Humanity and contingency

We’ve been contemplating contingency in one of our meditation exercises. The idea here is, the more you deny your mortality, your finitude, your thrownness, the less connected you are to your own being and reality. (Well, not exactly. I’m taking liberties with vocabulary here and mapping existentialist thought onto meditative practice.)

Lana Bragina's Tarotkarten

I’ve begun thinking that the modern way of saying everything is connected is everything is contingent. To the modern ear, the former phrase sounds vaguely positive and non-threatening, while the latter conjures up all the anxieties of an era of neo-liberalism.

Everything is contingent suggests to me a language and vocabulary derived from project management and capitalism and state power rather than a spiritualized woo woo language that doesn’t connect to our modern, everyday life.

Everything is contingent speaks to the inherent volatility of the financial market and its human fallout.

Everything is contingent calls the logic of the N. American cult of individualism and the narrative of the American Dream into question.

Everything is contingent presents to me, a more accurate understanding of modern life in which our freedoms (of consumer choice and a seeming ahistoricity) mask our dependencies upon modern networks of power and commerce.

I’m starting to think that in addition to the unequal distribution of material resources and wealth, we can also think of modernity as a force that has restructured the distribution of contingency. That is to say, we in the west/democratic/modern/”developed” world (and within the west, there are further divisions) have attempted to decrease the contingency in our own lives by downloading risk into other parts of the world where people now live highly precarious lives leaving them far more vulnerable to factors like market fluctuations, weather patterns, epidemics, what have you. I’ll refrain from examples – and there are many devastating ones – for the sake of staying on topic and I’ll return to this idea of distributing contingency in a moment.

We have a hoarding mentality in which everyone is fighting over security, never feeling satisfied, nor safe. Perversely, the historically aberrant levels of predictability and stability in the postwar west have only resulted in a collective state of vague dissatisfaction, anxiety and ennui while others have born the brunt of the west’s quest for security and happiness. First world problems. Mid life crisis. Quarter life crisis. What kind of crisis are we in?

 

Capricorn femininity

Capricorn is like a diamond. It does best under pressure. If a Capricorn native has a hard Saturn-sun or Saturn-moon contact, then the pressure can be intense. It’s not remotely fun. So you have to forgive us Caps sun for having a dour outlook sometimes. But if Capricorn can take all that pressure, the result is dazzling. Diamonds symbolize the incorruptible. They arise from carbon, the most common element, to become hardest substance in the world.

All that diamond hardness contradicts N. American ideas about femininity. There is something distinctly unfeminine about the cool, cutting, measured steeliness of a practical Capricorn woman. There’s nothing brash or boss-say or rough-and-tumble tough about it, qualities that we find in other more masculine signs. This is not to say that it’s unnatural for women to be steely. I am saying that in terms of gender norms, whenever we see the forceful, commanding Capricornian woman, she’s de-feminized, just as a gentle Cancerian male is emasculated.

 

Saturn Return redux (part two)

Brian Foo via society6.com

If you missed part one, you can catch it here. These posts form a two part series about what you can look forward to with a Saturn Return.

I recently gave a tarot reading to a friend of mine and she remarked that she was surprized that I was still practicing tarot. That seemed like something the “Old Isthmus” would do. And I thought what a strange comment that was because I hadn’t realized how much I had changed. You’re so practical now, she clarifies. You’re so into these practical things. Joining groups, chairing meetings, all of it. And she’s right; in the past I never concerned myself with ideas about civic engagement, leadership and what not.

The Saturn Return has consolidated a lot of my responsibilities to society. A prosperous, vibrant, tolerant and creative society doesn’t just happen by magic or by virtue of inertia. And contrary to a lot of articles I read, leading a meaningful, happy life is very much a social endeavour that is deeply tied into the participation in the creation of shared meaning. Whenever we talk about happiness or satisfaction in the west, we always focus on the individual. But without shared meaning, shared narratives, shared metaphors that are authentic, we are lost in our own idiosyncratic, solipsistic fantasies or, as is very common, we become easy prey for systems of meaning that are inauthentic, harmful and do not accurately reflect our reality.

 

Water series: Cancer

Andreas Preis

This is the final post in my contra-stereotyping water series. Please feel free to check out my Scorpio and Pisces posts.

In my experience, Cancer is the most poorly integrated sign in our society. I don’t find in other signs, such a polarized expression of a sign’s qualities when it comes to gender; women are allowed full expression of Cancer whereas men must basically repress all of it. I think it says a great deal about our attitudes toward femininity, female power and mothers. The patriarchy can co-opt and control the sensuality and femininity of Venus, but it can’t co-opt the menstrual cycle and motherhood of the moon so easily. The best it can do is pathologize and sentimentalize the hell out of it.

Very watery men have it rough. But while watery emotions are denied to men in general, Cancer has it the hardest. Mars ruled Scorpio gets to be the sex machine, the psychologist, the brooding bad boy. Jupiter ruled Pisces gets to be the spiritual visionary, the sensitive artist, the martyr on the cross. But what does Cancer get? Mama’s boy? Male “PMS?”

 

NASDAQ LULU/TSX LLL last trade: $49.06; 52wk range: $25.30-$64.49

There’s been a lot of attention given to Nasdaq LULU these days due to their newly Ayn Rand branded bags. The idea here is that Rand’s right wing ideologies are in direct contradiction to what yoga is all about.

I would like to suggest that NONE of LULU’s branding has anything to do with yoga. Branding is branding and that’s it. It’s a spectacle. Guy Debord warned us about this. “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

I like to think that brands are only as powerful as we make them. We give the LULU brand power when we allow the brand to represent what yoga is. We give our power away to brand images when we infuse them with all of our hopes and fears about our own existence. Who we wish we could be, who we don’t want to be, how we want others to think of us. This is different than simply trying project a social image. That is a natural human social behaviour. What I’m talking about is letting brands co-opt our voices, our narratives, and enthralling us with their myths which, unlike the myths of yore, are not trying to teach us to BE HUMANS. They are trying to teach us to CONSUME.

 

Shadow

My tastes in art have always veered into the dark corners of the human psyche. I love tales that are perverse, gory, blasphemous, wicked, cerebral. My favourite film director at the moment is Catherine Breillat whose film A Ma Soeur! was banned in Ontario. Before that, it was Peter Greenaway, whose arguably most popular film, The Cook The Thief His Wife Her Lover, features a sadistic lout of a man whose actions lead to a spectacular revenge scene that involves cannibalism. In high school, I was a fangirl for stories like Ballard’s Crash and Battaile’s Story of the Eye. All these texts always seemed to me, to capture some truth about humanity and modernity that I wasn’t getting from mainstream society.

Another story I liked in high school was Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. It’s been a long time since I read it so my memory has probably coloured the main character with personal projections, but as I recall him, the Underground Man, he’s a miserable, vicious little guy. If there was ever a great example of self imposed suffering, Underground Man is it. His entire being is composed of defiance, of refusal, of a two year old’s first angry NO! and his perception is wholly based upon this ontological position of negation. What I loved about this character is how simultaneously petty and principled he is. He spends pages obsessing over a non-event (some guy brushes his shoulder in the street while walking the other way) and nursing this self perceived slight into a festering personal affront that he’s going to somehow avenge by finding the same guy and doing the same thing to him. Yes, he spends pages going on about how he’s gonna… bump the dude’s shoulder. It’s hilarious, right, but also deadly serious in its vindictiveness, a real vindictiveness that causes people to perpetuate cycles of affliction.

The thing is, the Underground Man is clearly driving himself crazy but his craziness is so familiar. Who hasn’t rebelled for the sake of rebellion? Who hasn’t found themselves unable to figure out what to do, except for knowing  that you’re not going to do that? And frankly, how many of us, when faced between the “right” choice* and the “wrong” choice, have done exactly the wrong thing, even as you’re harming yourself – and really fucking enjoyed it? And I mean, enjoyed being wrong to the hilt, lost in sensory damage, empty calories and carcinogens, pure meaningless distraction and arrogance, burning bridges, just doing it and doing it and doing it until you’re sick all over yourself. What a wonderfully twisted bunch we can be.

My first reaction to imagining a world without self deception was that we would lose all this rich art full of suffering and perversions and kinks. Which I don’t think is really possible. Not in an age of modernity anyway. Although who knows, maybe this whole capitalist-democratic-modern paradigm is in the final paroxysms of dying? I digress. So I started tracing that thought about losing self deception further and I think what bothered me was what bothered the Underground Man, that is, losing the ability and the desire to make the wrong choice. Without that, people would somehow become inhuman. That choice is such a precious thing, really. It’s a crossroads we stand at everyday – to act as a whole being and to treat others and ourselves as whole beings, or, to just not bother or, in more extreme situations to actively inflict harm and to like it. I mean, if there wasn’t an element of liking it, of really savouring the NO, why bother? What’s the point?

I spend a fair amount of time around self destructive people. I have a lot of patience for individuals expressing misogyny, racism, criminality and suchlike, esp if I can find that egalitarian one on one dyadic connection I’ve written about earlier on this blog. And at the end of the day, I see myself in these maladjusted people as much as anyone else I come into contact with. Or to be more precise, I see the potential for it. Why I have turned out the way I have is really beyond me. I may have put a lot of conscious effort into the whole process to becoming, but I must admit that ultimately, I haven’t a clue how it all works. All I know is that everyday, I stand at this crossroads with everyone else. And over and over again, we make choices.

*I am conflating for brevity’s sake, two “right” choices. The first “rightness” being choices that are constructed along modern, mechanistic, biopolitical lines (e.g. Radiohead’s Fitter Happier) and the “rightness” of moral behaviours.

 

Water series: Pisces

Rachel Caldwell's Ocean Queen

Every sign has its stereotypes and misconceptions, but Pisces is a sign where the type doesn’t always fit well, especially with men. You know what type I’m talking about: the evasive, fickle, impressionable, hopeless new age space cadet who will lie straight to your face and is probably nursing an addiction of some kind. To be sure, there are some Pisces who fit the stereotype. But that kind of rigid thinking doesn’t work in Pisces-land.

Would it surprize you to learn that the late Steve Jobs, one of the most brilliant design innovators of our time, a man renowned as one of the world’s top business executives, famous for his intense and demanding leadership style, was a Pisces sun? Does this sound like someone unfocused, weak or out of touch with reality? Someone who doesn’t know anything about loyalty, commitment or power?

 

Metta, all grown up

Edward Blake Edwards

Was listening to a talk by Rob Burbea about metta practice, in which he dispels some common misunderstandings about metta. One of which is where metta is seen as a kind of “meditation lite” or even a remedial practice that one engages in when one cannot get a grip on the rigorousness of vipassana and insight. And he continues to describe how this kind of overlooking or even devaluing of metta was a part of meditation history in the west that caused an imbalance. Or, in the words of my sangha teacher, to only engage in vipassana, is to spend all this time cleaning and polishing the lens of your glasses, only to never put them on. Yet still, metta is sometimes thought by some of as a “baby” practice or at least one that is easier than vipassana.

Metta has never really been an easy practice for me. There is something very challenging to me about feeling out the boundaries of your own heart and moving through them, that is in some ways, more difficult than melting away the narrative of speaking mind that you know isn’t “real” anyway. Despite this, I did think of metta as easier. It’s not that I thought it was unimportant. One doesn’t practice meditation simply to be clear headed afterall; what use is clear perception if it cannot allow us to cultivate compassion, patience, joy, kindness and connectedness? But on the surface, from the perspective of immediacy, vipassana certainly seemed to require more effort. It was so obvious to me how it was a lot of hard work to constantly silence my mind.

 

Water series: Scorpio

Water is the weakest element in my chart. Its sensitive, receptive and intuitive qualities are something that I am constantly working on; it never comes naturally. There are benefits to being weak in water to be sure and I’ve had many people tell me they’re admirable. But as with many things in life, the degree of your strength can indicate the degree of your weakness and vice versa. I used to think very emotional people were kind of lame. Especially with my Sag planets, a sign that is notorious for its insensitivity. Just get over it! Lighten up!

So I’m dedicating three posts to the water signs. Like many people, what I don’t have naturally in my chart, I instinctively seek from my environment. I hang with a lot of watery people and this series is about what I’ve learned from them. So it’s 100% applied astrology. It’s not about the water signs in and of themselves, but their expression in people. I’ll begin with Scorpio as the sun is currently transiting the sign.

Scorpio, by Abi Heyneke via Society6.com

 

Saturn Return redux

Let me preface this post by saying that my chart is quite Saturnian. Saturn aspects most of my other natal planets. I am very familiar with Saturn. The whole world falling apart experience is not how I would describe my Saturn transits. They are more like having the sense of a formidable pressure. Like, a serious PRESSURE.

A lot of digital ink has virtually spilled online about the horrors of the Saturn return. I want to share a different take on the transit because there is far too much writing out there that I could not relate to and that, as an astrologer, did not match the experiences of the people I was reading charts for. (On that note, for a great series of videos about the Saturn Return that isn’t all sturm und drang, check out ElsaElsa’s blog.)

My return began with dreams of crossing a long river. Debating pragmatically what to take with me and what to leave behind. Knowing I had to swim alone.