“Always have a deep sense of connection to the past, a subversive memory that constitutes wind at your back. You are who you are because somebody loved you, somebody cared for you, somebody attended to you. Make sure that love flows through you, that’s what it means to keep love on the one.”
– Cornel West and Bootsy Collins, “Freedumb,” The Funk Capital of the World (2011)

Sometime in 1886 a woman named Myrtle Fillmore attended a lecture by the Christian Science practitioner Eugene B. Weeks. Myrtle suffered from numerous physical infirmities, including tuberculosis and incessant hemorrhoids, and it was in part these maladies that brought her to Weeks’ lecture. Her husband Charles, a Kansas City real estate man, left the event unimpressed, but Myrtle was inspired by this affirmation: “I am a child of God and so I do not inherit illness.” After several months of prayer and repetition of that affirmation, Myrtle believed that she had healed herself of her afflictions. She used a new form of knowledge to recreate her relationship with the divine and, consequentially, to recreate her relationship with her body. Scholars of American religion now usually call that knowledge “New Thought.”

Eventually Myrtle convinced Charles of what she had learned. He would then use the techniques to heal himself of the long-term effects of a childhood hip and leg injury. Together with Myrtle, he would begin a healing practice, treating people in the Kansas City area with their New Thought techniques. By 1890, Charles’ real estate business had begun to decline, and their healing practice had experienced some success. They decided to publish a magazine, first titled Modern Thought but soon becoming Unity Magazine, and with that act of print culture they inaugurated what would soon be known as the Unity School of Christianity. Unity claimed, at least in its early years, that individuals possessed spiritual union with the divine if and when they possessed physical well-being in the material world. It became Myrtle and Charles Fillmore’s mission to create and propagate a community focused on such a union. And their mission worked, as prayer groups begat churches, which begat associations, which begat the denominational structure that Unity operates by today.

The Fillmores were also especially able to align their emerging Protestant community with market forces, and to that end they quickly institutionalized their healing experiences in order to have the widest reach possible. The magazine started as a sort of Reader’s Digest of the New Thought movement. In their thought the Fillmores incorporated many early-twentieth century Protestant practices and norms, including prayer meetings, educational facilities, and a focus on the Bible as a source of religious authority. As the movement continued to develop, other people involved with Unity created a ministers’ association to authorize ministerial licensure and standardize the movement’s teachings. Other early bodily practices, such as vegetarianism and (briefly and obliquely) sexual abstinence, focused practitioners on recreating the material body as a spiritual body. While Unity was not unique in any of its recommendations, its fusion of metaphysical ideas and Protestant practices was. Myrtle and Charles Fillmore were American spiritual seekers who recognized and appreciated their past, their culture, and the role of community in authenticating experience.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James insisted that the individual’s feelings were the root of religion and that the tenets, rituals, and institutions of religion were but later additions that could only echo the true experience. For James, the real religious experience is ineffable, noetic, transient, and passive, all characteristics that could only be verified by the individual claiming the experience. What is fascinating about Unity is the way that it connected individual rituals with community contexts, how it conjoined the priesthood of all believers with a highly individuated metaphysics. In some sense, Unity sought to institutionalize the kinds of experiences so celebrated in James’ diagnosis of the healthy-minded.

The making of community is to me a fascinating and complicated element of any description of spirituality. Do contemporary American spiritual seekers enact spirituality by forming communities? I think one can make a convincing argument that the various new paradigm communities foster a contemporary American spirituality not unlike the Fillmores. Unitarian Universalists and liberal Mennonites qualify as spiritual seekers who are concerned with their communities and their relationships with the surrounding culture. In fact, I suspect that many of the members of more conventional religious groups would insist upon the very spiritual nature of their religious lives. Courtney Bender’s The New Metaphysicals (2010) demonstrates how even those seekers who most disavow institutional life do so on the premise of previous institutional conceptions and organizational structures.

The popular understanding of American spirituality is the claim that the authentic discovery of one’s relationship with the larger world is a project entirely undertaken by an autonomous individual who freely chooses any philosophy or practice that seems to fit their particular life journey. For many spiritual seekers—those religious “nones” who confuse sociological survey—community itself is anathema to authentic religious experience. One need only observe the continuing use of the extremely problematic concept of “brainwashing” in reference to religious communities with which a person disagrees to understand the extent to which Americans believe that authentic religious experience can only be had or adjudicated by an individual independent of social pressure or community ritual. Spirituality is a proxy for our vision of who we wish to be, and today autonomy seems to be the superior ambition. Yet even as this is so, communities do perpetuate themselves, on terms not merely religious but also spiritual.

Today, Unity churches might house Protestant-style Sunday services, complete with choirs and sermons, Buddhist meditation groups, self-help practices, youth groups, community service initiatives, singles’ nights, and ad hoc discussion groups on any number of spiritual topics, frequently all under the same roof and under the auspices of a trained and licensed Unity minister. A sophisticated web site allows individuals to explore Unity on their own, while also presenting opportunities for community interactions. For most Unity adherents, the spiritual life is one of seeking and exploration, but one done under the aegis of a community of faith.

The author is a doppelganger. Even better on the screen, lit up, big-time circulating word-wide, worldwide, s-i-m-u-l-t-a-n-e-o-u-s-l-y m-a-n-i-f-e-s-t-i-n-g. Illusion of coherence, this: neat and tidy on the screen, a well reasoned argument.

I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world, and I remember Nadja.

Nadja, four-times removed: 1. Somebody—which is to say, some body, allegedly—female in Paris, purportedly mad, institutionalized, the object of Surrealist André Breton’s obsession; 2. the main character in Breton’s 1928 novel Nadja, and by that fact immortalized, big-time circulating, simultaneously manifesting; 3. the ghost that haunted (in bodily time) or haunts (in doppelganger time) André Breton—either in Paris, or in the novel, or both—after he breaks off their 10-day rendezvous because Breton can not live with the thought of her as some body; 4. an introductory trope to this reflection (on automatic writing) that took on a life of its own the moment I began to yawp over the roofs of the world.

Qui suis-je?

Who am I?

Who wrote that?

Breton—transfixed by Nadja’s stream-of-consciousness, allegedly irrational, thought-words/thought-worlds—as the opening sentence of Nadja—and now “I”, coming to here underneath this blinking cursor that no longer exists as you read about it now on the big screen lit up (once upon a time, which is to say before time as we now experience it, I could have written on the page—which is to say, on the way to nowhere in particular, or everywhere in general, but here we are now, whatever this might mean, exactly.)

Good question, this qui suis-je. And might we not add as well, où? Where are we, exactly, now, anyway, tossed about, swaying side-to-side, undulating in the midst of this chaotic sea of words, electronic information, simultaneously glowing gigabytes, white hot, magic discourse, published or perished or polished or not?

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.

But where was I? Breton likened his own fascination with Nadja to Dr. Theodore Flournoy’s infatuation with Hélène Smith (née Catherine-Elise Muller), that automatic writer (and Surrealist darling, and Spiritualist medium, and later Christian visionary) who left her body in flights to Mars, bringing back the Martian language to Earth, speaking to Flournoy in Martian, writing down the alphabet of Mars for scholars to ponder.

Advertisement from the August 1925 Popular Mechanics.

And who wrote that?

The psychologist Flournoy wrote about Smith and her Martian travels in his Des Indes à la Planete Mars—“From India to the Planet Mars”—published in 1900. No automatic writer he, Flournoy shielded us all from Smith’s madness by explaining the visions—i-n-f-a-n-t-i-l-e r-e-g-r-e-s-s-i-o-n—mercifully providing an illusion of coherence, which is to say a reason, for all of the babble. Thanks to Smith’s own magic, the wily Flournoy entered into the stream-of-printed-consciousness as a rational doppelganger-subject.

Cease now the endless flow of motion!

But it is far too late for that. The automatic writing has been mushrooming, fragmenting, overwhelming, and recombining for a very long time now. I remember John Ballou Newbrough, who in 1880 saw a strange light envelop his hands as he held them over a manual typewriter. The next thing he knew, a manuscript began to write itself. It was Oahspe: a New Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his Angel Embassadors [sic]. (A Sacred History of the Dominions of the Higher and Lower Heavens of the Earth for the Past Twenty-Four Thousand Years, together with a Synopsis of the Cosmogony of the Universe; the Creation of Planets; the Creation of Man; the Unseen Worlds; the Labor and Glory of Gods and Goddesses in the Etherean Heavens; with the New Commandments of Jehovah to Man of the present Day. With Revelations from the Second Resurrection, Formed in Words in the Thirty Third Year of the Kosmon Era.) I remember Andrew Jackson Davis, who in 1845 lapsed into mesmeric trance at the hands of his operator S.S. Lyons. Two years later, the paradigmatic made-in-America metaphysical text appeared in print, “by and through” Davis. It was entitled The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind (In Three Parts. Part First. Any theory, hypothesis, philosophy, sect, creed, or institution, that fears investigation, openly manifests its own error. Part Second. Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge. Part Third. When distributive justice pervades the social world, virtue and morality will bloom with an immortal beauty: while the Sun of Righteousness will arise in the horizon of universal industry, and shed its genial rays over all the fields of peace, plenty, and HUMAN HAPPINESS!) I remember the Admiral of the Ocean Sea and the pre-1492 oikoumene cosmic-world-map before it exploded, supernova-like, into a multitude of worlds. I remember Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg and the Word before it erupted, Vesuvius-like, into a googolplex of words.

I write, “I.” Scribo ergo sum: the only way to be, coherently, worldwide, amid this raging molten meltdown.

Advertisement from the September 1926 The Rotarian.

You vapors, I think I have risen with you, moved away to distant
continents, and fallen down there, for reasons,
I think I have blown with you you winds;
You waters I have finger’d every shore with you,
I have run through what any river or strait of the globe has run through,
I have taken my stand on the bases of peninsulas and on the high
embedded rocks…

Neat and tidy on the screen, some semblance of form still remains, which is to say this glowing white rectangle, this body of yours slouched in a chair, my body nowhere to be found in this doppelganger-ether-ghost, automatic-Martian-author-voice, simultaneously-manifesting, which is to say, now is as good as any time to break from the stream, the other doppelgangers notwithstanding, and may automatic writing be praised forevermore.

Counted among my pantheon of personal heroes while growing up in California’s East Bay area were Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong. I was a strange kid. I still sometimes mimic Cheech’s purposefully exaggerated Chicano accent, American English with a Spanish rhythm and Aztec intonation, also known as Calo or Mexican American “Spanglish.” Its a sound distinct to the borderlands experience; the echo of Aztlan: the Chicana/o mythical homeland; a sanctuary; a pipe dream. When I speak like Cheech to my close friend and academic colleague, who I affectionately call Chong, we deploy a linguistic code decipherable sometimes only by us, and perhaps a few other confidantes. Referring to four twenty, I often say “los santos,” or just santos, which translates loosely as “the saints.” We conspire in our devotion to them. Like the Rastafarians, the practice becomes a sacred ritual. For us, praying to the saints, our muertos, is an attempt to connect to the divine; a gestural offering in hopes of elevating our spirits to Elysium; the mythical land of the triumphantly dead, or physically displaced, the heavenly space where the souls of heroes dwell. Aztlan by another name. This, I believe, is how my Chicano hero, Cheech Marin, understands his devotion to los santos.

It’s appropriate that Cheech, a Mexican American, would open the artistic space for the popularization and promotion of marijuana into the soul of American popular culture. The word, la palabra, derives from a distinctly Mexican Spanish, with a folk etymology leading to original usage by a legendary diva, señora Maria Juana. The name resonates. Consider the thinly veiled celebration by the late funk sensation Rick James:

I love you Mary Jane, you’re my main thing,
you make me feel alright, you make my heart sing.
And when I’m feeling low, you come as no surprise,
fill me up with your love, take me to paradise.

But there are many names for marijuana; some call it “the Buddha,” others “Ganja,” “mojo,” “ju ju,” and other nomenclature signifying its spiritual import. And yet, its potential to induce a mystical experience has largely escaped the scholarly gaze of religious studies. The term marijuana came into American usage in 1873, plotted into one of Hubert Howe Bancroft’s racist manifestos, Native Races of the Pacific States. There he impugned Mexicans by attributing to them what he deemed barbaric rituals, including the smoking of herbs and roots for purposes of conjuring hallucinations and states of ecstasy. Bancroft was blinded by his racialized vision of civilization.

On the other hand, in 1910 William James claimed that any activity or substance that distracted a person’s fixed attention could open up the psychic terrain wherein mystical experiences unfold. Counted among the catalysts were alcohol and psychotropic drugs, which acted as portals to a spiritual place of fresh revelation. In 1932 Walter Benjamin wrote about his experiments with hashish, a concentrated form of marijuana. In his “Hashish in Marseilles,” he describes the sensations of watching himself from outside of his body: ecstasis. When walking the streets his senses are heightened; he is penetrated by the aromas, the sonic vibrations, the aesthetic assault of a hot day in a pleasantly crowded French city. “It was not far from the first café of the evening,” he proclaims, “in which, suddenly, the amorous joy dispensed by the contemplation of some fringes blown by the wind had convinced me that the hashish had begun to work.” Remarkably he and James (both Rick and William) agree: “And when I recall this state,” Benjamin concludes, “I should like to believe that the hashish persuades nature to permit us—for less egoistic purposes—that squandering of our existence that we know in love.”

The act of smoking cannabis is an erotic spirituality, a praxis initiated by intense sucking, with the goal of capturing the maximum amount of smoke, of inhaling deeply, pulling and holding the breath; testing the limit; spirit. And then there is the release; the small death, that rapturous moment marking the satisfaction and joy of surrender. That is the pivotal movement when the lungs and the heart rock, when pleasure breaches the limen between the sacred and the profane.

Exhaling, some can shape the billowy plume of smoke with their mouths into an ethereal art form.

Indeed, marijuana is a gateway drug. Temporal borders seem to collapse as the act recalls the ancient sages who deemed the smoke sacred in its own right. Like the burning of copal, the cloud signals another state of consciousness, a liminal place where the psyche is permeable to fresh revelation. There, thoughts are intensified, scrambled, and reassembled into fragmented narratives that disrupt mundane cognition. Identity is questioned, challenged, opened, expanded. Though somewhat intellectual, that is the spiritual work.

So marijuana is medicine, at once traditional and modern. Today, sixteen states and our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, have recognized its medicinal value and legalized medical marijuana. Hence, in states like my own, California and Colorado, pot production and consumption have created an epic artistic and spiritual awakening. The shift from an underground culture to a mainstream movement is transforming American society and architecture. A neighborhood in Oakland has been renamed “Oaksterdam” and is the site of the first American Cannabis college. Recently thousands jammed into the Colorado Events Center for the 2011 Cannabis Cup competition and expo. All across America dispensaries are sites of spirituality. New strains of marijuana (Purple Haze, Train Wreck, AK47, Blue Skies, Yellow Kush), new forms of distribution, and new information all contribute to the emergence of artistic and ritualistic communities. Dispensaries frequently hold events and those in California can offer areas to medicate, free food, television and movies, internet access, and games, providing a platform to experience shared rites and community—the communitas.

The dispensary is a liminal space wherein the spirituality of cannabis can implode and explode. Each time I experience the warm embrace of my dispensary, I bask in the light emanating from the freedom of religion we as Americans so pompously celebrate. This is my church. There I connect to a community of likeminded believers and practitioners. There I am confronted by the awe-inspiring miracle of marijuana cultivation and presentation, the dozens of strains each distinct in color, shape, texture, odor, and effect. I am dazzled by the narrative of mixed strains, and by the array of precise medicinal properties each boasts. How can my provider be so knowledgeable of this one sacred plant? And how can there be so much to know? He, my “caretaker,” is truly my priest, a master of the botanical arts, a holy alchemist of spiritual ecstasy. My offering seems the lesser of our ritual exchange; money is eclipsed by the weight of his gifts.

¡Viva la Revolución!

El Shaddai is one of postwar Guatemala’s loudest, most successful Neopentecostal churches. With dozens of satellite churches throughout the Americas, with 25,000 parishioners throughout Guatemala, this mega-church pushes a predictably Pentecostal proposal: restoring the city for Jesus while preaching the good news to all nations. An observably active congregation has answered this call, with parishioners dividing their days into hours and their hours into minutes—all for the glory of God. Thematized months organize this collective effort. There is the month of evangelism. There is the month of divine healing. And, There is the month of praying for the nations. This is a vigorous kind of spirituality, one committed to action and to results.

Considering the seemingly unending energies of such Pentecostal labor, it is intriguing that a central component of most every Pentecostal political program, is rest—that is, planned relaxation and respite. To be sure, rest gets its own special monthly accord, but as with calls for collective effort and evangelism, rest is a practice supposedly superseding any month-bound allotment, stringing together your everyday. While Pentecostal restfulness mixes today with neoliberal regimes of self-help, it is important to stress that rest—that is, the activity of inactivity—has been a recognizable spiritual practice for millennia. Think the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day. Think Genesis 2:2, “and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” Rest is an observation that complicates popular understandings of spirituality as a mode of religious activity.

Sometimes spirituality emerges through the very absence of activity. Yet for it to become spirituality, it cannot be an absence. Spirituality is practice, making inactivity itself a rather arduous spiritual pursuit. The following is taken from Protestant Spiritual Exercises: Theology, History, and Practice (Church Publishing, Inc., 1999, pages 82-83). A representative selection taken from a dense archive, the following imperatives begin to explain why El Shaddai might set aside an entire month to rest. Beyond the theological, beyond the liturgical, the spirituality of rest takes considerable time and effort to pursue.

Relaxation Instructions

1. Find a comfortable place on the floor lying on your back. (People who prefer to remain in a chair for health reasons or personal comfort should be invited to do so). Make certain there is amble room for you to move your arms and legs. If you are doing this with a group, make certain you will not be encroaching on the space of people next to you. Take a few moments to notice your body and how it feels. How does your clothing feel? Is anything too tight around your waits or your neck? Loosen tight-fitting close as appropriate until you feel comfortable.

2. Now take a few moments to check on your emotional space. Are you preoccupied with anything? A work project? A relationship? If you feel preoccupied with something, take a few moments and give this over to God for the duration of the exercise. Whatever it is, you can return to it at a later time.

3. Now take a few moments to simply enjoy the quiet. If you have experience with centering yourself, take time now to do that. If you do not have that experience, simply notice the change in the room from activity to quiet. You may notice sound outside the room or the breathing and rustling of others in the room. Notice these sounds and allow yourself to notice again the contrast between activity and quiet. If you feel comfortably closing your eyes and you have not already done so, feel free to close your eyes. If you feel uncomfortable with your eyes closed, stare at a fixed point on the ceiling (if lying down) or floor (if seated).

4. We will begin now the relaxation exercise starting with our fingers and hands. Clench your hands tightly into fists. Feel the tension in your fingers and hands as you make a fist. Hold the tension. Concentrate on the tension. And now relax and feel the contrast between tension and relaxation. Once again clench your hands into fists. Feel the tensions in your fists. Hold the tension. Concentrate on the tension. And now relax and feel the contrast between tension and relaxation.

5. Now with your arms down along your side, stretch your arms straight out. Feel the tension along your arms as you stretch them straight out. Hold the tension. Focus on the tension. And now relax. Enjoy the contrast between tension and relaxation. Now hold your arms straight out and feel the tension in your arms while letting your fingers and hands remain relaxed. Hold the tension. Focus on the tension. And now relax. Enjoy the contrast between tension and relaxation.

There are eight of us tonight at the Tarot School. We’re sitting around a long, brown conference table in a small, grayish white room. The class meets weekly on Monday nights, on the sixteenth floor of a nondescript office building, on Seventh Avenue in New York City. “How will the court case come out?” a woman in her late forties wants to know. “Will it resolve well for me, or I am going to have to pay?” Those sitting around the table stare at her intently, thinking about her question, despite not knowing much more about her situation than what little she has told us. She and an unidentified man are locked in an ambiguous case where she stands to make a considerable amount of money. The case has been dragging; she is tired and would like the entire issue to be resolved so that she can move on with her life. “Okay,” Wald, the co-owner of the school, says, moving us toward the “reading practice” portion of the three-hour class, “who would like to read for Jill? You’re all accomplished readers, some with more knowledge than others, but all of you can answer this question given what you know about Tarot. Who wants to try it? Sara? Sara… why don’t you read the cards for Jill?”

Silence as Sara looks to Wald and then to Ruth Ann, the other co-owner of the school and Wald’s wife, and she smiles a bit shyly, to convince herself that she is up to the task. “Okay, let’s see what they say.” Sara “clears” her cards of negative energies by waving her hand over the pile and then picks them up to shuffle her deck (being the “Universal Waite,” which is an updating of the popular Rider-Waite-Smith deck, which is often abbreviated as the Rider-Waite, thus erasing the authorship of the woman who illustrated the cards, Pamela Coleman Smith). Shuffling the cards deliberately, Sara then lays the deck face down in front of Jill. “Please cut the deck into two piles using your left hand,” she asks. Jill does this, and as she does Sara explains that she will do a spread with two columns—the left column will be the “yes” column, representing the expansive forces that are working toward a positive resolution for Jill, and the right column will be the “no” column, representing restriction or the challenges that may be in the way of such a resolution.

I note to myself that this seems like a pragmatic way to hedge the divinatory challenge of “yes or no” that Jill is posing. Although many people at the school describe themselves as “intuitive” or report receiving unexpected “psychic hits” during the card readings, no one likes to be tested by a strict yes-or-no question.

I feel the pressure of the question and wonder how Sara is feeling about the reading.

A successful reading hinges on the ability to be, as Wald likes to say, “a master of your own ship,” which means someone who is in charge of the reading, who can integrate themselves into the reading, and who can tune in to the message the cards are sending. The mastery here comes in learning to choose your words properly but also putting the person receiving the reading at ease.

“Okay, let’s see what the cards say,” says Sara. “Let’s do the ‘yes’ column first,” she says as she flips over the card. “The Three of Pentacles, oh, a good sign. Now, for the ‘no.’” “The Nine of Wands. Okay.” “Well, the pentacles here seem like a very good sign that you will receive some money or that the case will go in your favor,” Sara says, as she points to the image on the card of three individuals consulting one another within the walls of a cathedral. “This card suggests there may still be some negotiation necessary, and perhaps you won’t receive as much money as you might hope for.” Jill smiles and nods her head. “The three is also known as the Lord of Material Works,” Sara says referring to the card’s esoteric title, which are additional attributes that the Golden Dawn associated with the cards in the late 1880s. “This seems to suggest that the business of the case will be handled smoothly and, ultimately, everything will come together.” In the “no” column, however, stands a card depicting a man with a bandage around his head, bruised and leaning against a single wand, in front of a wall of eight other wands. Sara says, “well, in the other column, there is some work to be done or something that you still might have to fight for. I don’t think you can rest just yet, or perhaps you feel like you have been fighting forever, and this might mean making one last push.”

Jill looks around the room as the rest of us are staring at her two cards, putting our own versions of the story together. Sara says, “Ultimately, the case resolves, but you may need to draw on the Lord of Great Strength of the nine. There may be more proceedings, paperwork, a hassle, but since this is a nine, it’s pretty far down on the Tree of Life, so you’re almost there. The final stop would be the ten, but you’re not there yet,” Sara says and gestures around the room. “What do the rest of you think?” One by one, the rest of us offer our interpretations. Jill nods, listening and thanking us. Wald asks, “did this answer your question or help you to feel better about the situation?” “Yes,” Jill says, “because I’m going to try to remember the three and not focus too much on the nine. But sometimes it’s just funny how the cards reflect back to you what you already feel is going on. I had a feeling this is what they would say.”

I practice Iyengar yoga. Yoga is a discipline. It is grounded in a set of teachings about the body and the mind. What this practice has to do with spirituality is, for me, an open question.

There is no question about one thing: to do yoga in America today is to make a statement. Doing yoga says that you are young and flexible, or maybe just that you are older and determined. You care about more than “just exercise.” You, and more than 15 million other people, are in recovery from a steady diet of aerobics or running, or too much time spent with re-runs of Sex and the City. Even those who don’t do yoga will gesture vaguely toward the hope that they “should” do yoga, or “get back to” yoga. It is a $5.7 billion dollar industry, with more than 70,000 teachers. The old days of yoga practitioners wearing their tie-dyed T-shirts to the food co-op seem long gone.

I do Iyengar yoga. Not Ashtanga, or Bikram, or the oh-so-generic “Vinyasa” yoga. Naming your yoga is a statement of identity. It situates you as part of a yoga denomination, with a very particular set of doctrines about the way yoga should be practiced. To do Iyengar is very different than joining into the “flow” of Vinyasa classes, where things go quickly, and sun salutations mix with twists and backbends. There, you might get some music to set the pace—a little Native American flute, perhaps a sitar-inflected hip hop mix, as the teacher tells you to “do what feels good to you.” I’ve even done Oms with Amy Winehouse moaning along. (I’ll admit, I kind of liked it.) But none of that can be heard in the stolid silence of Iyengar classes. There you find no music, no dancing through a class with your individual flow. You don’t do what “feels good.” You do what is needed, as you launch into an entire class of backbends, or perhaps an hour and a half spent perfecting triangle pose.

As avowed atheist, with only a tiny inclination toward sentimental humanism, I haven’t had much interest in the yoga sutras or the various books of wisdom that circulate in the yoga world. I’m dubious about collections of yoga poetry or daily mediations. (Although I do have a real fondness for the title of one of those “wisdom” books, which offers a fine bit of Buddhist wariness: After The Ecstasy, the Laundry.) When I challenge my body, quiet my mind, and pay attention to the state of things—this brings me a kind of joy. It is a different joy that what I feel when drinking wine with my friends, and different, too, than the joy of teaching a good class or holding a child’s hand. But a spiritual joy? I liked it when we called that poetry. Or happiness.

I do Iyengar yoga, and as such I am part of a long genealogy. Yoga is a spiritual tradition, thousands of years old, with a complex history intertwined with the development of Indian religious traditions. Americans were fascinated with their understandings of “Hindoo” practices from the mid-19th century onward. Emerson and Thoreau both eagerly read as much as they could about Hinduism. As one yoga history puts it, Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers “stacks quotes from the Bhagavad-Gita, like cordwood, and recommends it as highly as the Bible.”

Modern posture-based yoga, however, emerged alongside of the US and European physical culture movement of the late 19th century, which associated moral health with physical health, including body-building and gymnastics. The YMCA was a global influence on the early development of this model of intense, individualized focus on athletic health for the masses. The YMCA was big in India, and it had a real influence on yoga’s modern development. In 1905 bodybuilder Eric Sandow traveled to India to promote physical culture; by that time, he was, according to Mark Singleton, “already a cultural hero.”

While Indians were embracing physical culture along the Western model, they were also embracing and re-imagining yoga into a form of nationalist pride and anti-imperialist cultural production. As we might imagine, there were competing schools and approaches, but most shared the sense that India needed to re-energize its ancient traditions with a vital awakening of the (male) body. At this point, several sages also began to export their own visions of the practice of yoga to the West. Some, like Vivekananda, taught breathing exercises along with philosophical lectures, while others introduced the few simple postures associated with hatha yoga in India.

It was only in the 1920s that Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi) introduced a version of yogic “muscle control,” which drew on the metaphysics of the American New Thought movement and the bodily postures of European bodybuilding as well as Hindu traditions. Yogananda told his followers that this practice offered “the highest possible degree of mental, physical, and spiritual well-being at the minimum expenditure of time and effort.” The Indian sage already understood the efficiency obsessions of his American audience.

I practice Iyengar yoga. The Iyengar style of yoga comes from the teaching of B. K. S. Iyengar, one of the most influential yogis in the world. He is now 92, and he was already an extraordinary practitioner in the 1930s. (Here is a 1938 practice video.) His innovation was to slow down the yoga practice, and to demand the most profound and particular attention to detail.

Iyengar-style teachers will teach the poses deliberately, slowly. As an advanced student, when I go to class, I know I will be asked to hold the pose for a long time while carefully attending to alignment: the hands perfectly spaced, the pelvis balanced, the “three points” of the feet positioned evenly on the earth. The teacher may well explain the exact angle for the correct positioning of the foot in a standing pose or how to do camel pose by curling your upper back, right at T4 (for the initiated, that’s the 4th thoracic vertebrae).

These perfected bodily alignments are not achieved easily, however, and Iyengar yoga is known for its students’ enthusiastic embrace of an impressive array of props. There are blocks that extend the reach, and belts to tighten splaying body parts, and blankets and blocks and metal folding chairs, even ropes hanging from hooks in the walls. All of this can make the average Iyengar studio appear vaguely like a set-up for an S&M session, albeit with big windows and cheery lights.

B. K. S. Iyengar was still a boy when modern hatha yoga began to become popular in India. He was a student of Krishnamacharya, the famous founder of the “Mysore school” that taught a vigorous form of yoga to young Brahmins. Iyengar eventually went to teach in Pune, a provincial capital in Western India, quite distant from the elite and insulated culture of the Mysore Palace. In Pune he taught students who were far removed from the young, flexible boys who had been the core of the Mysore tradition under Krishnamacharya.Working with non-adepts, Iyengar eventually started to slow down the practice, and to use the props for which he became famous.

From here, there is a longer story that could be told about the embrace of yoga in the West, and the development of competing systems like that of Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, the founder of Ashtanga yoga. (He and Iyengar soon became global stars and serious rivals.) Iyengar was a much admired yoga teacher in India in the 1940s, but he became the exemplar of modern yoga for the West when he published Light on Yoga in 1966. That book quickly became the standard reference, bringing yoga to a new generation of Americans and Europeans. In 2004, Time declared Iyengar to be one of the most influential people in the world. The full and rather remarkable history of Iyengar’s life and his global influence cannot be adequately recounted here. It is told elsewhere, including in Iyengar’s autobiography Iyengar: His Life and Work.

I practice Iyengar yoga. Just as surely as it says something about what happens when I walk into class, this statement locates me firmly in the social order of the yoga world. In that world, the Ashtanga yogis are the track stars and the class presidents. They glide through conferences, with shoulders sculpted by sun salutations, looking lithe and confident. The Bikram folks are purified by their steamy practice rooms. I’m pretty sure the phrase “hot yoga” wasn’t meant as a pun, but it’s hard to avoid the association: these yogis look good, and they wear excellent, color-coordinated spandex. The Anusara yogis are lovely, emotionally open souls who are destined to run the bake sales that raise money for children’s charities. The Iyengar folks like to think of ourselves as more intellectual and precise. For everybody else, we’re more like the kids who stay home on Saturday night, carefully searching for flaws in the design of Klingon war ships.

For me, Yoga in the West began when I showed up at Patricia Walden’s studio in Somerville, Massachusetts, in the mid-1980s. Walden was not yet the yoga superstar she would become when she made Yoga Journal’s Yoga for Beginners blockbuster videos. She was, however, an amazing teacher, and I knew it. Nonetheless, I developed slowly as a yoga student. It was a hit or miss relationship for a long while. I would go to a class, try to do some yoga at home, watch Patricia’s tapes once in a while. I liked yoga—liked it well before Madonna or Gwyneth or Sting. But I was busy living my 20s and then my 30s, and consistency wasn’t my strong point: who had time?

Eventually, and for many reasons, I developed into a serious student with a daily yoga practice. I began to pay attention to the things that happened on the mat: how my body worked in this pose or that. When my mind wandered. When I gave up, and why. I struggled with poses—particularly with my bête noire, backbends. And I struggled, too, to figure out how I was supposed to get better at backbends if I was somehow also supposed to be “non-attached.” And, finally, in the middle of all that attention and struggle, I found my teacher.

I do Iyengar yoga and my teacher is John Schumacher. To name and claims one’s teachers is a common practice among serious yogis, a sign of respect. As a professor, I’m very impressed by this. For me, claiming John is also a statement about commitment; I’ve spent ten years in his classes, and I’m not going anywhere. John, however, is not my guru. He doesn’t do guru. And that’s one reason he’s remained my teacher; I don’t do guru either. What I do is listen and learn. And practice. And practice some more. And again the next day.

John is a particular kind of teacher, one who says relatively little about yoga philosophy directly, channeling pretty much everything through the poses themselves. Funny, sardonic, a little bit reserved, he is brilliant at structuring a class sequence. He demands attentiveness, and he offers attentiveness in turn. He also offers correction and advice, helping all of us avoid injury and commit to our practice. In the remarkably demanding hours I spend in his class, I learn a great deal, but my emotional state is usually a strange combination of fearless jubilance and despair of my own inadequacy. (Iyengar himself is famously a hard ass; don’t let his winsome smile fool you.) John is a generous presence but a hard teacher. He is not a warm and fuzzy cheerleader for my empowerment. He does not begin class by reading a yoga sutra or end it by reading a poem. I am deeply grateful all of these things.

See, I don’t want to be part of a yoga world of happy talk about unending potential and perfect happiness. I don’t have much time for the kind of self-impressed platitudes that give yoga a bad name. Like so many of the secular, health-oriented, somewhat prideful members of my clan, I do yoga to quiet my brain, not to fill it with nonsense. And yet nonsense abounds. Last month, I dropped in on a class at another studio. As class began, the teacher offered her thoughts about the goodness of the world and its benevolence toward us. “If you just reach out with your intention,” she said sagely, “the universe will rise to meet you half-way.” I almost walked out. The earthquake in Japan had happened the day before.

A few weeks ago, John also took the time to offer some thoughts. There is generally an opportunity at the beginning of class for us to ask questions, but these mostly involve things like where to put your elbow in a seated twist. This time, someone asked a question about the meaning of a yoga sutra. The sutra (II:3) states that “clinging to life” is an obstacle, “a pain-bearing obstruction.” In response, John said that “clinging to life” does not refer to what we do when we fight off an attacker or get surgery for cancer. Instead, clinging is the refusal to accept the reality of our own deaths, not just intellectually or abstractly, but fully and profoundly. To avoid clinging is to avoid the mistakes we make, both quotidian and profound, when we live without a recognition—an embrace—of our own mortality

If this sounds like the yoga version of The Bucket List (or, worse, Tim McGraw’s maudlin country hit, “Live Like you were Dying”), it wasn’t. The point is that the practice of attentiveness—the fundamental practice that yoga cultivates—should lead us to contemplate the full reality of our life, which includes its inevitable end. As the yogi Richard Freeman puts it, “Yoga is a rehearsal for death.” That is the universe rising up to meet you.

For me, this discussion was a rare moment when I had some inclination of what “yoga spirituality” might mean, particularly for someone who doesn’t actually believe in spirituality. In this version, there is no promise of health or happiness. There is only our embrace of reality, in both its quiet joys and its suffering. We recognize ourselves as part of the universe, and we accept that universe’s fundamental indifference to us. Then we see what flows from that. I suspect that this embrace of death, and life, doesn’t arise from an act of will or from reading the right books. Maybe, though, it comes from the act of the placing one’s feet in exactly the right alignment, and paying attention.

In a sparse, basement-level room of the Unitarian Church in a small Midwestern city—let’s call it Clifton—the fifteen or so members of the Clifton sangha gather on a Wednesday evening. There is no authorized teacher, though some members have studied with Zen or Tibetan teachers. Elaine, who convenes the weekly meditation session, pulls a ten-inch bronze Buddha statue out of a cabinet and places it on a small table. She leads a short Zen chant, and the group sits in meditation facing the wall for thirty minutes, followed by a reading, then ten minutes of walking meditation. After another brief chant, the group turns toward the Buddha image and bows deeply.

O  Shariputra, form is emptiness, emptiness is form

Form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

Across the globe, there are countless images similar to the one to which these Midwesterners bow. This one was purchased in Lhasa, Tibet, at one of the dozens of open-air vendors on the circumambulation circuit around Jokhang Temple. Pilgrims come from all over Tibet to walk or prostrate around the circuit, spinning prayer wheels and chanting mantras. During a two-week trip to China, another member of the sangha, Carl, chose this statue from hundreds of others available. The vendor tried first to offer Carl a new factory-made buddha, but he asked for one that looked older, more antique, so the vendor dutifully mussed one up a bit and brought it back the next day. Finally they settled on an older figure that, the vendor claimed, was once used in a Tibetan monastery. After the monastery was dismantled by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution, it stayed in a devotee’s house for a few decades and then found its way to the open market. Carl wanted an “authentic” image rather than one made in a factory, one that was made for a spiritual purpose rather than just to sell to tourists.

According to the vendor, the image was crafted by an artisan over sixty years ago. If this is accurate, it would have sat in limbo when completed alongside the other bronze buddhas in the studio with scarves wrapped around their eyes. When they were installed in a temple, a monk would have performed a consecration ceremony that has been going on since before the common era in which the Buddha is invited to take up residence in the image. In the final stage of the ritual, the scarf is removed and the eyes are painted in. Then the Buddha can look out at the devotees who come and prostrate themselves before it, praying for a better rebirth in the next lifetime, alleviation of sickness, or success on exams.

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Carl’s buddha now finds its home in the basement at the Unitarian Church, where it is kept most of the time in a dark cabinet. On Wednesday evenings, Elaine brings it out, sets it on a makeshift altar and lights a stick of incense before it.

A few in the sangha admit that they think there may be a special quality to items that have had intimate interaction with advanced practitioners—a kind of spiritual “energy.” But no one in the group thinks that bowing before it will give them karmic merit, success in business ventures, material prosperity, or a better rebirth. They are happy that it is old and consecrated, but they don’t believe that the Buddha dwells in the statue. Its eyes are as blind as metal deep in the cold earth.

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The image’s status in Clifton, therefore, is somewhat demoted from the one it enjoyed in Lhasa. Before we invite Max Weber in to declare it disenchanted, though, let us note the new kinds of enchantment it picks up in its new home at the far lower elevations of the Midwestern prairie. The biblical prohibition against idolatry, and its cousin, the scientific naturalist prohibition against naively attributing conscious life to an inanimate collection of atoms and molecules, demarcate certain limitations to this sangha’s reverence toward any statue. But there are deep currents of western culture that predispose these modern Buddhists toward disillusionment with the promises of modernity, its technology, its factories and corporations that promise to manufacture happiness for the masses. An old bronze statue from Tibet embodies the imagined antithesis of the failed promises of techno-rational-consumerist modernity. Tibet, in fact, has held such a place in the western imagination for well over a century—the last bastion of pre-modern wisdom, isolated beyond the Himalayas, its society devoted to spiritual wisdom that some even today hope will save modern humanity from itself. Coming from the land of the snows gives it the charisma of the mysterious, the lost, the authentic. And authenticity, as Walter Benjamin noted, is only possible after it has been replaced by the regime of mechanically produced commodities (after which, it is itself offered as a commodity).

The charisma of the lost Other of modernity only goes so far, though. The Clifton Sangha, after all, is an educated bunch. Of the fifteen, four are college professors (two in the sciences), three are engineers, and all but two have college degrees. Most are not content with dreamy, New Age longing. And some are a bit uncomfortable bowing to a statue. But they have agreed to continue the practice, insisting to anyone who asks that this is not idolatry and that the image is entirely symbolic. This object is ultimately a piece of metal, like any other. Nevertheless, for them it has its own kind of enchantment because it silently speaks of the possibility that beneath or within atoms and molecules—and especially within the mind itself—there is a cosmic spirit, a consciousness infusing the whole of things that connects everything with everything else, a vast interconnected network of life that weaves everything together into unity and harmony, over-riding the countless fragmentations and contradictions of the modern world. Buddha-nature, says 13th century Zen master Dogen Zenji, is neither east nor west, north or south. It pervades everything—is everything.

One bit of matter is, therefore, as good as any other for representing this cosmic truth. Thus, Elaine says, we choose a bit that represents someone seeing into that truth—the Buddha sitting under the tree of enlightenment. Spirituality in this sense does not oppose materiality—it encompasses everything—but it disposes of local gods, gods of a particular culture, place, and time. The Buddha can be in everything but not one particular thing.

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When the Taliban blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, one of the sangha members insists, Buddhists weren’t bothered at all. “They’re just pieces of stone,” he says with a shrug.

A few weeks later in my Buddhism class, I discuss the image of the Buddha and its role in various Buddhist traditions. At one point I pull a small Buddha statue out of a bag and begin to place it on the table, but it slips a bit and almost falls over, clunking heavily onto the surface. The young Thai women in the front row gasps in distress.

…form is no other than emptiness, emptiness no other than form…

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When Carl went to Tibet, he couldn’t help feel somewhat disappointed at the amount of ritual, liturgy, image-worship, and “superstitious” practices that he witnessed. He saw no one meditating. The reverence they seemed to show for the large buddha statues in the temples disconcerted him. Many Tibetans, he concluded, practice a kind of “cultural” Buddhism. It’s just a part of their culture, so they do it. Spirituality, as Elaine, Carl, and many other Western Buddhists understand it, transcends “culture.” It is the encounter with the universal. This puts them in an ambivalent relationship to even Buddhist culture.

Many western practitioners in the twentieth century have understood Buddhism as a matter of transcending cultural conditioning. Alan Watts insisted on a distinction between the “acquired self” and “your genuine, deepest self, not the self which depends on family and conditioning, on learning and experience, or any kind of artifice” but on Buddha-nature itself—the “original face” of the famous Zen koan. For Watts, Zen requires a person to realize that the “ego, the self which he has believed himself to be, is nothing but a pattern of habits or artificial reaction.” As Buddhism has been enfolded into western spirituality, it has often operated on some version of the idea, derived largely from Romanticism and modernism, that:

within each human being there is an individuality lying in potentiality, which seeks an occasion for realization but is held in the toils of the rules, beliefs, and roles which society imposes . . . that the real state of the self is very different from the acquired baggage which institutions like families, schools, and universities impose. To be “true to oneself” means . . . discovering what is contained in the uncontaminated self, the self which has been freed from the encumbrance of accumulated knowledge, norms, and ideals handed down by previous generations.

The East Asian conception of Buddha-nature—all-pervasive and embedded in each individual—is drawn magnetically to this indigenous western notion of transcendent selfhood, sometimes intertwining indistinguishably with it. Buddhist societies in East Asia, however, have generally been decidedly non-individualistic, seeing individual selfhood as deeply embedded in and dependent on social relations. Freedom from conditioning doesn’t mean freedom from society and its influences but from past karma. Universality doesn’t always override particularity.

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The Buddha statue of the Clifton sangha, therefore, displays the antinomies of its new function in its new home. It is an undeniably cultural product of another culture, deployed to symbolize the transcendence of one’s own culture toward a universal spirituality that overcomes, yet includes, all cultures.

The space for this particular articulation of Buddhism is created by specific cultural currents in the modern West: Romantics, Idealists, Transcendentalists, and their mid-twentieth-century counter-cultural successors, all of whom emphasize exploration of the deep interior of the mind, God as an all-encompassing spirit in nature, spontaneity, creativity, and suspicion of mechanized reproduction; Protestant Christianity, which eschews idolatry, privileges texts, looks askance at priesthoods and hierarchies; Enlightenment rationalism, which promises insight into the nature of things through careful observation and thought; psychology, which encourages introspection and exploration of the mind; and global capitalism, which allows for the flow of commodities newly valued in the West, like our Buddha image, by those who can afford them.

Thus Buddhism takes on yet another incarnation, blending with the indigenous cultures of the West, the United States, the Midwest, and Clifton. Even here, though, it turns out to be one incarnation among many. For our Buddha image unexpectedly finds its own kin scattered about—down the street in a temple where Vietnamese immigrants and their children bow and pray for good grades; in the backyard garden of a house in the suburbs; on a poster on the wall of a head shop downtown. The buddhas proliferate, mingle with the local gods, invite reverent or suspicious gazes, and take unexpected places on shelves, altars, and nooks throughout North America.