meditating past maya i

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james dean - an icon that revolutionized cool/hip in america

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"even james dean couldn't escape the allure, dying young leaving a good looking corpse" – jay z

a decade ago, on a monday night post club-crawl, my friend randa explained meditation to me. breathing in the east village skyline on the rooftop we sat on, she said “meditation is turning off the noise in your brain for a little bit and just focusing.” another friend added that, "meditation is a practice in concentration." my first yoga-guide, bullet, from cochin, india, said that meditation was the act of focusing on a single thing. meditation is being present, wrestling the wild beast of the mind that leaps like a monkey from tree to tree as goenka-ji of vipassana tells us.

for a while there, and when i say a while, i mean years, i didn't think i could meditate. i would sit and breathe and think about the 10 minutes i had remaining before work and whether i was going to talk to the boss and how flippant she was and peace to her and god help her and how i'm too old not be stacking paper and making big-things happen, so i don't have to work for that fat-bitch or anyone else, etc, etc. and thus, i thought, i had another failed attempt at meditating. 

recently, while here, while writing this post, i realized that i've not only been meditating, i've been doing it for a long time and so have many other people in my life, through their suffering from all kinds of babylon illnesses. 

my friends and i have been meditating on the allure of being an image, of fitting into the clothes and linguistics of a cool that doesn't seem aligned with the sun. but superficially, it sure does feel more gratifying to bling on the catwalk of subways and blocks, dates and friday nights. our meditation stems from the high of instant gratification, that like anitbiotics and raid and tylenol, kill that pain right away. and the sun and the rivers feels like ayurvedic medicine that is taking too long, and moving too slow. 

jay compares this allure, this meditation on material-living, to a blinding high: "and you could treat your nose and still won't come close/ the game is a lightbulb with eleventy-million volts, and i'm just a moth addicted to the floss, the doors lift from the floor and the tops come off..." 

narccissm has been a daily practice in meditation for many of my friends and i and it sure does feel good, for a second, like a cigarette and a drink. then there's your heart, lungs and the next day.