500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Maybe it’s because I live in the yoga capital of the world, Santa Monica, CA, that I hear people saying the word sacred every couple of minutes. They even say holy a lot. Pretty much, I hate that kind of talk. Holy brings to mind words reverently spoken by priests who take advantage of children, and sacred has been uttered by any number of false prophets who are all about profit. There are only two words more often abused than those two and they are targeting, as in targeting customers, and branding, as in branding yourself. If you brand yourself and then go around targeting people it sounds like the makings of an edgy, homicidal lifestyle. (“Honey, what’s that smell? Oh, that’s just me branding myself again. When I’m done, I’m going to get right back to targeting people. I knocked off ten today.”)
When a word is detached from meaning it can roll around on the floor and that’s really dangerous. You could trip over it, and that would be impactful, a word I always trip over because I get nauseous just thinking about it.
But it’s not a bad thing that I hang around people who say words I don’t always like hearing. They cause me to ask questions like what’s sacred in my life and how might I try to live more purely.
I will often come home from a yoga class and have a glass of wine. It reminds me of people who finish a nice run and then light up a cigarette. A yoga teacher I respect once mentioned that alcohol reverses the effects of yoga, but to me it’s a comforting contradiction. It’s part of what makes people people – their humanness, for me, is bound up in their complications. This will sound a bit like a Zen koan, but I don’t think people are meant to be pure, because impurity is the very essence of our purity. Objects are pure. Design is pure. A VW Bug always makes me smile. It exists purely unto itself, independent of function, which, of course, is transport. But it doesn’t need to be going anywhere to be serving the higher purpose of beautiful design.
Real people will never be pure. That’s for storybook saints and cartoon character heroes. Higher purpose is useful, but what happens in practice? Well, what do you make of Pepsi, a malicious maker of addictive sugar water, funding the Pepsi Refresh Project, which is helping fund the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation and things like warm winter coats for children in need? How much money will Pepsi have to give away to worthy causes before it becomes a corporate expression of higher purpose? As you do the math on that, consider this item from the Kansas City Star.
A 300-pound chimpanzee escaped from its owner Tuesday afternoon and ran rampant through a Kansas City neighborhood, scaring walkers, pounding on passing cars and breaking a police car’s windshield. The 21-year-old ape, named Sueko, also pointed and laughed at residents and flipped off an animal control officer near 78th Street and Indiana Avenue, witnesses said.
Not only is it remarkable that there are newspapers still being published somewhere, but when I think about a manic chimp flipping off an animal control officer, well, that makes me smile, and that’s sacred.
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Photo credits: Lee Schneider and VW Beetle by Chris Keating via Creative Commons License.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
What are you looking for? People are searching Google for “oil spill in gulf of mexico.” St. Louis, MO is the world’s epicenter for people typing in “how to find a boyfriend.” The number one city searching for “sex” is Delhi, India. The number one city searching for “peace” – Edmonton, Canada.
I’m going to follow the high (Canadian) road and try some Google searches before hoisting a cold drink and paddling a kayak into the Labor Day sunset. Here are my results, not all of them real.
Normally this Google search returns an administration that is wrongheadedly driven to job generation by building more roads, more airports and increasing our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s my read on Laura Tyson’s recent New York Times op-ed piece.
But when I did this Google search, I got something that didn’t suck. My search returned a president who delivers on his promise to build a green infrastructure for America, with solar and wind power. His administration helps move us away from oil, cars and bad mortgages and into something smarter – new online technologies and training and a green economy.
This returns yoga studios that offer classes by donation, like YogaCo and Yogis Anonymous, in Santa Monica. You simply pay what you think the class is worth. Your class is not some recurring charge on your credit card, or a health-club membership, or some other obligation like changing the oil in your car. The health club, credit card model of yoga doesn’t teach us as much about ourselves. As Max Strom writes in A Life Worth Breathing, we can’t use the methods we commonly employ in business and commerce to learn about ourselves. It’s like using a hammer to brush your teeth. Money needs to change hands for yoga classes, but just in a different way.
This search returns links about Bruce Lipton, a biologist who is leading a re-examination of Darwinian evolutionary theory. He spoke at a great event that I attended this week. Bruce says that Darwin’s concept of evolution, the “survival of the fittest,” has led humanity into competition and war. He thinks evolution is really about “survival of the fittingest” – successful species are those that adapt, fit in with nature and play well with other species. If we understand this in time, and stop killing the planet, Mother Nature might not need to cast us out of her garden.
This returns a link to this video, which is coffee porn for the overcaffinated engineer mind. The search does not return any links to Starbucks, which has a good health plan for its employees but teaches them to make an indifferent espresso, a great tragedy for dopamine delivery.
My dream Google search returns news of Architecture for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild in Haiti, Black Entertainment Television’s financing of local housing materials manufacturing in Haiti, and World Shelters’ work here and abroad to put a roof over everyone’s head.
Eastern Nebraska. Huh. Always wanted to know that.
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500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I am married to a holy vibe chick. Can I discuss this with you? We all know that women like to share. Holy vibe chicks like to share a lot. If they share a whole lot together they have something called a share-gasm. In fact, they are capable of multiple share-gasms, if conditions are right and there are enough lighted candles. It is a little intimidating, as a man, to witness this. Most of us men are capable of only one share-gasm at a time, and after that we have to rest a little before we go again.
Being married to a holy vibe chick (for a year, thank you for the congratulatory notes and checks) has brought many wonderful things into my life. I’ve learned to cook vegetarian and I am proud to say that I’ve stopped eating meat. Well, that’s not true. When I am away from my holy vibe chick I do eat chicken and pork sometimes, and it feels wonderfully illegal. I drink whiskey too, and port, which can seem holy, if it’s vintage 1977 port. After yoga I often get the urge for a good pinot noir, and I almost succeed in convincing myself that pinot after Pincha Mayurasana is spiritual in that it involves spirits. But that rarely works. I settle for organic juice squeezed from the sweat of yaks, which is all that we have in the refrigerator. Then I drink pure water to cleanse my soul, dress all in white and stare at the sun for an hour.
Holy vibers certainly do wear white a lot. This isn’t a problem here in Southern California, but if some holy vibe chicks went out in a snowstorm we might lose them in a blinding, monochromatic whirl of deep meaning. Did I mention that when you are living in the magnetic pull of a holy vibe chick everything has deep meaning? If you have a runny nose, a medical intuitive like Louise Hay will explain that means “inner crying.” 
I have been working through some running injuries, a balky knee and now a healing heel, which are apparently an expression of the transitions I am undergoing, or plain stupid overtraining. Take your pick. (Hint: Plain stupid overtraining is not the holy explanation.) Various Hindu goddesses have a hand in finding us a good parking space. Spiders and crows are messengers. We place fresh flowers on Lakshmi’s altar and ask her where our new clients will come from.
Consulting goddesses for their advice is novel for me. But I have learned that holy vibe chicks also consult other people about things. I am something of a lone wolf, and also male. I think about something for a minute and then I do it. There was a Seinfeld about this. Men hunt down a shirt and buy it. Women gather to discuss what shirt to buy. In a holy vibe household, few decisions are made alone. That’s the real beauty, of course. We find connection with ourselves and a community. Come to think of it, looking at the world as a place of deep meaning is a good way to live. It builds compassion; it brings focus and passion to life. Self-examination leads directly to self-improvement. Yoga feels good. It’s so true that the holy vibe chick I married is a deep friend who has taught me a lot. I love my holy vibe chick!
Oh my god, I think I just had a share-gasm.
Lakshmi image by Ravi. Photos by Lee Schneider.
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.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
I have stuff. I’ve used eBay to sell some. In the past I would put a camera up for auction and it would sell at a profit, like a hot stock. But more recently, I put up my entire Rollei camera outfit. 
It was a classic kit and went for half what I paid for it. The other day, the guts of my outmoded multi-thousand-dollar edit system went for $80. Markets can provide an experience not unlike the amusement park ride that makes you throw up. Walter Kirn put it like this recently in the New York Times Magazine:
“According to the worldly theologians of finance and commerce, a force known as “the business cycle” that governs the rise and fall of markets was supposed to have taken us higher by now, replenishing depleted bank accounts, restoring a sheen of functionality to corroded Rust Belt cities and permitting again the buying and selling of homes. The rock in front of this tomb remains in place, though, and the day of rejoicing still appears far off.”
If you look at the value of things in terms of numbers, well, it can get you nuts. Since going nuts is expensive, I’m trying to think of markets differently. Like my 1960s era Rollei SL66 camera. It included a type of Zeiss lens that many believe was among the finest ever made. It was a sad day when I eBay’d it. But the man who came to pick it up turned that around.
He was Japanese, a pocket-protector type engineer who was passing through California on his way back home. He explained that in Japan there’s a tradition of asking retired engineers to work on projects – a way of using, and respecting, their wisdom. The guy who came to get my camera was on a mission. He was going around the States buying great lenses to give to a retired engineer in Japan. The old guy was going to study them so he could make better lenses for the digital age. Suddenly my heirloom Rollei was pointing the way to the future. Some old guy whose skills may have been ignored over here was leading the charge in Japan. I liked the sound of that, so I gave the engineer a light meter and a couple of filters to go with the Rollei. The transaction transformed the value of my camera – raising it.
Max Strom, a yoga teacher, has seen the value of yoga increase among people who drive $85,000 cars. These folks arrive at his classes, turn off their cell phones and spend $20 to look inside themselves and see what they might find. As Max wrote, the experience often “triggers the profound realization that a 90 minute, $20 yoga class fulfills many of their essential needs, more than any of their other possessions they have worked like dogs to obtain.” The value of that twenty bucks? Pretty huge. Even more when you consider, as Max argues, that “Yoga is being embraced primarily by college-educated, upper-middle-class thinkers and businesspeople in positions of power–the very strata of society that has the power to make the changes this world so desperately needs.”
I believe in money, because I use it to pay my mortgage. But when the true value of a yoga class or an old camera floats above its money value, suddenly you’re playing the spiritual stock market – always a good bet.
