SoulJerky

“Can you see the truth of it boys?... Life and death. The eagle and the washing up and the outhouse. The stove and the snow. The horse and the mountains and the 'baca juice. No doubt about it. The whole stew is only a passing, you and me and all the rest. The goddam joke is on us, boys!”

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——Annie May (Ma) in The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer

I just finished reading The Drop Edge of Yonder, a smooth and hypnotic yarn about self and other, tales and truths, fate and nobility, chasing your dreams and having a drink. Good shit. Legendary cult novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer knows more about the sordid reality of spiritualism, yoga, and the pursuit of freedom, truthfulness and right livelihood than most of us. And he shares a few well-digested golden nuggets with us in this tasty, genre-drenched in spaghetti-western existential technicolor, tall tale. But be careful, he's libel to crack you upside the head and leave you dead in a ditch if you don't pay attention... Quién es?

“‘Perhaps this life doesn’t exist or has never existed. Perhaps this is not a ship but a floating coffin. Perhaps we are dreaming and will wake up to find that everything is the same’ ...The following morning, the Captain’s eulogy was brief. ‘We are guests on this earth. We come and we go. No one knows when or how his time will come. We can only have faith and abide.’”

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—Captain Dorfheimer, The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer

“‘You're confused about who is dreaming who. Your problem is that your dreams are controlling you, not the other way around. You no longer know how to stand on the earth. Too much hanging around the Dream Palace and following lost men.’.. He took a pair of dice from his sack and rolled them over the ground, muttering an invocation in a foreign tongue... After he had covered their bodies with dirt, except for their eyes and nostrils, he reached into his sack and took out a round mask of a grinning monkey... ’This mask is your face and the face of everyone who has ever lived. When you understand that the separations between people are illusions, the spirits will go back where they came from. Right now the spirits are angry and confused. All they care about is sucking everything out from inside you and replacing it with greasy smoke. That can be very uncomfortable if you don't know the remedy.’”

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——Toku in The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer

“‘Quién es?’ he [Zebulon] asked Plaxico. Or was he speaking to himself?...‘I did what I come to do... Some of it worked and a lot of it didn't... One last thing... Don't either of you hold on to whatever was said or done, even it it comes from me or that power witch over there, or anyone else. If you're foolish enough to hold on to what don't exist, one of you might go up in smoke and the other find himself driftin' between the worlds, not knowin' how to shake loose. If someone pushes your head underwater and laughs about it, or you snake a card off the bottom, or you get suckered from behind, let it go. And even if you don't, let it go anyway...’”

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——primarily Plaxico, The Drop Edge of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer

Zebulon Lives, the book site: Link.
Erik Davis' review in Bookforum: Link.

More Rudy Wurlitzer: official site, Wikipedia, IMDB, Riding The Dharma Trail.

Illustrations by Adam Collison.

Courtesy of Google Books---The New Larned History, 1922. (I think it's copyright free, or damn close...)

BRAHMANISM: Essential features.—"Although Brahmanism has exercised a vast influence over the beliefs and worships of Asia during many centuries, and still numbers, at the lowest calculation, more than two hundred million votaries, it is not a Faith that can itself be traced back to an epoch or a founder ... In the first place, it is neither militant nor aggressively missionary; it does not openly attempt to make proselytes, in the sense of persuading them or compelling come in. Secondly it is not historic; it has sacred books but no sacred history. And, thirdly, it has never been defined by formal creeds, nor has it ever accepted a single personal Deity. The general character of Indian religion is that it is a boundless sea of divine beliefs and practices; it encourages the worship of innumerable gods by an infinite variety of rites; it permits every doctrine to be taught, every kind of mystery to be imagined, any sort of theory to be held as to the inner nature and visible operation of the divine power...

"But the Indian philosophy does not ignore or hold aloof from the religion of the masses; it underlies, supports, and interprets their polytheism. This may be accounted the keystone of the fabric of Brahmanism, which accepts and even encourages the rudest forms of idolatry, explaining everything by giving it a higher meaning. It treats all the worships as outward, visible signs of some spiritual truth, and is ready to show how each particular image or rite is the symbol of some aspect of universal divinity. The Hindus, like the pagans of antiquity, adore natural objects, and forces—a mountain, a river, or an animal. The Brahman holds all Nature to be the vesture or cloak of indwelling, divine energy, which inspires everything that produces awe or passes man's understanding. Again it is very common in India, as it was in Greece and Rome, to deify extraordinary men, and the Brahman does not tell his disciples that this is absurd; he agrees that such persons must have been special embodiments of all-pervading divine power. In short, he accepts every variety of cult and objective worships as symbolical; it is merely the expression or emblem, suited to the common intelligence, of mysterious truths known to the philosophic theologian. In this manner, the gross idolatry of the people is defended, and connected with the loftier ideas. it is maintained that God is a Pure Spirit, but to make Him wholly impersonal is to place Him beyond the reach of ordinary human interest and imagination; so it is well for the less advanced minds to be encouraged by forms and signs of His presence. All worship, it is said, is expressed through the senses symbolically. A temple or church is a visible mark of our belief that the divinity abides among us; an image is the mystical token of the indwelling spirit of the indwelling spirit; while prayer and sacrifices are the preparatory training toward more intelligent devotion. What we can conceive in our minds we may well picture to our eyes: and, by this method, the innumerable shapes and sacred places of Hindu polytheism are consecrated and adopted into higher theology... Above and beyond the miscellaneous crowd of things and persons, living or inanimate, unseen or embodied, that are worshipped as possessed b divine power, we have the great deities of Brahmanism, from whom all this divine power proceeds, and in whom the principal energies and the fundamental laws of nature are personified. Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are the realistic abstractions of the understanding from of objects of sense. They denote Creation, Preservation, and Destruction, the constant succession of birth and death throughout all existence, the process of destroying to produce, and of producing to destroy. Here we perceive that, as soon as we pass upward through the disorderly mass of ordinary paganism, we come upon polytheism backed by philosophy; we may scatter the irregular levies, and are confronted by the outworks of disciplined theology. The great Brahmanic Trinity are adored with various rites and sacrifices; they have innumerable temples, images, and personal attributes. Yet to all the more intellectual worshipers, Vishnu and Siva represent the course and constitution of Nature. And, if you inquire further about these things, you will leaner all phenomenal existence is a kind of illusion, to be gradually dissipated by the acquisition of knowledge; for the reality becomes intelligible only to those whose souls have been strengthened and clarified by long meditation, by ascetic exercises, by casting out all worldly thoughts and desires...

"But all Hindus worship directly the high gods of Brahmanism. Brahma, having accomplished once for all his work of creation, has retired in to the background of the popular Pantheon; he has very few temples or images; Vishnu and Siva divide the allegiance of devout and orthodox people. It is impossible here to give the diverse names or emblems under which they are worshipped; yet some mention must be made of the Shaktis—that is, of the divine forces of preservation and destruction, especially the female principle of productiveness, as personified by goddesses, the mates or consorts of Vishnu and Siva, thus Vishnu and Siva, with their consorts, are the pinnacles of the visible Brahmanic edifice; they are different manifestations of the Supreme Being; they represent among educated men separate systems of worship, which, again, are founded on separate schools or opinions regarding the relations between God and man, and the proper ways and means of attaining to spiritual emancipation. For, the whole purpose of the higher Brahmanism is to find and show the path which leads upward, from the simple unvarnished popular superstitions to the true and pure knowledge of the Supreme Being, by laying out a connection between the upper and lower aspects of religion... This, then, is the philosophic religion at the back of the popular worship, to which it gives an explanation and a final purpose. For Brahmanism holds out to all men, as its scheme of salvation, the hope of escape from the pain and weariness of sensitive existence in any shape or stage...

"In regard to the Sacred Books, they contain, partly, the sayings, precepts, and mystic utterances of the ancient sages; partly, prayers and psalms; and partly, abstruse speculations on the divine nature, with scholastic dissertations and commentaries. The modern students and teachers of the various schools or sects of Brahmanism treat these books as authoritative, and are constantly discussing, expounding, or adapting them to the ideas and circumstances of a people that is becoming profoundly affected by European modes of thought. One thing must be noticed in these Books, that they are not historical: they give no account of the rise of spreading the religion, they do not trace it back to a founder, as in Christianity, Mohammedanism, or even Buddhism. [See INDIA: B. C. 312.] The Hindu would say, in the words of an early Christian Father, that the objects of religious knowledge are not historical, that such things, in their essence can only be comprehended intellectually, or through divine inspiration. And the fact that Brahmanism has no authentic and universally accepted sacred narrative, that it is not concentrated round the life and acts of a personal founder is, I think, one reason why it has remained diffuse, incoherent, without a central figure or dominant plan. On the other hand, this very want, so to speak, of dogmatic backbone has left the religion elastic and tolerant, has enabled its teachers to assimilated and adapt the lower forms of worship, instead of endeavoring to destroy them." —A. C. Lyall, Brahmanism (North American Review, Dec., 1900, pp. 920-928).—See also EDUCATION: Ancient: B. C. 15th-5th centuries: India.

"The first general impression produced by a perusal of the law-books is that the popular religion has remained unaffected by philosophy. And this is correct in so far as that it must be put first in describing the codes, which, in the main, in keeping the ancient observances, reflect the inherited father. When, therefore, one says that pantheism succeed polytheism in India, he must qualify the assertion. The philosophers are pantheists, but what of the vulgar? Do they give up polytheism; are they inclined to do so, or are they taught to do so? No. For there is no formal abatement in the rigor of the older creed. Whatever the wise man thought, and whatever in his philosophy was the instruction which he imparted to his peers, when he dealt with the world about him he taught his intellectual inferiors a scarcely modified form of the creed of their fathers... With rare exceptions it was only the grosser religion that the vulgar could understand; it was only this that they were taught and believed. Thus the old Vedic gods are revered and worshipped by name. The Sun, Indra, and all the divinities embalmed in ritual, are placated and 'satiated' with offerings, just as they had been satiated from time immemorial. But no hint is given that this is a form; or that the Vedic gods are of less account than they had been. Moreover, it is not in the inherited formulae of the ritual alone that this view is upheld. To be sure, when philosophical speculation is introduced, the Father-god comes to the fore; Brahma sits aloft, indulgently advising his children, as he does in intermediate stage of the Brahmanas; and atma brahma {the impersonal aspect of the Supreme Soul} too is recognized to be the real being Brahma as in the Upanishads. But none of this touches the practice of the common law, where ordinary man is admonished to fear Yama's and Varuna's bonds as he would have been before the philosopher grew wiser than the Vedic seers. Only personified Right, Dharma, takes his seat with shadowy Brahma among other gods."—E. W. Hopkins Religions of pp 247 249 See also BRAHMA; UPANISHADS; VEDANTISM.

Modern Hindu view.—"The one thing comes out most prominently when we study history of the progress of all religions, great and small, known to man is that anything like wooden uniformity in religious matters is both unnatural and impossible. Whether your religion is merely historic, or higher than historic including as a part of it the historic manifestation of divinity within its wide embrace, whether again your religion is defined by formal creeds or not so defined, the limitation of uniformity imposed by force upon that religion cannot but make it unsuited to the ever growing spiritual capacity the human soul. In Brahminism, for instance, the Avatar of Sri Krishna is positively historic, and Sri Krishna is well known to have been a great religious teacher. Indeed it is chiefly to Him that Brahminism owes its universality and comprehensiveness. It is He who first proclaimed to humanity the great truth that any form of religion is better than irreligion, and that in religious endeavors the human mind rises gradually from lower to the higher, and that in man's effort to realize the divine in his every day life even lowest forms of religion are, when suitably adopted, more or less productive of good. The idea that Brahminism has not accepted a single deity can be attributed only to ignorance. Brahminism is absolutely monotheistic and believes only in one God who is however worshipped under many names... Do the names Lord, Christ, God, Jehovah, Heavenly Father—all mean same thing, or do they imply that the Christian does not worship a single deity? We have no doubt that there is nothing wrong in calling the one God of the Christians by these many names. Only in Saivism and Vaishnavism the similar existence of many names to denote the God, that the followers of these religions worship, leads the critics of Brahminism to assert that this does not accept a single deity... Even an Christian mystic like Novalis has declared if God can be seen in flesh and blood he can seen also in stalks and stones.

"Thus what appears as gross idolatry to the unphilosophic fanatic becomes in the eye of Brahmin a source of great helpfulness to the weak worshipper in the conduct of his devotions and prayers. Is the Brahmin really wrong in supposing that God is apprehended only symbolically by man and worshipped also only symbolically? The relation of symbols to worship and to the apprehension of religious philosophy and final religious truths is a question of perennial interest to man. Man can never do without symbols in these matters, and his progress herein consists simply in his rejecting one set of symbols to rely more and more upon another set, human language itself being nothing other than such a symbol. Brahminism is high and true philosophy expressed in accurate language and concretized into visible symbols and practices, and the worth of such a religion is to be judged more from the philosophy which forms the life of it than from the symbols which form its external embodiment."—Brahmavaddin, May, 1901, pp 460-466. —See also BUDDHISM; ETHICS: India; CASTE SYSTEM OF INDIA; RELIGION: B. C. 1,000.

Text and source images from— The New Larned History for Ready Reference, Reading and Research The Actual Words of the World's Best Historians, Biographers and Specialists; a Complete System of History for All Uses, Extending to All Countries and Subjects and Representing the Better and Newer Literature of History By Josephus Nelson Larned, Augustus Hunt Shearer.

Download the a PDF of the entire book here and now: Link.

gbSk & I caught a preview show of Mike Myers doing this Guru Pitka schtick a few years ago. It was horrendous. Totally disappointing... and we were sooooooo excited about it. The show was all guru-student sex jokes with no juicy bits; nothing to draw you in.

Nonetheless the concept holds promise and with just a few added morsels of pseudo philosophy or mystical enchantment, it could have been great.

Happily, the years have passed. And practice prevails. The Guru Pitka's new web efforts are really strong. Great design and costuming. Elegant transitions. Funny stuff. Maybe the movie won't suck after all.

Link. (MySpace).

(Thank you, Joe Hova!)

Souljerky (in co-operation with Process Media, the Knitting Factory, The Shala, Tee Pee Records and Cold Sweat) are overjoyed to welcome The Source Family and Ya Ho Wa 13 to NYC next week for several rare appearances and special events to celebrate the creation of the Process book The Source: The Untold Story of Father Yod.

Souljerky is co-hosting an evening with The Source Family at The Shala next Wednesday (April 9). Join authors Isis Aquarian and Electricity Aquarian, editor Jodi Wille, and ex-members of the Source Family for an intimate gathering in New York City featuring slides, rare home movies, '70s cable access video clips, and numerous Ya Ho Wa 13 musical selections. First class chai will be served by the Sri Ganesha Tea & Book Stall. Please procure tickets early because the event is expected to sell out. For more information, and to purchase tickets, you can visit the Souljerky events page.

Also you may be wise not to miss the heavy, mystic vibrations of Ya Ho Wa 13 at the Knitting Factory on the night before (Tuesday, April 8). Details for all The Source Family related events in NYC are listed here.

[FYI, Souljerky posted a while back about Yod & The Source Family (with MP3's too!). Check it.]

Download video for iPod. Interesting text snippet about the video.

Link.

Here's a real gem available through the marvels of YouTube— Living With The Dead, a heartwarming story about a young Aghori who gets homesick. The fact that this was made by the folks who later brought us Monsoon Wedding makes me giggle.

Living With The Dead— | Clip 1 of 6 | Clip 2 of 6 | Clip 3 of 6 | Clip 4 of 6 | Clip 5 of 6 | Clip 6 of 6 |

The Bedi Brothers website page on sociology and people: Link.

More Souljerky posts tagged "Aghori".

My daily Shiva darshan in the East Village, NYC.

This excellent yoga advertising campaign exploded throughout the blogosphere a couple of weeks back while I was busy smelling flowers elsewhere. Some of you have already seen this stuff, but I felt it prudent to post and share nonetheless.

They're well done. And they're funny. Certainly better than those slick Italian yoga-taffy ads that I posted a while back. And it beats the standard stuff —those fit, new-age white guys+dolls perched on some rock in pristine, unspoiled nature. Ugh. How about a sense of humor and a dash of Village People, people? (But I digress..) Enjoy.

Yoga Festival Puducherry.
The ad agency: JWT India.
For nostalgia— The official XV International Yoga Festival registration form.
(via & via)

More Souljerky posts about advertising.

“’You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?’ We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question.”

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—On the Road

For some devotees of Jack Kerouac, seeing the scroll on which he typed On the Road is perhaps a bit like what viewing a relic of a favorite saint is for others. After all, he did once tell an editor that he couldn’t alter the book’s manuscript because it had been inspired by the Holy Spirit. A portion of the 120-foot scroll—whose ending Potchky, Lucien Carr’s dog, ate—was recently unfurled and on view in “Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road,” at the New York Public Library; a fascimile of the scroll is still on view for a few more weeks, along with a glut of journals, artworks, photographs, and writings culled from this and other icons of the Beat generation. It’s a feast of a show, reaffirming some myths about Kerouac and his work—lots of drugs, but dutifully in the name of spiritual exploration—while dispelling others—so much for “spontaneous prose”: while he did type the scroll in three weeks in April 1951, he had been composing it for much longer with drafts and notes. Scattered throughout the exhibition are some of Kerouac’s personal belongings, like a harmonica, an unfinished pack of chewing gum, and Buddhist bells, all of which take on a similarly fetishistic appeal behind their glass cases.

Kerouac was always clear about what he wanted the Beat movement to stand for: a spiritual and sexual liberation aimed at transformation, a revolution in consciousness that would alter the country. He wrote in a diary entry under the heading “The Ideal of the Beat Generation”: “Beat doesn’t mean tired, or bushed, so much as it also means beato, the Italian for beatific: to be in a state of beatitude, like St Francis, trying to love all life, trying to be utterly sincere with everyone, practicing endurance, kindness, cultivating joy of heart.” He himself failed to live up to the ideal in many ways—anti-Semitism, homophobia—and eventually came to feel that his fellow Beats (Ginsberg, Burroughs, Cassady, Carr) had betrayed the ideal and him. But much of his writing, particularly On the Road, is still revered for its portrayal of the road trip as quintessentially American, and as symbolic of a spiritual journey. Words from On the Road like “for life is holy and every moment is precious” might seem hackneyed in another context today, but when Sal says them, the cynicism fades, at least a little.

For Kerouac, writing was a spiritual discipline, and the exhibition attempts to trace how his interpretations of Christianity and Buddhism influenced changes to the manuscript for On the Road (there are three typescripts, heavily altered in response to prudish, libel-phobic editors as well as Kerouac’s own reinterpretations of his experiences and friendships). Raised in a Roman Catholic household, he began studying Buddhism and the sutras in the early 1950s, supposedly having had the dharma revealed to him in a library in San Jose when he opened a book on Eastern literature; Buddhism’s emphasis on the transitory nature of existence strongly appealed to him. He wrote extensively in his journals about its teachings and about meditation, a practice that played off his interest in dreams and consciousness. In one notebook he writes of a “Dawn Samadhi—The dreamless sleep,” in which he experiences “a vision of Citta-Vritti-Nirodha.” Yet his own spin on Ishvara Pranidhana, or devotion to God, was expressed strongly in his journals as well as his artwork; and by the late 1950s he had shifted from being a “Christian Buddhist” to a “Buddhist Christian.” Kerouac’s struggles with identity and spiritual beliefs help explain why writing was such an essential outlet for him, and why his work continues to resonate with so many readers.

It’s a pleasure to roam among all these works and figures, from Gary Snyder’s Rinzai-influenced poetry to photos of William Burroughs looking swank in Paris. Embedded in all of them are layers of stories. But if you can’t make it to the show, there is an accompanying book, by Isaac Gewirtz, the show’s curator. Or better yet, start by reading Kerouac’s own words.

Exhibition link. Catalogue. Kerouac's spiritual texts in archive at NYPL.

Dance is spiritual expression —but not all dancers explore the spiritual in quite the way modernist pioneer Ruth St. Denis did. This we discovered when searching with the keyword “yoga” at the New York Public Library’s picture archive (Check it). When Radha appeared, our curiosity was piqued. We did a bit more research into how St. Denis ended up performing such an unlikely piece and, as some of the pictures show, looking quite the part in her rather sexy costumes (this was, after all, respectable society in the early 1900s).

While St. Denis (1878–1968) was a lifelong Christian Scientist, she also studied Vedanta with Swami Paramananda, one of Vivekananda’s disciples. She developed a fascination with India through one with Egypt, or, more specifically, through darshan of the goddess Isis on a poster for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, which led her to the philosophies and myths of Eastern cultures. Among her early compositions were The Incense, which included her performing a puja, and The Yogi, “a pantomimic study of an Indian ascetic,” which included yoga exercises and drew on text from the Bhagavad Gita, including these lines referring to the yogi: “Pointing the mind toward one aim / Ruling the motions of thoughts and sense / Seated there, he should practice discipline / For the purifying of the self.”*

St. Denis first found fame for her mystical style and mythical subjects with Radha, originally intended as a vaudeville performance. For this work she researched India, coming upon an essay on Brahmanism by A. C. Lyall that included the idea that one “must free his soul, the divine particle, from the bondage of the senses.” But she also gleaned inspiration from watching an East Indian sideshow at Coney Island, where she later recruited Indian immigrants to perform in her dances and tour with her, an arrangement that surely brought her much attention at the time. St. Denis was particularly drawn to tragedy and drama, so where the myth of Radha—the beautiful maiden absorbed in her love for Krishna, who is often depicted with a flute, calling Gopis, or cow-herding maidens, to join him in dance, an ecstatic state through which one can achieve union with the divine—fell short, the dancer made revisions, like portraying Radha more as a goddess searching for samadhi than a maiden tending her cows. Set to selections from Leéo Delibes’s Lakmé (listen), the dance underwent elaborate incarnations involving a Jain temple and a free-standing shrine that enclosed the meditating Radha, but also included simpler symbols and props like a rope of marigolds, used in the piece’s “The Dance of Smell.” The performance was a hit on the American stage and abroad, partly because of St. Denis’s novel style and subject, as well as the public’s growing interest in orientalism and “exotica.” Nonetheless, St. Denis believed in the divine ecstasy of dance, even if her audience saw something quite different. Describing her performance White Jade, in which she played Kuan Yin, the Chinese goddess of mercy, she wrote, “I move to the rhythm of the Drums of Heaven . . . My body is the living temple of all Gods.”

YouTube also has a five-part minidocumentary on St. Denis. Here’s a link to part one:

Link.

*All quoted material from biographer Suzanne Shelton’s book Divine Dancer.

Image Source: Ruth St. Denis performing as Radha, from the New York Public Library’s picture archive.

Abdi Assadi's wonderful new book, Shadows on the Path, is an unflinching and inspiring discussion of spiritual seeking and crisis in today's world. Through Abdi's generous and colorful personal history, and via a cavalcade of lurid client stories culled from over 20 years experience in the field as a New York City based acupuncturist and healer, he offers practical, gritty truths to those of us stumbling along on the spiritual path. This non-dual meditation and memoir compels us to experience and integrate the elusive, uncomfortable, undigested parts of our humanity which lurk beyond our conscious gaze, individually and culturally. This is a critical read.

While you're at it, you might as well buy two, because you're going to know at least that many pals who need to read it as well. Svaaha! I hope you enjoy it.

My own shadow recently came out and bit me on the ass. This basically led me to Abdi, and to his book, separately. And since my favorite holiday, Groundhog Day, is all about hibernating in the hole that we call ourselves, facing the shadow, and the possibility of freedom (in this case, Springtime), I decided to seek him out and discuss these matters with him... And thus the birth of our new podcast, the Souljerky Yoga Vine.

Buy Abdi's book! Link.
The Souljerky Yoga Vine podcast at the iTunes store: Link.
Subscribe to the Souljerky Yoga Vine podcast RSS feed: Link.

Real magic happens when you drop the bullshit and remember that you’re God. Just like everybody else. No ritual required.

So what are you doing?

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Jason Louv, Mokshadelica, Ultraculture Journal One

Jason Louv, of Generation Hex infamy, has recently published the inaugural issue of a new journal, Ultraculture. It's a provocative and entertaining blend of art, mysticism, and Tantric thought.

Several years back, I had listened to a podcast interview with Louv and was impressed by his apparent levelheadedness and astute critique of modern western magick, calling for more practice and less theory. This meme is more fully demonstrated within the pages of Ultraculture and resonates with my own approach —which echoes Sri K. Pattabhi Jois's addage, "Ninety-nice percent practice, one percent theory" (itself reminiscent of Ben Franklin's perspiration/inspiration breakdown too, no?) For me this perspective is informed by a daily, non-verbal practice of ashtanga yoga, wherein the chatter of the mind and its grasping and gloating —"Why am I doing this?", "What is happening?", "Check this out!" or even "What is right or wrong about this pose?"— slowly becomes dampened by diligence, repetition, steadiness and surrender. This in turn allows space, patience, and perspective to emerge, a.k.a., The Observer.

Practice over theory is a tall order for a 420 page (primarily) electronic journal, and not entirely the aim. It has a sweet and somewhat Nietschean ambition to manifest our cultural Ubermensch. There are, of course, holes and distortions in this ego-gravity well. When it shines, however, the raw yet thoughtful spirit and energy, the ties to the hipster art and music world, and the often-excellent writing celebrates these holes like Goedel celebrates incompleteness. When it wallows, it becomes mired by these very same tasty Karmas: iconoclasm, humility and ego gravity, and the serpentine snarl of Chaos magick and assorted other esoteric black, bad-boy arts.

Louv and several of the contributors are largely influenced by Mahendranath and his Western Nath sampradaya(s). And there's definitely a strong strain of Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj non-duality. My favorite piece so far has been Ganesha Baba's clear and enjoyable Causal Comogeny & Cosmology. But there's a lot more treats as well: articles by cultural luminaries like Brion Gysin, Ira Cohen and Genesis P-Orridge.; a travelogue through India & Tibet; fiction and nonfiction by Louv and his band of Western neo-tantric practitioners. It's worth checking out by anyone interested in yoga and tantra in the today's global east-west con-fusion.

Most “magical systems” are either sterile and ineffective or will quickly hand your sorry ass over to “higher” entities who will gladly use you as a pawn in their old and feeble games because you were too weak to plot your own destiny and tap your own innate “magic.” And perhaps all of the freaky coincidences, the pressing late-night god contacts, the psychedelic grandeur, the arcane theories, the frantically-assigned meanings, the interstellar conspiracies, the greedily gathered flashes of insight and wisdom—perhaps, real as they can be, they’re simply more “stuff” at the end of the day, like the endlessly hypnotic lightshows and entity communications users of DMT or Salvia divinorium report as appearing to distract one from the real shit.

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Jason Louv, Mokshadelica, Ultraculture Journal One

Link.