patanjali

August 18, 2013
Natarja

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?
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April 25, 2013
Varanasi Joey L 003

Notes on the nirguṇa / saguṇa paradox, by way of homage to Aghori Babarazzi

Aghori's masala of cruel empathy flavours the absurd task of making us naked and strange to ourselves, forcing us to wriggle, shift, and grow in the glare of our own contradictions. It’s a dirty, dirty job, but somebody – I mean nobody – I mean somebody who’s made himself a nobody pretending to be everybody – has to do it.
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September 1, 2011

translating translating patanjali

All that is needed for a religion to form is a book that no one can read, a priestly class to read it, and a general need for faith that reaches out of prehistory and childhood to challenge the angst of reason. This may not be what we want in modern yoga. But it’s certainly there.
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