YOGA FOR KNUCKLEHEADS #30 "EINSTEIN & YOGA? COME ON"
This morning, as Samantha asked us to take any position that suited our needs, which meant some sat cross-legged and others like myself remained on our backs, she held up a sheet of paper she had been studying and announced she was going to read quotes from the great Albert Einstein, the genius more or less responsible for the nuclear weapons we are overwhelmed with today, as well as an intellectual philosopher and supporter of world peace—quite a paradox.
Anyway, the nucleus of what Samantha read, with some awe and excitement, as if making a discovery, is that Einstein asked us to to seek and find the “goodness” in our hearts and not the “evil.” and she equated it with yoga. At first, I tried to ignore such blather, because it reminds me of the mindless chirping from the hippies back during the Vietnam war, the “make love not war” lot, whose cause was righteous and true, though utterly unrealistic when one appraised even the most civil of societies, which seemed riven with discord bordering on war if not war in its own right, like what's going on today between liberals and conservatives, democrats and republicans in this fractured country. Class warfare. Age old and simple, breeding animosity, resentment, and eventually contempt, leading to vengeance.
Einstein had to be a gentle, non-combative guy, even if he hailed from the most war-mongering area of the world and sported hair that sprouted in all directions like he was being electrocuted, lending him a scary Dr. Strangelove mien. I guess the class was eating up Einstein's continued—in Samantha's reading of his treatise—plea for compassion and understanding and finding our love and mercy for fellow man. I got lost in Samantha's reading, which went on for a few minutes, and retreated to a sort of trance of remembrance of how, where I grew up, outside of family life, it was all about fear (which Samantha said is part of our every day), of getting jumped and having my ass kicked by bullies and aggressive war-like louts trying to prove their manhood's to friends or themselves or whatever drove them to such vicious aggression.
For it was a fact, in Compton, that from about the second or third grade on, there existed a predatory establishment so well rooted that at some point you literally had to fight, to withdraw from love and compassion and understanding and diplomacy and scrap your way out of trouble. Or else, when outnumbered or out-sized, you ran or found a weapon to batter whomever was terrorizing you.
And we did. All we knew about Einstein then was his relation to the atom bomb, which had devastated two major cities in Japan after their madman empire bombed our entire naval fleet into smithereens in Hawaii to set off WWII. Almost all of our fathers fought the Japs or the Krauts (that's what we called them), and we were indoctrinated in our contempt for they and their hideous leaders, Hitler and Togo.
And, according to our politicians, everybody was “out to get us,” because we were the biggest, baddest and richest.
I was thinking about this long after Samantha finished her Einstein dissertation (where did she find this stuff?) and was trying to figure out at what point in my life was it when I finally realized my entire being was formed by bloodthirsty competition, a refusal to accept pain or sentimentality, a readiness sparked by paranoia that had me always prepared to defend myself at any instant (verbally and physically), a hardened exterior crust meant to hide both my fear and soft-heartedness, etc, etc, and began to despise the whole idea of male aggression, psychotic competition, fighting, ego, hubris, war, but also felt totally helpless to do a thing about it.
I mean, if my neighborhood of mostly white kids in Compton in the 1950s was bad, think about when it became an absolute war zone years later, a killing zone, a place where if you looked at somebody the wrong way they pulled out an Uzi and shot you down with casual cold-heartedness.
This yoga business of mixing in Einstein seems, to me, comical when placed beside the real world, especially one where, later on in the day, I read in the LA Times of Sudanese immigrant children talking about growing up in villages where fear and terror was nonstop, because one never knew when somebody was going to come out of the woodwork with a machete to hack your head off or a gun or rifle to riddle you and your family with bullets, just for your crops, or because you were of a different tribe, or just for the hell of it, which is the reason a landslide of these terrified immigrants have unnerved a complacent white world, like ours, and sent much of it on a hate mission of these beleaguered people.
Here, on the Central Coast, where yoga participants live in golden largess, and thrive on peace and harmony and good tidings, it is easy to dwell on love and our petty thwarting of inner fears and minor neuroses, our self-obsessed daily battles with our pathetic insecurities and emotional scars, because we have actually spoiled ourselves beyond all human recognition compared to most any other area of this country and the planet, where all hell is breaking loose.
So yoga, mixed with beloved genius/philosopher Einstein's musings, even if what Samantha reads of his is good and nutritious and soul expanding and morally uplifting and health enhancing, falls on the deaf ears of this unrelenting yoga knucklehead.
Anyway, the nucleus of what Samantha read, with some awe and excitement, as if making a discovery, is that Einstein asked us to to seek and find the “goodness” in our hearts and not the “evil.” and she equated it with yoga. At first, I tried to ignore such blather, because it reminds me of the mindless chirping from the hippies back during the Vietnam war, the “make love not war” lot, whose cause was righteous and true, though utterly unrealistic when one appraised even the most civil of societies, which seemed riven with discord bordering on war if not war in its own right, like what's going on today between liberals and conservatives, democrats and republicans in this fractured country. Class warfare. Age old and simple, breeding animosity, resentment, and eventually contempt, leading to vengeance.
Einstein had to be a gentle, non-combative guy, even if he hailed from the most war-mongering area of the world and sported hair that sprouted in all directions like he was being electrocuted, lending him a scary Dr. Strangelove mien. I guess the class was eating up Einstein's continued—in Samantha's reading of his treatise—plea for compassion and understanding and finding our love and mercy for fellow man. I got lost in Samantha's reading, which went on for a few minutes, and retreated to a sort of trance of remembrance of how, where I grew up, outside of family life, it was all about fear (which Samantha said is part of our every day), of getting jumped and having my ass kicked by bullies and aggressive war-like louts trying to prove their manhood's to friends or themselves or whatever drove them to such vicious aggression.
For it was a fact, in Compton, that from about the second or third grade on, there existed a predatory establishment so well rooted that at some point you literally had to fight, to withdraw from love and compassion and understanding and diplomacy and scrap your way out of trouble. Or else, when outnumbered or out-sized, you ran or found a weapon to batter whomever was terrorizing you.
And we did. All we knew about Einstein then was his relation to the atom bomb, which had devastated two major cities in Japan after their madman empire bombed our entire naval fleet into smithereens in Hawaii to set off WWII. Almost all of our fathers fought the Japs or the Krauts (that's what we called them), and we were indoctrinated in our contempt for they and their hideous leaders, Hitler and Togo.
And, according to our politicians, everybody was “out to get us,” because we were the biggest, baddest and richest.
I was thinking about this long after Samantha finished her Einstein dissertation (where did she find this stuff?) and was trying to figure out at what point in my life was it when I finally realized my entire being was formed by bloodthirsty competition, a refusal to accept pain or sentimentality, a readiness sparked by paranoia that had me always prepared to defend myself at any instant (verbally and physically), a hardened exterior crust meant to hide both my fear and soft-heartedness, etc, etc, and began to despise the whole idea of male aggression, psychotic competition, fighting, ego, hubris, war, but also felt totally helpless to do a thing about it.
I mean, if my neighborhood of mostly white kids in Compton in the 1950s was bad, think about when it became an absolute war zone years later, a killing zone, a place where if you looked at somebody the wrong way they pulled out an Uzi and shot you down with casual cold-heartedness.
This yoga business of mixing in Einstein seems, to me, comical when placed beside the real world, especially one where, later on in the day, I read in the LA Times of Sudanese immigrant children talking about growing up in villages where fear and terror was nonstop, because one never knew when somebody was going to come out of the woodwork with a machete to hack your head off or a gun or rifle to riddle you and your family with bullets, just for your crops, or because you were of a different tribe, or just for the hell of it, which is the reason a landslide of these terrified immigrants have unnerved a complacent white world, like ours, and sent much of it on a hate mission of these beleaguered people.
Here, on the Central Coast, where yoga participants live in golden largess, and thrive on peace and harmony and good tidings, it is easy to dwell on love and our petty thwarting of inner fears and minor neuroses, our self-obsessed daily battles with our pathetic insecurities and emotional scars, because we have actually spoiled ourselves beyond all human recognition compared to most any other area of this country and the planet, where all hell is breaking loose.
So yoga, mixed with beloved genius/philosopher Einstein's musings, even if what Samantha reads of his is good and nutritious and soul expanding and morally uplifting and health enhancing, falls on the deaf ears of this unrelenting yoga knucklehead.