You know your life’s purpose has become too narrow when yoga is the biggest problem you have. Since the summer kicked in in earnest I’ve been remembering a lot of my old internal policies, one of which was to maintain yoga as an accompaniment to/facilitator of a rich life, not the focus of life itself, and that seems to be working out better than the latter. Asana itself is of course only one-eighth of the yogic smorgasbord at the best of times, and studying the yamas and niyamas more as a memo pad for guidance rather than the 10 Commandments Redux gives you a nice flexible template for contextualizing life’s peccadilloes: remember the light, basically. Remember that everything is sacred, and behave accordingly.
I'm a cowboy, on a steel horse I ride
Everything is sacred, especially Star Wars. M got into Clone Wars a little while ago and I was always a bit distant from it, since it seemed to just be the same lame Lucasian dialogue over and over again, combined with preposterous CG antics and artificial conflict. Since I cut my teaching schedule down I’ve been getting into it all over again and then last night we rewatched Episodes II and III, the “new ones” for those of you not as nerdly as I.
The first time you watch Episodes I – III your focus is basically: 1. cool FX 2. hey, there’s some characters we recognize and their origin stories, always cute a la “Batman Begins” 3. we’ve never seen more than 2 living Jedi in one place and it’s oddly satisfying to see their little United Nations interspecies panel with their matching meditation cushions [retroactive note to Samuel L. Jackson: practice more hip openers or sit on a block] and then the rest of the time is spent in agony over script, performance or awkward animations. Now that I’ve bricked in the whole aesthetic bridge AND political plot via Clone Wars none of it seems as jarring. Either I’ve redorkulated completely and crawled into this silly little world to the point of being unable to criticize it properly, or it really was as Lucas claimed, a grand sprawling epic covering some richly ambiguous moral territory.
The ambiguity hinges on two key points, to my mind: the political unrest and the spiritual crises. The political unrest is groovy to watch unfold in SW:TCW because basically the Jedi and their clone backers are cocky eminent-domain jackasses, barely kept coherent by the Jedi’s rules, and then of course guided by the Republic and all the complexity therein [different populations' special interests, topped off with Palpatine's eleventh-dimensional-chess architecture], so “the good guys” ceases to have any real meaning after a few episodes. Apart from the ghastly overt racism of the series itself, the clones are also viciously xenophobic, an effect made doubly creepy because of their self-similarity. Anakin is of course the most cavalier about torture and violence, which he gets away with because he’s so effective at what he does. It’s made clear several times that the more conventional Jedi like Luminara are disciplined and tightly wrapped…but that their missions would have failed had Anakin not swashbuckled his way into the situation.
This is the fascinating point for me: In Episode II, Master Windu and Yoda have a little chat about how basically they are made of fail: they can’t use the Force to perceive space-time the way they used to, since they couldn’t sense the creation of the clone army over a period of 10 years even with all their Jedi whiskers a-tingling. Yoda blames the Sith for this, but I think there’s more compelling read on it: The Jedi, pre-Anakin, represent stale old energy that can’t function effectively within the constraints of their own policies. The fact that they are politically aligned with the Republic in spite of their own ambivalence about it, the fact that they forsake relationships and “attachment”causing themselves misery and loss, and that they cannot act without the express permission of the Council, leading to the tedious bureaucratic stalemate felt on all levels of Episodes I and II: these are all signs of a dying structure. Anakin/Darth Vadar is a genuine bastard, but he DOES bring balance to the force in that he gets it moving and flowing again, at the cost of many lives. The take-away in Clone Wars is that in order to get the job done you have to think and act outside the box, and how many poorly-written speeches go back and forth between Master and Padawan before we get the picture? Anakin also has that weird picnic with Padme in Episode II where he moans about the tedium of democracy; you are pretty much invited to hate him throughout Episode II since he is the whiniest little punk of all time and this scene is no exception, but in retrospect it’s pretty obvious the Republic has administrative problems, to put it mildly.
Within the scale of our favourite characters and droids and furry mascots there appear to be Good and Bad guys, and Lucas helps
Discipline?
us out by coding everything properly [black clothes/brown clothes, white people/brown people, minor keys/major keys]. If you zoom out and take the Big Picture® though, the cycle we find our heroes in in Episode I is the end of the Lakshmi phase [overripe refinement, cloying ritual and bloated, tedious speechmaking]. Anakin is Shiva, the destroyer, and it’s really kind of too bad that there is no space made for his crazy genius within the ranks of the Jedi but they have no policies for him, he’s just outside the law and they leave him there. I think a Tantric set of Jedi guidelines would have enabled him to use his power for good, but instead he’s inwardly tortured two ways: through his natural emotional darkness and pain, AND THEN guilt for being a crap Jedi. Most of his lines are combinations of these two poles: how he really feels, and then how he knows he’s not supposed to feel that way. Any time he tries to “out” himself and his emotions to one of the Masters they just give him the same old line about quieting his mind which [we know, because we know the story] is WILDLY inadequate and actually exacerbates his suffering.
Lucas does give a little nod to Tantra by way of the Dark Side. Can’t remember which character it is that says they focus on themselves as individuals as opposed to following the greater good, a misunderstanding about Tantric philosophy that is indeed pernicious. The whole key to Palpatine/Sidious’s master plan is, as he creepily yodels while he electrocutes Samuel L, “UNLIMITED POWER”. Personally, I don’t find his “triumph” that compelling. Most of the Sith, they keep winning and the more they win the less happy they are, so they are clearly NOT focussing on themselves as individuals; would a Tantrika let himself get all pasty and wizened and grody-looking? [the constant theme from Grievous through to Vader, "he's more machine now than man, twisted and evil"] And they are at least as disciplined and rigorous as the Jedi, if not more so; Dooku in particular. So the Dark Side is a caricature of what will happen if you release your stringent rules’n'regs, but doesn’t actually reflect the reality of that freedom. Anakin knows there’s something creepy about Palpatine but he’s just so Goddamn happy to have somebody to TALK to, some other worldview besides the Council, he gets suckered into the other pole of a false binary.
Hm, maybe this is that old Hobbesian/Freudian debate about what civilization actually helps us do: whether it is keeping a lid on a powder keg of lust and violence and left to our own devices we too would be black-robed power drunkards, scrabbling over our fellows like crabs in a bucket…or if we have put these systems in place to ENHANCE our lives and when the energy gets stale and old, it’s time to move on. Would you really never get out of bed again if you didn’t have to go to work? Would you really eat nothing but pizza if you relaxed your dietary boundaries? Or is there a third way, a middle way, a way of being authentically human and feeling deeply and honestly, and remembering your own sacredness?
One thing I do take away from the morality play of SW is: the more powerful you are, the more you have to watch your six, which is why I think it’s such a bummer that the Jedi provided such threadbare guidance for Anakin. They were wise, and paid lip service to a non-dual worldview, but when it came right down to it they still had those technical question marks in their practice when it came time to address their impending extinction and Vader’s rise to power. They didn’t know how to help him. So, in your own practice, make sure it works for you: make sure you’re getting the answers that take you where you want to be. You can call that egotistical and self-centred if you like, and that may be coded as the Dark Side, but I don’t think there’s any other metric to assess your progress on your path.
Everything is sacred, especially Tilt To Live. I’m currently #1 in Vancouver with a Code Red score of 23 million; it took a lot of disciplined practice to get there and it feels good. UNLIMITED POWER.
