Brights, knee injuries

So I am back to resting my knee, having torn my ACL ligament yesterday while skiing. I feel angry with myself for not being more careful, but it was a run I had skied earlier in the day without any difficulty. The view from the top was amazing, I'll post a picture once I locate my camera card reader. Clear blue skies with blue ice-capped mountains in the distance, the nearby snow crisp and white like the sheets in a laundry detergent ad. I wanted to cry when I realized I had missed the sunset. My friend skied down behind the stretcher and put his sweater around me when I was shivering in the cable car, it would have been very cold and lonely without him.

On Christmas Day, while browsing the internet, I came across the Brights. They are the proselytes of a new religion, that has Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet for prophets. The aims of this new religion are to organize around disbelief in any mystical or supernatural elements, and advocate instead a 'naturalistic worldview', to gain public recognition for people who hold this worldview, and 'educate society' toward accepting such people. At first I felt worried about this new religion, that preaches intolerance toward other religions and attempts to convert people to its philosophy. But on second thoughts it is perhaps no worse than many traditional religions. I feel sad that while paying lip service to humanitarian values their website contains no volunteer opportunites or suggestions for doing good in society, either toward other brights or anybody else. All you can do as a Bright is help the Brights by promoting their faith. I worry a little that in a few years time it may become as unacceptable in scientific circles to be non-Bright as it is now in the Bay Area to be a Republican. The following statement, quoted from their website, is one I find particularly disturbing: "The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview." It is disturbing because I believe that ethics and actions should come from consideration toward others, both innate and socially sanctioned, and feelings of love, kindness and duty. It is not clear to me how a 'naturalistic worldview' accommodates such concerns, or in fact tells you anything about how to act morally.

My own atheism is pure apostasy. I have no interest in replacing God with a 'naturalistic worldview'. Doubt, curiosity, experiential and rational inquiry seem far more important to me than finding something to believe in.

On the one hand, I am fearful of promoting their cause by the mere fact of writing about them. On the other hand, I am playing with the idea of joining them to see whether there is any openness to change from within by promoting a more humanistic agenda. Thoughts, anyone?

Questions about the soul

I used to think I was not a dualist, taking in the critiques of Descartes with his ridiculous partitioning of mind and body and strange notions of how they interacted and affected one another. The upside-down image on the back of the retina that needs to be re-rotated for the benefit of some strange homunculus, looking at periscopically it via the pineal gland. How would he even know which way was up? Much more insidious was Descartes' identification of the self, 'I', with thought. I think therefore I am. Hegel pointed out that only stopping up the eyes and ears made this mode of existence possible. But the identification of the self with thought, and obsession over the existence of consciousness, has continued to dog Western philosophy and its latter day manifestations as pseudoscience.

Materialism posits that all facets of existence can be reduced to physical arrangements of matter and energy in space and time. I have no qualms about this idea. The problem is that we still don't know exactly how it happens in a way that produces our everyday experiencing. I venture to hypothesize that while individual consciousness manifests as the complex patterns of activation of many different neurons in the brain, together with the chemical signals that they use to communicate with one another, it is also determined by the people around us and the cultural legacy of historical brain activity in many, many people now dead who first came up with concepts such as the soul and God, and found words and language to communicate them with their contemporaries.

It would be a sad thing if our ability to transcend our individual existence once again in this same way became bogged down by neurobiological hyperbole.

Dog ritual, science as religion

This morning when I took my dog for a walk his friend Chauncey was out in the yard, barking to greet him. We crossed the road so that the dogs could say hi and to my surprise, after wagging tails and sniffing both ends through the gate, my dog peed on the gatepost. I was just about to reprimand him for what looked to me like bad dog etiquette, when Chauncey proceeded to do exactly the same thing. They both stood there, taking turns peeing in each other's general direction on opposite sides of the same gatepost. It must have been a ritual they developed together, away from the broader dog culture. My dog almost thinks he is a cat anyway. He adores our cat, who regularly joins us on our evening stroll. The dog tries to make friends with other cats and is at best indifferent towards other dogs, a mixture of frantic fear and aggression signaled by loud barks and fur bristling along his spine.

Taking turns peeing in one another's general direction from opposite sides of the same gatepost. I wondered sadly if this what many human interactions have become as we immerse ourselves in increasingly unnatural environments.

Somebody asked me what I thought about the movie What the Bleep Do We Know, so I watched it. My view is that science as religion is no more harmful than any other religion. Analysing the movie, we seem to have replaced God with the Quantum Universe (both out there and within ourselves), Bad or Evil with Addiction (chemical addiction and, slightly more troublingly, addiction to emotions) and Good with Self-Evolution, Awareness, Knowledge, Creation/Creativity and/or nonattachment. Genuine scientists as well as chiropractors and spiritual leaders served as the priests and prophets of this new religion. If badly spun metaphors of quantum theory and neurobiology are what gives you those tingles down the spine associated with spiritual feeling, then karma to you. I vaguely remember experiencing that when as a 17 year-old physics student I finally understood Dirac's matrices. Sadly the moment was fleeting as it took a great deal of mental effort to follow the math. My one qualm about all this is that if Jesus were nonattached, why would he have bothered? The same goes for Moses or Maimonedes, who was among other things a great physician. Show me someone who did some great thing for the benefit of humanity who was not emotionally attached to the world and the creatures on it. Oh, and what about the imagination? If all these other things are Good, then why not also Imagination?

What are the rituals of this new religion? The two ritual actions depicted in the move show the deaf protagonist (illustrating the limitations of our senses) tattooing herself with hearts using an eyeliner and then immersing herself in a hot bath. Later, she tosses away her anti-anxiety pills. Perhaps watching the movie is a ritual in itself in some circles. What the Bleep do I know?

Modern Yoga

Finished reading A History of Modern Yoga by Elizabeth de Michelis. I love the title of her concluding chapter: "Modern Postural Yoga as a healing ritual of secular religion." Here are some selected quotes:

"... the term 'secularization' refers, in a general sense, 'to the gradual decline of [institutionalized] religion as a consequence of the growth of scientific knowledge and [to] the continued diversification of social and ethnic groups in the Occident' ([Fuller, 1989]). All of these elements would be especially prominent in conditions of 'urban living', and it is in such environments that MPY grows and thrives. Adopted and cultivated in conditions of marked privatization and relativization of religion, MPY is successful, like other Harmonial belief systems, because it provides 'experiential access to the sacred'.
Such experiential access to the sacred, epitomized by the 'secular ritual' of the MPY practice session, represents the third key to understanding the current success of MPY, along with its fitness and de-stressing applications...
Thus the MPY session becomes a ritual which affords various levels of access to the sacred, starting from a 'safe', mundane, tangible foundation of body-based practice... there is room for the practitioner to decide whether to experience her practice as 'spiritual' or as altogether secular. Except in cases of thoroughly utilitarian (fitness or recreational) performance, however, some notion of healing and personal growth is likely to provide the deepest rationale for practice."

"Health is religious. Ill health is irreligious." (BKS Iyengar)

De Michelis' book is a thorough and thought-provoking look at a discipline that repeatedly emphasizes experience over knowledge. Because of this, the book is inescapably written from an 'etic' (outsider's) perspective, but is nonetheless empathic to the 'emic' views of yoga practitioners. What I have learned is that far from being a claptrap religion cobbled together to fill the void left by science, Modern Yoga was carefully crafted by a series of Indian intellectuals in a reverse mission to the West that began in the 19th Century. More recently, BKS Iyengar initiated the Modern Postural form of yoga, with its emphasis on the practice of asana poses. It came out of an expression of his own experience of yoga and his artistic creativity, carefully setting up the structure of the yoga session that has become a framing ritual for many Americans and people around the world.

The Language of Rain

When God made the flood, he said to Noah
Gather up your children and all the animals
And build them an ark, to keep out of the storm.

Then they built a tower, and hid from the elements
Sacrificing each others' lives for the sake of progress.
Everyone spoke the economics of growth.

But God had signed the rainbow, promising
Never to destroy his creatures again.
So instead he gave them politics.

The people scattered all over the Earth
Finding solace in their homegrown words,
Learning the language of rain.

Where the Devil?

Where did this idea of the Devil come from? I just returned from watching Dr. Faustus. It seems anathematic to the Jewish religion, I guess it must have come from somewhere else but it's so prevalent in most forms of Christianity and in the general culture. I've heard from people who believe they are the battleground of Good and Evil, and experience dreams of Spiritual Warfare. My view, after this evening, is that Evil comes from taking life too seriously. If you don't do that, then there are only mistakes.

I do like the idea of the seven deadly sins, however. Those, apparently, were invented by Pope Gregory the Great in the 6th Century. What I like about them is the concept of responsibility, that I am responsible for my own lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride - not others to blame for providing temptations, challenges and irritation. The one thing I would add would be jealousy - in Hebrew there are no two separate words for envy and jealousy. It took me a long time to figure out what those words meant in English. Just as there is no word for Evil, only bad or wickedness.

Back to project sleep. Gotta wake up to teach yoga tomorrow morning.

Bodies are interesting

When I was in my 20's I co-taught an undergrad anthropology class on 'The Body and the Senses.' At the time, I saw my role as teaching the anthropology students about sensory neurophysiology and brain anatomy. They didn't like me very much! Today I realized for the first time that bodies are actually pretty interesting.

I finally finished reading Elaine Scarry's book, The Body in Pain. She links pain and creativity or imagination, albeit rather tenuously, by defining 3 kinds of objects that she names a 'weapon', a 'tool' and an 'artifact'. A weapon has two ends, with power on one end and sentience (pain) on the other end. A tool is similar to a weapon, except that it has power and sentience both on the same end, acting on an inanimate surface. An artifact is a lever or arc that has no obvious ends and is a projection of the body onto an object which is then interjected by other bodies. Examples of artifacts are clothes, languages, and God. Riding on the bus this evening I noticed that we surround ourselves with artifacts, the crust of the earth is cluttered with them. I think we are as much made by them as making them. For instance, Scarry talks a lot about the chair as an artifact, and imagines Adam making the first chair for Eve to ease the pain of her body standing on her feet all day. But Western man (and woman) is shaped by the chair, chairs make our bodies lose the ability to bend in the middle and sit on the ground. The internet makes us lose our memory. We are made out of this stuff as much as we are made out of our genes and the food we eat.

One of the things that interests me, which Scarry barely mentions, is that this stuff we are all made of is co-created. Unlike Adam making the first chair for Eve, our chairs carry within them a whole history of chair design. When I was 6 years old, I used to wonder if my life had really happened, or if it was just a dream that I had dreamt and I was still really only 3. At that age I had to learn a new language because we moved to a different country, and I realized that I couldn't have invented a whole new language myself so therefore at least some part of my life was real. Artifacts can go beyond the creative capacity of a single individual, even a single generation of people that happen to be living on the earth at the same time.

We imbue objects and artifacts with sentient qualities, and can get quite upset with them at times. In some ways, I think this is a good thing. For example, my son was once upset that his surfboard had hit him on the head, so he spent a good few minutes cursing and being angry at the ocean. God can safely be blamed for most mishaps. Without God, we have only ourselves or other people to blame and that can be problematic. A student in my yoga class seemed tired, and I asked her after the class how she was feeling. She seemed a little embarrassed by the question, and said she wasn't doing too well today because she had skipped her cardio workout. I felt so sad for her, feeling that she had to do so much and that I was asking for more. Later I complimented her on listening to her body.

Going back to the theme of yoga as a religion, I realized the other day that when I took my yoga mat to the park I was noticing all the other people carrying yoga mats. I notice them all the time now. The mat is evidently the artifact of the new religion, since yoga can be practiced perfectly well without it. Most reminiscent of a Muslim prayer rug. The mat serves to protect our skin and hands from the surface of the world. I will [unconsciously] enact death by lying on it, but not get too close to the dirt?

Over the years, I came to my yoga teachers for advice on what to do for different aches and pains - asthma, blocked sinuses, backache, pain in the knees and neck. Not only for myself, but also for my ex. I trusted them more than my doctor, whom I thought to be in the pay of drug companies, and I found them more helpful than a massage therapist, because they told me what I could do for myself rather than doing it for me. I never thought about this up until now, perhaps I just regarded them as experts on the body, but I came to them as one would to a priestess or a shaman.

Summary of philosophical conclusions so far:
- Pain reminds me that I'm me, in my body, which is in the world and not in my imagination.
- Yoga has the elements of a religion. It has no god, but it incorporates ritual enactments of death. The central artifact of modern Western yoga is the mat.
- The power of yoga to heal pain may be based as much on faith as exercise.

Also thinking about eating disorders, and the problem of trying to attract clients to a group. If I have an eating disorder, then I am at war with my body. The therapist has to align with me and not with my body, so saying things like 'accept your body' and 'be diet free' would be counterproductive. If I have a pain disorder, then my body is at war with me. The therapist has to align with the part that experiences the pain, because that part feels like the real me.

Is yoga the new godless religion?

Project sleep has not been going too well (I slept for the whole of 4 hours). I've been reading Patanjali's Yoga Sutras online, and looking up the life and works of Wilhelm Reich. Yes, that is Yoga Sutras (not kama sutra) and Wilhelm Reich (not Theodore Reich) although the other ways around might have made more sense, in retrospect.

A friend of mine said, after the yoga prayer for peace at Power to the Peaceful last month, that we [scientists] have blown away the people's religion so they have cobbled one together out of the pieces. Yoga practice has been increasing steadily in the US since the 1990's, to the degree that up to 12% of Americans are now thought to have tried it and with 3% becoming regular yogis. Those who practice yoga regularly do so on average 5 times per week, and are split roughly equally between seeing it as a form of exercise, therapy (mostly for back pain) and a spiritual practice (guesstimated from various online sources). Research shows that yoga is an effective treatment for back pain, migraines, recovery from chemotherapy etc. It both increases wellbeing and reduces the use of pain medications as compared with self-help control groups. I wonder why? Perhaps this has something to do with breathing and relaxation, but I suspect there is also an element of faith. A recent study found that Catholics exposed to pictures of the Virgin Mary experienced less pain when exposed to pain-inducing stimulation, as opposed to atheists exposed to the same pictures or other calming works of art. [There was also a change in the pattern of activation in their brains, but this only matters if you doubt what they reported and either way there is always room for doubt]. The point I'm making is that while yoga is not associated explicitly with faith in any particular object, faith in yoga is part of the health zeitgeist.

My insomniac reading suggests that yoga in its origins is anything but godless. In fact, according to wikipedia, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras (around 150 BC) were a branching away from the older Samkhya system of Hindu religion or philsophy, adding the specification of a divine entity and a practice for gaining disentanglement from the bondage of human nature and unification with the divine (possibly the meaning of the word yoga). Hatha yoga, or the practice of asanas (postures) was outlined in the 15th Century in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika by Swatmarama. Why is this so popular now? The focus on the body matches the materialism of our culture, as does the obsessive emphasis on detail - posture, diet and lifestyle made into words. Samkhya philosophy stems from a primary dichotomy of self vs. other (rather than mind vs. body) that suits our individualist society better than the shackles of Judeo-Christian religion, with its baggage of an unpopular creation myth and the pre-requisite faith in the miraculous.

Personal experience of yoga suggests the opposite. My first experience of chanting om at a workshop in the North of England, years after I had started asana practice, was one of surprising loss of self in the community. It made me want to do this (chanting) with my own people, in a synagogue, not here with a random gathering and improperly explained articles of faith. Around the same time, I used yoga while babysitting to help calm my 8-year-old charge who was having an asthma attack. I had her lie in savasana on some cushions and breathe. Later she told me that she used to live with her family above the Quaker meeting place and watch people practicing yoga while her father was working on his PhD. She remembered this pose being described as the corpse pose, and she used to practice it on her own wondering if this was what it was like to be dead. I have to say that death is fascinating, and as a child I used to meditate on what it might be like to join some small animal that seemed to die easily, such as a sparrow, on its mysterious journey into nothingness. One thing I learned from the Yom Kipur sermon this year was that fasting and mourning practices are a symbolic exercise in death. As a yoga teacher and practitioner, I find savasana one of the most beneficial poses and like to do it before and after the other poses to experience them at their fullest.

I mentioned Wilhelm Reich, the psychoanalyst. If you want a good laugh, look up the 'orgone accumulator'. Now I will have to sit straight-faced through a training on Reichian analysis. Yikes! Anyway, he got in trouble with the FDA and the FBI in the 1950's because of the sex taboo (compounded by the fact that he was a socialist and a charlatan among other things). I would argue that money is an even greater taboo in the wider society. In my corner (if I have one) sickness is taboo. I recently heard a psychiatrist say that his patients don't mind having a disorder, but they don't want to know that they're sick. It hasn't always been this way. In the past, people loved their ailments. Read Pepys. Or maybe death is the real taboo, and that's why we can't sleep and need to practice savasana.

Bicycle Day

When I was a kid growing up in Israel we used to call Yom Kipur (aka the Day of Atonement) Bicycle Day, because there were no cars in the street. Nobody drove. Not that it's a greater sin on the High Holy Days than any regular Sabbath, just a local tradition. One year, I must have been about 8, I cycled all the way to a village the other side of town with my younger cousin riding on the cross bar of my blue Raleigh that we had brought over on a plane from England. We took picnic supplies with us (of course, all the stores were closed) and my parents probably had no idea where we were because there were no cellphones in those days and nobody worried. Only kids were on the streets, the parents were all busy praying or fasting, or privately not doing those things. The traffic lights were still on, even the one my mother had organized a demonstration about before it was finally erected to prevent further traffic accidents on the main road. At first, we played at following the lights, then we just ignored them.

This year, I went to synagogue and my soul was suitably tormented by a lecture on the cultural anthropology of mourning that included the phrase 'macro-feedback-loop'. I did not ask for that, nor did I ask for the phrase 'revives the dead' to be replaced by 'gives life to everything'. I have no need for a God that gives life to everything. Lightning in a pond, some organic chemistry and evolution will suffice. Raises the fallen, heals the sick, frees prisoners and... 'gives life to everything'? It is a non-sequiter. I want a God that makes miracles, thank you. I want something that binds me to my spiritual identity and inspires me. Not 'consoling the bereaved' as a duty whose worth cannot be measured, although I'm sure I could do more of it and that would be a good thing. Not when it is a mistranslation of 'accompanying the dead'. Never mind that I'm an atheist.

Maybe you have to be in the right mood. The best ever Yom Kipur drash I heard was by a woman rabbi in London, when my father was in a coma in hospital a few weeks before he died. She quoted Kant, sadly I have forgotten the context but it caught my attention because unlike Spinoza he never was one of us. She mentioned the dwindling numbers of Jews in Britain, and how a survey in the US had shown that short of thrice weekly religious school the best predictor of kids staying Jewish was keeping some sort of kosher at home. She said people laughed at her keeping kosher when she came over to the US for rabinnical school, but now she felt vindicated. Ever since then we've only eaten ham sandwiches outside the home.

Earlier in the day I played at the swing. It was gorgeously clear over the bay and the view of the Golden Gate Bridge was amazing. For the first time, I stood up on the swing and noticed all the other amusements. Someone must have hung a new trapeze and Tarzan rope on a nearby tree a little further downhill, and there was what appeared to be a yellow tightrope between two trees higher up, but loose and with knots in it. Next time, I'm bringing bicycle gloves.