I was at Peter’s Food Fest stuffing myself silly [See “The Curry-Colored Horse” http://rebelyogi.com/the-curry-colored-high-horse.html], when Lina started in about some “swami” she met in India. She said how he was one of those orange robe-wearing, “authentic” swamis. I was rubbing Ninja’s back at the time and she turned to me and said loud enough for everyone to share in her white trash toothy grin, “A real one,” which by implication was saying that I was a fake one. I looked at her like, “Don’t make me backhand you in front of everyone, bitch!” and she immediately knew she had crossed a line and said, “Sorry.”
I won’t tell you the whole India swami story, because it was idiotic and if I retell it I will have to live through it again and I am not scheduled to commit suicide until the government decides to off me like they do with the people they need to silence, either in a small plane “accident” or with two shotgun blasts to the back of the head and a suicide note neatly penned on the dresser. But what I will share is the hypocrisy of this entire fake spirituality bullshit.
Lina said how one time she saw the “authentic” swami get mad when they went into a restaurant and the restaurant wanted to sit them away from the rest of the patrons because they consider dark-skinned dot heads the niggers of the Far East. This made him all so “real” in Lina’s eyes and if I weren’t so against all the New Age phonies who think that the only expression a face should ever wear is a dopey Joker’s smile, I would have argued with her that he was just another fraud who loses his peace of mind as soon as some gullible Westerner is not giving him a free hand-out.
But I’m not against anger. It’s as good an expression of emotion as any of the other seven dwarfs, be it Sneezy, Dopey, Farty or Cheesy. Some people even point out that when Jesus dumped the tables of the gamblers and traders in the temple that he was a bit pissed-off himself and if it’s good enough for J.C., it’s good enough for me. But if I owned a restaurant in India, I would certainly never tell a dark-skinned swami that he couldn’t sit in the front of the restaurant—I wouldn’t let that Far East Rosa Parksananda nigger into my establishment in the first place.
Now I’m not saying this swami wasn’t legit. I’m saying that even if he were, his swami ass spits out curry and lentils just like every other Indian. But what gets my goat, more than a Catholic priest taking a break from sodomizing young boys to cleanse his foreskin with some bestiality, is when in the name of “spirituality,” people act very un-spiritual.
I understand this regarding religion because religion, whether it involves an elite “clergy” who wants to control the stupid sheep or the mindless herd Jewing with God to get into Heaven, is just a business. But spirituality? This totally kills that hipster line, “I’m not religious but I am spiritual” for me, for now I can’t just sit back and hear and accept it as a dig against religion; I have to come back with a knee-jerk reaction of, “No, you’re not religious or spiritual—you’re a douche pretending she’s not encased in pussy.”
Lina sent me an email and asked me what my “real” name was, as if “Swami X” wasn’t real. As appalled as she appeared in her recounting of the restaurant bigotry, isn’t she being a tad racist asking me this question when she would never even consider asking a brown-skinned swami named something ridiculously affected like, Swami Ramakrishnavishnudevananda, “Gee swami, would you tell me your real name?” No Indian mother names her child something like Ramakrishnavishnudevananda, if for no other reason than she wouldn’t have the energy to speak such a long name after going through labor on only two spoonfuls of white rice in her belly that she ate a week earlier because it was her birthday and she had 100 guests at her party and each four guests chipped in for a single grain of rice.
We are so easily sold on the “exotic” that we forego the herbs in our backyard that carry such a powerful punch, like dandelion, in lieu of some herb that you pick up from some backroom Chink in Chinatown whose name is like the sound a Vietnamese cat makes after being thrown into the pot of boiling water and whose taste is like licking the back of some street bum swamis shit-stained dhoti. We see some foreign, dark-skinned swami as more “authentic” than a homegrown pale-skinned one, despite the fact that just about every swami that comes from India to America ends up being caught in a scandal involving fucking his students.
Yes, it’s true—my birth certificate doesn’t say, “Swami X” on it. But at least it’s from America, which is more than I can say for Obama The Kenyan. “So are you a real swami?” Your question assures me that you are a real douche. But I will still answer it, as I like the smell of pussy.
I did go through a ritual where I was given the title of swami. But who gives a shit? That would be as pathetic as Colin Powell coyly reminding Queen Elizabeth II, the Wicked Queen of the West, that she knighted him, seemingly proud of the fact that some evil old hag touched each of his shoulders with her droopy breasts and said, “Hail Mary—you’re a knight!”
In my tradition, being a swami is not a renunciate path that thinks becoming a bum is something noble. Nor is it a path that chooses some arbitrary restriction on something totally natural, like sex, and results in you walking around with a hard-on that is more intense than the 3-hour Viagra boner, just waiting for the first small boy or doe-eyed disciple to kneel before you and get a mouthful. Sure, I fuck small boys and doe-eyed disciples—I’m just not a hypocrite about it!
Being a swami means that you are committed to the path of your own self-realization, full consciousness, knowing that while the path may occasionally have company, it is always walked alone—and getting as much ass as you can along the way.
When I was in India, the orange-robed wanderers were the renunciates. I saw one outside his hut off a trail on the Arunachala Mountain where Ramana Maharshi took refuge and found self-realization. When I asked if I could take his picture, he spent several minutes preparing, which included rubbing ash on his forehead, placing his red dot just right and making sure he didn’t have any cum stains on his orange robe. After I took a couple of pictures, he indicated that I needed to pay him. I left him some change and he seemed annoyed, as if I hadn’t given him enough. I told him to fuck off and so he painted the word, “OFF” on a nearby monkey and fucked it.
Another time in town I saw a bunch of orange robes. I offered one a fig from my pack and he looked at it as if it were a crappy offering. I said to him, “Bitch, I don’t care how down and out you are—you show gratitude when someone offers you something!” I then offered a passing orange robe a fig and he took it and smiled warmly. I went after him and gave him the whole pack. Coming back to the orange rat pack, I bent the ungrateful orange robe over a table and made him my ashram bitch.
Another incident surrounding the “authentic” swami happened when the swami walked into a store where Lina spent all her free time buying useless trinkets when she wasn’t being “spiritual.” The store owner was so touched that a man in orange entered his establishment that he completely forgot his “NO DARKIES IN THE STORE” rule and later voiced to his “friend” Lina—for how else could you describe a relationship between two people where one gives the other money and the other in exchange gives up their goods, or “bads,” as in the case of Thelma the 8th Avenue hooker—how moved he was by the swami entering his store. The most movement I would have felt would be either in my bowels, as seeing such a big pile of bullshit has the same effect on my bowels that the sound of running water has for many regarding opening their urine pipes, or in my lingam, as the sight of any celibate gets me thinking of small boys.
Ninja jumped in and said, “You see, you never know how you can affect a whole person’s life by what to you may be a seemingly insignificant event.” I was like, “What the fu—? Et tu Brute?” It wasn’t “seemingly” insignificant—it was totally insignificant! And if the store owner chose to make it significant, it is in the same vein that Christians make holy water or a virgin birth anything more than Evian’s latest marketing scheme and a promiscuous whore preying on the stupidity of the mindless masses to believe any tall tale.
I saw the documentary Sadhana, which followed an Australian guy who went to India seeking self-awareness. He followed some renunciate bum, dressed like him, wiped his ass with dried leaves like him, washed himself in the freezing waters of the Ganges like him and did his best to find the sense in the stupidity, for the truth was that he was just follower someone blindly who wasn’t even as charming as Hitler and the sought reward of “enlightenment” was much more intangible than the distinct smell of burnt Jew.
But who is to say that that bum could show this man anything? Why did he attach himself to this fraud? Because he had no possessions, slept outside and wiped his ass with twigs and berries. Yeah, I can see the interview now:
“Hi, I’m looking for an enlightened master who can guide me to an understanding of my Higher Self.”
“I play with doo-doo!”
“Uh, so are you telling me that from the very bowels of our existence we can create a beauty that parallels heaven?”
“Wipey me butt with a pine cone!”
“Ah, so you’re saying that to remove the debris of the past sometimes requires some tough scrubbing.”
“Fucky little boys!”
“Now I see, that only in the innocence of youth can one expect to reach full satisfaction. Sir, I would like to follow you around until the end of time.”
“Suck my dick!”
“Oh, so there is an initiation involved, where I must forego all my old conditioning of right and wrong in order to enter the path.”
“Shut your fuckin’ mouth and start sucking!”
“Oh, a Zen koan: How can one suck a cock if his mouth is closed? I will work on this, Master.”
“Get on your knees!”
“Oh, of course. I must supplicate myself to the higher wisdom to begin—“
And if the renunciate had a fly it would have made a loud opening ZIP sound. And if the Australian lap dog had a brain, he would have amscrayed out of there and took the next plane back to the land down under and stopped looking for sunlight under rocks.
Later in the documentary, they went to the Kumbha Mela, a celebration that happens once every twelve years where the losers who run off to live in caves because they can’t function in society come down and feed their egos as the millions of Indians with no self-respect treat them like they are somehow special because they have managed to live off of cactus and bird droppings. A couple of men threw themselves down in the dirt and rolled around on the ground that the cave losers had just walked. Why? Because they considered these people holy. Why? Because they wore the costume that the superstitions of these dirt-rollers had conditioned into them.
Some people seem to think this movie was a great representation of the spirituality of India. I saw it as a pathetic example of how some cowards act a certain way, mindless followers respect them for their cowardice, and then the foreigners think they are so hip and respectful for seeing cowardice and kow-tow down to it as something holier than thou. The Kumbha Mela is nothing more than a great Douche Fest.
We have all these aphorisms in our lexicon like, “Don’t judge a book by the cover” or “One Truth, many paths” and yet we do judge a book by its cover and think that if we judge it a “good” book that somehow our judgment will be forgiven. And we seem to claim that all paths are just as valid but somehow we place the underwearless OM chanter higher up on the spiritual pedestal than the Calvin Klein pantied heavy metal headbanger.
Putting on a fuckin’ costume, be it an orange robe or a fake name, doesn’t make you any more “authentic”; it makes you a douche that thinks Who You Are relies upon your clothes or your label. I like costumes but, unlike the “authentic” Indian swamis, I know it is just ridiculous nonsense and that while the costume may rest against my skin, it can never penetrate beyond my surface—even if it receives praise.
“What’s my real name?” Why don’t you just feel me, taste me, learn from me, be with me, enjoy me and not worry about labeling me. If you’re kneeling in front of me, you won’t be able to call out anything anyway. And if you’re not kneeling in front of me, you’re probably looking for some other “spiritual” dick to suck—instead of putting in all the sweat, blood and tears of years of yoga study, so that eventually you can suck your own.
Preach it!
Can I get an AUM-en? Praise Shiva!