Thursday, March 25, 2004


fun blog site & smell the coffee

so our pal q. (not that q!) is getting his great new nyc-oriented site up and running, and naturally it has a fun list of new york blogs. since several of us he's been kind enough to list live in bklyn, i'm not sure exactly why it's called manhattan.com. . .i suppose it's just another acknowledgment that bklyn remains the chicest borough.

here's a big bccy hug to q; trust me, his site's gonna take off like a rocket.

maybe this should be called "regional coffee culture, part xxii:"

"we linger forever in a state of dreamy nursing, suckling our mother's breast to a very late age, finally graduating to the slightly more independent bottle. even this, some of us have not given up too easily, the transition made more palatable as our parents sometimes spiked our bottle milk with grown-up coffee. 'you want a café con leche?' is still our first question to a friend or relative needing a little nurturing."

this charming piece on coffee culture in cuba is a prize, a total prize. . .

and this looks like a fascinating yoga workshop: the founder of mcafee anti-virus software -- who's now a yoga teacher with his own center -- on tour with former kripalu guy amrit desai. that's an unusual pairing. or is it?

what's a little confusing to me is mcafee's stated emphasis on the so-called siddhis. why?

why would you want them? patanjali in his yoga sutras frankly calls them obstacles to progress in yoga (for example, pada 3, 38).

they are also a form of "citta vritti," or "mental constructs, fluctuations," and so are dead-ends. i mean, they aren't even worth talking about if you have a serious yoga practice, you know?

i remain more in line with mark whitwell's famous statement about yoga, asana, and various so-called states of consciousness: "pointless movement, tourist consciousness."

when he says this i think he means that it's a trap to become too fixated on perfect form in the postures, and that the pursuit of supposedly altered states of mind in yoga is tourism: maybe amusing for a day, but not a serious goal worth pursuing in our yoga. . .

i agree with him when he says we should avoid an attainment yoga. i'm pretty sure that leslie kaminoff feels the same way.

to seek after these supposed and dubious "psychic powers" (which i doubt even exist!) seems just another avenue of greed. once you had them, wouldn't you just be a total ego-monster, even if you played the role of mind-reading, invisible superhero. . . .?

there's nothing we need but what we have. everything's already here, you know? in fact, most of us are burdened with more than is useful --- as erich schiffmann says, "love's what's left when you let go of everything you don't need."

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