All right, here’s a little factoid from my life I’d all but forgotten until yesterday, when I was thinking about a quip I made to Jeff Kripal* recently. He was asking me why I’m so different from anyone else he’s ever heard talk about the “spiritual” stuff I talk about, because clearly I have a completely different presentation with the humor and the undisciplined demeanor. I said something like, “What, do you really want to see me in a man bun?”
And off I went theorizing about the trickster element in me—namely that the one you least suspect has any depth to him is the one carrying it—and our fraudulent hangup on appearance equaling substance. Of course the real answer is, this is just who I am. But that’s no fun, so we went with the theorizing.
But was I always this way? Sort of. I mean yes, always, but I’d forgotten about a little hiccup that happened somewhere between becoming blissed-out heart guy in Manhattan and fully kundalini-awakened tai chi guy in Queens. Somewhere in there I grew an affinity with Asian fashion and what I took to be—but what was probably the Hollywood version of—Chinese sensibilities. I grew my hair longish. I owned what I called a “Luke Skywalker” shirt. It was a loose-sleeved beige tarp-looking thing that I’d had since my Middle School Renaissance Faire acting turn as Kyoll Windward, a lovable bumpkin who, once a day, performed a truncated version of Hamlet using a carrot as a sword.
That shirt? Asian enough.
But not enough Asian, not for this Buddha-Christ White guy. I wanted those fancy shirts. The silks. The ones with the popping colors and pretty patterns that you couldn’t clean in a washing machine. I took up lighting incense. Does anyone actually enjoy incense? Short answer: no. But It seems like something one should do when one starts using “one” in sentences instead of “you.” It doesn’t matter if incense is from India or Egypt or wherever. Who cares? It’s Asian. It’s Chinese. It’s whatever I’ve been told is spiritual, from a spiritual culture, that churns in my ignorant mind, like ingredients for sour dough, and spits out a wonderfully non-Western White bread.
So, yeah. At one point in my young adult life I A.] could still fit into a shirt Mom bought for me in Middle School, B.] was five seconds away from a man bun, Chinese kung fu shirts, Japanese kimonos, and, let’s face it, patchouli oil, and C.] unstated because obvious, wanted an authentic tai chi sword.
In the end I settled for a variety of incense. That other stuff was expensive. Buddha-Christs don’t make silken kimono money.
But why did it get to this point, I asked myself yesterday? Why did I almost become a full-on poser at a time in New York’s history when “hipster” wasn’t a thing? Why do so many of us White people feel a tickle in the heart and then gravitate toward non-Western fashion trends and co-opt foreign ways of making space and sitting still?
With me, I’m sure it didn’t help that soon into my kundalini awakening I began having visions of Asian people, whom I took to be Chinese, that then spilled into real-world interactions with Chinese people—specifically, practitioners of Falun Gong—which were wholly synchronistic and mystical. The interactions, I mean, not the people. Well, maybe the people, too, who knows?
Didn’t help because as one is going through these motions, one’s “I” feels like he’s being swept down a river. If I am not to drown, I must cling to an identity. I am engaged with, and by, these Asian people, and these quiet sensibilities I associate with Asian cultures. I’ll be Asian, too.
And this is the beginning of the art of posing. Posing is for painters and sculptors. Do we really want to be posers, drawn by the hands of other people? Yes, if that means I survive this recontextualizing self-sense.
I want to live, you see? I want to recognize me, even as everything I thought I knew and was is swept away—even though what is revealing as me feels better, wiser, more authentic. It’s like when you do nice things for a friend in an abusive relationship. Give them a nice day. Show them what could be if they’d only let go of the bad. And they see it. They feel it. They want it. It is better than abuse. But abuse is what they know, how they identify, and what their behaviors are patterned to handle. So they stick with what they deeply, continuously know despite what they have just learned and yearn for.
We are creatures of continuity. Abrupt change naturally breaks continuity. Clinging to an identity that is still me but dressed up like some of the associations I’ve made, or that have been present in the abrupt change, is what I do. It doesn’t matter that I never grew up in these cultures, or even distinguish one culture from the other. I know the feeling it gives me to identify with what I think I know about them. And that is all that matters me. No matter what I tell myself or others, that alone is the whole of what matters to me.
So thank the real Buddha-Christ I was too cheap to buy any of those beautiful Chinese and Japanese wares. I might have stayed asleep in the nasty, clingy habit of identity. I might have become an amateur historian of Asian cultures. Or just a douchebag doing yoga in the park with my package hanging out. Either way, I promise you I would not have owned a wide-eyed cat statue with a swinging paw.
I mean, really. What’s that about?
______________________
*Author/J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University/Chair of The Board at the Esalen Institute. Also, a person.