Head to the ground

"The earth has been made for me [and for my Ummah] as a masjid [place for worship] and a pureness ; therefore, anyone of my Ummah can pray whenever the time of Prayer is due."
--Prophet Muhammad

Fig. 1 A two-year-old can understand this. Someone fetch me a two-year-old!

Listening to a Speaking of Faith podcast from a few years ago, I was struck today by Ingrid Mattson’s description of her first prostration experience. This particular episode is an interview with Ingrid regarding her conversion to Islam and subsequent appointment as the first woman president of ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America.

Ingrid tells the story of being in France during her first exposure to Senegalese Muslim devotees who became her friends. One day, they invited her to pray with them and she said she didn’t know how. They said that she could just follow along with what they were doing, so she obliged. Islamic prayer, the du'a, involves many steps, including several body positions and prescribed chants and Ingrid felt extremely awkward trying to keep up.

Fig. 2 I'm pretty sure it's not quite this complicated

But once she had her forehead to the ground, taking pause in that position, she felt closer to the earth, closer to God, and in the intimacy of the moment in which she could not be distracted simply because her eyes are staring at the floor, she felt prayer as a full body experience for the first time. When I heard her say that, I remembered that I had the exact same feelings doing my first Buddhist prostration.

I don’t know about y’all, but the last time I had my forehead to the ground was last night, after dinner. My pre-yoga ritual consists of what may be called a standard Buddhist chant:

I take refuge in the Buddha.

I take refuge in the Dharma.

I take refuge in the Sangha.

I follow this up with candle-lighting and some prostrations of my own, borrowed from the Tibetans. I hold my palms together in a specific mudra (hand formation) and touch the top of my head, my forehead, my heart, and then bend down for a full-body prostration on the ground, touching my forehead to the carpet. I do this three times, each time reciting the above mantra.

Fig. 3 Olympic Cross-country prostration

When I did this for the first time, I was in the privacy of my bedroom, with nothing to distract me and no one to see me make this new step toward adopting a cultural tchotchke my new faith. It felt incredibly strange and awkward. As a not-so-churchy person to start with, when I saw movies and documentaries showing Buddhists doing this pretty obvious, involved, anti-subtle prayer ritual, I was confused. I had to keep in mind that it was a Tibetan-style prostration, one full of meaning and metaphor and even superstitious history, but it was beautiful and I wanted in.

I wanted to “create sacred space” and learn to respect it by bookending my meditations and yoga practices with a small ritual.

But the prostrations were awkward for more than one reason, i.e. I had no clue what I was doing because I had never done them before. It was strange because bowing and touching the floor, in Western society, is associated with subservience and is way too self-deprecating an act for a middle-class protestant nation that worked very hard to escape class-obsessed systems and aristocratic societal structure.

For Eastern societies, these acts are a sign of profound respect toward someone or something and in no way demeans the person doing them. It is humbling, but it’s a willful humility I adopt whenever expressing my respect for my teacher, The Buddha. I bow to him, not as a worshipper, but as a student, and in the process, I also bow to nature and the Universe, connecting myself to a stable ground beneath me through a gentle touch that always touches me back.

I definitely fulfill my quota of hours with my head in the clouds (and especially in outer space due to my love of astronomy), so it's common sense to balance it out by literally touching it down to the ground everyday.

Blessed Samhain

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." --Shakespeare, "Hamlet," Act 1, Sc. 5

Fig. 1 Something Willy this way comes

First order of business: Blessed Samhain to all, and I bestow wishes for a truly Happy Halloween free of too many tricks (I know we all enjoy a few here and there) and tooth decay. Be careful around midnight, for the veil between this world and the next is thin and ethereal, and there are many spirits roaming about who may be looking for you (or looking out for you; they're not all bad) and will surely find you if you are not properly dressed up. Unless of course, you miss dear old grandma or deceased pet parrot and want them to visit with you for a little while.

That's exactly what I did last year, in fact. I stayed up late into the silent night and set up a basic circle, lit some candles, grounded myself, cast a protection spell, invoked the cardinal directions, and meditated for a bit. It was just like my normal everyday Buddhist meditations except with really cool accessories. It got me in the spirit, anyhow. Plus, I dedicated some heart time toward all those importnant soulds in my life who have left this earthly sphere of existence. Nothing dramatic, no pointy hats or boiling, toiling cauldrons. Just me and the veil, and nothing in between. I felt connected to my family, my ancestors, and yes, my beloved pet parrot, Birdo.

This year, I woke up at 5:45 in the morning, very much by chance, and was elated to see that the sky had cleared up for the first time in days. I hauled my new telescope (dubbed Nye-Tyson of course) outside into the 80-degree humidity of this terrifically hot Floridian October. For an hour and a half before dawn, I scanned the bright stars of Orion, Canis Major, Taurus, and Perseus, finding star clusters, nebulae, and planets not found at 10:00 at night this time of year. I sipped my tea and found the Orion Nebula with my new higher magnification eyepiece (nerdgasm!) and stood in absolute awe at the wispy, ghost-like clouds of gaseous dust wrapped around the Trapezium set of stars within it. At that moment, the view presented an image very similar to the one I have in my mind of souls crossing that ethereal veil of Samhain night.

Fig. 2 Communion

What better sight to find on the morning of Halloween than the constellation costumes of the stars dressed up as dogs and fish and scorpions and swans? What better way to commune with the inner pagan--one who respects and wonders in the natural cycles and celestial shows of the cosmos?

As has happened on almost every occasion of stargazing, I spotted several meteors streaking across the dark colbalt of the sky, like diamonds cutting into glass. The more time you spend outdoors on clear nights, the more you appreciate how common a phonemonon meteors are, and the more you thank the Universe for an atmosphere that burns them up before they cause cataclysm on the Earth's surface. As a result, meteor sightings never lose their cosmic allure... even if the metallic rocks themselves most definitely do since they disintegrate entirely in half a second.

Tonight, I will be watching a Bollywood movie about a boy who befriends a ghost--a ghost who just happens to be Amitabh Bachchan!--and frequently pausing it to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters. Hindi-speaking spirits and little kids dressed like Hannah Montana: one is definitely more scary than the other. As soon as that's over, I think I'll pause before bedtime and perform that little ritual again. This time, out under the stars.

Fig. 3 Celestial trick-or-treaters

The iPod as the Third Eye

“I was in yoga the other day. I was in full lotus position. My chakras were all aligned. My mind is cleared of all clatter and I'm looking out of my third eye and everything that I'm supposed to be doing. It's amazing what comes up, when you sit in that silence. 'Mama keeps whites bright like the sunlight, Mama's got the magic of Clorox 2.’” --Ellen DeGeneres

Fig. 1 I think, therefore, iPod

Hardcore meditators spend a majority of their time attempting to open the sleepy lid of the “third eye,” what the Hindus call the ajna chakra or insight energy center. It’s the most popular metaphysical organ that allows one to gain insight on experience that goes beyond what is physical reality. Traditionally, this most intuitive place on the human body is located right between and above your regular eyes, contrary to the common belief that it is in the gut. It’s a long-standing idiom that guts have shit for brains, which qualifies it for instinct, not insight. The head eats, the gut digests. Just like with food, the ingestion of thought really shouldn’t be reversed.

The third eye, when not possessed of retinal problems or chronic dryness, can provide anyone with great wisdom about how the universe works as well as quell irrational thoughts and fears. It educates and enlightens and gives you the most legitimate reason to sit on your ass for hours doing absolutely “nothing.”

If you are not quite jived about gluteus numbness, there’s some good news. There’s a compact, portable electronic device which can provide you with hours of insight and knowledge with the spin of scroll wheel(showing my age with that one, aren't I?). It also contributes to millions of peoples’ raging gadget envy everyday.



Fig. 2 No one can resist

I bought my first iPod the moment they came into existence. Freshman year, Thanksgiving present to myself. It was worth every penny of the $400 price tag just to see the faces of joyous jealousy around me. Five gigabytes of hard drive gave me the power to carry around my entire music collection in something the size of a deck of cards. At the time, my collection was much more modest than it is now.

After getting acclimated to the concept of listening to anything my heart desired at any moment anywhere, I noticed I could only listen to my favorite music for so long without getting bored or getting infected with one too many musical earworms. Luckily, I stumbled upon the precious Dead Sea scrolls of electronic audio: podcasts.

Fig. 3 The Qur'an tops the charts

Learning about religion is learning a language. When studying any language, it’s always best for a student to hear the voices of people speaking in their native tongues. Podcasts provide the best listening.

I encountered a whole new lexicon of delicious ten-dollar terminology (chametz, dukkha, and transubstantiation are some of my favorites) and you not only have to know definitions, but how to work with religious grammar. Muslims always follow any mention of the Prophet Muhammad with an alayhis salaam (a wish for “peace and blessings”), “Nirvana” cannot not be used interchangeably with “Heaven,” “Zen” should be capitalized, and out of deference, the Jews tend to type “G-d” when referring to the one who says “I am what I am.”

English degree. Forgive me my anal retention.

While we're at it, let me introduce you to what my film prof might have called the Barthes Paradigm. This method--which I just based on the philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes’ archetype of textual analysis--assumes a long list of subject associations for any cultural reference in works of art or expression that enriches the work, especially if the beholder already has background contextual knowledge or has the initiative to explore it.

It’s not a mind-numbing as it sounds.

Say you’re watching Caddyshack and you skip to the sequence where all the caddies are allowed into the club pool from 1:00-1:15. At one point, a swimmer tosses a Baby Ruth into the water, and mistaking it for human excrement, all the other swimmers start to freak out. Throughout this sequence of shots, an ominous two-note tune escalates until the last person in the pool realizes that he’s come face-to-face with the offending candybar.

Fig. 4 It's not so bad

On the surface, this scene is funny because of the irrational fear of a very inoffensive foodstuff, but for summer moviegoers and any viewer who is in the loop of American culture, the scene has an extra level of humor wrapped up in the usage of that simple music choice. The implicit joke of that tune assumes that the viewer has a certain familiarity with the first American summer blockbuster Jaws, which was released in 1975, only five years before Caddyshack. Playing that tune imbues the candybar with the even more irrational and hyperbolic abstract concept that turd-shaped chocolate-dipped nuts and nougat is as dangerous as a ginormous great white shark. Also, it humorously illustrates the current Michael Pollan doctrine that all processed foods are crap.

Sucked all the calcium out of the comedic teeth of that scene didn’t I? For our final thesis, my prof made us write 26 such explanations—one for each letter of the alphabet—for a classic Hollywood film from the 40s. I couldn’t watch The Philadelphia Story for years afterwards.

Fig. 5 Movie gods

Luckily, on the internet, the Barthes Paradigm is in a most obvious state of full swing. You go to a page, you read a block of text, you see a word or phrase colored in a way that indicates that it’s a link, you click on it, and it instantly pops up with a whole new page associated with that word or phrase. The cultural referents are imbedded for you. The medium is the message, right? I may not have Marshall McLuhan standing next to me to confirm this idea, but I’m not as lucky as Woody Allen.

The podcasts work in the same way. You listen to one, and they will often refer you to another cast, blog, website, book, movie, TV show, documentary, or a magazine, creating arteries that branch into veins and capillaries that deliver you to the most detailed and specific areas of the religious body. That body just happens to be in a shape of a Möbius strip.

Fig. 6 Forgive me, Father, for iSinned

After stumbling upon a Los Angeles-based Buddhist monk videocasting from his zendo in Koreatown and listening to a Catholic priest from Holland discuss doing an overseas interview using Skype, it’s extremely difficult to continue convincing yourself that religion is stuck in medieval times.

Even after teaching devotional prayer in public schools was banned in the 60s and people quit going to Sunday school for fear of waking up before eight o’clock on a weekend, traditional thousand-year-old religions had not, in fact, been cast down. They had sublimated into binary code, and they are easily accessible no matter how culturally homogeneous your surroundings.

God is in the machine, and It works in ones and zeros.