Articles – Page 57 – Matthew Remski

August 18, 2013

The Unbearable Distance of Belief: Notes on Icons, Appropriation, and the Second-Order Religiosity of Modern Yoga

Why does a thing need to be reconstructed? What exactly has been lost? Childhood? Homeland? Faith? Is there a motivating insecurity? Is reconstruction the public response of private lives that are felt to have fallen into disrepair? And when we reconstruct the thing on the dance stage or in the yoga studio, how do we deal with our awareness of the reconstruction?

August 14, 2013

steve jobs: an ayur-reverie about a lost mother, the pancreas, and the maternalization of technology

First published on www.elephantjournal.com, 10/12/2011 __________ How is it meaningful that Steve Jobs died of pancreatic cancer? The poetry of ayurveda might say: Steve Jobs lost […]

August 11, 2013

Deepak Chopra muddles words like “consciousness” and “quantum”, but that doesn’t make him a charlatan

If we're going to critique Chopra as an interloper into science, let's keep it clean of the ad hominem, and not feed this projection beast. Critique the material only; force ever greater transparency about the distinctions between science, spirituality, and poetry. Don't allow him to perpetuate a transcultural and transhistorical language error that confuses scientific terms with religious terms. Allow for the possibility that like everyone he is less a manipulator than one manipulated by history.

August 10, 2013

His body is a golden string your body’s hanging from: Leonard Cohen and the disgraced guru

For so many men, the spiritual path is a road for those who donâ€™t know how to be their own fathers, who crave to relive the crisis of clashing with authority, to retest themselves, perversely enthralled by the strange virtues of the bully. Thereâ€™s an erotic self-hatred in it: it feels good to rub yourself raw and then to rub yourself away against an absolute. It feels like justice, like what you deserve. Your right to be here is liminal in the shadows of the temple, the church, Geshe Michael, Abraham, Roshi. But the shadow also protects you and makes you invisible if you are too fearful to grow.