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lovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelovelove…

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

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.

Our present consciousness rides the crest of a wave, a wave consisting of patterned thought and behavior. What you think or do at a given moment is in large part determined by everything you have thought or done in the past. The Buddhists say that every thought/action is a planted seed, cultivated through habit, that subtly shapes future states of consciousness. Karma, then, is a force of momentum. It describes a mechanism of mental cause and effect.

I’ve got no formal training in neuroscience, but I’ll risk playing the fool because everything seems to fit so well. Arguably the most significant discovery in the field over the past half-century is that the adult brain is not a static entity, but continually restructures itself. The mechanism is referred to as long-term potentiation, and holds that every time a synapse between two neurons fires, that connection is strengthened. It is a process analogous to muscle memory, where the ability to perform physical movements is reinforced with every performance. Likewise, each time I think about love, the neurons associated with love fire and the connections between them (synapses) grow stronger. Thereafter I have a brain slightly more predisposed to think about love, at least when the context matches up. If you need an easy way to remember all this, here it is:

What fires together, wires together.

The important thing to take away from this is that every single thought you have alters the physical structure of your brain.

Skógafoss, Iceland

I shouldn’t have to point out that this is merely the scientific explanation for the process of karma depicted a few paragraphs earlier. Karma is the mechanism whereby past actions shape present consciousness. Because consciousness is at least somewhat a product of the brain, long-term potentiation is the neural analog to that very mechanism. It is also known as enculturation, practice, learning, and conditioning.

Breaking from some traditional views, I see no “good karma” or “bad karma” inherent in actions. My interpretation of karma is morally relative, you could call it a law of nature if you’re into that sort of thing; it’s like gravity in that thieves and saints fall at the same rate.

So what about all that stuff about karma accruing from our past lives?  How is Buddhism, the “scientific” religion, going to explain that? Well, not only were the ancient Indians cutting-edge neuroscientists, but they seemed to have had some insight into a primitive evolutionary biology. If we accept karma to describe the mechanism by which the past shapes present consciousness, then we have to look farther back than our individual histories. The particularities of someone’s brain structure are determined by their life experience, but the basic blue-print is contained in their DNA.

Thus!, my present state of consciousness is in part a product of my own life experience, but primarily a product of natural selection which evolved the human central nervous system. My present consciousness was conditioned first by the history of the human species and then by the history of my individual organism. A product of thousands of generations, of my ancestors, of my past lives.

Where does that leave us, knowing that our “free” thoughts and decisions in the present are determined by a tyrannical past? Is the Here and Now an inevitable consequence of the Then and There? What chance do we have against the waves of karma, the eddies of history, the riptides of conditioning?

Luckily, the teachings tell us that we are riding the wave, not that we are the wave, and therein lies the way out. Matched up against the wave of karma we have two options. One is to close our eyes, pray for deliverance, and allow our consciousness be tossed and buffeted by its conditioning. The other is the Buddha’s escape from the cycle, the Dao’s doing-by-not-doing, the Golden Dawn’s True Will.

It’s the doctrine that when you spot a big wave, the wisest plan of action is not to chicken out, but to get on your board and Surf. That. Shit.

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

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.

This summer I spent a couple weeks doing fieldwork on the Hopi Indian Reservation in Arizona. Outsiders aren’t allowed to bring cameras. Neither are they allowed to record audio, sketch pictures, or take written notes. Nothing going but raw, unfiltered sensory input. They say it’s not only about protecting the Hopi culture from exploitation. It’s for our own good.

These days many concertgoers, some only a few feet from the stage, are watching the peak moments of the show through a blurry, pixelated LCD screen. Live performances used to be one of the few times when you had to stay in the Here and Now. Music being what it is, there was no other option than to BE in the moment, go with the flow, join the dance. If you tried to hold on to anything it’d simply pass you by.

Well, that’s no less true today. What’s changed is that now we have gadgets which give the illusion of encapsulating lived experience into a digital format. Of course no one thinks that the cell phone video that looks like a fight scene from Batman Begins and sounds like a dial-up modem actually is the concert. But it does stand for it, and the fact that we have the ability to create simulacra of our lives starts to change how we live.

Capitalism gradually converts everything into commodities, discrete items that are to be collected and owned. First it was material objects, then ideas (I’ll be expressing displeasure at the concept of “intellectual property” at a later date, stay tuned), and now lived experience has been reduced into a tidy package of capital, a building block for constructing our identities. For the uninitiated, here’s a quick primer in identity construction, with a pinch of Indian philosophy that I find improves the flavor:

• The true Self (with a capital S), or atman is the single point that connects all your life experiences. It has no extension in space, only in time, and has no attributes whatsoever, other than the fact that it is synonymous with the entire Universe. Buddhists might say that its only attribute is emptiness, which means the same thing. Some would call it the Soul. It never changes at all, ever. Normal people don’t identify with their true Selves.

• Normal people identify with their constructed selves (lower-case s). The identities of individuals are a collection of attributes, the answers you would give if someone asked you to describe yourself. Things like race, personality, favorite bands, hometown, interests, profession, physical appearance, horoscope sign, name, whatever. Three main factors contribute to the final product: (1) Biological Construction, through evolution, (2) Social Construction, through enculturation, and (3) Individual Construction, through conscious decisions. These processes construct a wall around the true Self, higher for some than others, but nevertheless keeping it out of sight.

We’ve reached the point where Individual Construction is all rage, courtesy of postmodernism and the Internet. People seem to be getting hints that there’s more to themselves than an outfit of adjectives that are deployed and discarded with the changing fashions. That might account for the global identity crisis that’s making our time the Age of Mental Illness. The trouble is that no one knows what to do about it, so they just keeping hoarding more adjectives. It’s the capitalist solution–turn the constructions into capital and accumulate as much as possible. Like anything else, the false self wants to survive, and its existence is contingent on continual re-affirmation.

The grammar of capitalism and the constructed self is constituted entirely by adjectives. First it turned nouns into adjectives, objects into descriptions of their owners, and social stratification based on material wealth was born (baby I’m a rich man). Commodification of experience submits verbs to the same fate. Being “well-traveled” becomes more important than the actual traveling.

Back to the cell phones. People have always constructed their identities by picking and choosing from the boundless supermarket of experience, but now we have proof. Proof to ourselves, and proof to anyone who visits Facebook/flickr/MySpace pages en route to constructing their friends’ identities. Now at every party we have to take periodic time-outs from partying for picture time. That way we can prove we had fun that night by taking the same picture with the same people and same faces that’s been taken a thousand times [note: I'm still ok with pictures of drunken antics, as long as they're funny the next morning]. The value of our experiences is migrating  from the thing itself to what it signals, from the cheeseburger to the menu.

turn off your phone and throw up your W's for Shaolin

Thing is, the menu doesn’t taste very good. There’s very little artistic merit in 99% of concert snapshots these days. Hold up, I’m not being elitist, because the definition of art lies in the intention of the artist, and aesthetics don’t appear to be the intention in most cases. I’m all for “Concert Photography”–that’s an experience unto itself, whereas “photography at a concert” is rarely worth looking at more than once. I hate to say it, but you really need either an SLR, a tripod or a press pass to get decent shots. Photography as an art has been superseded by an imperative to possess. The potentially insidious narrative is that an experience is somehow less real unless it has been photographed, bottled up and objectified in a digital cage, and tossed into the solid-state attic of our SD memory cards.

In some ways its beautiful, the constellation of back light and liquid crystal that adorn the masses. But the stars don’t connect, and a closer look reveals a bastardization of the lighters they’ve replaced. That collective flame which carried crowds and performers alike into a moment outside of time has died, each light reduced to an individual Ego bent on capturing the experience for themselves.

Sorry for waxing so cynical and polemic, but I think there needs to be some opposition to a worrisome trend away from lived experience and towards simulation. The Here and Now is an important place for me, and I’m determined not to let it sink into the depths with Atlantis and the 1960′s. So leave the cameras and the phones in the car (don’t forget the tickets and a lighter) and get lost in the music. There’s a lot to be found inside.

“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.

the eagleman dances

Then the sirens started up and I began to understand what was happening. Intruders. From the Outside. The free exchange of energy between drum circle and environment broke down, disrupted by the very notion of Power. Drum circles have survival instincts just like any other organism, and all moved as one without conscious thought, without deliberation. We closed our borders, contracted the circle, upped the tempo. Only drummers and dancers remained; the casual observers who generally constitute the bulk of the drum circle population had long since fled to the safety of the boardwalk. Tension coalesced above and between us, fluid and thick. It was a double-shot of 190 proof adrenaline and we used it to spike the mixing bowl of the drum beat. Now the rhythm had kick to it. Again, we upped the volume and tempo.

By this time all three vehicles had their sirens going. It was a display of dominance – they were trying to drown us out. Structure maintains itself by continually enforcing its hierarchies, and dominance is the only game in town. I too succumbed to the primal thrill of battle. At the prospect of engaging the cops in sonic warfare I threw myself entirely into the drumming, banishing the pain in my hands and shoulders to the periphery of awareness. This was it, the final showdown. Drums vs. Sirens.

That night the drum circle taught me a valuable lesson about non-violent resistance. The cops and sirens aren’t the enemy. Neither are the corporations, the government, the oppressors of freedom. The only thing to be resisted is the binary script of winner/loser, dominator/dominated. It’s the construction of arbitrary categories of people and the assignment of arbitrary value to those categories. This is conceptual violence, subtler than physical violence, but violence nonetheless. And I, in my willingness to use drumming to battle and defeat the police, was just as guilty as they.

That’s why the drum circle never fought back. As far as it was concerned, there was no “our sound” and “their sound.” Sounds are sounds, and sounds are meant to harmonize. So when the sirens blared we responded in the only natural way.

We played along.

Go apeshit people.

RSVP here. The code is “chimp”.

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.”

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 campaign to discourage hitchhiking never had the safety of the hitchhiker or driver in mind, only the safety of the structure itself. For the liminal figure (def. “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” – Victor Turner) has a Midas touch which dissolves and denatures structure everywhere he goes. By appropriating the roadways for his own use, a hitchhiker transforms it from a line connecting points A and B into a medium for enjoying travel as an end rather than a means. Liminal figures exert a gravitational aura, a charisma that draws whoever they meet into a free, unstructured bubble of communitas. The hitchhiker and whoever is free-minded enough to give them a ride interact not as performers of social roles but as expressions of the emancipated potential of human beings.

As Victor Turner noticed, there is a certain sacred power that people recognize in liminality, in figures like wandering Siddhus, rambling bluesmen and the mysterious gunslingers of spaghetti Westerns. Clint Eastwood in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is all the more compelling because his character has no name, no label. Calling hitchhiking dangerous only serves to heighten the image of intrigue. A more effective way of curbing the practice is to locate it as what Erving Goffman calls “out of frame activity.” Culture frames what people, objects and events are worthy of attention during any particular situation. Thus when driving with a structural mindset, the hitchhiker becomes a non-person, he becomes an object of the landscape. The most common reaction to my thumb was complete disregard, not even a glance.

While some of these people may be beyond our help, the number of people who did stop shows that there endures a sympathy for liminality, a hint of a common mission. It was structure used to achieve anti-structure, calling to mind the Taoist assertion that, “When purpose has been used to achieve purposelessness, the thing has been grasped.” The problem with the infrastructure is not that it exists, but that it begins to control how people live. Thus the path of resistance is not one of destruction, but of liberation. Hitchhiking or any other activity in which a liminal figure employs the products of structural organization for their own use constitutes a hijacking of the structure. Such a freedom fighter storms the cockpit, dismantles the autopilot, and puts human consciousness back in the driver’s seat.

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.

traces of a fire-dancer

The drum circle is unlike other social gatherings. In fact I have trouble categorizing it as a social gathering at all, unless the definition of the social is expanded beyond the behavior of organisms. For the acting agents in this “society of sounds” are the not the actual human drummers, but their creative energies. It is the sounds themselves who interact with each other, who form groups and social structure, who conform to the will of the masses and enforce hierarchies. Yes, identity is always constructed, but never as distinctly, as transcendently as inside the anarchic drum circle. The drum circle  identity does not even strive to be human. When I first walked into the fray and sat down with my drum no one acknowledged me.  Not out of disrespect, but simply because my material body never registered on their awareness. Not until I Dropped Out of the physical and Plugged In to the aural-energetic plane was my presence was felt. I was no longer a person. This took deconstruction of identity to a whole new level. I now existed as the crisp rat-a-tat of

diagram of drum-consciousness

syncopated accents. “Oh,” my neighboring sounds (Mr. Snare Drum and the Egg Shaker Twins) seemed to say, “there you are. Welcome to the circle.” They subtly altered their volume and cadence to clear some space for me, Danny Doumbek. Now, things aren’t quite as clear cut as I’m presenting it. It’s only a model, and states of consciousness are subtle things. Usually it takes more than a drum to entirely transcend the body. Still, there’s a Society of Sound out there, trust me. All you have to do is Drop Out and Plug In.

The happening didn’t last long; the cops showed up and broke up the party only an hour after we arrived. We watched the exodus from a lifeguard stand some ways down the beach. Everyone moved in unison until the very end, slinking onto the boardwalk and towards the darkness beyond, towards wherever these people come from.

the police decide that drumming is TOO much fun

if you disconnect the dots,

because a thing is a thing

except when its not