An email to a friend

[Slightly altered for a more general readership...]

Thanks, ... You are the voice of sanity and wisdom here.

I will "link" to yoga sites or yoga people. Georg Feuerstein, author of a dozen or so books on yoga, who is the foremost American academic authority on yoga owes me a favor. I've reviewed enthusiastically three or four of B.K.S. Iyengar's books. He's the biggest name in hatha yoga, considered the greatest yoga teacher in the world. I doubt he's read my reviews or maybe he has, but he's in India, and bit older than I am and no doubt retired. But maybe I could make contact with somebody on his staff…

And so on. As to your suggestion of a title, "Dennis Littrell's Experience of and Understanding of Yoga" that's not arrogant. It's modest and the truth. But it is entirely non-commercial.

Here's the rub, and here's where Howard Bloom fits in and why his experience is important. Right now he is counting down the days to the publication of The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine. Twenty-nine days left. It is gut-wrenching to read his missives. He spends all day writing and telephoning everybody he knows and everybody they know in the media, and no doubt cold calls and what have you. He nags them: "Bear with me while I try out another angle on you…" He's in the manic stage. It is so desperately important that this book be a success.

What kills me is that it's all about the publicity today, not the writing. Or perhaps it's always been that way. His book is wild with rhetoric and metaphor and analogy and stuffed with information and nouveau terminology. It's brilliant, but for me with all that I have read, it's familiar as he uses biological cycles to inform the reader about economic cycles. It's 167,000 words long, over 800 pages in double-spaced manuscript. There are hundreds of footnotes.

He's probably headed for a psychological fall, and I feel for him. He's 64 or 65 years old. His emotions are out there, and his personality is manic-depressive, like the cycles of business. (His book projects his personality.)

I do NOT want to go through this. I am learning from his experience and that is why I have chosen "to give it away on Seventh Avenue" (so to speak), a reference he would appreciate since he was in the pop music biz. And this is why he inspired me to start the blog. I don't need the fame and fortune. I don't need the anguish of reaching for it. I just want to say, "Here I wrote it. Read it if you like." Send me a note or not. If I were a young man and/or needed the money it would be different. But I'm not and I don't.

This is a ten-year-project like writing reviews turned into a ten-year project. I'll be 78 when the ten years have passed. I'm going to put all my work on the Web in various places, and as you say, I'll learn from the process. My stories, maybe a couple of novels, maybe even some of my poetry. And I'm not going to worry about it.

And it has, as you say, an element of "future shock" to it, this Internet business. The world is changing. Everything's accelerating. The world is zooming by. I was in the supermarket yesterday. There's this old guy, all white hair and pink skin, face moist with the work, checking groceries. It's an assembly line with the constant beep, beep, beep. He's punching in prices and remembering and not remembering produce numbers. I always exchange some chat with him. He has recalled a produce number without having to look it up. I tease him, "You remember the numbers!" I exclaim. He laughs. "Some of them." Then he says, "I can't even remember what I had for breakfast." And of course neither can I.

I am thankful that I do not have to be a cashier in my old age. But I admire him. He likes talking to the people and the job keeps him vital. He's almost too old for the work and pretty soon people might be saying he's too slow…

The last part of life is coming to grips with not only death but with the decline in our abilities and with the realization of who we are, since most of the evidence is already in.

Your friend,


Dennis

Yoga: Sacred and Profane

The dilemma we all face is the dilemma that stood in vast array before Arjuna of the Bhagavad Gita. The young warrior of noble birth, strong of arm and wise beyond his years, sat before the great field of battle and doubted.

Doubted.

He doubted whether it was to any good purpose to continue, whether it made any human sense to kill those who came to fight against his army. Many of them were kin. How could he bring himself to kill them? What if he won? What would be gained? What if he lost? But Krishna urged him on by saying that effectively speaking he had no choice.

But Arjuna was a young man with all of his life before him. Not to fight would in effect be suicidal, psychologically speaking, as he would lose face with his fellows, and worse. So he really had no choice.

In a larger sense none of us have any choice. We too must fight. The enemy is delusion and doubt. It is lack of confidence in ourselves and our will to power that holds us back. We slay not, neither do we die, says Krishna.

But let's put aside the Bhagavad Gita for the time being. Instead consider this little ditty:

I went to the animal fair,
The birds and the bees were there;
The big baboon by the light of the moon
Was combing his auburn hair.

Which might well be:

The world's a vanity fair,
With bangles and beads to snare;
Where we sing the tune to break the gloom
While combing our auburn hair.

Howard Bloom wants his book to be a success, a big success. It's a big book with a big subject. He put his heart and soul into the book and he knows that if the book is to be a success he has to put his heart and soul into marketing it. He is counting the days down and sharing with his friends the experience. He is going to appear on radio and TV. It's doubtful that he can interest Oprah, but perhaps NPR will schedule him, maybe he can go on Bill O'Reilly. He will go on tour and give talks and sign copies of his book. He will see the adoring eyes upon him and hear the cheers.

Howard Bloom, as I have said, is a brilliant man. He has great energy and is a formidable scholar who understands the human predicament as a Solomon might.

I haven't read the book yet, but I will as I have read three of his other books, one in digital manuscript.

He is reinventing capitalism, and we all know how desperately capitalism needs reinventing. Naysayers are suggesting darkly that capitalism is a ponzi scheme on the future. They see the pollution and the exploitation. They see the giant international corporations as psychopathic entities who “externalize” costs by dumping their excreta into our oceans and waterways and into the atmosphere. They see how the corporations with their profits buy up the politicians so that their bidding might be done. They see how the corporations buy advertising and pundits in the media to better manipulate the mass mind so that we might continue to blindly acquiesce in their rape of the planet.

Well, no, Howard Bloom won't be saying anything like this. He will present solutions to these problems or show how these problems are illusory. He is reinventing capitalism. And I wish him well.

But I too have written a book. It is called Yoga: Sacred and Profane. Its theme is that the yoga that has come down to us is not the complete yoga, that yoga is more than artful exercise, that yoga is a great psychology, a “religion” if you will that confronts the dilemma of life head on and like Buddhism presents a way to what in Christianity is called “salvation” or “the peace that passeth understanding,” and what in Zen is called “satori.” I have spent thirty-five years writing it and living it. I have read hundreds of books and spent thousands of hours in practice.

Yoga: Sacred and Profane leads to an understanding of yoga that both a rationalist and a spiritualist would appreciate.

I would like Yoga: Sacred and Profane to reach a large audience, but I am a writer not a publicist. I am a yogin not a media maven. I need a publisher, an editor, and a publicist. Perhaps I will get them.

At any rate for now I will “publish” Yoga: Sacred and Profane in another Google blog of that name and elsewhere and hope that my efforts at marketing will be successful. Why? Because Yoga: Sacred and Profane is great work. I say this without any false modesty or false immodesty. I say it because I have studied not just yoga but all the great religions of the world and have lived the life of a jnana yogin for many years. I know a truth deeper than my skin. What I know is the way to samadhi, and I can show it to you.

--Dennis Littrell

The Genius of Howard Bloom

I recently had an email conversation with Howard Bloom, author of the forthcoming The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Revision of Capitalism (2009). In part it went like this:

Howard wrote to some of his many friends: "When we contribute to social groups we're part of, we are alert, vigorous, and healthy. When we don't make a contribution, we are grabbed by a process like apoptosis--pre-programmed cell death. We go from active to lethargic and from exhilarated to morose. What pushes the switch from agony to ecstasy? How do we know when we're making a contribution? Attention."

He added: "May the fascinated eyes of other always be upon you."

I wrote: "I learned the truth of this in my life as well. But what I want to do is become non-attached. While 'freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose' (perhaps) I would like to become free of all of society's indoctrinations, all of the evolutionary mechanism's imperatives, and swim in the sea of the fish without desire for more than simple creature comforts."

Howard returned: "Keep in mind, Dennis, that too much detachment is death. And your pains and passions keep you alive...and keep you contributing to the rest of us, including me. Howard."

I wrote: "Well, you got that right. I'm impressed. It took me many years to understand the dilemma: the end of desire is death."

Howard wrote: "This has just gone into my epigram folder: The end of desire is death. Dennis Littrell"

Consequently I was inspired to begin this blog.

Howard Bloom (not to be confused with the literary critic Harold Bloom) is also the author of The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (1995) and Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000) among other works. He is a brilliant man with incredible reserves of energy. Reading him is an eye-opener. See my reviews at Amazon."

But what is this "dilemma" mentioned above?

The answer in the next post.

--Dennis Littrell