranky cuz this plane doesn't have those cool screens on the back of every seat. And the movies are quite unenticing...(Be Cool...yikes!)... So this secont portion gave me the opportunity to let go, fill in the air seat and sleep. Interesting how my mind feel fresher now even as the teeth and mouth feel worse.
Body is stiff never mind the yoga. I wrap my head, Iyengar style, pulling the wrap over my eyes. Post 911, wondering if the cabin crew will think I'm putting on my crazy lady gear before I start shrieking? No one cares. What an invention! Then I think of Guruji (BKS Iyengar) sitting in an air chair - would he wrap his head? Would he get up to stretch? How stiff would his body be? And where does His Holiness sit on the plane? And rich people, do they have a yoga room upstairs in the front? On and on it goes...
June 24, 2005
June 17, 2005
Tea in the Samovar
10/02
A couple of years ago, a friend was emailing me spiritual quotes by ‘Osho’. I had no idea who or what this was (a brand of tarot cards?) and somehow it seemed too creamy dictatorial and contradictory for me to ingest so I asked her to kindly stop sending me these little ‘diatribes’. Now, I am here in Pune, India, and it only clicked yesterday that the Osho in quotes and the Osho who established the Osho Multiversity and the Osho Commune International are the same being. Oh…
I came to India to study at the Ramamani Memorial Iyengar Yoga Institute. Word gets out about where to eat, where to drink coffee and most importantly where to relax poolside on the weekends or in the afternoons. Apparently there is this fabulous pool at Osho, in Koreagon Park, a lush oasis on the other side of town. Just 20 minutes away in a rickshaw and 30 rupees (equivalent to 75 cents). The only things you have to do to get in and get a pass to the pool are wear maroon robes, maroon swim suits, take an AIDS test and pay $20 to attend a 6 hour mandatory orientation.
If one goes to the German Bakery here and has chai and apple strudel or that ‘safe’ washed salad, you can see the Europeans smoking, sipping something in their maroon smocks. You know Osho is nearby. It sets the stage for what is inside the ‘compound’, now called a resort. And so last Sunday, while my friend Carolyn was back up at the mountain spa receiving ayurvedic treatments, I coughed the rupees for ‘participation day’ at Osho. I wasn’t sure I wanted to even go through all this, taking myself away from yoga practice, dharma practice, just for a few hours at the pool, but I can say it was worth every rupee, not because I am now over at Osho and have given up everything else (which is not the case, don’t worry), but because it is so splendidly an art piece in the making for my somewhat skeptical eyes (please pardon me in advance if you are into Osho the Bhagavan...I don’t mean any harm). When I entered Osho last Sunday morn, I felt like I was entering ‘Logan’s Run’, the movie (from 1973)where everyone has these diamond shaped implants in their palms and when they start blinking red, at the age of 30, you must expire.
I approached the Osho resort gates, tall dark black granite, encapsulating 40 acres of cultivated beautiful foliage and flora. Waterfalls. A large line of Indian men already waiting for the 9 a.m. visitor’s tour. I proceeded past them to the Welcome Center for my AIDS test. The technician saw my Buddha necklace and we expressed mutual admiration for the Dalai Lama ("he’s my teacher too," the technician whispered.) Smiling...oy. What am I doing here, really? I borrowed a maroon dress from one of the employees and then quickly had to catch up with the induction group, already at the ‘plaza’, next to Buddha hall and the bookshop, which all looks like a cross between the entrance at Busch Gardens (for those of us who remember them in LA - SF Valley) and some pyramidic landing deck. We gathered in front of a computer to look at the website. Our leaders were a red-head smoker voiced British woman in her fifties and a skinny bearded and tattooed French Canadian guy, who winked at each other frequently and seemed a bit jaded with the whole schtick of leading introductory tours of Osho, or so I assumed. Participants for that day included a very tall elder Sikh who looked like a gray lion, hair down, beard uncovered, an Indian man with his father, a female Gujrati devotee, and 3 Italians. The Sikh and Italians had individual translators so we had 3 people constantly talking over each other, again all in maroon.
Dorky is a word that comes to mind for me. But what was to come would even feel dorkier. After being presented with a multitude of multi-versity trainings, and meditations on the bulletin boards we could attend with titles like ‘Awakening to Love’, ‘Born Again’, ‘Beyond Family’, ‘Co-dependency and the Art of Relating’, ‘Diving into the Center’, ‘Humaniversity’, to ‘Primal painting’, for extra fees, we followed our leaders past the Gibberish room, the Osho packing dept., the Cyber Center, the Cappucino Cafe to the residential area, where over 200 people live and work, those who have come like our leaders, to spend months or years helping run things. The French Canadian (FC) guy had given up his job in Montreal 2 years ago to play bass for the evening gatherings here; the British woman (B) has been coming back for the past 15 years, for many months at a time. We passed ‘Naropa’ and ‘Tilopa’ named buildings, black granite facades with black triangular placards, why black? Mystery, the void, darkness.
So you must be wondering who Osho is...I still don’t completely know. Perhaps you know more. I do know he is no longer. Now the resort is run by 3 lawyers from the West. Not much was told to us about Osho the Bhagavan. But those of us who recall the happenings in Oregon in the 70s with Rajneesh and the eventual dismantling of the compound there...yep, same guy. He changed his name, they changed the color of the robes (from orange), he started advocating brahmacharya (correct sexual conduct), and got into Buddhism. That’s all I know except that I also am now familiar with his voice, and I see a man smiling from the OSHO bookstore, wearing a sparkling knitted skull cap, white long beard, a vest/costume from the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, looking like the Liberace of spirituality.
Oh yeah, back to dorky. So it’s 9:30 am and we’re led up stairs in the residential area to a practice room where Madonna is booming, ‘Ray of Light’ steaming up the walls, and we’re asked to start dancing. Let it all be free, no a/c, some stinky b.o., wafting through the room. Ah well. I started giggling, looking down at my maroon fabric, and then reluctantly became a whirling der-jew-vish. My anti-social mind went ‘ew’ but I felt like I had a mission, to get to the pool, and to tell a funny story, if nothing else. Sweat broke, we stopped and then we sat down in a semi-circle and were introduced to various meditation techniques, all trademarked by the way. We started partnering..."you are now the papaya and she is the guava". For ‘Chaotic breathing’, you shake your head, exhale without structures, rhythm, control. Eyes are closed. The ‘Guava’ watches. Then she gets to imitate you. Then you explode, scream, hold nothing back while jumping around. Eyes closed. I peeked. Was the Sikh screaming too? He was actually smiling and being hardly audible. FC looked like he was at a soccer match and B looked blissful. Then came ‘hoo-ing’. You raise your hands to the ceiling, keep arms overhead and jump up and down, shouting ‘hoo, hoo’...landing on your heels so that the "sound hammers deeply into your sex center". Then comes the freeze portion, noticing, witnessing what is happening (to your sex center?). Then more Madonna. This whole thing is called ‘Osho Dynamic Meditation’ and it happens daily at like 6am at the resort. Rules were given. B told us where the smoking areas were, repeatedly. You could be in silence by wearing a ‘silence tag’. And hugging was not mandatory anymore. You make a sign with your arms of ‘no thanks’ if you see someone coming towards you with widespread wingspan arms ready to plunge at you. It’s perfectly okay to bow, dip, or run the other direction, they said.
Then came the mask exercise. To see how we wear our personality, culture, conditions. Also trademarked. So out came the wigs and Halloween masks. FC decided we should all take on the mannerisms of the British and so we were to meet and greet each other reservedly, with the utmost fake politeness. I looked like Porky the Pig with gray hair, saying ‘hello’ guardedly to ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’, and other ‘cats’. Then as if in the finale of ‘Chorus Line’, we gathered at the full length mirror and on a count of 3, unveiled our true selves in silence, taking off our masks to stare, gaze and gawk at our wondrous own countenances. Oh gosh, getting old, I look like my mother, lift the cheeks, there ‘me’ again, now can we break into song?
For lunch, we disbanded and I ran into another Iyengar yoga student from Australia who’s been lulled by the loosey goosey ness of Osho. We ate together in the gardens, off black plastic trays with triangular and diamond shaped plates. I wolfed down the organic spread and tried to talk with James but his eyes wandered constantly, to pleasant female beings strolling around, "it’s been a long time", he said and laughed. "Me too..." uh...Oh there’s the pool; gotta finish my food. We were to be in the ‘practice room’ right after lunch. Music thumping again. Oh no. I was ready for supine digestive yoga poses, not dancing. "You’re always stretching" said FC to me, referring to my inclination to get into twists and Uttanasana at any free moment. I just wanted a bolster and strap. The thought of flailing my arms again at full stomach made me a bit cranky. But again...it’s all about the pool. So now it was time for ‘kundalini’ meditation ™. Wearing a maroon eye mask, we were told to shake, shake, shake. Then dance, then lie down, then sit in meditation. We then did Gibberish, where you speak in another made up language, and get your ‘garbage’ out, but you must be so loud as to hear anyone else’s garbage. Wait, am I not at some experimental voice class at Cal Arts right now??? (JOKE!!!).
FC and B spoke to us about the need to free ourselves of conditions, that Osho is a place to come to and let go of your ‘stuff’, stuff that inhibits, that makes you suffer. So you can deeply experience the energies of your life, so you can touch silence, find ‘eternity, the deathlessness’. Even Vipassana (meditation from the Theravadan Buddhist tradition) is taught here. James had signed up for a 3 week Vipassana course but it’s not anything like what I’ve done. The first week, they laugh, the second they cry and then the third, they sit in concentration. Then I heard Osho’s voice, smooth, slippery, calculated. FC & B were introducing ‘white robe’, a nightly gathering where you change into white robe, freshly scrubbed, and go with everyone else into this large tent for closed eyes dancing, 3 shouts of ‘OSHO, OSHO, OSHO’, gibberish, falling down ‘like a bag of rice’, drumbeats, then a video of Osho is shown.
"My speaking is one of my devices for meditation. Speaking has never been used this way before...I speak not to give you a message but to stop your mind functioning." So when I heard Osho talk of tea coming out of the SSSSssssss-aaaaaaaa-mmmm - ovar, my mind didn’t stop functioning, it started rolling its internal eyes. Hanging onto the ‘s’, I moved back to my torso and spine. Breath. I just couldn’t claim that this was ‘excellent’. It’s okay, I thought, good for some but not for me. Osho’s efforts weren’t resonating with me. I only hoped it was helping others, to be free of suffering in some way, even if temporary and happier. I cannot judge. I just wondered where it all leads here, what about the ethics, mutual responsibility, what happens after we dump the garbage...landfills? Gestalt is important...I’m just hoping kindness and patience and generosity also arise...otherwise, as Geshe Gyeltsen laughs, ‘we are flying on airplanes with holes in them, no good, not safe...can’t get to the other shore’. Birds need two wings to fly.
FC caught me several times when he asked for feedback about the meditations. "How was it?", he stared at me. Fine. "Always fine, eh?", he seemed irritated with me. I can’t qualify it. I hear Ruth, one of my teachers, talking about ‘My’ meditation. We want it to be so precious that we try to shut out what we ‘think’ disturbs us. Impossible. But many try. It comes, it goes. Fine. Still see the effort, still keep sitting. Not just for you but for all living beings.
Finally, the afternoon portion was ending. FC asked if we had any questions. An Italian gal asked what is meant by ‘energy’. FC replied that it’s just felt, like when you’re sexually aroused, it’s very apparent what energy is and where it is coming from. I noticed his slumped groin, wide open sitting posture. Hmm. There’s that and the energy that fluctuates in the morning and evening. Is it the mind? No, he says. Why is there an AIDS test? To insure all guests are healthy and free of disease at the resort. Apparently Osho was said to have seen into the future and predicted AIDS. And, he wanted to protect his community from it.
I went to the pool in a borrowed maroon suit, a bit too small. I met another fellow Iyengar yogi there. We swam in the dark granite kidney shaped lagoon. Nice. Refreshing. I was very close to staying for ‘white robe’, after melting into the water. Sounds were coming from Buddha Hall. FC was now rehearsing on his bass. Maybe they need a singer? I could do long melodious tones??? Cells tingling, skin clean. It’s in my skin now. There.
Days later, I have yet to go back. I have purchased the maroon dress but no suit yet. I preferred to go home today after lunch with Carolyn instead of to the pool. To study the Diamond Cutter sutra, think about emptiness. Tomorrow I have a 7 a.m. yoga class with Prashant. It’s always an incredible effort it takes to get this tamasic body out of bed and move out of the dullness. Whether it’s ‘hoo-ing’ or doing downward facing dog, I suppose we need to hoo the dullness out. But the Iyengar yogashala is where I belong, grounding, seriously. More demanding, less whispy for my limbs, awakening shakti with awareness, through every single limb, bone, joint, nerve, nadi...I’m inside alot these days, within my shins, knees, groins, torso, feeling the strands of my abdominal walls. I see the unevenness of my shoulders and how if I turn my head to the right, left, shoulders are affected in different ways. I see my laziness, when I don’t want to adjust myself, but I do it anyway. I feel the walls of the rib cage when air presses against them, how this affects the jaw, throat, frontal brain. I catch a visual of Joshua Tree, Dhamma Dena zendo. I hear "stay close to the ground, don’t go far away from your heart. It’s the simple things that tell the reason we are here, it’s the simple things keeping us whole." The Iyengars are working hard, Ruth Denison is working hard, His Holiness the Dalai Lama is working hard, Geshe Gyeltsen, even Osho...They just want us to get it. Mind is a tough cookie. It wants happy hour(s) but there’s work in paying for those ‘drinks’.
A couple of years ago, a friend was emailing me spiritual quotes by ‘Osho’. I had no idea who or what this was (a brand of tarot cards?) and somehow it seemed too creamy dictatorial and contradictory for me to ingest so I asked her to kindly stop sending me these little ‘diatribes’. Now, I am here in Pune, India, and it only clicked yesterday that the Osho in quotes and the Osho who established the Osho Multiversity and the Osho Commune International are the same being. Oh…
I came to India to study at the Ramamani Memorial Iyengar Yoga Institute. Word gets out about where to eat, where to drink coffee and most importantly where to relax poolside on the weekends or in the afternoons. Apparently there is this fabulous pool at Osho, in Koreagon Park, a lush oasis on the other side of town. Just 20 minutes away in a rickshaw and 30 rupees (equivalent to 75 cents). The only things you have to do to get in and get a pass to the pool are wear maroon robes, maroon swim suits, take an AIDS test and pay $20 to attend a 6 hour mandatory orientation.
If one goes to the German Bakery here and has chai and apple strudel or that ‘safe’ washed salad, you can see the Europeans smoking, sipping something in their maroon smocks. You know Osho is nearby. It sets the stage for what is inside the ‘compound’, now called a resort. And so last Sunday, while my friend Carolyn was back up at the mountain spa receiving ayurvedic treatments, I coughed the rupees for ‘participation day’ at Osho. I wasn’t sure I wanted to even go through all this, taking myself away from yoga practice, dharma practice, just for a few hours at the pool, but I can say it was worth every rupee, not because I am now over at Osho and have given up everything else (which is not the case, don’t worry), but because it is so splendidly an art piece in the making for my somewhat skeptical eyes (please pardon me in advance if you are into Osho the Bhagavan...I don’t mean any harm). When I entered Osho last Sunday morn, I felt like I was entering ‘Logan’s Run’, the movie (from 1973)where everyone has these diamond shaped implants in their palms and when they start blinking red, at the age of 30, you must expire.
I approached the Osho resort gates, tall dark black granite, encapsulating 40 acres of cultivated beautiful foliage and flora. Waterfalls. A large line of Indian men already waiting for the 9 a.m. visitor’s tour. I proceeded past them to the Welcome Center for my AIDS test. The technician saw my Buddha necklace and we expressed mutual admiration for the Dalai Lama ("he’s my teacher too," the technician whispered.) Smiling...oy. What am I doing here, really? I borrowed a maroon dress from one of the employees and then quickly had to catch up with the induction group, already at the ‘plaza’, next to Buddha hall and the bookshop, which all looks like a cross between the entrance at Busch Gardens (for those of us who remember them in LA - SF Valley) and some pyramidic landing deck. We gathered in front of a computer to look at the website. Our leaders were a red-head smoker voiced British woman in her fifties and a skinny bearded and tattooed French Canadian guy, who winked at each other frequently and seemed a bit jaded with the whole schtick of leading introductory tours of Osho, or so I assumed. Participants for that day included a very tall elder Sikh who looked like a gray lion, hair down, beard uncovered, an Indian man with his father, a female Gujrati devotee, and 3 Italians. The Sikh and Italians had individual translators so we had 3 people constantly talking over each other, again all in maroon.
Dorky is a word that comes to mind for me. But what was to come would even feel dorkier. After being presented with a multitude of multi-versity trainings, and meditations on the bulletin boards we could attend with titles like ‘Awakening to Love’, ‘Born Again’, ‘Beyond Family’, ‘Co-dependency and the Art of Relating’, ‘Diving into the Center’, ‘Humaniversity’, to ‘Primal painting’, for extra fees, we followed our leaders past the Gibberish room, the Osho packing dept., the Cyber Center, the Cappucino Cafe to the residential area, where over 200 people live and work, those who have come like our leaders, to spend months or years helping run things. The French Canadian (FC) guy had given up his job in Montreal 2 years ago to play bass for the evening gatherings here; the British woman (B) has been coming back for the past 15 years, for many months at a time. We passed ‘Naropa’ and ‘Tilopa’ named buildings, black granite facades with black triangular placards, why black? Mystery, the void, darkness.
So you must be wondering who Osho is...I still don’t completely know. Perhaps you know more. I do know he is no longer. Now the resort is run by 3 lawyers from the West. Not much was told to us about Osho the Bhagavan. But those of us who recall the happenings in Oregon in the 70s with Rajneesh and the eventual dismantling of the compound there...yep, same guy. He changed his name, they changed the color of the robes (from orange), he started advocating brahmacharya (correct sexual conduct), and got into Buddhism. That’s all I know except that I also am now familiar with his voice, and I see a man smiling from the OSHO bookstore, wearing a sparkling knitted skull cap, white long beard, a vest/costume from the ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, looking like the Liberace of spirituality.
Oh yeah, back to dorky. So it’s 9:30 am and we’re led up stairs in the residential area to a practice room where Madonna is booming, ‘Ray of Light’ steaming up the walls, and we’re asked to start dancing. Let it all be free, no a/c, some stinky b.o., wafting through the room. Ah well. I started giggling, looking down at my maroon fabric, and then reluctantly became a whirling der-jew-vish. My anti-social mind went ‘ew’ but I felt like I had a mission, to get to the pool, and to tell a funny story, if nothing else. Sweat broke, we stopped and then we sat down in a semi-circle and were introduced to various meditation techniques, all trademarked by the way. We started partnering..."you are now the papaya and she is the guava". For ‘Chaotic breathing’, you shake your head, exhale without structures, rhythm, control. Eyes are closed. The ‘Guava’ watches. Then she gets to imitate you. Then you explode, scream, hold nothing back while jumping around. Eyes closed. I peeked. Was the Sikh screaming too? He was actually smiling and being hardly audible. FC looked like he was at a soccer match and B looked blissful. Then came ‘hoo-ing’. You raise your hands to the ceiling, keep arms overhead and jump up and down, shouting ‘hoo, hoo’...landing on your heels so that the "sound hammers deeply into your sex center". Then comes the freeze portion, noticing, witnessing what is happening (to your sex center?). Then more Madonna. This whole thing is called ‘Osho Dynamic Meditation’ and it happens daily at like 6am at the resort. Rules were given. B told us where the smoking areas were, repeatedly. You could be in silence by wearing a ‘silence tag’. And hugging was not mandatory anymore. You make a sign with your arms of ‘no thanks’ if you see someone coming towards you with widespread wingspan arms ready to plunge at you. It’s perfectly okay to bow, dip, or run the other direction, they said.
Then came the mask exercise. To see how we wear our personality, culture, conditions. Also trademarked. So out came the wigs and Halloween masks. FC decided we should all take on the mannerisms of the British and so we were to meet and greet each other reservedly, with the utmost fake politeness. I looked like Porky the Pig with gray hair, saying ‘hello’ guardedly to ‘Casper the Friendly Ghost’, and other ‘cats’. Then as if in the finale of ‘Chorus Line’, we gathered at the full length mirror and on a count of 3, unveiled our true selves in silence, taking off our masks to stare, gaze and gawk at our wondrous own countenances. Oh gosh, getting old, I look like my mother, lift the cheeks, there ‘me’ again, now can we break into song?
For lunch, we disbanded and I ran into another Iyengar yoga student from Australia who’s been lulled by the loosey goosey ness of Osho. We ate together in the gardens, off black plastic trays with triangular and diamond shaped plates. I wolfed down the organic spread and tried to talk with James but his eyes wandered constantly, to pleasant female beings strolling around, "it’s been a long time", he said and laughed. "Me too..." uh...Oh there’s the pool; gotta finish my food. We were to be in the ‘practice room’ right after lunch. Music thumping again. Oh no. I was ready for supine digestive yoga poses, not dancing. "You’re always stretching" said FC to me, referring to my inclination to get into twists and Uttanasana at any free moment. I just wanted a bolster and strap. The thought of flailing my arms again at full stomach made me a bit cranky. But again...it’s all about the pool. So now it was time for ‘kundalini’ meditation ™. Wearing a maroon eye mask, we were told to shake, shake, shake. Then dance, then lie down, then sit in meditation. We then did Gibberish, where you speak in another made up language, and get your ‘garbage’ out, but you must be so loud as to hear anyone else’s garbage. Wait, am I not at some experimental voice class at Cal Arts right now??? (JOKE!!!).
FC and B spoke to us about the need to free ourselves of conditions, that Osho is a place to come to and let go of your ‘stuff’, stuff that inhibits, that makes you suffer. So you can deeply experience the energies of your life, so you can touch silence, find ‘eternity, the deathlessness’. Even Vipassana (meditation from the Theravadan Buddhist tradition) is taught here. James had signed up for a 3 week Vipassana course but it’s not anything like what I’ve done. The first week, they laugh, the second they cry and then the third, they sit in concentration. Then I heard Osho’s voice, smooth, slippery, calculated. FC & B were introducing ‘white robe’, a nightly gathering where you change into white robe, freshly scrubbed, and go with everyone else into this large tent for closed eyes dancing, 3 shouts of ‘OSHO, OSHO, OSHO’, gibberish, falling down ‘like a bag of rice’, drumbeats, then a video of Osho is shown.
"My speaking is one of my devices for meditation. Speaking has never been used this way before...I speak not to give you a message but to stop your mind functioning." So when I heard Osho talk of tea coming out of the SSSSssssss-aaaaaaaa-mmmm - ovar, my mind didn’t stop functioning, it started rolling its internal eyes. Hanging onto the ‘s’, I moved back to my torso and spine. Breath. I just couldn’t claim that this was ‘excellent’. It’s okay, I thought, good for some but not for me. Osho’s efforts weren’t resonating with me. I only hoped it was helping others, to be free of suffering in some way, even if temporary and happier. I cannot judge. I just wondered where it all leads here, what about the ethics, mutual responsibility, what happens after we dump the garbage...landfills? Gestalt is important...I’m just hoping kindness and patience and generosity also arise...otherwise, as Geshe Gyeltsen laughs, ‘we are flying on airplanes with holes in them, no good, not safe...can’t get to the other shore’. Birds need two wings to fly.
FC caught me several times when he asked for feedback about the meditations. "How was it?", he stared at me. Fine. "Always fine, eh?", he seemed irritated with me. I can’t qualify it. I hear Ruth, one of my teachers, talking about ‘My’ meditation. We want it to be so precious that we try to shut out what we ‘think’ disturbs us. Impossible. But many try. It comes, it goes. Fine. Still see the effort, still keep sitting. Not just for you but for all living beings.
Finally, the afternoon portion was ending. FC asked if we had any questions. An Italian gal asked what is meant by ‘energy’. FC replied that it’s just felt, like when you’re sexually aroused, it’s very apparent what energy is and where it is coming from. I noticed his slumped groin, wide open sitting posture. Hmm. There’s that and the energy that fluctuates in the morning and evening. Is it the mind? No, he says. Why is there an AIDS test? To insure all guests are healthy and free of disease at the resort. Apparently Osho was said to have seen into the future and predicted AIDS. And, he wanted to protect his community from it.
I went to the pool in a borrowed maroon suit, a bit too small. I met another fellow Iyengar yogi there. We swam in the dark granite kidney shaped lagoon. Nice. Refreshing. I was very close to staying for ‘white robe’, after melting into the water. Sounds were coming from Buddha Hall. FC was now rehearsing on his bass. Maybe they need a singer? I could do long melodious tones??? Cells tingling, skin clean. It’s in my skin now. There.
Days later, I have yet to go back. I have purchased the maroon dress but no suit yet. I preferred to go home today after lunch with Carolyn instead of to the pool. To study the Diamond Cutter sutra, think about emptiness. Tomorrow I have a 7 a.m. yoga class with Prashant. It’s always an incredible effort it takes to get this tamasic body out of bed and move out of the dullness. Whether it’s ‘hoo-ing’ or doing downward facing dog, I suppose we need to hoo the dullness out. But the Iyengar yogashala is where I belong, grounding, seriously. More demanding, less whispy for my limbs, awakening shakti with awareness, through every single limb, bone, joint, nerve, nadi...I’m inside alot these days, within my shins, knees, groins, torso, feeling the strands of my abdominal walls. I see the unevenness of my shoulders and how if I turn my head to the right, left, shoulders are affected in different ways. I see my laziness, when I don’t want to adjust myself, but I do it anyway. I feel the walls of the rib cage when air presses against them, how this affects the jaw, throat, frontal brain. I catch a visual of Joshua Tree, Dhamma Dena zendo. I hear "stay close to the ground, don’t go far away from your heart. It’s the simple things that tell the reason we are here, it’s the simple things keeping us whole." The Iyengars are working hard, Ruth Denison is working hard, His Holiness the Dalai Lama is working hard, Geshe Gyeltsen, even Osho...They just want us to get it. Mind is a tough cookie. It wants happy hour(s) but there’s work in paying for those ‘drinks’.
Twilight in America
Twilight in America revisited 11/04
One morning I was reading ‘a treasury of sublime instructions’ from a high Tibetan lama. America contains the symbol ‘Ah’, which sounds the unborn nature of truth. It’s also the symbol at the throat chakra, colored red. Sometimes when I sit and visualize the colors white, red and blue according to my Buddhist practice, I think of the American flag and how uncanny it is that they are the same. I sit and pray for liberation from physical, verbal and mental afflictions, as the country I was born into is rocking itself into the hell realm by way of its own blood soaked actions.
There are more than 5 billion humans on the planet now and few study the Buddhist dharma. According to Buddhist scriptures, in contemplating the sufferings of cyclic life in general, they can be broken down into six sufferings. Life is uncertain. We can never find a sense of satisfaction. We have to shed our bodies over and over again. We are born over and over again. What goes up must come down.
I felt bad at lunch the other day as a friend told me about a CEO of a well-known movie studio and how much he makes a day; how much he spends to redecorate his office that he doesn’t use. How he also had a quadruple by pass. And my mind flashes abruptly to begging bowls penetrating the stone fences of India. $10,000 a day to sit in a soft malleable chair and bark at your employees could feed the whole of an Indian town for half a year! "It’s out of whack", she said. Yet there’s no visible awareness of cyclic existence and how it all goes round and round. You reap what you sow. And so…and so…
We live in a land of Costcos, of sterilized supermarkets with pasturized milk, genetically engineered beef, plastic containers, rubber gloves. The supermarkets here don’t smell. They freeze you. You should probably wear a ski suit to shop at Ralphs or Vons. We drive Hummers to prevent death. We pull the skin taught on our faces to avoid looking at the aging process. We think we can defy death. We think that our minds are so powerful. But the mind that is contaminated is only as powerful as its contaminates. It can’t see. It can only see through its own dirty lens.
It’s just that with Hummers and Costcos we’ve developed a battleground we think we can win on. We can drive over death. Eat him up and liposuction him out of our bodies. We can kill some people in a foreign land and not feel. Not feel. That’s it. I put my flag on my Hummer and I feel something else. Pride invasion.
I watch TV and see talking shriveled up American men in suits. I think of the invention of the suit and tie. Clothing symbols of achievement. Wow. We became stiff. Old and Gasping, I watch Rumsfeld deliver a speech on TV. He can hardly get a breath. They are short heaves and his chest seems hard and I think, "that man is suffering so much". And has no idea. As a yoga teacher, I see the physical structural ailments much more now. The caved in chest, the sagging shoulders, the color of the skin. Not even a suit or a tummy tuck can hide what’s really going on.
Human birth is precious and rare. It is often said that the birth of a human is more rare than a blind turtle that swims in the ocean and only surfaces every hundred years, putting its head through a golden hoop which has been tossed around on the waves and driven by wind. By contrast, the Buddha taught that the number of beings in hell equals the number of atomic particles in the galaxy. Each human being has the capacity to reach nirvana (liberation from all mental afflictions), or Buddhahood (total enlightenment for the sake of all beings) from here. In other words, you have the capacity to transform the awful-ness in you and around you and reach for something beautiful, pain free, for the sake of all beings, hell, animal, hungry ghost, semi-god, god as well as human. But as one of my teachers lamented in retreat, the Buddha taught the 8 fold path, the way out, over 2,500 years ago and still people haven’t learned, still they are doing the same awful things.
Some say it’s enough to notice the breath. Accept the breath. But there’s more. Understand how you got to be breathing in the first place. Understand how we all breath. How interdependent our breath is. Your Republican breath out is my breath in. It may or may not kill me. It’s not about the Republican breath then, is it? Think about this. Use it as a koan, traverse the breath and those streets. See the swaying masses on the streets writhing, darting. See Bush breathing. And all those evangelicals and those soldiers in Iraq. And know as well that your last breath is your death at this juncture. Your last breath in this life is the last breath of countless beings, countless times. And the beginning of another cycle of life and breath. Then, how the red might be the blood you’re swimming in or the thin streak in the sky of a new beautiful dawn, the white might be the frozen ice of the coldest hell or the most intense stream of bliss, and how the blue might be the darkest pool of hot tar or the lapis lazuli sky of the Pure land.
Oh say can you see? By the dawns’ early light…what so proudly we hail as the twilight’s last gleaming?
One morning I was reading ‘a treasury of sublime instructions’ from a high Tibetan lama. America contains the symbol ‘Ah’, which sounds the unborn nature of truth. It’s also the symbol at the throat chakra, colored red. Sometimes when I sit and visualize the colors white, red and blue according to my Buddhist practice, I think of the American flag and how uncanny it is that they are the same. I sit and pray for liberation from physical, verbal and mental afflictions, as the country I was born into is rocking itself into the hell realm by way of its own blood soaked actions.
There are more than 5 billion humans on the planet now and few study the Buddhist dharma. According to Buddhist scriptures, in contemplating the sufferings of cyclic life in general, they can be broken down into six sufferings. Life is uncertain. We can never find a sense of satisfaction. We have to shed our bodies over and over again. We are born over and over again. What goes up must come down.
I felt bad at lunch the other day as a friend told me about a CEO of a well-known movie studio and how much he makes a day; how much he spends to redecorate his office that he doesn’t use. How he also had a quadruple by pass. And my mind flashes abruptly to begging bowls penetrating the stone fences of India. $10,000 a day to sit in a soft malleable chair and bark at your employees could feed the whole of an Indian town for half a year! "It’s out of whack", she said. Yet there’s no visible awareness of cyclic existence and how it all goes round and round. You reap what you sow. And so…and so…
We live in a land of Costcos, of sterilized supermarkets with pasturized milk, genetically engineered beef, plastic containers, rubber gloves. The supermarkets here don’t smell. They freeze you. You should probably wear a ski suit to shop at Ralphs or Vons. We drive Hummers to prevent death. We pull the skin taught on our faces to avoid looking at the aging process. We think we can defy death. We think that our minds are so powerful. But the mind that is contaminated is only as powerful as its contaminates. It can’t see. It can only see through its own dirty lens.
It’s just that with Hummers and Costcos we’ve developed a battleground we think we can win on. We can drive over death. Eat him up and liposuction him out of our bodies. We can kill some people in a foreign land and not feel. Not feel. That’s it. I put my flag on my Hummer and I feel something else. Pride invasion.
I watch TV and see talking shriveled up American men in suits. I think of the invention of the suit and tie. Clothing symbols of achievement. Wow. We became stiff. Old and Gasping, I watch Rumsfeld deliver a speech on TV. He can hardly get a breath. They are short heaves and his chest seems hard and I think, "that man is suffering so much". And has no idea. As a yoga teacher, I see the physical structural ailments much more now. The caved in chest, the sagging shoulders, the color of the skin. Not even a suit or a tummy tuck can hide what’s really going on.
Human birth is precious and rare. It is often said that the birth of a human is more rare than a blind turtle that swims in the ocean and only surfaces every hundred years, putting its head through a golden hoop which has been tossed around on the waves and driven by wind. By contrast, the Buddha taught that the number of beings in hell equals the number of atomic particles in the galaxy. Each human being has the capacity to reach nirvana (liberation from all mental afflictions), or Buddhahood (total enlightenment for the sake of all beings) from here. In other words, you have the capacity to transform the awful-ness in you and around you and reach for something beautiful, pain free, for the sake of all beings, hell, animal, hungry ghost, semi-god, god as well as human. But as one of my teachers lamented in retreat, the Buddha taught the 8 fold path, the way out, over 2,500 years ago and still people haven’t learned, still they are doing the same awful things.
Some say it’s enough to notice the breath. Accept the breath. But there’s more. Understand how you got to be breathing in the first place. Understand how we all breath. How interdependent our breath is. Your Republican breath out is my breath in. It may or may not kill me. It’s not about the Republican breath then, is it? Think about this. Use it as a koan, traverse the breath and those streets. See the swaying masses on the streets writhing, darting. See Bush breathing. And all those evangelicals and those soldiers in Iraq. And know as well that your last breath is your death at this juncture. Your last breath in this life is the last breath of countless beings, countless times. And the beginning of another cycle of life and breath. Then, how the red might be the blood you’re swimming in or the thin streak in the sky of a new beautiful dawn, the white might be the frozen ice of the coldest hell or the most intense stream of bliss, and how the blue might be the darkest pool of hot tar or the lapis lazuli sky of the Pure land.
Oh say can you see? By the dawns’ early light…what so proudly we hail as the twilight’s last gleaming?
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