Enlightening Nonsense

 

Happy Oasis runs the Rawspirit Festival (www.rawspirit.com), a gathering of uncooked food, music, lectures, meditations, yoga and glowing people—not because they are eating irradiated food but because their life force energy is beaming out from their inside. Last year I attended my first Rawspirit Festival in Sedona, Arizona, where I guided a meditation and a yoga class and played and played under clear blue skies, barefoot on rich green grass, with red rock mountains spreading across the horizon. While the weekend cost me about a grand, it was one of the most enjoyable weekends of my life and well worth the price of an expensive call girl from former Governor Elliot Spitzer’s prostitute service; but unlike Spitzer, I didn’t have the taxpayer to foot the bill.

The Rawspirit Festival is offered several times a year at different locations. This year I will be sharing some teachings at the festival in the District of Criminals (D.C.) on the weekend of August 29^th. Having walked along the Raw Foods circuit for awhile now, I see it as time for me to offer my voice and thoughts as a pleasant change from the ten or so headliners they always seem to have, for not only am I the Rebel Yogi on T.V. but I also play one in real life.

On the subway today to a Raw Food Meet-Up at Raw Soul Café in Harlem, I saw a phrase that I thought was very apropos to what I see is a major issue in any cult, the Raw Foods cult as well:

“To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both disperse with the need for thought.”

There are a lot of mindless idiots who are willing to follow whatever the “expert” of their choice has to say, be it their doctor or Deepak Chopra or David Wolfe. Whether you kiss the ass of your medical hack or David “Salesman” Wolfe—you’re still an ass-kisser. My teachings are not designed to have you place your lips against my firm buttocks but to have you question your propensity to seek out buttocks in which to adhere them to.

My first interaction with Happy was through a raw foods personals webpage where she showed interest in me and I didn’t really reciprocate the “Happy-ness.” This does not mean that I don’t respect what she has done personally and for the Raw Food community, just that I plan to keep my “Happy endings” at the Korean massage parlor. I met her briefly at the Rawspirit in Sedona but as the main organizer, even the powers of my charmingly firm buttocks could not keep her in one place for very long. In subsequent correspondence she seemed always busy but interested in the enigma of Swami X and suggested that I should teach a workshop at her place in Sedona.

So Happy was scheduled to speak today at a Raw Food Meet-Up and I thought it would be good to see her in person, truthfully more for business than because I wanted to hang out with some Raw Food freaks and pay $12 for a couple of peas on a plate that was billed as a “Raw Pea Salad.” I’m somewhat of a creative screw-off, which means I have a million creative ideas but when it comes to the business side of making them happen, I’m usually like, “Ah, screw it.” Someone like Happy could help me make a few of my ideas manifest out of my imagination and the world of make-believe, especially in regard to breaking into the old boys raw food network.

Happy sat down next to me at the table and asked me my name, trying to pretend that she didn’t have a ratty old picture of me from the raw dating site which she kept in her wallet at all times. When I told her I was Swami X, she was like, “Oh, of course.” 

We talked a little about my current teachings and she asked if I had written any books. It is really pathetic that I haven’t sat down and pumped out a few of my many book ideas, especially when I see that everyone and their brother has done so. “Welcome to my book-signing of How Raw Food Changed My Life and to my left is my brother who authored Why Did Elliot Spitzer Pick The Ugly Call Girl?”

Happy had asked three people whom she flattered as “experts” to get up and share their stories. One girl got up and stumbled and stammered about how she was a volunteer for the Rawspirit Festival. While I can appreciate everyone for playing their part in God’s plan, that’s kind of like someone getting up and saying, “I’m the coffee boy at my firm—you want two creams and one sugar, I can do that. You want it black and without sugar, I can accommodate that as well.” Or like someone getting a past-life psychic reading where they are told, “You know who Jesus is, right?” to which they excitedly respond, “Yes, of course!” “Well, you were the boy who on one night brought a bucket over into which he took a piss.” Everyone’s always the reincarnation of the Buddha or Joan of Arc; never a piss boy. Well this girl had been a piss boy, or rather, a piss girl.  [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGfXiIXTpE0]

The next woman present had authored about eighteen books. Her shpeel seemed so formula to me, from her inflections to her material, that I almost expected her to pull out a blackboard and write in chalk her speaking formula:

CM + I = BS

CLICHÉ MATERIAL + INFLECTION = BORING SPEECH (or BULLSHIT if you prefer.)

The last guy shared with us his dramatic transformation through raw foods from diabetic to just a plain boring guy with normal blood sugar by attending the Tree of Life center in Arizona. I just recently saw a documentary called “Simply Raw” following six people with diabetes who were going to cure themselves of diabetes through going 100% raw for 30-days under the guidance of the raw chefs and medical doctors at The Tree of Life and found it very interesting; let’s just say, this gentleman needed a good editor for after about 10-minutes of him droning on, I felt like I was watching Spike Lee’s 3-hour epic film Malcolm X and wondering, “Spike, do you think you could have cut out the 20-minute oral hygiene scene without losing any of the essence of the film?”

I told Happy that I wanted to speak and shared with the group about how my teachings often involved destroying our conditionings and how this is not always looked upon favorably in the Kumbaya world of hand-holding and 10-second hugs. Referring to one point made by the plain boring guy, I said that while it is nice to talk about “the power of love” and all, when one piles up a mound of love on a brewing volcano of anger and hate, this inevitably leads to a collapse of the love and an explosion that burns anyone nearby with your fiery fury.

I also mentioned how when one comes out of Corpse Pose at the end of a yoga class, she usually feels pretty relaxed but it is a lot harder to keep that sense of peace when you step out of the studio and into the world with jerks and morons. I said that while we can find peace in isolated collections of like-minded people, it is our job—not just to create a better world but to claim our true mastery—to figure out how to keep our peace of mind in a world that doesn’t always support this.

I finished by challenging some raw food “facts” as probably being more raw food “parroting” and when I asked, “Do you really have to sprout nuts?” and mentioned how there was a doctor in the raw food movement that said you didn’t, Happy jumped in with a comment that “seemed so obvious,” about how her stomach would complain if she didn’t sprout her nuts. I supported her comment saying how her body is probably more of an “expert” than a raw parrot but intentionally left out how so many people are so distanced from their bodies that they could use that same logic to conclude, “I drank nothing but juice for three days and felt totally sick. Juice is just not good for me.” I, myself, stopped sprouting my nuts after a girl who started to go down on me freaked out when she saw little green shoots where she had expected pubic hair.

I concluded saying that it is easy for any of us to get attached to a belief system but do we ultimately want a new set of “rules and regulations” to follow dogmatically or do we want freedom?

At the end of the meet, Rawbin, who is on staff at Rawspirit, said that what I said really resonated with her. The difference between me and the other “experts” tonight is that what I was saying was inspired—not just by my personal experience but also from a source outside of my self.

I find the same to be the case in my experience in teaching yoga. There are many teachers who can flow in their talking and guidance and can give you a pretty decent physical workout. It is rare to find the teacher whose teachings are not just smooth, but inspired. When I connect in teaching yoga, I disappear and the Inspiration flows through me. When my ego teaches, I fall somewhere in the middle of the lot of uninspired teachers and while the unconscious students may still like the class, I don’t have a good time with it and, personally, I don’t care whether I’m feeding the hungry or skipping rocks on the water—if I’m not enjoying my-Self doing it then I don’t consider it something “spiritual.” Thankfully for me, this rarely happens any more than a few moments in each class and usually disappears just as quickly as it entered, like someone who sticks their head into the wrong classroom and says, “My bad, wrong class,” and leaves before you can say, “Get the hell out of here, moron!”

One clarification on what I mean by “inspired.” I don’t necessarily mean that the gift comes in the form of a beautiful sermon or dharma talk or that the words of a story or the sequence of a yoga class are in someway “profound.” Like ten people playing the same selection on a piano, the outer structure may be the exact same but it is the silent Source that colors the piece and makes it more than just about who is dexterily more proficient. It’s the difference between a technical dancer, like Savion Glover, and a performer, like Gregory Hines. Savion Glover can jump up and tap his toe on the ground ten times before landing. It is amazing but the moment they develop a robot that can do the same thing, he’ll be out of a job. No robot can reproduce Gregory Hines, well, when he was alive that is; I have a dead computer that is doing a pretty good Gregory Hines six feet under impression as we speak.

Dr. Christopher, the founder of The School of Natural Healing where I received my Masters in Herbology, said, “I can boast about my herbal formulas because they don’t really come from me but from God.” I may have a slight pre-agenda going in, but when I “tap in” what comes out of me is only passing through. I, too, can brag about it because it is not me and, truthfully, when “me” comes too into play, I can just as easily turn into one of those other “professional presenters”—at times stimulating to the mind but leaving the heart and soul still seeking a place to dance.

This is the difference how, for example, a story about healing oneself from diabetes can be either boring when we are not feeling connected to the speaker, it can be inspiring to hear because when we are residing in love we innately enjoy seeing another excited about his process, or it can be inspiring because the story touches something inside of us and stirs awake the ember of passion that has been sputtering. It is not the words that light fires; it is the connection to Source. And it is only when the speaker connects to the Source that a true union with the speaker is almost impossible to avoid as the listeners use the conduit of the speaker to connect with the Source directly.

I rarely go to raw food restaurants, partly because I usually feel ripped-off paying $12 for three peas and when the check comes containing my sprouted appetizer, fermented drink, dehydrated main course and agave-ridden dessert, the only difference between the raw food restaurant and Peter Lugar’s Steakhouse is that in my overpriced raw meal “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie.” If I were given the choice between having Bambi slain for $10 and paying $50 for a few sprouts, I may hesitate for a minute, reminding one of the old joke where the punch line is, “Well we now know what you are. At this point we are only haggling for the price.”

Every story has a dramatic high point and in this one it was when the food arrived. Rawbin and Happy were going to split an $18 sampler meal, as Rawbin said she wasn’t really hungry but just wanted to try an assortment of things. I told Rawbin that I was jealous, that that is what I would have liked to do. She said that we could go three-ways and for a minute I had to question whether she was talking about the food or having a ménage. I said to her that there was probably not enough food to divide three-ways and she reiterated that she wasn’t’ really hungry, that she only wanted a sampling.

I told Rawbin that I was in, cancelling my $10 single celery stalk lunch and just keeping the raw vegan cheesecake as my order. During these negotiations, Happy was off somewhere being happy and in the back screen of my mind a subliminal flash came on, just for a second, questioning whether Happy should have been consulted about this new division of labor regarding the eating. I think a single frame of a large Coke and popcorn also popped on and I had a strong pull to excuse myself and go to the nearby movie theater and say, “Hi, I don’t want to see a ticket, just pay $15 for some artificially colored carbonated sugar water and a bucket of airy, greasy, small pieces of Styrofoam.”

When the food came and Rawbin started to divvy up the Sea Monkey-sized entrees onto three plates, Happy asked in a more pleasant form, “What the fuck are you doing?” When Rawbin informed her that she had contracted out a third of the jaw work to me, Happy said, “You should have told me. I would have ordered something more.” At this point I started to question whether I should go and get the Coke and popcorn. Instead I said, “You know what, I’m good with just my dessert. You guys divide it in two,” as I scraped my miniscule portion back onto the pre-divided plate.

Happy seemed to react as if she were seven years old and they had just placed in front of her a complex algebraic formula and told her, “You have five minutes to solve this.” Smoke started to come out of her ears and I thought about reciting to her the raw maxim, “Just make sure you don’t cook your brain above 118 degrees or else you will destroy the enzymes.” It’s funny that the magazine Maxim is so racy and sexy and all the “raw maxims” sound like they come from a nun telling you to stand facing the corner until your erection subsides.

Happy is a slave to singing Kumbaya and my solution sounded like heavy metal music to her ears. She babbled something incoherent as she started to divide the food into threes. Sometimes I let the Type A dominators take over control of such a situation but I was pretty set on my solution and stopped her and said, “Happy, I’m set in what I just said. I’m really good with just my cheesecake and don’t want to be cut in.” Happy went on with some more babble about how she needs to always help and I said something metaphoric, how if you keep grabbing an old granny’s arm to help her across the street when all she wants is for you to just fuck off—you’re not helping. Happy gave me a fake smile and said how now she was very uncomfortable. I said she should get over it, as I was way past caring about the food and onto the present agenda.

I didn’t think a second thought about this—I was truly “over” it—until Happy concluded our little meet with a couple of stories of her experiences with sharing around the world and even referenced our little three-way gone awry! She told one story how she was trapped in a train car with a few dozen natives and it got to 120 degrees in the car and no one but her and her “honey” had any water. She went on about how babies were crying and how people were passing out and she shared her water, everyone ending up getting only a capful. I wanted to ask, “Why would such a poor country that would jam everyone in a single car without any air conditioning go to the expense of attaching a thermometer on the wall of this overheated car?” but assumed she was in the La-La Land that my father goes to when he creates facts to fit his story.

She told another story about how some native somewhere that she was working with said that he was leaving, that he couldn’t stand the tourists as they were “barbaric.” When Happy enquired what he meant, that they were not “barbaric” but came from Idaho where, even if they were inbred for the past two hundred years, to her knowledge they still had running water and outdoor plumbing. He replied how they didn’t bless their food before eating it and they didn’t share their food with everyone else. She said it wasn’t until she got home and was sitting around a table where no one seemed to pray before chowing down and no one shared that she heard his words in his head and thought “Barbaric!”

My take on her story is a little different. While the inbred Idahoians might have been unconscious, it is the native who was the prick. How arrogant of him to pretend to be so loving and God-conscious and at the first sign of someone not living up to his ideals, he’s ready to bolt.

Next up on the Happy Sharing Tirade came a teaching story where all these people around a feeding table had arms that wouldn’t bend and they all starved to death and how there was another table where there were the same number of crippled freaks with the same unbending arm syndrome and they all fed each other and lived. I would have interjected that it was good for those freaky crips to have died, for if they were too stupid to just stick their faces directly into the food they would produce equally stupid offspring and cause an even larger divide between extraterrestrials who are travelling intergalactically to apply their interior decorating skills to make geometry designs in crops, to turn cows into empty bags of skin and to anally implant earthlings, and us human beings who are playing with our own shit and wondering why our hands smell. I would have but I was too dumbfounded by her referencing our threesome debacle as being the perfect example of “barbaric” behavior.

Funny, it’s the first time that the word “dumbfounded” actually makes so much sense to me: to be struck dumb, not as in stupid but as in speechless. It’s probably also the first time that I had no words to say in a given situation.

As I was making my goodbyes, Arianna, my favorite raw foodie, could sense that something seemed awry in me and I shared with her that I thought Happy’s little storytelling on sharing was bullshit. She told me that she agreed and didn’t know why she brought up that non-situation. The reason I like Arianna so much is not because she may agree with me or that we both acknowledge we are emotional eaters, but because she doesn’t bullshit others or herself. She will acknowledge her struggles, she never seems to imply that she’s somehow “raw” perfected and she will never fill a glass with some condescending cesspool stories and pass it off as coconut water.

I also shared a similar sentiment with Rawbin, who happened to be one of the food ménage, and she also agreed that Happy’s cesspool stories left not only a shitty taste in her mouth but had her gagging soiled toilet paper as well.

Now I will share some teaching stories. The first is a shorty, and by this I don’t mean the slang for a small black or Hispanic girl. Jesus told a couple of people to follow him and they said that they would love to, as rumor had it that Jesus knew where to get all the best prostitutes for half-price, but that they had a few relatives who just kicked and they had to bury them. Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead.”

This story is clearly allegorical, for how could a dead person dig a hole and throw a dead body into it—let alone even grasp a shovel? He is saying that all those past issues between people, be they arguments or insults or obligations, are dead. We are alive and a living person should not deal in death. Whoever deals with death is dead themselves. This of course does not apply to the Family Guy episode where Death, with the voice of Norm MacDonald from Saturday Night Live, came for Peter and through the marvels of brilliant stupidity, Peter didn’t actually succumb to death, but Jesus knew that if he added something like, “…with the exception of…” it would become too wordy to be quoted by later pedophiles with white collars.

When I had told Happy that I was cutting myself out of the three-way, the issue was over for me. I wouldn’t have thought about it again and I probably wouldn’t have written anything about the Meet-Up besides a note to myself that the raw cheesecake was scrumptuliscious but not worth $8.

The next teaching story is from the Buddha. A man was furious with the Buddha, something about him eating his last piece of raw cheesecake, and spit in the Buddha’s face. Buddha’s main disciple, Ananda, told the Buddha that he would handle this man, which was probably akin to Tony Soprano saying he’d “handle” someone, if you know what I mean. Buddha told Ananda to chill out. He said, “This man is exactly like me! He does not have the words to express his anger and so he resorted to the action of spitting. I do not have the words to express my love and I, too, feel tremendously frustrated by this.”

The spitting man went home and after pondering over what the Buddha had said, he felt horrible. The next day he went to the Buddha and touched his feet and begged forgiveness. The Buddha said, “First of all, I did eat your last piece of raw cheesecake and it was good—a touch too sweet for my taste but I know your wife likes to use a lot of agave. Secondly, the two people we were yesterday are dead. We are two different people alive in the here and now. I can’t forgive a dead man and the man who you really are asking to give you forgiveness is also dead. Stand up, brother, and let’s enjoy living.”

It was Happy who was holding onto the dead, seeking to resolve a problem that had already past and disintegrated back into the Source. It was Happy, whose inability to let it go and allow herself not to be able to organize and control this situation with the same precision she does the Rawspirit Festivals, who was responsible for her own discomfort—not me. And while we are all self-responsible for our own misery and suffering, it was Happy’s inability to get out of her own self-righteousness and understanding of Truth that was the catalyst that brought my moderately enjoyable time crashing into disarray.

Because of my understanding of how the Universe teaches me, I don’t look at this situation as Happy being “barbarian” needing to be avoided at all costs in the pretense that my super-spiritual ego couldn’t handle a monkey wrench thrown into its machinery. As I wrote in “The Soul Family Barbeque” [http://rebelyogi.com/the-soul-family-barbeque], the Universe doesn’t teach me through books or lectures or workshops or “experts”; she teaches me through mirrors.

I am Happy, and I don’t mean “gleeful” but the person. I have at times allowed my self-righteous “truths” to override the potential hurt feelings of another. I have been so steadfast on what is “conscious” and “unconscious” that I have bulldozed over people in the name of Truth and really I was no different than all the jackasses who kill people in the name of God.

I couldn’t ask for a better teaching and if Happy hadn’t lost herself in dogmatic condescension, I would have probably left thinking, “I spent $10 with tip on a decent raw cheesecake that gave me about 30-seconds of pleasure, listened to three sleeper talks by self-proclaimed—or Happy-proclaimed—experts, and spent almost three hours of a Wednesday afternoon where I could have instead watched Internet porn and wrote more derogations about Christianity and all its perverts.” But this little non-drama turned drama held a mirror to my face and allowed me to see the blackheads that would develop into full-blown pimples if I didn’t take action to squeeze them free with awareness.

They say the best teaching we can give is through our righteous living. Well, sometimes the clearest teachings for me are given when someone holds a mirror up to me through their dysfunctional behavior so that I can more clearly see where my living falls short of righteousness. On the surface I may call them names, but beneath the surface I thank the Universe whole-heartedly for the teaching that was blessed to me through these idiots.

“The factual memory says, ‘This man insulted me yesterday,’ but that ‘me’ has changed. This man has changed. So it is as if that incident had happened between two persons with whom you have nothing to do any more–then you are psychologically free. You don’t say, ‘I still feel angry.’ There is no lingering anger. Memory is there, but there is no psychological affectation. You meet the man again as he is now, and you meet him as you are now.”

–Osho, from Walk without feet, Fly without wings, and Think without mind (p.141)

 

REFLECTION:

Think to what you hold near and dear to you, less so in objects and more so in ideals; it could be animal rights, veganism, raw foods, peace, abortion, 9/11 Truth. Have you ever carried a “discussion” about your dogma of choice to the point where you either put the other party down or, at minimum, made them feel so uncomfortable that you ruined their time, their meal, their peace of mind? Lord knows I have done this on a multitude of occasions! Is dogma worth more than an individual’s happiness? How are you any different than any other fundamentalist, be it a Pope who shuffles around his perverted clergymen because he cares more about the business of the Church than he does Truth or a murderous Islamo who values getting drunk and laid in a make-believe fairy world more than he does putting in the work to live in a the world he has been placed in with harmony and love?

MEDITATION:

Imagine yourself at dinner with another where you are arguing your dogma. Imagine that you “prove” your dogma to the point where the other person is so miserable they cannot eat and enjoy their meal but instead you can see that they are mechanically cutting a shoving down the food just to be finished with it. How do you feel?

Imagine yourself at dinner with this same person where you start to discuss your dogma and you see that it has the potential to ruin their enjoyment of the dinner and the evening and so you decide to refrain from pursuing the argument. You then say, “I care more about enjoying my dinner with a good friend than I do about any dogma. I feel so blessed that we have this time to share. Let’s not waste it talking about things that don’t really matter.” How do you feel?

Imagine yourself at dinner with this same person and instead of theoretical, philosophical bullshit, you decide to just talk about what’s alive in both you and your friend. Maybe talking the dogma of the dead needs to be buried with the dead as well.

 

“If you…drop psychological memory, you will become creative. Otherwise what you call creation is not really creation—it is just a composition…You go on arranging your old known things in different ways,…nothing is new…You simply change the structure…like arranging your drawing-room: the furniture…pictures…curtains are the same, but you can arrange again…

That’s what ninety-nine percent of authors, poets, painters, go on doing. They are mediocre; they are not creative. The creative person is one who brings something from the unknown into the world of the known, who brings something from God into the world, who helps God to utter something; who becomes a hollow bamboo and allows God to flow through him. How can you become a hollow bamboo? If you are too full of the mind, you cannot become a hollow bamboo. And creativity is from the creator. Creativity is not of you or from you. You disappear, then the creativity is—when the creator takes possession of you.

The real creators know it perfectly well, that they are not the creators—they were just instrumental, they were mediums. Something happened through them, true, but they are not the doers of it.

Remember, the difference between a technician and a creative person. A technician just knows how to do a thing. Maybe…perfectly…but he has no insight. A creative person is one who has insight, who can see things, hear things, which nobody has ever seen before.”

—Osho from Walk without feet, Fly without wings, and Think without mind (pp.147-8)