the tanis doctrine on the reality, power, and freedom of LOVE

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove

lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove…

and that’s all I have to say about that.

karma mechanics OR how to surf your brain waves

As a word, karma translates to “action”, but as a concept people tend to have difficulty agreeing on what it entails. Even in India, the Jains, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs all have radically different explanations of karma. Once decontextualized and transplanted to the West, it usually shows up in appeals to some vague notion of universal justice or in conjunction with a particular species of color-shifting lizard.

In the name of polysemy I’m not going to reconcile these differences, but instead toss a new interpretation into the milieu. It is a neuroscientific interpretation, and argues that karma is an attempt by ancient scholars to describe the brain mechanism now known as long-term potentiation.

I draw the most from the Buddhist interpretation, for three reasons: (1) unlike most sects of Hinduism it requires no God or external arbiter to function, (2) it focuses on psychological motivations and intentions rather than resulting actions, and (3) it is an internal process carried out entirely within an individual’s mind. Both the cause (hetu) and effect (vipaka) occur in a closed system; none of that “today steal a cookie and tomorrow have a piano will fall on your head” nonsense where the “universe” reacts to outwardly projected actions. It’s more like “if I perform a generous act today, then I am more likely to perform a generous act tomorrow.” And that is a good thing.

RIP CL-S

Say a prayer for one of the greats. The round-table discussion in heaven just got a whole lot more interesting.

saving it for right now: the commodification of experience

People take pictures of each other,

just to prove that they really existed,

just to prove that they really existed

– The Kinks

These days I’m finding very few things that continue to annoy me. Once I stopped worrying about being so damn logical, it all began to sound less like noise and more like music. Still, there’s a couple pet peeves I’m having trouble shaking.

I was reminded of one of the big ones last Wednesday during a Pretty Lights show at the Key Club. It was about an hour into the show, after my high-velocity school-day consciousness had been dragged down and molded into a glitched out, down-tempo sort of configuration, that I started thinking about how concerts have changed in recent years. Some self-reflection was required. On the performers end, not much is different from when I saw Blink 182 in the seventh grade and learned that music that isn’t live is…well, dead. The shift has been with the crowd, or rather in how the crowd construes the experience.

"It's extraordinary irriating, all these people holding up these horrid little squares of bright light" - Roger Waters

It started with the digital cameras, a few scattered here and there among the savviest of the technophiles, seemingly innocuous novelties. Then they got smaller and cheaper. They became concert necessities, right below the tickets (the only kind of paper worth more than money) and the joints tucked into your crotch or your girlfriend’s bra. Then they started putting cameras in cell phones and things began to spiral out of control.

the drum circle diaries: defensive mechanisms

Part 2 in the ongoing narrative of my drum-circle fieldwork. Read part 1 here.

“They say that they’re celebrating the sunset…” said the cop.

He surveyed his handiwork, struggling to keep the smugness from corrupting his professional demeanor. As we spoke, the broken multitudes milled aimlessly, faces wiped of expression. There was an occasional angry glance at the three uniformed men. Eventually, like the crowds on Calvary, they dispersed into the shadows. Blood spilled, shows over, time to go home.

“…but everyone knows, it’s just an excuse.”

I asked if he had ever been to a drum circle, other than to break it up. He laughed – my query wasn’t worthy of a response. A few yards away, someone softly rapped their fingers on a pair of bongos.

“Hey kid, stop playing that drum!”

∞

Fifteen minutes earlier

∞

The flashing lights didn’t even register on my consciousness at first. I’d been drumming for hours and was getting deep. My world ended at the edge of the circle; had I been inclined to think about other things they would have seemed very far away. It takes time to get that deep. The lights were a welcome addition to the enclave of sensory stimulation I found myself inhabiting. Modern invention and ancient practice woven into a techno-shamanistic dreamcoat.

jane goodall lecture

Jane Goodall, the O.G. of primatology, UN Messenger of Peace, and all-around cool, cool lady, is going to be speaking at USC’s Bovard Auditorium next Tuesday, October 6 at 3:00 PM.

Go apeshit people.

RSVP here. The code is “chimp”.

ethnographic yoga: inversions

There is an imminent wisdom nestled in the practice of ethnography; every important lesson along the spiritual path finds its analogue in the research process. Take, for instance, the anekāntavāda concept in Jainism. Robert Anton Wilson called them Reality Tunnels. The basic idea is that every individual perceives reality through a personal set of filters, though they seldom realize it. Jains tell the parable of the blind men and the elephant, where six blind men were asked to determine the shape of an elephant by touching it. One felt the tail and believed the object to be a rope. The one who felt the trunk believed it to be a tree, and so forth.

the yogi ethnographer: balanced and flexible

We all have the same tunnel vision when it comes to interpreting reality, and much of it can be attributed to culturally constructed filters. Undergraduate anthropology classes harp on cultural relativism as fundamental, but no one really believes it. At least not in the beginning. Belief is a physical condition, and physical conditions are induced through corporeal experience, not from a textbook or lecture (or blog post!).  That’s where participant-observation comes into play. In a sense, the anthropological method can be described as the mining of new reality tunnels. To really do the job right, the ethnographer must place their body in a position where they can adopt the cosmological “vantage point” of the culture being studied. In assimilating a new set of cultural filters on reality, a researcher is forced to acknowledge, to physically believe (I’m sure you can tell the difference between physical and intellectual belief) that reality is plural and mutable. Or as Wilson put it, “Reality is what you can get away with.”

hijacking the social structure

Earlier this year I went on a walkabout/vision quest in the Utah desert for the sake of self-ethnography. Here’s an excerpt from my notes, after I exited the wilderness and began hitchhiking.

Walking alone in the desert can get you a lot of places, but it does have its drawbacks. For one, it takes an awfully time to get around. Trekking on foot can’t be replaced as the primary means of transportation, but sometimes you need to go fast because it’s fun. Modern technology bestows upon our generation the gift of the High Velocity Vision Quest in the form of a true modern art, hitchhiking. To thumb a ride with no particular destination is to divert all power to the turbo-thrusters, pour on the juice, and send the Greater Vehicle of the Mahayana hurtling into hyperspace.

Hitchhiking, by virtue of the uncertainty involved, must be an anti-structural activity. It defies the patterns that social structure imposes on other modes of travel. Even in countries like the Netherlands where drivers are legally obligated to pick up hitchhikers, it remains thoroughly liminal. The society that is heavily invested in its structure strongly discourages its members from participation in behavior that falls outside the norm–thus the heavily exaggerated reports of hitchhiking as dangerous. There is a widespread rumor these days that the practice of hitchhiking was perfectly safe in the 1960s but nowadays you’d have to be a crazyman to do it. Yes, there are dangers involved, but not more than there used to be, and then there are also dangers involved with doing anything. Literally. Anything at all.

the drum circle diaries: plugging in

For the next year I’ll be conducting fieldwork on drum circles and chronicling my experiences/findings/photography here. Enjoy!

In the beginning all we could feel were the vibrations. They emanated through the medium of the beach, dropping in amplitude with distance from the epicenter, reduced to a dull pulsation as they reached my bare feet. With me were housemate B and our mutual friend J, the only one of us with any serious proficiency in hand drumming. We had a djembe, doumbek and a pair of bongos, respectively representing West African, Middle-Eastern and Cuban percussion traditions. Though on the beach, such affiliations are deposited outside the circle like shoes on the doorstep of a Japanese home. Ethnic identity is deleterious to the function of the circle, and the selectively permeable membrane soundly rejects it. The drum alone is granted passage as its symbolic meanings are deconstructed, laying bare the more relevant internal properties of volume and timbre.

the Treeman gets to jam

It was after seven when we arrived, and the circle had already been maturing since midday. Venice Beach was undergoing its daily metamorphosis from an arena for weirdness as a commercialized spectator sport into a habitat for the truly bizarre. Venice after dark can be intimidating. We had intended to sit apart from the circle to warm up, but there was no resisting its influence. The gravitational well around the circle seemed to steepen with each step forward. As the energy coalesced we found ourselves running towards it mindlessly, as if in free fall. It is a curious thing, this force of attraction that no scientific instrument can measure.  A force exerted not only on the body but also upon one’s faculty of awareness, so that within a certain radius it takes extraordinary effort to attend to anything other than the circle itself.

in the beginning

the stars shall sing

if you disconnect the dots,

because a thing is a thing

except when its not