People are Beautiful
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
My mother used to do yoga regularly, and once she tried Bikram, the kind of yoga where they dress in hot pants and heat up the room until your eyes melt.
She didn’t like the puddles of sweat and got up to leave in the middle of the class. The teacher was aghast.
“You can’t leave! What about the toxins? You have to get the toxins out of your body!”
My mother responded, “Fuck the toxins.”
I’ve always liked the sound of that. I know there are toxins in us, but we are not dirty. We don’t need cleansing. We are not originally sinned. Most importantly, nobody’s more pure than anybody else. Holier than thou doesn’t work for me.
There are yoga classes in LA where you have to audition to get in. There are people out here on the Left Coast of Crazyland (to borrow a friend’s coinage) who are telling me about conscious parenting classes, suggesting that the rest of us bumbling fools have been doing this parenting stuff with a can of warm beer in one hand and a burning cigarette in the other. (Some of us have.) The assumption is that the conscious people (and parents) are going to be ascending to a higher plane, while the rest of us will be consumed in an inconvenient fireball. (“Before you consume me in that fireball I need to check my email one more time.”)
This creates a spiritual caste system. You have your vegans with the glassy, golden light in their eyes and you have the rest of us coffee-drinking, indulgent humans moping about in parking lots scratching off Lotto tickets. I believe it’s a fantasy that people can be “saved.” Saved from what? People are morally messy, lack focus in their day-to-day activities and eat too much candy. People are impure. The world resolutely lacks absolutes. So how are we going to get better?
Scientists are documenting that we are soft-wired to feel empathy. If you feel joy or anger I can feel that with you, and the same neurons will light up in my brain as though I’m having that experience myself. Jeremy Rifkin wrote a 700-page book about this called The Empathic Civilization, but you can look at an animation that tells the story in a couple of minutes. (Not only am I impure, I also like to save time.)
“Empathic moments are the most intensely alive experiences we ever have. We empathize with each other’s struggles against death and for life. One acknowledges the whiff of death in another’s frailties and vulnerabilities. No one ever empathizes with a perfect being.”
-Jeremy Rifkin
Empathy means you become part of another’s experience, of a family’s, of a nation’s, and a planet’s. In the empathic world, there’s no spiritual caste system, no holier than thou – we’re equals. If we extend the concept of empathy to its outermost then we can connect with anyone, and we can save the planet, too. I think that’s a true spiritual democracy.
Photo credit: j_silla via Flickr and Creative Commons License.
Your mother’s yoga exit made me laugh! If you are a PBS fan and watch the Charlie Rose show, maybe you saw his monthly ‘Brain Series’ this past winter. It was fascinating listening to his panels of experts and learning how they are beginning to unlock some secrets of our brains. Not only can researchers use the latest brain scanning technology to clearly demonstrate how empathy happens in our brains, but also how happiness and depression spread through online networks the same as personal networks.
It’s as if we’re wired to feel each others’ happiness and pain. I don’t know what it all means, but I agree with you that empathy embraces the greatest depths of imperfection. Where brains are concerned, we are all interconnected, and all equal.
Thanks for sharing your insights. I’d better go outside and enjoy the starry sky before I’m consumed by that inconvenient fireball. I hope you feel my joy!
I am not into blogs, and am barely hanging on by a thread to social media. This particular entry speaks my language and is an example of why your blog will survive another day in my inbox. This contains so many nuggets of excellence, I am pissed off at myself for not writing it.
Maybe it’s because I’ve recently become a parent, and even more recently become a coffee drinker – or perhaps more embarrassingly because the empathy that pours out of me in tears when I watch So You Think You Can Dance… whatever… Your spiritual caste system assessment is so right on that a whole book can be written about it. Yoga nazis, vegans and moms who potty train their babies by 6-months-old could benefit from another, less righteous, perspective.
I’ve met some yoga nazis here and there – they are scary. And there’s so much information coming at us at once – that’s scary, too. I’m predicting that some filters will move into place – either human-created (like we all go offline for one day a week) or machine-generated (the next Google will be something that helps you not find things that you don’t want to find.) Thanks for hanging in with this blog at least – I value your comments!
I’ve read that about happiness and depression spreading through online networks the same as personal networks – amazing stuff. Thanks for your thoughtful comments!
The communicability of empathy or other positive feelings–I believe strongly in this. It does seem to be hard-wired–we all know what we should do. But the ego often overrides it in its quest for advantage. I find that the more meditation I do, the more empathetic I become (just like Diogenes!). A demonstration of empathy can spark it in others. But the same holds true for negativity–it can be a match to kindling. The SS comes to mind. Are we just an evolutionary herd?
I’ve seen the “yoga Nazi” phenomenon in the qigong world–the continous quest for purity that squeegees the fun out of life. It’s torture to be around people like this. They are the Puritans of the Eastern energy arts (Puritan declaration: “Only the Saints will reside in Heaven with God. We are the Saints”). Relax–have a beer once in a while and a bag of Doritos. I doubt there’s a special place in “Heaven” for the toxin-free. God, I hope not.
I like this post as well, Lee. It’s so much easier to define ourselves, to ourselves and to others, when we have something concrete to say.. like.. I do martial arts three times a week, or yoga, or meditate. But who are we when suddenly there is no time for those things… forming connections with people, feeling empathy, embracing humanity.. this is enough to fill one’s life, one’s head… and to the comments about Doritos and candy… even biting into a really good piece of bittersweet chocolate makes you think about the lives of those at the other end of the earth who helped make it…
thanks for commenting! so true about identity. I’ve been taking a break from running this week … and have to seek another definition of myself as “not a runner” – challenging!
Busted. And I was so convinced that I had something over the “less spiritual.” Thanks for the reality check, Lee.