new age – Becoming Human

Street religion

cyberdog_and_grafitti_by_we_will_break-d31amhx — Nigel Harvey Photography. Source : http://we-will-break.deviantart.com/

London on a Saturday night is brimming with raw sexual energy. Party goers dress to impress – and to excite.

A couple of hours earlier I had been in the delightful energy of the alternative fashion scene in Camden Market, beating out ecstatic dance music and brimful of creativity (at this point, I have to link to Cyberdog and Sai Sai, I just love them too much!).

I’m not sure if the denizens of this milieu see themselves as a subculture or counterculture, I have no doubt that society (still) does, but I see them as in the very vanguard of culture, its vibrant, beating heart. They turn me on, excite me, leave me spellbound and dumbstruck at their artistic prowess. Where stuffy old conservatives see decadence and degeneration, I see the opposite… cadence, generation, life springing inexhaustibly from its source.

Leaving Camden market, I was on my way to a self-styled “Ecstatic Dance” event. There was live tribal-style dance music with drums and other instruments, accompanied by incantations to Gaia and helper spirits, all mixed up with yoga breathing and chakra meditations. The participants were dressed casually – read, in many cases, badly – and they interacted very little with each other. While the music was OK, it was nowhere near the ecstatic heights of what I had been listening to in a mere retail store a few hours before. And raw vegan food meant lots of sugar and plenty of chocolate.

I’m not knocking it. Well OK, I am, but the thing is this. One experience was creative and ecstatic, if maybe lacking in self-awareness. The other was derivative and stale, a veneer of spirituality on top of behavior with which everyone was comfortable. No remise en question. An attempt to recreate a tribal dance and shamanic healing “vibe”, but achieving at most only something of the form, very little of the substance.

In the world of spiritual practice there is nothing which is true or false, but there are some things which are authentic and alive and there are other things which are stultifying and dead. The two may resemble each other in form, but they differ wildly in spirit.

Spirituality, you see, is creative. It is an attempt first of all to imagine, and then to create, a more beautiful world. There are innumerable ways of doing that, but there are many more ways of failing to do so. The spiritual seeker is an artist. Copying someone else’s form of spirituality is nothing more than plagiarism. It will never put you in touch with yourself. That is what people who have no wish really to change are doing all over the world, day in day out, and it makes no difference if they do it in a traditional place of worship within an established religion, or in a community center hired for the occasion with an ad hoc crowd of revelers who found each other, as we did, on the internet. Of course, learning from a true master in any sphere of life may be a wise choice of apprenticeship. But this does not change that there is great art, and there are sad imitations.

Spirituality is out on the streets these days (perhaps it always was). It is the quality of all those who rebel against social conditioning, who strike out on their own or with a group of friends, who believe in themselves and dare to change the world, but never retreat from it. It goes as unnoticed by self-styled new agers as it does by the established church, yet it is way more authentic, way more life-affirming, than either. This post is my attempt to tell these kids (of all ages) that those who are really spiritual esteem them beyond measure. That if only they have the courage to stick with who they are, explore and, over time, deepen their youthful intuitions, they will make the world better for all of us. And while peaceful meditation in nature and solitary moments under the stars may be just as numinous, I wish more of us would cast aside stale, “ecstatic” asceticism and worship there, in the thick of life, at its source.

Oh, and I wish that they would start their parties just a wee bit earlier… 😉

God, sang Faithless, is a DJ. But not quite. In fact, it’s the DJ that is God.

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.

With the kisses of his mouth

I just finished reading Monique Roffey’s “With the Kisses of his Mouth”, an astonishingly forthright – if frustratingly incomplete – account of the author’s exploration of her sexuality following her breakup from her former husband, through casual sex dating, swinging, tantra and new age practices.

The book is so personal that I have hesitated in how to review it. It feels like I have become a party to confidences which normally stay safely confined in workshop spaces, as if a private diary had been left on a train and discovered by me inadvertently. In short, it seems indecent to respond publicly, and even more so in a critical, if I hope sympathetic tone. On the other hand, the decision to publish so uncensored an account belongs to the author, and puts her views on record. By virtue of this it makes a leap from subjectivity to intersubjectivity, occupying a shared space which is also mine. I also get a sense that part of the author’s purpose is to invite readers to react. So here goes with my thoughts.

There are already several reviews out there. Julie Myerson’s in The Guardian is excellent and I largely share it. The book has an engaging character despite its literary flaws, and this is essentially because, at all times, one senses the author is being breathtakingly honest – to the point, indeed, of a degree of dullness at times. Literary critique should however be carefully distinguished from the slutshaming disguised as esthetics that has evidently motivated a number of her reviewers, and which I feel no obligation to reproduce.

As I have some familiarity with the settings portrayed in the book as well as with the quest that underlies it – and care about it also – my own review is from a different angle.

There is no denying this is a courageous book. It captures a lot of the flavor of tantra in the UK, and also of the other places the author visits and discusses, insofar as I am familiar with them – Cap d’Agde for instance. I am glad she is proud of her sexual quest and willing to say so. This is a major contribution to creating a sex-positive climate for her peers, from which we can all only benefit. However, I do find the book, as an account of a quest which is ultimately and obviously spiritual – as the title of the book, taken from the Biblical Song of Songs implies – painfully self-absorbed.

Moved by the author’s predicament, one reads on hoping at some point she will transcend the limitations of her own tragic discourse on love and achieve a new triumphant synthesis; and yet ultimately this is not so. This gives the book a feeling of incompleteness and anticlimax which I found frustrating. The attempt at a synthesis at the end feels little like one, and more, in fact, like a distraction from the themes discussed throughout the book.

Viewed from Europe, with most of my experiences in Osho-related and German milieu, which stress humanistic psychology and meditation rather than sex and esotericism (much less BDSM), the UK tantra scene the author describes – accurately I believe – looks erratic, veering off into new age meanders the purpose of which can only be to escape the path inward. Roffey’s book is absorbed with the question of who she is: but not yet really as a spiritual enquiry; it comes across still primarily as an attempt to salvage the ego. The author’s journey – perhaps also her decision to publish the book – appears as a quest for an intellectual and/or relational refuge which would finally allow her to affirm that how she is, is actually OK. This quest, by its very existence, however, is evidence she is still consumed by doubts on this score. Her inner dialectic between salvation and self-doubt is markedly narcissistic and ultimately, I found, also became for this reason tedious in the retelling (scarcely a word attempts to establish a bridge between writer and reader; all this is left to intuition). Yet there seems to be little or no awareness of this indelicate degree of self-centeredness. It would have been the job of her spiritual teachers to point this out; I am a little disappointed if they have not. (Astonishingly, Osho is dismissed in the book as “much vilified”; in my view there is no more profound and practical teacher, and it sounds like Roffey knows him only at second hand).

The dilettantism of the author’s quest is illustrated especially by her discussion, in the closing pages, of Quodoushka and her valedictory declaration that she has discovered herself to be “monogamous”.

Now Quodoushka, apart from being hilariously funny (and hard to spell), has little else going for it. It is a patent and unimaginative fraud, as the link to the Wikipedia article makes amply evident, best known for (and in Roffey’s account largely limited to) a somewhat bizarre character typology based on genital types. In contrast, however, to the Reichian analysis of character, or the one offered by the enneagram (discussed by me here and here) – the purpose of which is to uncover and deconstruct patterns of childhood conditioning and to return to essence – the Quodoushka typology relies on allegedly objective anatomical features to categorize people into categories which they then can hide behind, but never change.

Conceivably there might be elements of truth in this typology, though I highly doubt this given how ridiculous it is. But in any case the spiritual point of this – other than the convenience of escapism – eludes me. Ultimately we are one; it cannot be that acquired character traits have in fact some indelible nature. And more particularly, it cannot be that some of us are “monogamous” and others not, or suffice for our salvation that we accept such a conclusion and move on. It can only be, as I have argued time and again on this blog, that those who stress monogamy have sensed certain truths but missed others, and those who stress polyamory may have lofty ideals but still often fail to engage with the challenge of unconditional love for actual real people because it is too painful a mirror of themselves.

One may, perhaps, accept that one is conditioned in a certain way and likely to remain so conditioned; but then ones spiritual quest is at an end. And this is not the kind of end to which, in my eyes, such a book should point.

I in no way want to denigrate what the author means by identifying as “monogamous”, but her adoption of this label seems to preclude further enquiry and, against the backdrop of a hoped-for epiphany, is wildly disappointing.

Roffey uses the term “monogamous” as if she knows what it is. But she, and we, do not know what it is, at all. We have no idea, or rather a wealth of conflicting ideas. “Monogamy”, as uncountable studies show, is an essentially contested concept. The behavior she recounts in the book moreover – with, if I am not wrong, some pride and satisfaction – is hardly “monogamous” in any identifiable sense, past or present. She seems simply to conclude that it lacks something and remains unsatisfying – and thereby prepares the bed for her inane critics and the chorus of self-justifying I-told-you-so’s.

This “something missing” she leaves, in line with the dominant social mythology, to serendipity, to the future, to a force outside of herself. The hackneyed, and overbearingly dehumanizing, “knight in shining armor” projection which so disappoints in every encounter man has with woman: that moment of realization that it will never be you that is object of love, but only ever a distorted representation of you.

It must be obvious, and it is obvious to all true spiritual teachers, that this claimed contingency of self-realization is only ever a sign of resistance to self-knowledge. What Roffey seeks is what we all seek, and few of us, whatever our relationship status or history, ever actually find, namely the ability to utterly abandon ourselves and to dance in love among the stars. But, to this end, members of the opposite sex, and relationships, are merely vehicles. The turgid institution we call monogamy is antithetical to the desire for transcendence in most cases, and tangential to it at best. Marriage simply is not the logical consequence of the numinous rapture we call “falling in love” which it purports to be. In self-identifying as “monogamous”, Roffey makes an ersatz projection which at the same time precludes what she is looking for – unimpaired and ecstatic love.

My advice to the reader is to reach beyond this well-disguised counsel of despair. Love where love is – as Roffey has been doing in practice – and become aware and compassionate towards the feelings of incompleteness which result, because they are a guide. Monogamy is not a precondition of plenitude. Pace Aristophanes and his drunken nonsense, there is nothing out there for you to find in order to become complete, but only things inside of you, negative self-judgments, to drop. Sex has no importance at all, it is just a celebration of what is. It only becomes important because it is so problematic: the barriers we put in place to our sexual expression tell us almost everything about our conditioned selves and our inability to love. The monogamy fixation, by abandoning the moment and subordinating it to expectations and unmet needs, voids sexual experience of its essence, voids it in fact of what we sense is there and some of us imagine to imply monogamous pre-eminence. Monogamy clutches at stars, for fear they will elude us. But they will not elude us; it suffices to open our heart and they are always there.

Life may certainly be lived in such a way as to be marked by deep union with just one soul. There is no reason why not. However, there is equally no need to choose this or to accord it preference, and still less normative status, blindly unaware of the mixture of motivations that contribute to the moment of rapture and the meaning given to it. By projecting on a man the burden of impossible roles to play, a woman can only estrange herself – and her partner – from self-realization and numinosity.