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A novel by Betty Smith written in 1943.  I decided to read it because it took place during a time when my ancestors would have been immigrants in New York.

Francie is smart she thought.  She must go to high school and maybe beyond that.  She’s a learner and she’ll be somebody someday.  But when she gets educated, she will grow away from me.  Why she’s growing away from me now.  She does not love me the way the boy loves me.  I feel her turn away from me.  She does not understand me.  All she understands is that I don’t understand her.  Maybe when she gets educated she’ll be ashamed of me – the way I talk.  But she will have too much character to show it.  Instead she will try to make me different.  She will come to see me and try to make me live in a better way and I will be mean to her because I’ll know she’s above me.  She will figure out too much about things as she grows older; she’ll get to know too much for her own happiness. She’ll find out one day that I don’t love her as much as I love the boy.  I cannot help it that this is so. But she won’t understand that. Sometimes I think she knows that now. Already she is growing away from me; she will fight to get away soon. Changing over to that far-away school was the first step in her getting away from me. But Neeley will never leave me, that is why I love him best. He will cling to me and understand me. I want him to be a doctor. He must be a doctor. Maybe he will play the fiddle, too. There is music in him. He got that from his father. He has gone farther on the piano than Francie or me. Yes, his father has the music in him but it does him no good. It is ruining him. If he couldn’t sing, those men who treat him to drinks wouldn’t want him around. What good is the fine way he can sing when it doesn’t make him or us any better? With the boy, it will be different. He’ll be educated. I must think out ways. We’ll not have Johnny with us long. Dear God, I loved him so much once -  and sometimes I still do. But he’s worthless…worthless.  And God forgive me for ever finding it out.

Thus Katie figured everything out in the moments it took them to climb the stairs. People looking up at her – at her smooth pretty vivacious face – had no way of knowing abut the painfully articulated resolves formulating in her mind.

From Yoga and the Quest for Self by Stephen Cope.

We’ve forgotten we’re simply the fantastic play of consiousness and energy, of shiva and shakti.  We’ve become ensnared in a gross misidentification. We have become exclusively identified with our physical bodies, with our possessions, with our thoughts, with our personalities. We think we’re our ideas, our careers, our families, our countries. We live our lives in utter ignorance of the vastness of our real nature, estranged from our true selves. This is the source of our suffering.

In yogic philosophy, the source of this alienation from the true self is not sin or wrongdoing of any kind. It’s simply ignorance-avidya. As they awaken to themselves, the fundamental problem is not guilt, it’s delusion. The Upanishadic sages described this ignorance as a “viel of illusion” that obscures the truth and confuses the mind so that it cannot discriminate between reality and appearance.

In the yogic view, suffering has its origins in a process called extroversion (unmesha). The soul gradually becomes completely identified with the material plane of existence, even though this “gross material plane – the physical body and the personality – is only the most outward and visible aspect of her true home. This is a disasterous misidentification because, in addition to the body, mind and personality, yoga teaches that the true home of the soul is also beyond time and space, in the eternal now of consciousness. When we live disconnected from these vast roots of the Self, we suffer.

Self is capitalized here because it refers to the divine, awake, free self. Given the yogic view of our predicament, it’s not suprising that we so often feel estranged, that we feel unreal, that we feel disconnected from our center. That is precisely our condition.

Yoga psychology gets very specific about the exact nature of the conditioning that keeps us ensnared in delusion about our true nature. The classical scriptures identify five “afflictions” or kleshas – five conditioned beliefs and behaviors that keep us bound to “gross apparent reality.” They are:

1. Avidya: Ignorance

2. Asmitta: “I-ness”

3. Raga: Attraction

4. Dvesha: Aversion

5. Abhinivesha: Clinging to the life and fear of death.

Passages from Yoga and the Quest for The True Self by Stephen Cope. It’s going to take me a while to finish this one.

In yogic view, shakti is the energy essence of the phenomenal world, the purely active force in the manifestation of the universe. Shakti is seen as the divine Mother, the essence of the feminine principle, because she brings the world into being. She is also energy, the primordial power that is always at play, creating, preserving, destroying, the world of form. There is no object or event that doesn’t disclose the presence of her power. But the body of a yoga adept is a particularly open channel for the play of pure energy.

The thing is though, that you can’t really understand the action of Shakti in the world without understanding Shiva, Shakti’s consort. Shiva is the masculine principle in creation. He is the pure witness consciousness, the archetypal seer. He is the formless brahman, pure spirit, transcendent, without any attributes. You might think of Shiva as the still point, the absolute subject, the One. And Shakti is the dance. It’s like T.S. Eliot said “Without the still point, there would be no dance.” In the yogic view, the entire universe moves between these two poles – shiva and shakti. Pure consciousness and pure power. Pure being and pure becoming. The still point and the dance. Always arcing toward one another.

Here’s the really cool thing, In hatha yoga-the practice of postures and yogic breathing-the whole drama of the universe gets acted out right within this very earthly body. In this drama all the condensed powers of shakti lie coiled at the base of the spine. This is what we know as kundalini, the essence of divine goddess energy. The kundalini shakti rises up to meet her consort shiva, pure witness consciousness, who resides in an energy center at the energy center at the crown of the head, the so-called crown chakra. The union of shiva and shakti, which is the goal of hatha yoga, is accomplished when shakti moves up through the central energy column in the area of the spine-called the shushumna-and arrives at the crown. On its trip to meet shiva, this highly condensed energy of kundalini shakti awakens all the latent energy centers in the body, and as this happens, the body moves spontaneously into hundreds of postures. The dance that results is the interplay of energy and consciousness, or what yogis call lila-the divine play.

An article about honesty and it’s implications by Sally Kempton from YogaJournal.com.

…
An argument for radical truthfulness goes deep: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi’s position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth “the signet ring of God.” In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general’s son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna’s position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

My college philosophy teacher used to make this point with a personal example. As a Jewish child living in Germany, she was saved from being captured by the Nazis because a Catholic family lied to the Gestapo about her presence in their back bedroom. For the family to have told the truth would have brought about her death. It was a small lie for a larger truth.

Another situation in which lying might be ethical is when the truth is simply too harsh for the person who is receiving it. A friend of mine, when diagnosed with breast cancer, told her 90-year-old mother that everything was fine, because she recognized that telling the truth about her condition would create too much anxiety for her already-fragile mother.

Conversely, there are times when telling a factual truth can be an act of disguised or overt aggression. When Fran tells her friend Allison that she saw Allison’s husband with another woman, Fran may be speaking out of concern for her friend, but she may also be expressing a hidden hostility or envy. Most of us can remember less dramatic but equally painful examples of bitter truth telling: disclosures made in anger, hurtful comments about a friend’s or partner’s secret vulnerabilities, revelations that destroy trust. In the past 30 years, especially in certain spiritual communities, there’s been a prevailing ethic that privileges full disclosure, public confession, and extreme transparency in relationships. The results have been liberating in some respects, destructive in others. So it seems vital that we each find our own way of balancing truthfulness with other values. One great yardstick to use is called “the four gates of speech,” which include the following questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? and Is this the right moment to say it? When we feel caught between speaking a bitter truth and keeping quiet, these questions help us sort out the priorities.

As I’ve said, balancing the relative value of, say, truth and kindness, is not always easy, and it requires a high degree of honesty—especially about your own deep inner motives. If the compulsion to be relentlessly honest sometimes conceals aggression, the decision to hide the truth because of kindness, or because the time is wrong, can be a cover for your fears or for the desire to stay inside of your comfort zone. Radical truth telling is simple. You just plunge in and do it, regardless of the effect it has on others. Discriminating truth telling demands far more attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and self-understanding.

As you begin to look at how you lie, it becomes possible to find out why you lie. My friend Alice is getting divorced and is facing a child-custody battle. Her lawyer suggested that she write a description of all the incidents in which her ex-husband had failed as a father and husband. She wrote a series of “He said, then I said” dialogues, highlighting the ways in which her husband had hurt her and their daughter. When Alice reread the document, she realized that she hadn’t included her own hurtful words and actions. Part of the reason she hadn’t was tactical: She wanted sole custody of their child. But another part of it was her need to feel justified about leaving her marriage. “Once I started to look deeper at these conversations, I could see that both of us were at fault. In fact, there were times I acted like a total bitch. I so much didn’t want to see myself that way that my memory would literally distort what happened.”

Alice was confronting what most of us would recognize as a particularly insidious form of untruth: the justifications, excuses, and blaming strategies that we use to avoid facing the gap between how we want to act and how we actually behave. For the postmodern, psychologically informed yogi, Patanjali’s vow to unconditional truth demands much more than a commitment to factual accuracy. It asks you to become transparent to yourself, to be willing to gaze unflinchingly, yet without bitterness or self-blame, at the parts of yourself that you are afraid to expose to scrutiny. Only when you’re willing to look at your areas of falseness can you discover the deepest possibilities of the practice of truth.

Here are the basics in the practice of truthfulness: Pay attention to factual truth. Notice and make a point of calling yourself on the urge to conceal embarrassing facts, make yourself look better, justify mistakes, or run away from confrontation. When you notice yourself telling an untruth, acknowledge that you did it. As much as possible, make a point of not saying anything you know to be untrue.

As you learn how to catch your own characteristic patterns of untruth—both inner and outer—you will also begin to notice that sometimes truths need to be spoken, and other times remaining silent is an acceptable alternative. In other words, your commitment to truthfulness comes to include an authentic and trustworthy capacity for discriminating speech. Truth is a genuine teacher. When you decide to follow where it leads—constantly asking questions such as, What is my motive for speaking? Is it kind and necessary to say this? If not now, how will I know that it’s right to say this?—the power of truth will show its subtleties as well as teach its wisdom. Patanjali says that through truthfulness we gain such a power that all our words turn out to be true. I don’t believe that he means we become alchemists, able to turn the base metal of lies into the gold of reality just through our words. Instead, I believe that he is actually talking about the power to speak from inspiration—to hold firmly to the truth that is not only factual, but that illuminates, that can be received, and that reflects the deeper state within the heart.

A passage from Yoga and the Quest for Self by Stephen Cope.

“In the world of yoga, you must remember that there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide. But the human realms are the most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realms of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to produ us toward taking the path of liberation.”

“You have come to live in the gurus house, now. This is a very auspicious time, you know. Maybe thousands of lifetimes you wait for this. You must be very careful not to waste it.” Amrit talked about the preciousness of taking a period of time to live quietly, deliberately, away from the restlessness of our culture. “There must be movement back and forth from the mountaintop to the marketplace, but just now is a moment for the mountaintop. How will you use it, I wonder?” He talked about how yogis discovered the amazing potentioals present in the “seed of the self” and challenged us to be yogic scientists, to experiment while we were at Kripalu with those ways of living that helped us to be fully alive. He urged us to tune in carefully to our energy, to listen to it, not to abuse it. “A conscious use of energy is the hallmark of the yogic lifestyle.”

An article by Sarah Nardi in Adbusters magazine #78.

That’s the problem with infotainment media, says Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. It has created a culture of passive, uninformed Americans accustomed to being spoon-fed their informaiton. At its most innocuous, infotainment is grossly over-simplified, occassionally inaccurate and often irrelevent “news” passed along to a less than vigilant public. At its most insidious, infotainment is the carrier of disinformation – partisan agenda maquerading as fact. It’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, the War on Terror. It’s the vague and ill-defined threat to our Democratic ideals.

But we know all of this. We know the story is bullshit, we wknow the network is owned. We know that every second of soft-interest celebrity update peddled to us with the manic urgency of breaking news is a fallen soldier unrecognized, a humanitarian crisis ignored. We know that We Were Lie To. But still, we come back for more.

Why?

Jacoby’s argument – explicated in the book with frightening historical support – contends that since the time of our nations inception, we have become steadily more divorced from the process of reason. Citing factors such as the rise of religious fundamentalism, the decline of educational standards and our growing technological dependence, Jacoby argues that, as a nation, we have become not only dumb, but increasingly incapable of rational thought. Six out of ten adults can’t find Iraq on a map, but we fail to see how that’s a problem. Fewer Americans are learning foreign languages because more and more of us don’t believe that it’s necessary. Our collective standards for knowledge have become frighteningly low. Our expectations of each other and ourselves, increasingly slight. And with each generation born into the ever-darkening age of unreason, we move further from the enlightened ideals out of which this country was born.

But Jacoby’s arguments, no matter how fresh, how sound, how meticulously researched, are all-too easy to forget. That failure isn’t hers, it’s ours. Jacoby offers perspective – a map charting the paths that have brought us here. It’s a tool designed to help us understand the past. But history offers nothing if we’re unable to understand ourselves in relation to it. Every shrug, every mindless utterance of baseless fact – every time we roll our eyes at the depraved state of media but continue to watch – we contribute. We look around and see the problem. We sadly shake our heads. And then we go about our lives. We are the reason behind unreason.

by Tom Robbins. Second time reading it

The constant battle with the reproductive process, a war in which her only allies were pharmaceutical robots, alien agents whose artificial assistance seemed more treacherous than trustworthy, was gnawing with plastic teeth at her very concepts of love. Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?

Who does have a love life anymore? These days people have sex lives, not love lives. Lots of them are even giving up sex. I don’t have a love life because I’ve never met a man who knew how to have a love life. Maybe I don’t know how either.

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.” That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

When crises arise, some people flourish while others flounder. Here’s how your practice can help you build resilience. An article by Sally Kempton on yogajournal.com.

Yoga practice is meant to teach us how to untangle inner knots. Often, you don’t realize how much difference your practice has made until the day that you find yourself dealing with a crisis without going into an absolute meltdown.

Tapas literally means “heat” the inner heat created as we undergo discipline or hardship for the sake of change. When we understand tapas, any hardship can be seen as a purifying fire, removing veils from our awareness. Laura’s intense, painstaking effort to rehabilitate her brain was a tapas that actually purified her mind. In fact, for a yogi, any effort can be reframed as tapas. My friend Scott kept it together through years of working with a difficult boss by telling himself that he was doing tapas. He figured that each moment of forbearance was helping purify and dissolve his tendencies toward impatience and anger. Understanding the concept of tapas as purification has taken many a worldly yogi through challenging situations that can be as mundane as surviving a 14-hour plane ride or as primal as a serious illness or the death of a parent.

Asana practice offers basic training in tapas: You are emotionally strengthened each time you make the physical effort to stay in a pose while your legs burn. Meditation and mindfulness practice teach us to sit through boredom, mental restlessness, and emotional upheavals. Another form of tapas is the effort we make to practice kindness and nonviolence and to tell the truth. But during hard times, tapas often means pure endurance hanging tight when fear, sadness, and frustration threaten to send us into a tailspin. Doing this kind of tapas, we actually become heirs to the great spiritual practitioners who experienced long periods of difficulty, doubt, and darkness, figures like St. John of the Cross, Ramakrishna, and Bodhidharma especially if, like them, we also remember to practice self-study and surrender.

From Adbusters #77, The Global Moment, an article titled Your Moment of Truth by Laurel Saville. It’s about an art piece by Tino Sehgal called “This Situation.”

As with his other pieces, he is looking for a deeper level of engagement between art and audience. In “This Is New,” museum attendancts read newspaper headlines and visitor responses determine the continuation of the work. In “This Success/This Failure,” young children pull passersby into an empty room to play. In “The Situation,” Seghal is asking the audience to consider larger issues along with the players, while expressing his discomfort with our culture’s love affair with consumption and his impatience with the conventional search for political solutions.

“The big new task of my generation is, how can we morally defend our lifestyle, which will not be possible for future generations,” he says. “A political solution won’t do it.”

By Eckhart Tolle

Continuing to read this book for the second time and still finding yummy tidbits. These are from the final chapter of the book.

Without the impairment of (egoic) dysfunction, our intelligence comes into full alignment with the outgoing cycle of universal intelligence and its impulse to create. We become conscious participants in the creation of form. We don’t identify with what we create and so don’t lose ourselves in what we do. We are learning that the act of creation may involve energy of the highest intensity, but that is not “hard work” or stressful. We need to understand the difference between stress and intensity, as we shall see. Struggle or stress is a sign of the ego, as are negative reactions when we experience obstacles.
The force behind the ego’s wanting creates “enemies,” that is to say, reaction in the form of an opposing force equal in intensity. The stronger the ego, the stronger the sense of separateness between people. The only actions that do not cause opposing reactions are those that are aimed at the good of all. They are inclusive not exclusive.

The three modalities of awakened doing…
There are three ways in which consciousness can flow into what you do and thus through you into this world, three modalities in which you can align your life with the creative power of the universe. Modality means the underlying energy-frequency that flows into what you do and connects your actions with the awakened consciousness that is emerging into this world. What you do will be dysfunctional and of the ego unless it arises out of one of these modalities.
The modalities are acceptance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm.
Whatever you cannot enjoy doing, you can at least accept that this is what you have to do. Acceptance means: For now, this is what this situation, this moment, requires me to do, and so I do it willingly. If you can neither enjoy or bring acceptance to what you do – stop. Otherwise, you ar enot taking responsibility for the only thing you can really take responsibility for, which also happens to be the one thing that really matters: your state of consciousness or mind.
Enjoyment
The peace that comes from surrendered action turns into a sense of aliveness when you actually enjoy what you are doing. On the new earth, enjoyment will actually replace wanting as the motivating power behind people’s actions. You don’t have to wait for something “meaningful” to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The “waiting to start living” syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state. When you say, I enjoy doing this or that, it is really a misperception. It makes it appear that the joy comes from what you do, but that is not the case. Joy does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do and thus into this world. The misperception that joy comes from what you do is normal, and it is also dangerous, because it creates the belief that joy is something that can be derived from something else, such as an activity or thing.
Then what is the relationship between something that you do and that state of joy? You will enjoy any activity in which you are fully present, any activity that is not just a means to an end.
Enthusiasm
Then there is another way of creative manifestation that may come to those who remain true to their inner purpose of awakening. Suddenly one day they know what their outer purpose is. They have a great vision, a goal, and from then on they work toward implementing that goal. Their goal or vision is usually connected in some way to something that on a smaller scale they are doing and enjoying already. Enthusiasm means there is a deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.