Personal Life Media

Transcript

Harmony Niles: Welcome to a Taste of Sex guest speaker interviews coming to you from the one taste urban retreat center in San Fransisco. I am you host, Harmony Niles. For those of you new to the show, One Taste is an organization committed to developing awareness in all of those areas of our being where we've shut down. We offer workshops and practices designed to bring more connection to your life. And every Tuesday night we bring in a guest educator to share their perspectives in a fun and interactive way. You can join us live at 1074 Folsom street in the south of market neighborhood of San Fransisco. Tonight we have Eric Shaw speaking about the tantric roots of yoga. Eric is a doctoral candidate in Hindu religion and philosophy and has over 20 years experience in meditation and movement, and he teaches yoga here in the city.

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Eric Shaw: There's ways in which that push, from a kind of populist perspective to express oneself and the body has a mirror in the practices that came into yoga, through tantra; tantra was interested in engaging transgressive acts: drinking wine, eating meat (this is for Hindu culture), sexual practices, eating what they called parched grains, wodra [sp?], which were seen as addictive, which if you think about it, carbohydrates are kind of addictive, they were these taboo things, and they used these taboo things as a vehicle towards the divine.

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Harmony: Eric, thanks for joining us.

Eric: Great to be here.

Harmony: So tell me about your talk tonight, the tantic roots of yoga.

Eric: The tantric roots of yoga... What intrigues me in my studies is the relationship between yoga's forms, and how they come out of cultural conditions, or tendencies in culture. So when I look at the tantric roots of yoga, what I'm looking at are a set of homologies, we might say, polarities within Hindu culture which produce a variety of forms, many of which we see mirrored in popular culture in America, and eventually ripped into the mature forms of hatha yoga.

Harmony: How do you see the rise in the popularity of yoga and the total embracement of yoga by popular culture, is tantra close behind?

Eric: Close behind, interesting question. Tantra is definitely been coming into our culture since maybe the early 1900s. There were people who translated tantric text and attempted to kind of present tantra in a way that was acceptable to Victorian culture in the 1800s, which was kind of a difficult task, as you might imagine. But culture has sort of turned in it's taste, and now we look at tantra through new cultural eyes and it looks much more attractive. Both views distort what the original tantra is, but aside from that you have what's happening now, which is generally called neo-tantra, rising which is not related to Hindu cultural forms or the kind of guru pomperum [sp]  relationship. It's not related to a lineage of guru practices that come out of India. There kind of neophyte forms that people are kind of-- in dialog with suggestions from Hindu culture, but they're kind of recreating them on there own with different forms and maybe different aims.

Hatha yoga I see as taking a similar route which might be a little surprising at first. In the late 1800s, hatha yoga was looked on very much the same way that tantra was look upon, it was sort of looked down it, it was kind of a negative epithet to be called a yogi. The theosophists, who were the first group to really begin dialog between Indian cultural forms and American cultural forms, western cultural forms, were accused of being yogis, and that was something that they kind of ran from that, that label. And even in this country it took quite awhile for yoga to have the kind of appeal that it has today. In the twenties it was looked down on, in the thirties, it was looked down on. When you get into the fifties, and you get beat culture, and you get these forms of populists culture starting to arise and assert themselves at that same time you get the popularity of yoga, a physical practice, a practice concerned with certain forms of power that are not what we might call, I don't know, aristocratic power or high brow power, its power that comes from individualized practice, it comes from forms that are artistic, forms that are rooted in spontaneity, forms that are rooted in energy rather than refinement, you might say. And these are a little tricky, because there's always kind of messy edges around these words, but that's kind of how I'm casting it, that's the way I'm looking at it.

Harmony: Was it changes in America culture that made us ready to embrace this now?

Eric: I definitely believe that. What we saw in the fifties and sixties was the rise of mass media. And what mass media did is it created advertising culture, and it gave populous culture momentum that it never had before. Populous culture always had a certain amount of momentum, there were always village performers and then even in the first stage of newspapers and when popular culture started to generate new forms; you had circus, you had vaudeville and that sort of thing. But with television, all of a sudden art became threaded into people's lives in a deeper way. That had already started to happen with Movies. So people became cultural junkies for the first time in any culture's history. It was always nice to sing, it was always nice to do the kinds of artistic things that any culture did, but we became consumers of culture in a way we never had before. Along with that, everybody's aware of that famous statement by the director of the FCC in the early nineteen sixties that TV was a vast waste land.

Along with that I think there was a certain taste developed that was broad based for certain styles of culture that were not high brow culture. So you had this mass movement in that way, towards this energetic direction in cultural forms, rather than a refinement in cultural forms, and I'm looking at that as a polarity; energy on the one side, refinement on the other side. You also had a departure from mass forms of religious practice and mass forms of meaning-making through religious practice and that began to open up religious practice, and this has happened through history again and again. With the sixties it happened big time, we had all these new age practices coming in and the ferment that had been created in the eighteen nineties with swami Vivekananda coming to America was really strongly coming to a head, and the ground was prepared, you could say for the coming in of gurus from India to speak to people who had been acculturated in a new way.

Harmony: We're going to take a short break, we'll be back in just a moment.

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Harmony: Welcome back. You're listening to a taste of sex, guest speaker interviews. We're here with Yoga and Tantra educator, Eric Shaw. Eric, do you consider yourself a Tantra educator? [laughs]

Eric: Interesting nom de plume. [laughs] Tonight, that's what I am.

Harmony: Awesome.

Eric: Yoga educator perhaps more exactly.

Harmony: Tell me how you came to this path.

Eric: How did I come to the path of yoga, or come to the path of speaking about tantra and yoga or--

Harmony: Yeah.

Eric: All that, I suppose. I was raised in a pretty religious home, and so I always had a penchant for religious practice and spiritual practice, in various ways. You know, I rebelled against it, I embraced it, rebelled, embraced. I've always been involved in working my body, I've practiced martial arts and done a lot of athletic practice. At the end of a long period of doing triathlon, when I was really pushing my body quite a lot, I had this little voice in my head that was saying “do yoga, do yoga, do yoga,” and at some point I gave in to it. And I tend to be a gestalt type person, when I do something, I do it completely, so almost immediately I started practicing yoga everyday and at the time I was making a big shift in my life, I was starting to explore dance a lot, and teach dance and I was making new forms of self-examination practice from some work I'd done in group process. And then at some point about a year after I started practicing yoga very religiously, I just had this other light bulb go on in my head and I said, “Eric, yoga gets everything that you want, it has everything in it that you want to offer to people, why not just focus on yoga?” So that was about six years ago, maybe seven, and it's been pretty much a gestalt since then, pretty pure focus.

Harmony: And what brought you to the studies of Hindu religion?

Eric: That followed in turn because yoga's rooted in Hindu religion and I've always been a scholar, I waste my days collecting degrees. [laughs] So then at some point I was teaching in college and I wasn't in tenure tract because I didn't have a Ph D, so I said “Eric, you need to get a Ph D,” and why not thread that with my interest in yoga, so that's what I did.

Harmony: how do you feel that your studies have changed your life?

Eric: How have my studies changed my life, wow that's a pretty major question. Well, my life revolves a lot around my yoga teaching and there's a way in which what I study enriches that. I start to see the multi-level experience through time of what I'm teaching in this moment. I see how it echoes previous forms of yoga practice, previous ideas about yoga, previous intents in yoga, previous forms in yoga, and I hope that I can offer that to my students. Sometimes I feel like I dwell in a very different place from the people around me because my study is so much focused on different cultures and what has gone on in the past, so I feel like I see everything through a lens that is echoing former cultural forms, so in that way it's changed my life even more, I feel like I'm living in a number of  centuries at once [laughs] rather than just living in the here and now.

Harmony: What else do you wish I had asked you?

Eric: Hmm ... Well, I guess I could talk a little bit about the specifics that I'm recognizing in the relationship between tantra and yoga and they're intriguing. If we doing the imagisitic part of my talk I have a rash of images I show in this lecture. What I would be showing you were pictures of sadhus and their various practices and then I would be pairing them with modern day practices. Some of them are the more extreme forms of yoga practice, but still they're quite interesting. One of the slides that I pop up pretty early on the screen is a picture of a break dancer, and he's upside down, he's got his legs in the air, and he's doing something very much like a Hindu sadhu.
So going back to how I started out introducing this topic, there's ways in which that push, from a kind of populist perspective to expression oneself and the body has a mirror in the practices that came into yoga, through tantra; tantra was interested in engaging transgressive acts: drinking wine, eating meat (this is for Hindu culture), sexual practices, eating what they called parched grains, wodra [sp?], which were seen as addictive, which if you think about it, carbohydrates are kind of addictive, they were these taboo things, and they used these taboo things as a vehicle towards the divine.

So I look at some of the other elements of Sadhu practice: you have what's called Digambaras, the wandering sadhus who don't wear clothes, they wander naked through the cremation grounds and the streets and that sort of thing. And then you have this modern development of naked yoga, which we could say comes from a sensual drive or you could say it's echoing a natural attitude towards physical practice; you had the Greeks who ran the Olympics in the nude, you had the elements of pagan culture who did rituals in the nude, there's been this kind of relationship in low-field culture between the body and religious practice, so you see that echoed in hatha yoga.  Hatha yoga itself means force, or sun-moon, it's developing this set of polarities, sun-moon, but it also has this suggestion of force and that comfort with the element of violence is also something you see coming out of populous culture in a certain form; in actual physical encounter with violence we often associate boxing and we associate karate and that sort of thing with elements of low brow culture so physical practices in yoga naturally have a relationship to that field.

Harmony: So tell me about your doctoral thesis, what are you studying now?

Eric: My doctoral thesis is on the history of yoga in America and it begins at about the point in eighteen ninety when a swami by the name of Vivekananda came to America. There were certain developments in Hindu culture at that time which mirrored things that were happening in our culture at the time; we might say there was an avant garde of religion. You had this group called the Brahmo Samaj that Vivekananda came out of. He was a bridge figure, he was schooled in western forms but he came out of Hindu culture, he was in an eastern culture but he was confronting western culture at a time when western culture was oppressing eastern culture in a huge way; the British has been running India since the mid seventeen hundreds, and their control over that culture was deepening, at the same time there was a way in which the Hindus were confronted by and challenged by British culture and stimulated by British culture, you had the Hindu renaissance happening in the early eighteen hundreds. And Vivekananda owes his development of thought and spirit to that movement; that movement was a dialog with elements in the west: the unitarians, Emerson, Whitman, the transcendentalists, and if we think about those figures, they're figures who we look on as enlightened, it's not evangelical culture, it's not orthodox culture, it's an emerging culture that's challenging norms.

And so as Vivekananda came into this culture, presenting ideas around yoga, presenting ideas around Hindu culture, certain elements of this culture started to gravitate to them. They already were gravitating to them, Bhagavad Gita had been translated in 1795 and it was being read: as everybody knows, Emerson was a great fan of the Gita, in Boston there were Buddhist groups, the Theosophist had start around 1870, who were pushing in the other direction, moving into India with ideas from the west and then translating them for the west. They published a lot of early text, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and yoga sutras. Vivekananda himself translated the sutras for an American audience, using the idiom of America. This is the era of Horatio Alger and robber barons and a strong polarity in the culture socioeconomically. You had the great depression of 1893 and muckrakers attempting to break up the trusts that were running this culture economically. So you had these intense dialogs going on in the culture and Vivekananda stepped in, kind of appealing to high brow people, people who have that freedom to explore another culture; he was bankrolled by a lot of rich widows and whatnot. But he brought these ideas about Hindu culture into a country that was experiencing a lot of ferment, ideas were being challenged around religion because of Darwinism and Nietzsche, the whole idea that God is dead or that we're just creatures of biology and not divine creatures. So he stepped into that with a new kind of synthesis; that's kind of the beauty of Hindu culture, it doesn't sweep away science, it has no beef with science, whereas orthodox religious cultures in the west often do, we see that as a separation. So that integration, the way he offered that integration to the west was appealing to people. Not at first to everybody, of course, but it eventually gained momentum, and if you read Vivekananda's ideas today, they seem very up to date because this new age culture has been prevalent since the sixties and we're all familiar with his forms, whether you're aligned with it or not.

Harmony: And what about the tantra, how widely embraced is that becoming?

Eric: In America?

Harmony: Yeah

Eric: Well, I think there's little sects that are interested in tantra, neotantra is huge in the bay area, if you put tantra in a google search, you get all these websites, many of them are in San Fransisco and they have thousands of members. I think the west has a problematic relationship to sex and I think tantra offers an opportunity to explore that in a certain frame that perhaps makes it safe or perhaps provides a template for some new forms that might be more satisfying. Ways to understand it, ways to embrace it. You have Kali Ma here in the bay area, you have Gurumayi Chidvilasananda who runs a Siddha foundation, and those are guru pompera [?] traditions, those are traditions that are rooted in the tantra tradition, Kashmir shamanism in India. I think Kali Ma actually comes out of a Buddhist tradition, but there's also a long tradition of Buddhist tantra. So you have those forms side by side, and I know that you guys have hosted Kali Ma. So there's a resonance there that you guys share, one is not rooted in the old tradition in India, it's sort of looking at it from afar and admiring it's forms and then adapting them willy nilly. And then you have this other tradition which is deeply rooted in that but it adapted to a western context, if you look at what guru Ma's doing it's phenomenal; she's adapted to western culture big time, they've got the whole media machine running and they're doing a great job.

Harmony: Thanks for listening to a Taste of Sex. We've been talking to Eric Shaw, and you can visit his website at prasanayoga.com. This show is produced by One Taste, check out our other podcasts on personallifemedia.com. If you have any questions or comments about the show, we'd love to hear from you. Please post to our online chatboard at OneTaste.us. You'll find calendars for our San Fransisco and New York centers, both online, check out some of our upcoming workshops and classes. Thanks so much.