November 29, 2019

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Meditation 🌀 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

This episode is guest hosted by Sci-Fi writer and Comrogue, Andrew Dana Hudson.
He talks about Mediation, Arm raising, Class Struggle and How Will We Live?

You can find links to all of Andrew’s published work on his website.
 
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewDHudson
Andrew’s Website: https://andrewdanahudson.com/

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Midsommar vs The Buddha

 I’m a science fiction writer and sometimes solarpunk thinker, but today I want to build on some of Jay’s discussions about meditation. I’ve never felt like seated meditation was for me, but recently I’ve had better results as I deepened my yoga practice and had an opportunity to try more dynamic styles during a meditation weekend.

Some of these had the same goal as most seated meditation, to teach you to metacognite, to watch the fluctuations of your mind about, as the yoga sutras say, identifying with those fluctuations. But I also attended yoga classes. An arm raising workshop that engaged a different sort of technique. In arm raising, you simply stand together in a group and slowly lift and lower your arms.

The catch is, you only do it once, and it takes an entire hour. Yes, the facilitator talked us through stepping back from the pain in our shoulders and metacognizing about what was happening in our minds, but she also encouraged us, as a group, to recall moments in our life of being happy, sad, safe, vulnerable, betrayed, or loved.

Halfway through, we were all sobbing or laughing, both. I found out later, the technique came to our training by way of the notorious John McCaffey. For me, the real satisfaction in arm raising was collectivizing emotion and struggle, getting and giving permission to express pain and joy, sharing those feelings with a group, and literally standing in solidarity.

It made me think of the movie Midsommar, the feel good hit of 2019, where American tourists are weirded out by a Swedish commune’s collectivizing of pain and sensation through drugs, breathing, touch, and ritual. And yes, the tourists get murdered, but my hot take is that the movie would have worked just as well without that bit.

I, for one, watched Midsommar with a sense of longing behind my horror flick anxiety, because it reminded me that I don’t know my neighbors, I don’t feel connected to my community, I feel alienated. Alienation is in part a product of class society. It’s probably worst under capitalism, but I suspect people have experienced alienation as long as there has been class struggle, which of course is all of history.

Class society both separates us from each other and restricts our freedom to pursue what makes us individually happy. So I wonder, as a sci fi writer, how people will balance individuality and collectivity after we’ve finally overcome all the systems of oppression and exploitation. How will we live when, as my friend Stan Robinson wrote in his novel The Years of Rice and Salt, there is no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and we see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.

It seems to me the world’s spiritual wisdom offers two main strategies for dealing with that last kind of suffering. Individual journeys to enlightenment that help us step back from pain, desire, and ego, and solidarity, where others share your pain to make it more bearable and you have collective experiences that quiet the mind.

Most religions offer a bit of both strategies. You go to church to hear sermons on how to think about hardship and control desire, but also to sing together and lose yourself in the vibrations of voices becoming one. Both strategies suffer under capitalism. There’s alienation, but also so much anxiety and unfreedom.

I never forget that the Buddha was a wealthy prince who didn’t have to work to survive. He’s not wrong about desire, but it’s a lot easier to let go of earthly wants if you don’t have to worry about losing your health insurance or paying your rent. If we finally abolished class society, what would be the more effective or more popular strategy?

Would more people use their economic freedom to pursue individual journeys of enlightenment? Or would we walk back our alienated individuality and find satisfaction in being part of a group? Would it be more like the Midsummer Commune, where 10 billion individuals all becoming Buddhas in their own time?

Or both, or some combination, or neither? Sometimes I see people deride left ideals as demanding some hopelessly utopian destination. But if there are still such open questions about how we will actually achieve happiness and peace in our lives and what we do with these technologies of the self, how can the end of class society be the end of history?

These goals feel a lot more achievable if we don’t view them as an endpoint, but as just another step in a journey that we’re still defining, a forking path that’s still pulling us in different directions the whole way. Thanks for listening. I have a new story out tomorrow in Slate about AI and religion titled A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Robot Walk Into a Bar.

I’d love for you to read it. Find me on Twitter @AndrewDHudson and let me know what you think.