Well, I’ve lost my mind again. Rather, it slipped quietly out while my body was distracted – like a babysitter so focused on the crackle of hot oil she doesn’t notice Timmy sneaking out into the alley. All of a sudden, the gem whose safekeeping has been your only concern – mischievous and unpredictable as it is – has unexpectedly disappeared. Ah, that slippery mind of mine.

So, to introduce my new brand new Xenith column about Eastern practices of mind in the West, the loss of mine shall have to do until I get it back.

It happened sometime between 11:00 am and noon, while I was vinyasa*1 flowing from down dog to plank pose to cobra, morphing from animate to inanimate with a breath. Mind you, if not familiar with the practice of yoga, this is not generally the time when the mind is supposed to leave; rather, it is the conditioning of the mind-body connection. Mindfulness through yoga does not mean mindlessness through dissociation. The mind through yoga becomes elastic, unreal, flowing like an ocean across thoughts – peaceful, controlled energy. A dissociated mind is quite the opposite, fragmented and chaotic, or everyday life for many of us. I had woken up that morning already feeling mind slightly imbalanced, like a feather resting on a fencepost. One wrong exhale and it was gone. So what do I do? The body is still here. Luckily, or unluckily, I’ve gotten used to the occasional abandonment of my mind, and I look to others who have crossed similar paths.

Jack Kerouac writes in Dharma Bums, “Everything is okay, forever and forever and forever.”

Poverty, scoundrel living, irresponsibility, mad dashing across the country, drunkenness, dancing, sex and orgies – these are what the Beats are most famous for. The literary styles that emerge from that are spontaneous prose (Kerouac’s personal stamp), bee-bop prosody, words like jazz, stream of consciousness, and freedom of expression, not all of it good, but most of it novel, and a good chunk of it important. That there should be a connection between the highs of moment-to-moment free flying “Beatitude” and the placid, momentary infinitude of Buddhism is less surprising than it may seem at first glance.

To believe this world is actually real would be devastating for those existing on the outskirts of society.

And that semi-obscure mind practices like astral projection, yoga, meditation, sensory deprivation tanks, Beatnik ideals and of course mind-altering substances should be (re)surfacing among certain groups during the time of America’s Great Recession and Reorganization should be no more surprising. The frantic, chaotic nature of being a young, thoughtful person living during a time characterized by information superhighways, the crumbling of the economic and educational systems, increasing disparities in wealth, increasing distrust in government and technology, extreme joblessness and hyper-consumerism, on top of regular postmodern existential crises of existence, brings me, and others, to a search for some sort of fluid stability, or at least some other way of existing in my mind than a television-saturated moron. The Beats weren’t looking for fame, just experience, and I often complain, “I’m just seeking enlightenment, that’s all!” As a novice to Ohm and meditation, I seek a balance of energies, and sometimes adopt a Bukowski-esque mantra, even, of just doing nothing. We’ve got physical reality and virtual reality; why not cultivate transcendental reality? What are we all rushing toward anyway? Death will surely come.

Back to my mind, then. I wait patiently for it to return. I had gotten a little drunk the night before it abandoned me, stuffing myself with tacos, chips and salsa, margaritas, beer and live Hawaiian reggae music with a steel drum. I wore a long skirt, and it twirled nicely on the straw covered floor. Music so loud thoughts are drowned out, or silence so full thoughts are invisible – this is the see-saw of the East-West mind ride, the roller coaster of the Beats, the highs and lows of Youth Culture. To reject any sort of fundamentalism, yet to assimilate certain ideals, is to constantly negotiate your own sense of self and beliefs, and to trade security for novelty.

Desire may be the root of suffering, to go all the way in one direction, but ceasing to desire is ceasing to live, going all the way in the other direction. So I dance and I meditate, and sometimes I lose my mind.

Kerouac also writes in Wake Up (A Life of the Buddha) of the evils of women and their talent for distracting men from the Sacred Path. Like most religious tales, women are borne of evil and cast only evil upon the world. For Gotama Buddha, women are the most singular cause of suffering because birth is the cause of death, death the cause of suffering and women the cause of birth. “How then ought you to guard yourselves? By regarding her tears and smiles as enemies, her stooping form, her hanging arms, and all her disentangled hair as toils designed to entrap man’s heart.” Sounds like another subconscious attempt at population control to me, and surefire alienation of women. Pandora, Eve, Buddha’s women – all scapegoats of the ages for humanity’s constant domination of its environment and inevitable expansion.

What of women’s suffering, then, if there is to be a difference? Even in Dharma Bums, Japhy Ryder (a fictionalized Gary Snyder, the deep ecologist, Zen Buddhist and poet) announces that women can never achieve status of a bodhisattva (an enlightened being); the closest they may ever come to it is delighting in orgies with the enlightened men. Now, the Beats reigned mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, so this sort of an attitude is not unexpected, but how can my heroes be such misogynists? Because what they speak, though yet unknown to them, moves deeper than gender boundaries. All is nothing and nothing is everything, so the difference between men and women, following this logic, would be null. The Great Enlightened Buddha seemed not to acknowledge this fact, however. The Beatific men didn’t quite fully grasp it, either.

Though the Beats were blatantly misogynistic and irresponsible, some may say cloudy and airy in thoughts and action, they were among the first post-war mid-50s voices to be heard saying, loudly, “Something is wrong here with this society, this way we are living. So we’ll do it another way.” I think Allen Ginsberg even said one time, “I hate society.” They called for a more vibrant and daring way of living, a constant jumping into the freezing river of new experiences, and an alternate way of being that is deeper than the cookie cutter mold you were handed. Buddhism and Hinduism and Zen meditation all crossed their paths and they delved right in.

Though a part of me is turned off by the ascetism and the aversion to pleasure in Buddhism, and a larger part of me is heavily disgusted by the scapegoating and condescension towards women, there is still a part of me that understands “All is empty forever, everywhere, wake up!”

I suppose all writers and philosophers understand the malleability of reality. This is where words come in: to give shape to, to give form to, to graph lines around a non-objective yet forever-spinning web of experience.

As a 20-something half-Asian American with no religious upbringing but with tendencies toward dissociation, I plan to explore the richness of Eastern philosophies and traditions, and how they may relate to the struggling existence of being a mind in America. The Beats have a lot to do with it, though many others make themselves relevant, as well.

People ask me what I want to be when I tell them I’ve (virtually) graduated college. I know they expect to hear something like “an accountant” or “a marketing representative” or even “a filmmaker,” and sometimes I appease them by saying “a writer” but usually I answer simply, “better.”

That’s all for the first “Eastern Beat.” I shall simply wait for mind to return, and carry on. Maybe it just needed to break the leash and go for a run. I trust it will come back, my faithful companion. In the meantime, all there is to do is cultivate flow.

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1: Sanskrit term referring to breath-synchronized movement