"A master asked his disciple, 'What is the sound of one hand clapping? Speak! Speak!' "
The Blue Cliff Record
[Often, a riddle is assigned to a meditation (zazen style) student. These koan, so called, are highly respected and profoundly meaningless - explaining why zenists, yogis, and the like are neurotic, crowding L.A.'s shopping malls, eating lots of ice cream.]
"Help in three-ten! Help in three-ten!"
I do not hear - I listen. I awaken; so does the universe, because no such thing as the sound of only one hand clapping exists; all things arise in mutual relationship. Living in a world of quiet harmony and peaceful equanimity, I often find myself in the living room of my apartment overlooking Laurel Canyon shortly after the Los Angeles sun rises through a haze of smog and fumes. I sit in a half-lotus position on a blue mat, dressed loosely in yoga whites. This morning kicks-off with ten repetitions of Pranayama breathing. Inhaling beautiful, golden-white energy deep into my lungs slowly, slowly, ... I hold and release. The movement is precise; my chin drops into a center cleft between the clavicle bones while mastoid muscles on both sides of my neck melt into the upper trapezoids, and I have mastered expanding the floating ribs without raising or tightening my shoulders. Upon its release, I hold my breath, bottoming out before inhaling again.
A few feet away sits a plastic bottle of mineral water. The clear liquid is purity inspected, fortified using thirty-six essential minerals and vitamins and contains "green tea;" that's New Age yoga-speak for caffeine - enough G-force raging through the circulatory system keeps one buzzing and meditating for seven days and nights, eyeballs plastered against the wall, hair follicles standing on end - but not mine. After thirty years of koan, meditation, and green tea, well, green tea is murder on hair. I might drink coffee or soda pop or eat a sugar donut, however, I am a knowledgeable shaman, a disciplined yogi if you like - the vehicle is pure and I don't wish to risk feeding baser instincts. The mineral water is called Yo-Go! It awakens this shaman, ears popping, and focuses the senses on such koan as One Hand Clapping, and I also find it useful for cleaning tough lime deposits off shower walls.
"Help, somebody! Help in three-ten!"
After holding each inhalation and exhalation for an extended length of time and polishing off a bottle of Yo-Go!, I channel my spirit guides. Our business together is esoteric, very spiritual. My special field of Eastern practice is subtle energy healing and we are in the process of saving the world. I am in the process of knocking back my second bottle of Yo-Go! and my consciousness is expanding nicely. It is divine in the midst of the mundane. I now contain enough New Age rocket fuel coursing through my vascular system to blast-off for yet unexplored dimensions. I feel the urge to leap up and rip - gracefully - into my first of a series of eighteen asanas (yoga postures).
Momentarily I rise from the mat, yawn, and step to my window overlooking a private courtyard of lush, overgrown banana palms, and next to those a row of potted plants burgeoning under the shade of the palms' rubbery leaves. The sun begins its daily arc from east to west. All is right with the world and I smile to myself ... "Help in-" and slam the window.
This happens: only a muffled noise, a desperate plea in the distance of an otherwise beautiful universe. Taking it to the blue mat, I assume a Mountain posture, standing feet together, buttocks tightly protecting the sacral nerve center, hands at my sides, shoulders back and relaxed with my stomach just a touch forward. This places the center of gravity over my hips. I am organic - growing out of God's aspect called the earth, a piece of the planet. I am a mountain. The Sanskrit word for mountain is tada. I repeat the word, tada, several times. However, bursting full of Yo-Go!, purity inspected, and fortified using thirty-six essential minerals and vitamins, and containing green tea, the word escapes more like a preparatory drum roll - tuh duh! - and I feel my feet will fly into a crotch grabbing, Michael Jackson dance.
Immediately I jump to the Extended Triangle posture: feet spread, arms outstretched like airplane wings and I am now bending to my right until the hand on the end of my straight right arm rests behind my heel. My left arm is reaching above my head and I stare at it. I must meet the position, that is, maintain the position until yoga and I are one. 'Yoga' means 'to unite'. Nothing exists - no thing exists. The universe is empty of 'selfness' - 'thingness'. In a void of dynamic change filled only with relationship, momentary position is everything - I do not look - I see the Great Void, through which Brahman creates itself as numerous aspects of mundane fingers pointing to the divine. Existence is transcendently integrated because each aspect transcends itself to become the whole, and the whole's virtue to become itself is present in each aspect. In the end, the mundane and the divine are one.
"Help in three-ten!"
Her voice is weakening. She's old, tired, and spends days pasted in a chair watching television. She's nursing a bad hip and is tied to the whisky bottle. That's why she periodically falls out of the chair. A gentleman friend of hers visits every day. He delivers the good-juice and is no great shakes. He drives a lemon yellow Buick with a tennis ball stuck on his radio antenna - a real sport. Last week he collapsed in a drunken stupor downstairs by the mailboxes until the paramedics arrived.
"Can you breathe?"
"Urp."
"Breathe for me, old timer, or their gonna throw yuh's in a box and nail it shut."
He sputtered and spit-up. "No hospital, please."
"Yuh want I should let you die here? You'd like that."
"No hospital, no-"
He's a distinguished appearing gentleman retaining most of his hair and a silver mustache. She can still snatch an older Adonis because she used to be a knockout - the Coca-Cola Girl of 1945.
Time was she'd invited my wife up to her place for tea. The old lady brimmed full of life before Cutty Sark became an appendage. That afternoon she sat Ann on the sofa balancing tea and pound cake. Her ancient eyes lit up and she driveled incessantly, as if she hadn't a visitor in eons. Above the sofa hung a glass shrine containing Coca-Cola memorabilia: bottles, painted serving trays, calendars, all with her pictures on them - her supplication to the gleaming, toothy American dream. "Oh my, yes, I was very popular, what with the U.S.O. dances and armed services tours. You know," she spoke with a glint in her eye and a hushed tone, "they used to pin my pictures up on the barracks. I gave that Betty Grable gal a run for her money! You're cute too, dear."
Afterwards, Ann ran off at the mouth, breathless. "Youngbear! She's famous!"
"That's nice." Yogic training dictates that I practice non-attachment and deep compassion simultaneously - very profound. "I'm going to the mall and score a double-scoop of Rocky Road in a cone."
"No. really! She's got a giant poster of herself drinking Coke out of a glass bottle with some army Major So n' So from the forties. A glass bottle, no cans, and she's wearing a jacket with padded shoulders and a hat with a feather in it and everything!"
A week later, Ann managed a chance meeting with the Coca-Cola lady downstairs at the mailboxes. The old girl stood weaving, buttressing the wall with her nose, disoriented, whiskey aromatic at eleven o'clock in the morning, and she saw Ann. "Well, now, if it isn't little Mrs. Yogi Bear." Ann felt betrayed; her illusory faith in the material world shattered.
***
Lunging my left leg forward, I stop when the knee aligns above the left foot and my thigh is right-angled. This throws the balance forward and must be counteracted by keeping the right leg stretched straight behind my right hip. My arms are both thrown into the air and my upper torso is twisted completely in line with my left leg. Very good - this is called The Warrior posture. My eyes are fixed forward while I wait patiently, uniting with yoga, becoming one with *extreme pain in the quadriceps (thighs) and deltoids (shoulders). I wonder why it is called The Warrior posture; with my arms extended above my head, my torso completely open to any and all attacks, I would name it The Certain Death posture.
Yoga is more than an exercise; it is a state of flexible energy existence. Our bodies are mindful energy. They function as separate units from the mindful energy outside of them due to a boundary of tension. Practicing asanas unites inner and outer energy by forcing us to use our energy to meet outside energy by breaking down the separating wall of tension. That tension is memory, it is history. As long as we remain human we will keep and maintain our bodies, however, the more flexible our energy boundaries become, the less tension we sustain between our selves and the rest of the universe; we feel united. Each of us carries a limited history of movement. Yoga interrupts that familiar history expanding the energy movement territory. Some yogis are able to extend their energy at will meeting with outside energy and actually "reading the energy map" of other people. At the moment, I am not reading energy. I am fighting intense pain in my left knee as the tendons stretch beyond human endurance. No more Yo-Go! and this session is turning rugged.
"Help in three-ten!"
Being an enlightened shaman means coming to a meaningful understanding of generosity's virtue. I must save my yogic bliss for a later time. The Coca-Cola lady needs help up from the floor. I shake off The Warrior position and hobble across my room. Down the corridor, between my apartment and the elevator landing, Neanderthal man struggles through a series of evolutionary anthropological postures to stand once again upright. I opt for the stairwell to the third floor, knowing that Adonis rode the elevator earlier. He left while he could still walk and now the elevator reeks of urine, Aqua Velva, and Ripple. It's their plot to die together, a grotesque Romeo and Juliet - double cirrhoses of the livers. It will be a conclusion with no respect, no love - prolonged suicide.
I approach the screen door to three-ten peering into tomb-like darkness. The death chair, a mummy blanket strewn across it, sits empty. Her television blares afternoon soap opera. Pictures hang crooked and walls are stained nicotine yellow. Liquor bottles grow scattered in groups, half empty or full, depending on your point of view, and sticky. Trash overflows. The stench of rotting flesh wafts a perfume of finality. Gawd, she's dead. Then I see her behind shadows, sprawled on the carpet: a sack of bones showing blue veins; a piece of meat holding two cavernous eyes; a tubercular vision by Edvard Munch.
It wasn't so horrible that she called Ann, "Mrs. Yogi Bear." It's sad, her life a tragedy. And those eyes wide open and staring at me, frozen. The Coca-Cola lady raped by Western culture and cast out as corporate refuse because her teeth no longer twinkled. I feel no attachment, yet, strangely, I feel compassion. Above the chair hangs an old tin-serving tray with her likeness illustrated on it. She's smiling and young and the bottle of cola in her beautiful, perfect, feminine hand is only a dime. She lays, head propped against the chair where she's fallen, flesh loose and gray, and those eyes. "Don't just stand there. Help me!"
All compassion takes a hike. An experienced yogi knows when to change game plans, to go with the flow as it were.
"I need my chair! I need a drink! You gonna help me, or what?"
"No. I was just checking."
"Creep! Yoga creep!"
"Fine. Have a nice day. Someone will be along and pick you up."
***
Occasionally a fresh point of view is called for. At times like these, the yoga practitioner must clear his mind like a painter distances himself from his canvas. I stand back by my window and breathe. Just breathing. That's all there is. In and out and in... A tree outside my window! A sturdy oak blowing in the wind, it's leaves gently rocking back and forth. This will be fine for five minutes, and if a bird lands in it, maybe seven or eight.
"Help in three-ten!"
I am on the mat sitting in The Hero posture. Both of my legs are bent at their knees, calves straight behind me, and I am sitting on my heels. Again, my arms are overhead, this time palms up and fingers interlocking. My knees and the tops of my feet are being crushed into bone meal and colors float in front of my eyes.
I can't help her, cannot heal her. I am a powerful healer but not a panacea for the world's problems. She's too old. What if I picked her up the wrong way? I might break a bone, smash her vertebrae. My knees and feet have had it.
Back at the window, across the street, city workers shatter asphalt with jackhammers. That's interesting. If it's an election year, perhaps they'll paint lines. I wonder why they wear blue jeans two sizes too large. Do they know they're showing every time they bend over?
Okay, fine! I'm a neurotic, non-compassionate, lousy yogi! Is that what this is all about? I spy on traffic below. It's mid-day and cars are inching along. This is Southern California. Half the cars are Mercedes convertibles, the other half Hondas. I move slowly to the telephone and dial 911 emergency. "There's an invalid upstairs who needs help getting back into her chair."
"What's the apartment number, sir?"
"Help in three-ten!"
"Got it, sir."
***
No more yoga now. An old lady's life is at stake. I've got to supervise the paramedics, make certain they find the right apartment. What if she dies? Poor thing. I jog down to the mailboxes and wait. They pull up, a deafening siren and flashing lights. Two men wearing starched white shirts jump out, and carrying oxygen they race past me up the stairs.
See, I'm compassionate. I called them. Now, how about it? A little peace in my life? I wait the long wait until her screen door clacks shut and the starched shirts ride down in the elevator. Leaping stairs two at a time, I press my nose against the Coca-Cola lady's screen. She's pasted in the chair watching television, and then she notices me. "I'm glad you're alright. I was worried about you and being compassionate-"
"I don't recall saying, 'Hey, Yogi Bear, call the paramedics!' " A vein pulses out of her forehead. "Idiot! Do you know what this is going to cost me!"
***
The Head on Knee posture requires absolute concentration. While sitting straight up on the mat, the left knee is bent bringing the left foot into the groin. The right leg is straight and flat resting calf and hamstring muscles on the floor. Stretching arms overhead, one bends over the right leg - keeping the left foot tucked into the groin - bringing the head down to the right knee and grabbing the bottom of the right foot with both hands. One slip of focus and a week in hospital traction is the only way the head can be separated from the knee; yoga is called the 'gentle' art.
Back at my window, the blood flow normalizes and my morning workout, which has taken all day, is over. I watch the cars, wondering how many people suffering aches and pains and injuries live unaware of that which the east has bestowed upon us: Yo-Go! and yoga for a pain-free, stress-free existence. Ann's key turns in the lock. When she pops open the door, I notice a bit of commotion outside. "What's the hap's Ann?"
"The Coca-Cola lady just passed away."
"These inexplicable happenings, these things we dare not fathom," I said. "May peace and harmony be her reward. I'm going out for a quick pint of Rocky Road ice cream."
END
*Note: Clearly, true hatha yoga practice is accomplished without pain. It is not a battle. It takes place in that silence between the notes of music and never over-stretches a tendon. Yoga grows slowly, using patience and awareness of one's body. If, dear reader, you find yourself being injured in yoga class, politely seek a different instructor. Y.B.
