Читать книгу White Utopias - Amanda J. Lucia - Страница 20

Opportunities for spiritual growth vary widely between different transformational festivals. Each of the festivals discussed herein incorporates yoga into a variety of religious traditions, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, Tantra, and Indigenous religions. Transformational festivals seamlessly transition between these traditions. In some cases, they are segmented into autonomous workshops and classes on subjects such as Buddhist meditation, Tibetan singing bowls, creating your own maṇḍala, Ayahuasca, and Native American ceremony. In other cases, however, instructors blend these traditions together within a singular workshop or class, for example when a yoga teacher splices Buddhist, Tantric, and Native American ideas into one yoga class. Echoing this, some vendors sell products focused particularly on the wares of one tradition (e.g., a shop selling Hindu murtis [religious figurines]), while others offer products that amalgamate a variety of Indigenous and Indic religious traditions (e.g., Hindu, Buddhist, Indigenous, and consciousness wares). From an aerial view, transformational festivals are broadly eclectic, exhibiting a variety of practices, worldviews, and products drawn from Indigenous and Indic religious traditions. The aesthetic of festival fashion also embraces Indigenous and Indic motifs blended with expressions of the mystical and magical—from body jewelry to “tribal” body paint, feathered headpieces, bindis, and gopi⁹ skirts.

With a few exceptions related to their more ritualistic and mystical forms, Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and, in particular, Islam) are notably absent. Also absent are appropriations of African and African American religious and cultural forms. This is an interesting anomaly particular to the field of religion; in the cultural mainstream, for instance, white appropriations of Black aesthetic, arts, and cultural forms have been particularly ubiquitous.¹⁰ This lack of engagement may signify that the religious exoticism of these subcultures is deeply, if unconsciously, intertwined with legacies of anti-Black racism, as many scholars have argued.¹¹ It may also signify that appropriations of Black culture are viewed as taboo (politically incorrect) in these predominantly politically liberal communities, while Indic and Indigenous traditions are understood to be more available for white consumption. It may also be the notion that African Americans are the primary referent of racialized others in the United States and thus cannot fully fulfill the allure of the exotic. Such speculations open fields of potential research but are largely beyond the intended scope of this project.

Predictably, the relationship between transformational festivals and religion is complex. The majority of interlocutors I interviewed identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). At Burning Man, the only event that hosts a community census and publishes it publicly, 46.4 percent of participants identified as SBNR (24.3 percent identified as atheist, and 15.2 percent identified as agnostic, while only 5.5 percent identified as religious).¹² Events at Burning Man exhibit the most overt rejection of religion; even with the 2017 theme of Radical Ritual, events engaging the parody of religion outnumbered formal religious services advertised on the playa¹³ three to one. Most participants view LIB and Burning Man as intentional, consciousness-raising, and transformational festivals. They host the highest number of workshops and events focused on religion, meditation, and other spiritual techniques, but the percentage of such offerings in relation to the massive size and scale of these events renders the impact less influential. Bhakti and Shakti Fests are the most overtly devotional, with the most concentrated emphasis on ritual and the majority of events focused on the Hindu ideal of bhakti (devotion). Wanderlust festivals are situated as transformational events, and the practice of yoga as a method of reenchantment, a kind of “secular church.”

In general, among many participants there is a sense that religions have a pure and beautiful essence and have created practical and efficacious tools with which to access that essence. However, they also feel that religions have become institutionalized, political, and corrupt. As Devanand (Joshua) explained during our early morning interview at Bhakti Fest:

There are so many different approaches because there are so many different people and types, and what is attractive to one person is definitely not attractive to another. But love, truth, compassion, kindness, generosity, these are all attractive to every human being. And those are all what’s at the core of most major religions, and all of these things that they were founded on, these kinds of principles, but then [they] gradually became corrupted systems of control. . . . Once people have power, they’re like, “We want to keep this power, so we’ve got to control rather than allow its expansion and a flow of consciousness and allow people to believe that they can choose their own life.” And that is where they started to separate that there’s God out there, over here somewhere among the clouds, and we have to obey, which is quite the opposite of what we are.¹⁴

Many of my SBNR informants echoed this sentiment, and as a result, the majority had deliberately turned away from institutionalized forms of religion. At Bhakti Fest, Kara explained to me:

Well, being raised in a Pentecostal, charismatic environment in Indiana in the 1960s and ’70s, . . . it was like, . . . “We don’t do that. It’s against my religion.” . . . I have more of an aversion to Jesus than a love for him. . . . I hated church, though I felt really deeply moved by so many things, you know, music, art, or love. . . . It’s taken me a long time to remember how to pray. It’s like—how do you pray? Who am I praying to? What am I asking for? And to me, it just comes back to gratitude. As long as I feel gratitude, then that’s all. So, I say my religion—I have the religion of common sense.¹⁵

In addition to having this personalized sense of spiritual communion, the majority of these SBNR participants employed theological universalism as a means to conflate and obfuscate differences between traditions. Even if they practiced a particular religious form, still they maintained that there are any number of possible paths to God, self-realization, and enlightenment. During our interview at Bhakti Fest, Susan explained,

It does not matter whether you are singing God’s name in Qawwali or Sanskrit or in Hindi or what have you. Do you think God cares? Just ask him. No. . . . The type of meditation I’m doing, it’s a very scientific approach, a very mechanical approach. Yes, it’s Sanskrit. Yes, it’s a lot easier for me to pull my energy to the eye center if I’m focusing on my teacher’s face, which is a devotional aspect of it. And yet, is it necessary? No. It doesn’t matter if you’re Muslim or Catholic or Lutheran or Jewish or Sikh, it’s the same. It’s pulling you up, and it’s connecting to the divine. And all of the paths can get you there if practiced with diligence.¹⁶

In this soteriology, one can pick and choose the most effective tools across traditions because, in essence, they all lead to the same goal. This fundamental and widely pervasive belief has led SBNR practitioners to view religious forms as practical tools that can be extracted from the institutional mores and theological cosmologies of their parent traditions.

My interlocutors echo Altglas’s research on Kabbalah centers and modern Hindu gurus, wherein she found that “courses, commentaries of the scriptures and writings, and teacher’s interviews all associate religion with dogma, constraint, obedience, ‘mindless ritual,’ lack of consciousness, and lack of fulfillment.”¹⁷ Likewise, speaking of the New Age movement’s propensity toward religious exoticism, she articulates this same pragmatic approach to religion: “Above all, individuals seek practical methods for personal growth in a ‘lifelong religious learning,’ beyond religious particularities. . . . The imperative of self-improvement constitutes an incentive for not stagnating and endlessly trying new techniques that could hasten this improvement.”¹⁸

Esme, a young female participant at Shakti Fest, self-identified as a “quester” for this “lifelong religious learning” in the following terms: “We’re questers, spiritual questers. So we quest for a lot of different areas, and thus in that questing you expose yourself to a lot of different paths, a lot of different experiences, a lot of different thoughts. You know, just allow that which really works for you, and [adopt] the essence as it were. Find the commonality amongst all the paths.”¹⁹ Rather than stagnate within a fixed religious identity framed by dogma and institution, these questers search for practical tools that will lead them to pure and ancient essences that are believed to be untainted by the corruptions of modernity.

The result is that even among those who visibly practice meditation, postural yoga, Vedic rituals, or kīrtan, few self-identify within the particular religion from which these practices are extracted. As I have written elsewhere, this is commonplace among those who identify as SBNR, many of whom believe in God and routinely practice religion.²⁰ Very few yogis attending transformational festivals claim to be Hindu or Buddhist, but 95 percent practice meditation, 94 percent practice āsana, 90 percent practice prāṇāyāma, 74 percent read yogic texts, 67 percent recite mantras, 64 percent sing kīrtans, 41 percent read Hindu scriptures, 38 percent read Buddhist scriptures, and 33 percent worship deities (pūjā).²¹

There are multiple reasons for this absence of religious self-identification: (1) alternative spirituality is a category established in opposition to religion and formal religious affiliation, which fosters an antiestablishment and anti-institutional constituency; (2) these practitioners are not exclusive to one religious tradition, and this exclusivity is a defining feature of religious belonging;²² and (3) white SBNR populations are excluded from some of the religions in question because the assumption of a particular ethnic identity is considered a qualification for belonging. This last point is critical; both Hinduism and Native American religious traditions are ethnoreligions, within which there are no standard avenues for formal conversion. Neither is traditionally a proselytizing religion, and both have a history of foregrounding secret rites transmitted through oral traditions along strict hierarchical systems. Both are exclusionary toward outsiders and have established regulatory systems to enact that exclusion (purity and pollution in the context of Hinduism, and earned hereditary knowledge in the context of Native American religions). In fact, their predominance in SBNR communities may have everything to do with their secrecy, because the history of metaphysical religion is deeply intertwined with the quest for esoteric knowledge. Wouter J. Hanegraaff traces the very idea of the birth of a New Age to “modern Theosophical speculation which, in turn, is dependent upon older traditions in Western esotericism.”²³

Yoga, pūjās, kīrtan, and homas (Hindu fire sacrifices) blended seamlessly with Tai chi, Qi gong, Tibetan singing bowls, and mindfulness meditation at the transformational festivals I studied. Altars combined images of the Buddha and Shiva; Ganesha sat next to the Virgin Mary. They were often erected in beatific natural spaces, such as at the bases of trees and at the top of hills, and included feathers, pine cones, crystals, and sage. Rituals included not only Buddhist and Hindu religious practices but also South American crystal skulls, labyrinth-walking meditations, shaman-led visualizations, Maori storytelling, medicine wheel creation, and Native American drumming, singing, and prayers. This religious behavior extends beyond the boundaries of benevolent Orientalism²⁴ to encapsulate a form of religious exoticism, one that employed a pragmatic approach by valorizing religious forms and practices that were viewed as both exotic and effective spiritual tools.

Wanderlust festivals celebrate a form of enchanted secularism that involves sublime experiences engaging with nature, personal introspection through yoga, and spiritual fulfillment in contact with community. In contrast, Bhakti and Shakti Fests cultivate explicitly religious experiences by drawing on the teachings of various Hindu-derived gurus, devotional yoga (bhakti), devotional music and chanting (kīrtan), mantra recitation, Vedic rituals, and postural yoga. They also include the most significant population of white practitioners who identify as Hindu bhaktas (devotees). Many of the core facilitators of this community are serious devotees and do not represent the “noncommittal”²⁵ and superficial, “aesthetic” choices of the New Age,²⁶ as is often described by scholarly critics. Rather, many were born into the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) or the Hare Krishnas (ISKCON), or born into families that were deeply committed to a particular form of Indic spirituality. For example, when I asked Jesse, a young male attendee, when he got involved in the guru-yoga scene, he told me that his grandmother had been on the board of the SRF in the 1940s.²⁷ When I asked Gopal, a prominent kīrtan musician, when he became a Krishna bhakta, he told me that he and his bandmates were born into ISKCON families.²⁸ Some have lived for decades in guru-led communities in the United States or in India, while others make annual pilgrimages to the subcontinent or otherwise divide their lives between East and West. Although these participants are mostly whites who adopt Indic cultural forms, including dress and bodily comportment, they complicate the stereotyped critique of noncommittal and aesthetically based spiritual tourism. Many of the core facilitators of this community are converts in all but name.

In opposition, Burning Man and LIB emphasize spiritual expression and exploration through the creation of transtraditional spiritual assemblages, or bricolage, rather than religious devotion to any one tradition or teacher. LIB hosts multiple learning environments wherein participants are exposed to workshops focused on everything from conscious business and entrepreneurial skills to permaculture and essential oils. There are opportunities to engage in chanting Hindu mantras, meditating with Tibetan singing bowls, and singing with members of the Native American Church (Peyote Religion). In 2016, the LIB Temple of Consciousness, which ran programming every hour for the entirety of the festival, focused explicitly on Indigenous knowledge; there were over forty different lectures and workshops related to Indigenous traditions and arts. In 2017, LIB festival organizers established a permanent space dedicated to learning about and supporting the spirituality and political activism of Native peoples.²⁹

Wanderlust festivals in Great Lake Taupo, New Zealand, in Sunshine Coast, Australia, and in Oahu, Hawaii, opened and closed with ceremonies conducted by Maori, Australian aboriginals, and Hawaiians, respectively. Throughout each Wanderlust festival week, there were special lectures, guided walking tours, meditations, and rituals focused on Indigenous knowledge. These inclusions were the festivals’ attempts to raise consciousness of the fact that they occur on settler colonial lands with a fraught history of oppression of Indigenous people. For the initial welcome ceremony of Wanderlust in Great Lake Taupo, the festival’s organizers invited a large group of Maori leaders and performers to conduct a Pohiri ritual dramatizing the encounter between different tribes. To do so is a political recognition of the Maori history of New Zealand; indeed, to open a Wanderlust festival in New Zealand without a Maori-led Pohiri ceremony would be a public affront to the history and land rights of the Maori people. Similarly, the 2014 LIB festival began with a collaborative ceremony between multiple Chumash tribal leaders and LIB organizers prior to the formal opening of the festival. Bhakti and Shakti Fests also acknowledged the Serrano, Cahuilla, Chemehuevi, and Mohave, for whom Joshua Tree, California, is ancestral land. However, organizers addressed this issue by having their own (white) performers lead Pan-Native prayers and invocation of the blessings of the sky, earth, and four directions to begin the festival.³⁰

But the importance of Indigenous religions extends beyond public recognition of the Indigenous lands upon which these festivals are conducted through ceremony. My 2014 survey of attendees at a wide variety of yoga festivals asked, “Which traditions have some of the deepest resources for spiritual growth on our planet?” The top five traditions respondents cited were: yoga (86 percent), nature (83 percent), Buddhism (72 percent), Native American traditions (56 percent), and Hinduism (53 percent).³¹ In fact, American yoga practitioners valued Native American traditions as containing deeper “resources for spiritual growth” than Hinduism! Certainly, the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign proffered a subjective (and motivated) interpretation of yoga by claiming it as a Hindu practice,³² but the practice certainly developed in India, influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions.³³ Hindus in India created modern forms of postural yoga from a foundation in Sāṃkhya-Yoga philosophical ideals, body building, esoteric dance, gymnastics, and Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious texts. In the early twentieth century, the founders of modern postural yoga—Shivananda, T. M. Krishnamacharya, and Krishnamacharya’s students B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Patthabi Jois, and T. K. V. Desikachar—universalized a system of physical practices and readied them for international export.³⁴ These modern innovators lived within a religious worldview wherein the term yoga referred to a religious path, or more specifically, yoking or binding oneself to Absolute Truth, as in the various yogas (karma yoga [the path of action], bhakti yoga [the path of devotion], and jñāna yoga [the path of knowledge]) in Hindu scriptures, such as the Bhagavad Gītā. They also centralized the Yoga Sūtras, a Sanskrit text that integrates Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religious ideas.³⁵ While these first-generation proselytizing yogis universalized yoga as a new scientific method for health and wellness, they also rooted the tradition with Hindu and Indic texts and India’s religious systems.³⁶ So then why would today’s American yogis claiming alliance with these lineages rank Native American traditions as a deeper “resource for spiritual growth” than Hinduism?

In response to this surprising data, I began to look for evidence of Native American traditions in the field. I found yoga teachers invoking the ritual systems of Native American ceremony, calling for a return to ancient Indigenous lifeways, demanding a return to respect for Mother Earth, encouraging their students to find and follow their spirit, and developing alternative epistemologies and ways of inhabiting the body through the philosophical lessons and practical methodologies by combining Indigenous and yogic knowledge. The broader context of these transformational festivals provided attendees with Indigenous-derived experiences, like singing with South American crystal skulls,³⁷ lectures on Indigenous methods for attaining mystical experiences (including peyote, ayahuasca, and DMT), fire ceremonies, ecological messages, Chakra Village healing sanctuaries (established in teepees), teepees erected in communal spaces, Native American Church sacred singing workshops, and workshop and lecture themes focused on learning from Indigenous knowledge systems.

Several prominent yoga teachers hybridized Indigenous and Indic worldviews in their teaching. For example, Ana Forrest, a revered global yoga teacher who often teaches at Wanderlust festivals,³⁸ extracts practical spiritual tools from both Indic and Indigenous sources. In her autobiographical book, Fierce Medicine, she writes:

I have no loyalty to concepts that aren’t true for me. Although I studied Yoga with B. K. S. Iyengar himself, the most important lesson I learned from him was to disobey the dictator if you don’t find a man’s character congruent with his teachings. . . . I discarded what didn’t work from both ancient and modern wisdom traditions and braided in the wisdom from my years as a horse whisperer to create the unique approach I call Forrest Yoga . . . . This book lays out a system of practices founded in Yoga and Native American Medicine. . . . I created Forrest Yoga to do my part in Mending the Hoop of the People. This is my life’s calling, my Spirit Pledge.³⁹

Throughout the text, Forrest posits Indigenous knowledge as a panacea for the errors of Western modernity. In her view, Native cultures have retained that which has been lost or corrupted in the West. She writes,

One of the things I prized about my years on the reservation was seeing the initiation ceremonies the people used to hone intuition and the skillfulness in wielding it. Children who grow up with Native American traditions see the importance of developing these skills, of becoming aware of the sensitive, magical part of ourselves that don’t yet have outlets. Western culture squashes and invalidates our nature so we don’t develop intuition, nor do we know how to use the information from our intuition as a tool for improving the quality of our daily life. I am working to correct that.⁴⁰

Forrest envisions her integration of Native American ceremony and yoga as a means to mend the “Hoop of the People,” to teach people how to get back into alignment with their bodies and nature, and then to activate that change into more eco-conscious patterns of action and consumption. In addition to working with Native traditions and yoga, she also studied as an energetic healer. During healing sessions, she summoned the energy of the Hindu goddess Kali to serve as her “healing partner.” In Forrest’s view, Kali, whom she describes as “one murderous bitch of a goddess,” was “exactly what I needed in my healing work.”⁴¹

Eli Gordon, one of the central yoga instructors at Bhakti and Shakti Fests, seamlessly blends environmentalism drawn from Native traditions, rituals of sage and sweat, and Native dances and songs infused with yoga, bhakti, and kīrtan. Many of his classes began with Native American invocations, and his rhetoric integrated Indigenous ideals of sacrality with bhakti. As quoted in the ethnographic vignette at the beginning of the introduction, his message calls for restoration of ancestral wisdom and veneration of the divinity of nature. These incorporations of Native American religious forms into the contemporary yogic landscape reveal the importance of place in the formulation of transnational religion. American yogis have reached across the oceans to adopt Indic rituals and yogic practices, but they are still ensconced in the contextual history of the United States. This history reveals that when white Americans embody religious exoticism, the alternative sacred forms that they imagine to exist outside of Western modernity are geographically localized. Because of the context of settler colonialism, even if white Americans are pursuing yogic and Indic religions, Native American traditions serve as the most proximate others—supplying pragmatic spiritual tools to revision the self and society.

Festival yogis, organizers, and participants focused on Indigenous rituals and ontologies as a means to open a conversation about alternative modes of sociality, economy, and relation to nature. Indigenous ideas and practices provided a bridge to engage with yoga and Indic religions as alternative pathways of being and knowing in the modern world. The presumed ancient essence of Indigenous and Indic knowledge becomes a generative platform from which to create visions of alternative utopias—new futures that do not attempt to fully revert to the ancient past but rather to use its resources as practical tools in order to evolve into a more conscious future. In the racialized global context of white supremacy, whites easily displace Indigenous peoples and Asians as representatives of that knowledge. As Shelby Michaels told her yoga class at Wanderlust in Great Lake Taupo, “All people are Indigenous and can find the landmarks that lead straight back to original spirit.”⁴²