\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
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When yoga is reduced to a self-obsessed, bourgeois lifestyle distraction, people who are so poor they would never have time to take a yoga class actually die in collapsing Bangladesh sweatshops. So a bare minimum goal in yoga work should be to keep things real.<\/p>\n
In preparing for a few upcoming discussions of the Bhagavad Gita,<\/em> something inescapably real occurred to me. I began by considering the question: \u201cWhat war is about to begin for me<\/em>, in this hour?\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s not a new question in Gita studies. Commentators have forever personalized the old book\u00a0in this way. Non-dualists abstracted the battle at Kurukshetra into an attack on the illusory self. Tantrics turned the war upon the fragmented psyche that cannot bring itself to love life and delight in the present moment. Some Indian freedom fighters heard Krishna rallying them to slaughter the British; others heard a pacifist message.<\/p>\n I resonate with all of these approaches a little. But they don\u2019t really bite hard. It always seems like there’s\u00a0something missing. The question nags: What war is about to begin for all of us, right now?<\/p>\n We can take our pick of wars, given the countless forms of oppression that surround us, live through us, benefitting\u00a0few and wounding many. Racism, sexism, classism: so many wars.<\/p>\n But the inescapable war, which both exacerbates and transcends\u00a0every socio-political inequality \u2013 a war as inevitable as Arjuna\u2019s war against his nihilistic cousins \u2013 is the war that human civilization is waging upon terrestrial life.<\/p>\n Everyone is trembling on this battlefield. For most of us, there is no God to talk to, to instruct, encourage, and comfort us. We must make the most of speaking with each other.<\/p>\n Arjuna had it easy in a sense. At least he could see the approaching absurdity with his own eyes. He didn\u2019t have to interpret the horror of climate scientists muted through\u00a0the equivocations of economists. He could actually see his enemies on the stormy horizon: uncles and teachers waiting with a million foot soldiers, ready to loose their arrows upon the innocents. We have to make do with articles, hockey-stick graphs, pictures of receding glaciers or 10,000 walrus stranded with no sea ice. There is so much data.<\/p>\n Arjuna fully cognized the story of how this moment had arrived: the battle over inheritances, the echo of ancient and stubborn vows, insults and deceptions, the paralysis of a blind king, the psychopathy of Duryodana. Arjuna could see his inescapable position, as well as his own role in creating it. When he falls weeping to his knees, his conflict is as tangible as the earth beneath his armour.<\/p>\n But can we see the war waged by human civilization on terrestrial life? Can we taste it in every sip of imported coffee from every\u00a0takeaway cup? Can we hear it in every rumble of every oil furnace in every home, whether mansion or trailer? In general, we cannot. Technologized, industrial, fossil-fuel-based, capitalistic war against terrestrial life does an ingenious thing: it makes the humans that spread it feel safe, good, even loved.<\/p>\n My two year-old son has a red plastic front loader he takes to bed with him like a teddy bear. Like most teddy bears today, it was probably made in a Majority World country by a child six or seven years older than him. He\u2019s fascinated with construction sites, which are deceptively named, if you think about it. We didn\u2019t encourage this fetish, other than to delight in his delight.<\/p>\n As I watch him play with his toy construction vehicle, it\u2019s clear that the enemy of terrestrial life is inextricable from our pleasure at extracting primary colours, moving things, changing things, clearing things away. So often, our exuberance expresses itself through creative actions we cannot conceive of as destructive.<\/p>\n I\u2019m sure of it: Arjuna definitely had it easier than us, because he was convinced that war was inevitable. His problem was in understanding how he should participate. Our problem is in seeing how deeply we are participating already.<\/p>\n Plus, nobody was gaslighting Arjuna. Nobody was telling him it was all going to turn out alright. His enemies were not tempting him to distraction with a new car or smartphone, or with vague neoliberal hopes that free markets or technology will save us, that eating sustainably harvested salmon will halt the collapse of ocean life, or with the insinuation that being a good citizen with your recycling can rationalize the expansion of the tar sands.<\/p>\n In the battle the Gita sanctifies, Arjuna\u2019s half-brother and tortured enemy Karna deploys an invincible weapon, a bow called Vijaya. Strung by the war-god Indra, Vijaya cannot be destroyed. It never misses its mark, delivering unbreakable arrows that slice the air with lightning.<\/p>\n Today, civilization has an even more powerful weapon of mass destruction than Karna\u2019s. This weapon is the propaganda that says there is no war at all. Every red plastic front loader and yoga-ass advertisement sends an arrow, Cupid-like, into the heart. It seduces our discrimination, our ability to see beyond our daily balances, with a simple lie: personal salvation will come through more gratification at cheaper prices<\/em>. Everything is okay.<\/em><\/p>\n We have projected, embodied, fallen in love with, married, and merged with human civilization, the enemy of terrestrial life. In some hidden part of us, we know that something is not okay. With every banal purchase, we delay the bracing thought of divorce.<\/p>\n