By Ed Staskus
“To live outside the law, you must be honest.” Bob Dylan
The difference between policies and principles is the difference between saviors and savasana, or what is known as dead man’s pose in yoga practice. Our many saviors, ranging from Islam to Christianity, much like our Messiah-like political leaders, have a heavy hand. They employ the carrot and stick approach to control the increasingly complicated reality they have constructed.
Biological reality is based on universal laws, spontaneous growth, and self-organization. Constructed reality is based on artificial rules, intentional design, and standardization. Biological; reality is ordered by evolution. Constructed reality is ordered by never-ending maintenance.
Savasana is a simple thing. It is practiced at the end of yoga exercise classes. You lie down on your back on the mat with your arms at your sides, close your eyes, and breathe slowly and evenly. When you surrender to saviors you agree to live by their rules, even though they sometimes seem like office temps with a bad temper. When you surrender to savasana it’s just you as you are, not as what anybody else says you should be.
Dead man’s pose only works when you’re being honest about it. On the other hand, nobody is required to be honest to live in the world of saviors. You only have to do what you need to do to get along and get what you want. It’s all right to lie to yourself. Who cares about the spirit of the thing, especially in our modern age? Besides, we don’t believe in honesty anymore, unless there’s money in it. For all their problems, they cared in the Middle Ages, but that was then and this is now.
You have to be honest to dive into the sea of yoga. It’s sink or swim. There’s no one looking over your shoulder. There’s no lifeguard. Yoga is honesty without the flag waving. It’s not saviors talking and talking, trying to convince you to think what they feed you.
“Next to a circus there ain’t nothing that packs up and tears out faster than the Christmas spirit,” Kin Hubbard said a hundred years ago, after there weren’t any more Great Awakenings.
In the making of our modern age of mass media, mass merchandising, and mass more-of-everything, Santa Claus and Jesus Christ have become staples from about the beginning of November until the Big Day. Jesus Christ once had pride of place, since Christmas used to be about celebrating his birth, but Santa Claus is the top dog in the 21st century.
“Christmas is a baby shower that went totally overboard,” Anthony Borowitz has said. He’s not far wrong about that. All we have to do 24/7 is turn on our flat screens or suck up some social media on our cell phones to find out how right he is.
Sometimes it seems like the celebration is more about the birth of Santa Claus than Jesus Christ. Even though he doesn’t exist, Santa Claus is everywhere during the holiday season, selling fashions, electronics, cars, and whatever else is trending. Besides cash, checks, and credit cards, there are even Christmas Club bank accounts to pay for what’s loaded on his sled. A capitalist is someone who loves his fellow man and woman in groups of a million-or-more. Wall Street and Scrooge never had it so good.
Santa Claus is a portly man who brings gifts to straight arrow children on Christmas. He spends the rest of the year supervising elves in his workshop and making out a list of those who have been naughty or nice. Children who have been on the up and up get gifts. Children who have stepped off the strait is the gate and narrow is the way do not get gifts, unless it’s a gag. Santa Claus, like our saviors, can be judgmental, although he fortunately doesn’t have the power to send anybody to Hell.
He is everywhere, in California in shorts, in Nigeria shooting off knockouts, which are like firecrackers, and in China playing the saxophone. Most Chinese reenactor Santa Claus’s, on street corners and at the entrances to shopping malls, are usually jamming on a sax. No one, not even the Chinese, seems to know the reason why. Beijing-based writer Helen Gao thinks it might be because “the saxophone is portable so Santa can make Christmas music anywhere.”
You don’t want to be the only one who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, because then you’d ruin somebody else’s Christmas. Some Black people are on the fence about him because they don’t believe a white dude would ever come to their neighborhood after dark. If he did, they ask, what’s in that pipe he’s smoking? In any event, bad neighborhood or not, nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
Many children believe in him, up to a point. Shirley Temple’s faith was shaken at the age of six when her mother took her to a department store and Father Christmas asked her for an autograph. Her mother returned the favor by charging the bearded legend a dollar for the handwriting.
Christmas was once the first step to getting safely home to your Loving Father in Heaven. Over time it became more a state of mind, a tradition of good cheer for communities, retaining most of its original values. It continued to morph, however. Today it’s a mash-up of visiting family and friends, bread and booze, of the economic miracle of gift giving – Make It a December to Remember With a Lexus – and NBA excitement nationally broadcast on Christmas Day.
In 2016 the Cleveland Cavs stormed back in the 4th quarter and beat the Golden State Warriors on Christmas Day by a point at the last second. Some broadcasters said it was a miracle. It was “The Miracle on the Corner of Ontario Street.” Other broadcasters said what Richard Jefferson did to Kevin Durant at game’s end to preserve the win was a sin. But, when it comes to professional sports, and many other professions, sins don’t necessarily adversely affect the payoff under the tree anymore. Everybody loves a winner, whether by hook or by crook.
The issue with Christmas has always been God at the front and center of it. If Santa Claus is a judgmental old man, then God is an eternally older and infinitely more judgmental man. Santa Claus may not give you a gift this year, but there’s always next year. When it comes to Heaven and Hell, however, we all get one chance at it and the outcome is forever.
Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, proposed a bet about God. Everybody with any sense should live as though God exists. If he doesn’t exist you lose very little, maybe a roll in the hay and some good times on this earth. However, if he does exist and you live by his rules, you stand to win the Grand Prize. You also avoid the Big Bust, namely eternity in Hell. In the end, if you bet against God you bet against yourself.
To accept a savior into your life is to accept the belief that God has a plan for you. Hearing from God about the big picture is vital. Listening, following, and obeying the plan is everyone’s personal decision, of course. That’s why God grants us free will. Many people believe it’s in their own best interest to stick to the game plan both chapter and verse.
Like it says in the Bible, “Whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” You can say no to God’s way of doing things, but, come hell or high water, God will have his way, one way or the other.
The snag in this approach is inherent in the story of the angel walking down the road of good intentions, with a bucket of water in one hand and a torch in the other. When someone asks the angel what he is going to do with them, he says that with the bucket of water he intends to put out the fires of Hell and with the torch he will burn down the mansions of Heaven.
“Then,” the angel says, “we’ll see who really loves God.”
Santa Claus and saviors rule from the top down. They don’t necessarily care if you love them, or not. They didn’t get to where they are with a ho, ho, ho. Santa Claus’s doppelganger is Krampus and God has many millennia of the Old Testament behind him, not just some forward-looking centuries of the New Testament.
The consequence of breaking the rules is consequential. The naughty are denied the magic of Christmas and sinners are turned away at the Gate of Heaven. “He who breaks the law goes back to the House of Pain,” said Dr. Moreau to the beast-men in the movie “Island of Dr. Moreau.”
Students follow rules. They have to please their teachers. Dogs follow the rules. That’s why they’re man’s best friend. Until recently women followed the rules because men made the rules. When all is said and done there’s only one rule worth following. That’s the Golden Rule. Treat other people the way you want to be treated. It’s a homespun peg to hang your hat on outside the law courts.
Santa Claus and saviors, like everyone who has ever wielded power, are puppet masters pulling the strings. God is all-loving, but he’s all-powerful, too. “If you must break the law, do it to seize power,” Julius Caesar said a long time ago. From then until now the love of power has more often than not trumped the power of love. Julius Caesar was worshipped as a god.
There are no yogic puppet masters. The reason the practice is puppet masterless is that the power of the practice doesn’t flow from the top. It’s not just another kind of trickle down, economic or otherwise. It flows from the bottom up. “You cannot believe in God until you believe in yourself,” said Vivekananda, a key figure in the introduction of yoga to the western world in the late 19th century.
Power lives and dies in a hierarchical mode. There is no hierarchy in yoga. Power is like the Trump Tower. There is a penthouse at the top and a damp basement at the bottom. Yoga is more like a 5000-year-old tree with many branches. Power never stops sending tweets. Do this, do that. Believe this, believe that. Yoga quiets the body and mind.
The fly in the ointment of top-down power is when was the last time anyone at the top had a good idea? When was the last time Tim Cook, Bill Gates , or Jay Y. Lee wrote computer code? When was the last time Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, or Xi Jinping reduced their country’s armed forces? When was the last time Mark Cuban, Dan Gilbert , or James Dolan sank a three-pointer with time running out?
Savasana is sometimes thought of as the most important pose of yoga practice. It comes at the end of class and no one needs a teacher at the front of the room to tell them what to do. It is the nonpareil bottom-up posture, since you have to lie down on your backside to do it.
Dead man’s pose is about the self, and the non-self, and self-discovery. It’s about letting go of rewards. When you’re in the pose nobody can boss around your better half. You’re not doing something that somebody else told you to do. Nobody can tell you what to do because there’s nothing to do.
Letting Santa Claus and our saviors read the riot act is a backwards way of living, from the outside in, rather than from the inside out. Yoga is a practice of learning who you are by exploring yourself, not by reading a guide book. Marching in the ranks is fine on a parade ground, but who wants to be marching to a drill sergeant calling out commands day after day?
“The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers, or saviors,” said the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti. “Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself, and that is why you must know yourself.”
It’s never question and answer time in dead man’s pose, because it’s the end of yoga class, and you’re tired, and the makers of our constructed reality are just going to have to wait while you and your breath take a break and recharge. Putting Santa Claus and all the self-appointed Messiahs of this world and their carrots and sticks on the back burner is to be up front, knowing and being your very own self, yourself as you are from the inside out.
“Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakes. Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart,” Carl Jung, who pioneered the concept of the collective unconsciousness, said in the early 20th century. He wasn’t any Bob Dylan but he hit the nail square on the head.
Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”
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