News From The Sporting World

Michael Vick, the quarterback from the Atlanta Falcons, is being investigated for holding dog fights at his house in Chesepeake, VA. There is a national uproar over the issue, and it is likely that the Falcons will cut him.

I find it interesting that people are outraged over dogfights, while they are eating the flesh of animals that were tortured every moment of their incarnation. But eating meat is acceptable because of the systematic routinization of it. I think of Hannah Arendt's discussion of "the banality of evil" in her account of Adolf Eichmann's trial. Eichmann performed the bureaucratic work of arranging the transportation of European Jews to concentraion camps. The Moussaud found him in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel for trial. To his last day he could not see his mistake, as he was physically removed from the acts of violence.

We are conditioned to ignore the negativity of some undeniably negative acts, while we explode in the face of what we have not been conditioned to accept.

Apologies to all for the two week stretch without a post. No muse was flowing.

The picture from the April 18 post is in the Cordillera Real, a range of 21,000 foot peaks in the Central Andes of Bolivia. The provide a boundary between the 12,000 foot Andean plateau and the Amazon forest. The latter is the world's largest forest, encompassing 2 million square miles of tropical rain forest in 9 countries. Visit while you can: it is being burned at an alarming rate to make room for cattle.

I found myself in South America in the late summer/fall of 2006. I initially spent a week in southern Peru. The landscape and history are stunning, but the ancient cities and ruins were swarming with fanny pack tourists on 10 day package tours. So I jumped the border into South America's most indigenous and rugged nation, Bolivia.

After reading reports of a 3 day hike to a sixteen thousand foot glacier lake, I had to do it. My initial departure date was postponed, as it took a week to recover from a bought of dysentary. In the meantime I met Mike Lewis, a fellow Virginian and soon to be travel mate, roomate, and best friend. I convinced him to make the trip with me.

After finding a guide service, we stocked up on quiona, pasta, tomato sauce, oatmeal, avocado, cheese, bread, and chocolate. We departed with two indigenous Aymara guides, who speak Spanish as a second language. Mike and I carried a daypack, as a horse and the guides distributed most of our equipment.

We began in a lightly forested valley, with flocks of squacking flocks of parrots dusting the sky with emeralds. The trail meandered trails through small villages and farming plots before reaching high grasslands. The peaks of Illampu and Jackhouma towered above, cloaked in glaciers.

We finished the day camped a lake that the guides said was enchanted. Some whacky Dutch claimed an alien race had left signs in the lake, and dwelled in a kingdom under the mountains. We camped there two nights. As I did yoga both nights, I felt strange energies looking at me.

We arose early the next morning, and hiked off into the rocky ethers. For 5 hours we ascended over scrabbly rock, filling our water bottles with glacial melt. The oxygen decrease became evident. I drunkenly stumbled over boulders, my body not used to altitudes higher than the highest peaks of the continental US.

The trail ended at the Laguna Glacial, a 16,500 foot glacier lake. A glacier is in a col separating and Illampu and Jackhouma. It feeds into the lake, with pieces of the glacier calving off and cannonballing into the milky water. The lack of oxygen clarified the air, illuminating Lake Titcaca's distant gleam. An Andean falcon stood on a boulder 20 meters away.

Seizing the oppurtunity, I replaced my Incan stocking hat with a turban, and began remembering past lives meditating in the mountain ethers. Mike grabbed a camera, and caught a few photos.

After a lunch of cheese, avocado, and tomatoes, we began our descent to our base camp. We camped another night, where I stayed up until one in the morning reading a novel about Madam Lynch of Paraguay.

The next day we arrived back in town. What a trip.

Reliving Past Lives in the Andes

Here I am meditating at 16,650 in the Bolivian Andes last September. Above me are Jankouma and Illampu, 21,000 foot peaks. On one side the Andes drop precipitously into the Amazon basin. To the other stretches the Andean altiplano, the world's second highest and largest plateau (second to Tibet). My dear friend Mike Lewis (Nirbhao Singh) took this picture.

Worry

The longer that I am on the spiritual path, the more it becomes evident that engaging in fear is draining and unproductive. The moment I allow a negative thought to enter my head, I watch my productivity and relations with others diminish. It rips open a hole for any and all neuroses to enter. I know it, but it still comes out even when I am conscious of it.

I grew up with fear. My grandmother lived with my family until my tenth birthday. The woman’s hard life had become a Petri dish of fear. I was constantly reminded to stay right next to my family when in public. If I wondered off, one of the numerous child abductees in the vicinity would grab me and torture me. As a child my brother left me in the car for a minute. I flew into hysterics, convinced of my eminent slavery.

My fears conformed to new situations. I became constantly scared of the imagined wrath of my Catholic school teachers. I was physically shaking on my way to 1st grade, horrified of being assigned to the Sister Camilla and her full habit. When I was in 6th grade, I was convinced of abductors entering the house. I carried a baseball bat when left in the house by myself at night. At night my ears would search the house for the sound of intruders slowly opening windows and removing televisions.

In high school I fretted about not fitting into the social scene. In college I worried about grades and how they would affect my future.

And now I worry about money, about achieving enough to sustain myself in Los Angeles. In the past my level of worry was just as potent, with different reasons.

Fear is a habit, a leech that adapts itself to whatever situation is at hand. This unwanted emotion is unfounded. Imagine if part of me insisted that the sky was blood red, when everything in me told me it was blue. I would view that rogue element as ridiculous, and would be sure to discard it.

Fear has been so ingrained in me, and much of the populace, that it does not come out with one washing. We must work on it, slowly chipping away at the façade of the beast until it reaches a point of dissolution.

Meditation is our cleansing tool, patience our foundation.

LA's Boiling Point

Much of Los Angeles are suffering. The Whole Foods Market across from my place of employment seems to be the center of it. Located at 3rd and Fairfax, where mid-Wilshire and West Hollywood come together, the grocery store is filled with employees on lunch break and scrambling shoppers. The wealthy Beverly Hills/Hollywood Hills set is here, as well as the West Hollywood struggling actor crowd. The homeless populations is especially unwelcome here, leading to numerous confrontations. The homeless have decimated their projection and positive outlook. When you think everyone is out to screw you, than people will be out to screw you.

In Los Angeles nothing is enough. If you are making a million dollars a year, you look across to the mansion in the Hills whose owner makes $50 million year. Having a vehicle that works is not paramount. If you are driving anything less than a shining BMW or Mercedes, you must not be making it. Home ownership is restricted to the wealthy, leaving most of the population biting their fingernails over rents that have doubled in the past decade.

These are intense statements, and one might ask where I get off making these judgments. The faces in the market give everyone away. Mouths curl and tighten, holding in the screams of frustration. Even those who have "made it" cannot let go their addiction to stress.

And it is addiction, a mere habit. We are accustomed to believing that stress is our natural state. This lie is the ultimate prank played on the Western World. This facade of false worries began with a simple belief that God had abandoned us, and that we had to worry about every facet of life. From that ballooned the great mental prison.

Los Angeles hit a point of unbearable stress before many other places, and thus it has opened to new ways of viewing reality. Having hit bottom earlier than most, it is the center for meditative practices to lead us out of the void.

SDS

Nationalism for the Universalists?

Over the past few days I have been researching the movement for a separate Sikh state in the Punjab. Before presenting my opinion, I would like to say that there is no denying the numerous hardships the Sikhs have faced. Their land was carved up during the partition. Those on the Pakistani side endured the violent resettlement of 1949. The Indian government has taken the region's water while giving little in return. When the discontentment spawned separatist paramilitaries, the Indian government reacted by bringing martial law to the Punjab and attacking the holiest spot on earth for Sikhs, the Golden Temple. When Indira Gandhi was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in response to the attack, a systematic slaughter of Sikhs took place in Dehli.

I spent some time reading the separatist website www.khalistan.com. The articles I perused seemed rooted in fear. According to the authors, the only way the Sikhs can thrive is to establish an independent nation. Israel was given as the example of a state thriving from its religious identity. Should the Sikhs emulate a state entwined in a massive civil war with little end in sight?

A former Sikh political leader was oft quoted as saying that no one can be a Sikh if he is not in favor of the independent state. This is reminiscent of Catholic bishops refusing communion to pro-choice politicians. Should doctrinal religious rules define political preferences?

I understand the Sikh path as a recognition that there is one God, and that all are brothers on the path to experiencing God. It was founded in the recognition of human dignity and brotherhood in the faces of the regimented caste system and Islamic sharia. A Sikh is a soldier of God, emanating hope and delivering justice when all else is faltering. Injustices have occurred, but the religion should not be transformed into a reactionary movement against said atrocities.

In a world shrinking daily through instant media and McDonalds in every country, coexistence is the sole solution to disaster.
No state can exist that defines itself on exclusion.

Here in Los Angeles we are on track to experience Southern California's driest winter on record. I can recall only a day or two where we received any precipitation more thant drizzle. One week ago we saw a glimpse of summer, with temperatures reaching the high eighties. Then the marine layer arrived, bringing June Gloom to March. When the marine layer arrived a month early last year, "May Grey," became the name of Southern California's month long cloud purgatory.

Stay tuned as the world's weather shifts ever so slightly. Seeing that we have built our society around a fixed weather pattern, things shall be interesting...