FINDING KALI MA (2)

Without boring you to death with all the details of my preliminary online search, let’s just say that with the help of Google Web (infinite websites scoured), Google Images (a sneaky way to get to even more websites that don’t come up otherwise), Google Maps (very helpful if you have the patience to travel at “street view” around town), and Google Earth (an eerie technology that consequently does help in learning the lay of the land from home) I was able to get a few phone numbers and some addresses of people and places possibly serving the Kali community. This was about a week or so back. First let’s get up to speed.

 

FINDING KALI MA

The search for devotees of Kali Ma has begun.

Finding places where people gather to worship the aspect of God of severed heads is not necessarily an easy task. There’s nothing particularly secretive about Kali worship, it just tends to often be the practice of either A. Amma or Bhagavan Das devotees who, while fine enough people, are not necessarily my main focus here, or B. immigrant communities that aren’t necessarily interested in proselytizing and thus do not have fancy websites calling all those outside the diaspora to the faith.

 

THE SPIRITUALLY INTENSE IN FILM

Recently I posted a review of Bertrand Bonello’s latest spiritually cacaphonic film On War. The review starts like this:

Spiritual disciplines span the spectrum from quiet personal self-reflection to physically militant offensives against the ego that tyrannizes us all. Writer/Director Bertrand Bonello’s latest film On War deals with the latter.

On War is a film about purging—the purging of self, of attachment to the world, and of attachment to assumptions about one’s self in the world. As the characters in the film suggest, it is only through this purging that a person may fully release into the immediacy of joy and pleasure. And it is joy and pleasure, things real and authentic, that our protagonist Bertrand (Mathieu Amalric) is searching for.

Full review over at Quiet Earth.

I feel as if it’s a rare thing to see non-conformist spirituality depicted as a center-piece to a film. Anyone know of any others of note? Let’s assume Peter Brook’s Meetings with Remarkable Men is a given.

 

INTERRUPTED BY FORD

After “Breakfast with Henry Ford” by James Opie (PARABOLA Winter ’08)

Why is being interrupted so jarring? Looking out my office window I see people walking. They are moving. Walking forward. Those who are standing are swaying just a little. Why is it that the stopping of movement has such an effect on us humans where bumping into someone’s shoulder, even with a polite “sorry,” is an irritation?

Anyone who has practiced some form of meditation has probably been told to “still the mind” or “cease the flow of thoughts.” Even meditation practices that shy away from commands to “quiet the mind” still at least suggest an interruption in mental chatter. The call to mental stillness is ubiquitous in spiritual communities and yet, for some of us (most of us?) being told, subtly coaxed, or gently lead into stillness is an act that is as simple as balancing on the head of a pin.

 

COVERED IN PARABOLIC MATERIALS

This is just a little note to say that I will be back up writing soon. Right now I’m knee deep finishing up PARABOLA’s latest issue on “Man & Machine” and it’s looking great. Expect to see an interview with Ravi Ravindra, as well as articles covering Islam and science, webmasters of the Orthodox Jewish world, Bread and Puppet theater, cyborgs, and more!

 

UPCOMING EVENT: : “Agni: The Wisdom of Fire”

Dr. Robert Svoboda and Dr. Scott Blossom will be speaking at Ashtanga Yoga New York (AYNY) in New York City on Saturday June 14th & Sunday June 15th from 1–4pm.

From the AYNY website:
Fire embodies the sun, and is its spirit on Earth. Fire is the celebrant of sacrifices, and “digester” of life experiences. We rely on fire’s good judgment to keep the other Elements in right relationship to one another. These lectures will discuss how best to invoke fire into our lives, internally & externally; how to prevent fires in places we don’t want them to start; how to align our internal fires; and how to keep Tejas predominant, and Pitta subservient.

 

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

“Things are not as they appear. Nor are they otherwise.”
From the Lakavatra Sutra (The epigraph to The Drop Edge of Yonder)

About three months ago my cyber self came across the Ashtanga Yoga inspired and spiritually genuine musings of Spiros Antonopoulos at SoulJerky.com. As a site whose well-earned no BS take on yoga and all things Eastern came as a breath of fresh air, I quickly made it one of the few haunts on my weekly Web wanderings. Happily, while browsing the site I was hipped to Rudolph Wurlitzer’s latest novel The Drop Edge of Yonder.

 

THE NEXT BIG THING

The Situationists were a radicalized group of international post-Dada ex-artists and political theorists who in the 1950s and 60s attempted to expose everything from the banality of grid-like city planning to the mediation of reality through images and commerce. One graffitied statement attributed to them reads, “Boredom is counterrevolutionary.” An unabashed declarative such as this has always had a special place in my heart. Yet, lately I have been wondering if an obsession with subverting boredom has led us down a rather boring path itself. Especially when it comes to the commercialization of spirituality, perhaps raising our hands and admitting to an excessive ennui is just what we need to do.

 

JESUS, BUY ME A BANJO

For me the term “Christian Rock” has always been synonymous with “bad music.” It’s happy, it’s slightly arrogant in that “I’ve been saved” kind of way, and more often then not it just seems manufactured (think: N’Sync with the Spirit of Jesus running through their veins). But these days I am finding (though I admit I’m slightly skeptical) that as all good well-read twenty-somethings should do, taking an old approach to living and making it radical again is as American as a log cabin in Brooklyn.