King Material Desire in Everyday Ramblings

It’s a pumpkin! Very cool to see them growing in my neighborhood. I just took this on my midday walk.

As I was walking I was listening to a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita called “The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita: Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda” written and read by his disciple Swami Kriyananda.

Swami Kriyananda’s western name was James Donald Walters. He spoke a whole lot of languages and lived all over the world but his parents were Americans. He was involved in a land deal with the poets Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsburg back in the day and when he was in college he took classes from W.H. Auden.

He reads this audiobook and he has a very strange way of enunciating English, this flat tone but then he will try to tell a joke or use a big word to show that he is erudite and it comes out in this bizarre manner. There is some beautiful poetic imagery and lots of opinion about the Gita.

He says that Yogananda called Dhritarashtra (He was a blind king) “King Material Desire”. A king who lived by and through his senses.

When I first heard that a few days ago I immediately thought of Donald Trump.

In this weird way I find this reassuring.

The Gita was written a long time ago, thousands of years. I think maybe we have been kidding ourselves if we think as a species we have evolved since then. There seems to be some evidence that we haven’t…but we have survived. Kind of.

Or that evolving is difficult and people do not like change and when there are cultural shifts (as there have been in our lifetimes) the folks who have taken being the most powerful for granted are so frustrated they are willing to bring everything with them when their ship goes down.

(Speaking of ships, did you know that parts of San Francisco are built over the hulls of many many ships that came for the gold rush and just cluttered up the harbor? I find this fascinating… One of the transit tunnels actually goes right through the middle of a ship they didn’t bother to excavate.)

Anyway, my class was last night during the Presidential Debate. About half my students stayed away to watch (one even put together a fun game of debate bingo, she is a hoot. She was telling me last week she went canoeing by moonlight over in Eastern Oregon and how much she enjoyed it.)

And about half of them came. They all expressed anxiety about the current state of things. So I spent the class talking to them about how we can use spiritual tools to help us deal with our anxious thoughts, I did some deep breathing, some visualization, of course movement and just tried to exude calmness and kindness.

Afterwards one of them was asking me about how folks could see things so differently than most of us do.

There I was standing in a hallway seeing if I could inhabit the point of view of a person who is enthusiastically for and will be happy if Mr. Trump wins. I found a lot of fear and anxiety there too.

And this made me sad.

For us all.

Anytime Krishna wants to bring his chariot to rest between these contentious opposing forces and offer up some hope and mutuality I am all ears.

Last updated September 27, 2016