I started this blogspot with some trepidations and admittedly some feeling of embarrassment. I still have those feelings. What does it mean when a grown man wants to share his obsession with boots and leather and jeans and all the places those things take him in his memories and even to the store? In the real world anyone who knows my so-called real self also knows that the things I write about here are but the tip of my iceberg of obsessions---and yes, that is the right word, because obsessions are not always bad things.
What are the alternatives? Superficiality? Not caring? Indifference? Mere hobby? We like to think that there are "more important things in life" but what's more important than the things you love? Sure, the people, the places things take you, to cite a good pal. But since we can't take it with us when we finally go, we might well go with the good stuff. Each of us defines the "good stuff" to suit our tastes and too often declare this or that is the best or better.
Sometimes we know more about this or that than other good folks because we really do have a brought swath of experiences that are hard-won. But we never know it all and in certain things, like boots or hi-fi or anything we like there is going to be more we don't know because that's usually another reason we like it. When things run out of getting better and more we move on. The best things keep us ever-obsessing and to each their own. I for one appreciate all the input I can get about the things I obsess about even if that means having to sort it out or being misled or just annoyed. I can enjoy another's obsessions that aren't mine.
Personally I don't do wedge-soled boots but I do dig on boots and the guys who love their wedge-soles. I dig their care and concern for stuff even if it's stuff I don't prefer. I can care about your obsession with nearly anything that is legal more or less and makes no effort to harm. If you dig it, I can dig you're digging it.
So today I write in praise of geekdom where the illusion can be as rewarding as the facts or even more rewarding. But I'm not going to focus on clothes or boots. I may lose some of you too because I'm interested stuff you might care about. That's cool. See if you are, read on.
I deal with my obsessions not by calming them down but by going deeper and finding more. More sometimes means more obsessions; sometimes it means revivifying those that are dormant---there's lots of ways to multislack your life into focus. There's a fine line between the mindfulness and focused experience of a dedicated awareness---let's call that samādhi---and diving into the abyss of compulsivity and delusion. But in truth, not much. What moves our hearts always puts us at risk.
Aren't we delusional in a good way when we look into our baby's eyes and feel like this is the most beautiful child eva'? How about how we love our dog? How about shell cordovan?
I revel in the illusions my boots create, and the impressions that soothe and disturb as I chase this or that. Of course, it could be will also be jeans and leather. In my case it could be watches, bicycles, Sanskrit, interesting translations of the Iliad. As Cormac McCarthy once said (maybe not thus no quotation marks), I have a hobby for everyone in the room.
And then we post pictures oof our shoes as if other people will care. And they do. This is no illusion but for the virtual likes and their meaning, if there is any. But it is precisely that it is an illusion that intrigues and keeps us going.
The illusion is the meaning. This is what ancient India calls māyā and, yes, I am qualified even professionally accredited to write about that idea. But that's not the point since you will find this credible or interesting if you're still interested in what's coming down.
In more common parlance māyā is more narrowly (and incorrectly) understood as illusion in a bad way, but here is another take on the idea of illusion in a good way.
I get excited about the things that I do and try not to impose them on others. We are all evangelists of our heart's desires when we dare to share being human with others. I try to tell myself that it's healthy to share them with friends but I'm careful, as likely you are, not to get too righteous and unrelenting so as to be over-enthused and annoying or just obdurate and opinionated. But isn't some of life sharing opinions that move us to reach out and preach? Careful, I say but to be human is to want to share something and it's left to others to care or not. Geek on.
When I think about the power of illusion I'm reminded of that famous old "blown away guy" photo from ads for Maxwell tape (you know, in the photo below). Of course, I reallyreally wanted to be that guy and last night it happened again. For a brief shining moment wearing my shades, boots on, heavy denim 'cause that's everyday, in leather, and slumped in my chair---albeit with a book also on my head because I need four hands to keep up---the music came.
I study too the often controversial subject of Tantra---too often reduced to sex, drugs, and not enough rock' n' roll. I'm not here to dissuade but I can't help but want to educate because it's been that kind of life. So like all of the things truest in the Tantra, the proposition is that the very things that confuse us or are problematic can be also gateways to the sublime. Or more to the point, sometimes the confusion is the sublime. Much of Tantra deals with goddesses. In certain goddess traditions, the very goddess who loves with all her heart also creates worlds that cause us confusion or hurt. She is māyā, literally the Measure of things. (The word maya is linguistically cognate to the English "measure," as in all things are what they measure and of course how we measure them.) And while some like to think that māyā is principally a problem to be solved (most of the Vedanta philosophers would take a version of that stance), in the Tantra, māyā invite us instead to embrace our paradoxes. We don't solve them and we can't get rid of them: paradox isn't a quirk, it's a feature of our human experience.
To wit, māyā is all that confuses us and even misleads us because the veils of experience reveal and conceal in ways that come through the medium of our consciousness. This applies to our individual and collective experiences because we are limited and conditioned beings: we don't experience the world so much as we experience our experience of the world.
We are sometimes singularly confused and then often confused (or worse) together in ways in which we might otherwise be able to embrace the illusion, the problematic, and with greater appreciation. Māyā is the way things are experienced no matter how they might be creating experience. Māyā is the way we are making the measure and taking the measure of the world
The heart of the matter is simple that the appearances of māyā---the measures we make and receive---are not false. Rather māyā means that the appearances we experience have other causes than what may be the actual (dare we say factual) causes of experience. What we see is real enough but why we are experiencing it with joy, despair, indifference---all possibilities apply---is a feature of how we process those possibilities.
Thus, the māyā is real because we are experiencing it and the māyā is illusory because our experience is more complex in the way it is being caused or framed.
Last night between ordinary geekdom and personal revelation the matter of māyā got real because I was so delightfully fooled.
First a bit of prelude.
Sometimes I'm late to the game but as a kid I had aspirations to be a true audiophile. I lived for my stereo and for the records that shaped and changed my life---for better and for worse. I paid attention to the lyrics, the music's construction, the production, and of course I read every single liner note and memorized it all. In addition, I wanted to reproduce that music on ever better sounding record players. That's what we called them, of course, or we called them our stereo.
Then life happened, I went to India where I had one of those single speaker cassette players and then the upgrade to a Walkman. When I came back life rolled on, I still loved my stereo, the digital age began with CDs, I got hooked up---and then was robbed. They didn't take my records but they were soon after lost in a flood: a travesty I can say I will never get over. 'Cause some things really are like that.
We take those losses inside and need to turn them into a closer connection to our honest humanity. Integrated stereo?
Anyways, the kids happened, everyone knows that makes you a better and more stupid adult just to survive it all, and while I also replaced most of my equipment and music, I ended up outside the evolutions of music reproduction.
Because of our sketchy home internet until recently out here in the boondocks of Am'rka, I am somehow new to the streaming revolution that has long been everyday reality for most music lovers. And then there are the delivery systems. All of this warrants making illusions real and figuring out if we make reality into a better illusion. Of course my old hi-fi equipment was and still is pretty darn good.
When you enter High Geekdom it's suddenly like Sanskrit where the lingo and the rules and the possibilities take a lifetime of obsession to play with the true obsessives. No one gets really good at Sanskrit or boots or music or anything without a commitment to the commitment, with full-fledged geekdom. My old stereo system is fine and of course it's practically nothing in comparison to the True Geek possibilities, but isn't that always the case? Do I need that level of hi-fi geekdom for myself? You do know where this can go, right?
If you don't, lemme tell ya', guys with Amekaji obsessions and all the vintage life can really be brought back to the future when you hear from the hi-fi geeks. They are never not coming into another future possibility even as they revel in provenance and vintage. So what do you want? Do you need to be like them, I ask myself? Maybe. All? Some? It's always a matter of degree, isn't it? I mean, if we care.
Hi-Fi Audio Geeks are a species unike most of us ever need to be but I am glad for them. I am content to know that I will never afford the stuff they regard as high end. But there's soooo much good even at their version of the low end. Like boots.
I revel in people who obsess because if I am willing to learn, they have done the work. I may sound so elementary here but I have just learned about how DACs (digital audio converters) and streamers can take a mostly analog system (other than the CD player) and reproduce wi-fi streaming music.
You may be snickering 'cause who doesn't know this who is already audio (Sanskrit, etc.) but I am admitting that it's taken me a while to figure how to do better than Bluetooth ('cause that whole compression, reduction, and signal thing can be resolved waaaaay better than Bluetooth. And you can wear better footwear.) Don't mistake me Bluetooth is really fine because most of us and so are your less than $200 boots. I think I am happy to accept Bluetooth limitations for convenience just like the sound of most earbuds or single speakers on the kitchen counter---just go get some music going. I am with you. Get on with it.
The Geeks will tell us that we don't know what we are missing. And they would not be wrong. The issue is always what it's worth to us in time, effort, money, care---like all things there is māyā to measure for ourselves. We don't have to go all in like the all-in-audiophile-geeks anymore than we have to spend 40 years learning to read Sanskrit. They can really really help us and we can merely glom off their goodness, obsession, and relentless curiosity. We have to tolerate their obsession so that we can profit from their wisdom.
Watching audiophile videos is like listening to myself (something I loathe to do) because I too carry on and on about stuff that the more sane, less geeky have not made their personal obsession. That said, I pretty much geek everything because I collect obessions like drowning people catch their breath---with urgency, love of life, anxiety and fear realizing itself in moments that will not give in without a fight.
I admire all forms of geekdom (whether or not I care what you are geeking about) but likely also because I need to tell myself that obsession is a gateway to greatness even when it makes us less likeable or accessible. More māyā.
The best audiophiles I am tracking try to make their obsession and opinions accessible because they know the good stuff and like to share the notion that you could too and that you don't know what you are missing until you do. Does this sound familiar?
When we go for the geek we pay the price. Is it worth it to you? Every Rajanaka newsletter asks you that and I try to say that it is worth it because my geekdom has told me that this is cool and you could like some of this. I also know you may not be as into it, that that is a good thing, a healthy thing, and that you may not be into it at all, and that too is cool.
But the price remains high at least in terms of the relationship between investment (emotional, intellectual, financial, whatever) and outcome (sometimes wonderful, sometimes hard to assess, sometimes not and not so good, 'cause all of those are possibles.)
Convenience with music had become so pervasive in my life that not only did I not know it could be better, I forgot what I was missing. This too is how māyā does its job: we get used to things because we get familiar and we rarely choose the more complex way of dealing with our needs when there's an easier way.
We're always weighing the need or desire against the burdens of the task and it's just normal to want things that hassle us less. Sometimes the hassle is worth it to us and on occasion the experience can be so much better that we are reminded to do difficult things.
All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare, wrote Spinoza, and while I have cited that since I first read it in college, I sometimes often like the easy way that isn't the better way. Who doesn't? Thank you, māyā, for better and for the worse of that.
Are excellent things always difficult? If we take māyā even a little seriously we find out that Spinoza was right. Difficult things made easy is called virtuosity, which is pretty much what happens if you are willing to do the yoga. Sometimes its good to let others do the hardest yoga and we get to have some of that goodness.
So you will need to forgive me if this sounds elementary or like a child's wow moment but with a few sometimes simple, sometimes confusing steps involving a bit of work, I got my old stereo to stream. Now this system from the 80s is still pretty darn good sounding but that's where my revelation (re)appears.
I'm sitting last night sort of delighting in my newfound access to music I love and of course it sounds a gazillion times better than it does on the one little noise maker Bluetoothy speaker (to say nothing of the adequate but genuinely terrible DAC that is in my iPhone or laptop). (N.B., it's easy to forget that the music playing our devices are digital and need to be "converted" to be heard because we are analog experiencers. Thank you, māyā.)
I can't even remember what was playing but when it happened it took me a few triple takes to see how māyā was magic, nothing less than a deception of delight. I was looking down at my book when I realized that the music wasn't coming from each speaker but from the space in between them. Duh. Stereo.
I could sort out the channels, left and right, but the illusion that the music was coming from the center was real. That's good production, good enough equipment, and the māyā of stereo giving us a truly wonderful experience. It is course an illusion, māyā, that the music is coming from the midline but alas the midline is the space where experience is both an illusion and reality. That's something we talk about a lot in these parts.
Sometimes the stereo illusion takes us to a midline that causes us distress because we can't quite sort it out. If I had not re-paid attention to the channels I would have thought that the music really was in the center. In this case the māyā brought wonder, delight, and was something I really didn't want to sort out. In other words, I stopped listening for the channels delivering each their sides of the argument and re-started loving the illusion of the midline.
In other cases I can think of the illusion created in the middle is fraught with problematics or it instead invites us to receive and accept the incongruities, uncertainties, and ambiguities.
Thus the māyā can be māyā that isn't quite so settling or delightful because we can't quite sort it out---and it stays that way. But sometimes we find out that it's better not to sort it out, like the stereo illusion of the music last night, and the experience of the māyā is the better part of the living experience.
Māyā gives and sometimes takes away, māyā conceals and sometimes is hard or even impossible to reveal further, and then māyā sometimes is the joy. But no matter how we experience the māyā it is always the point because there is māyā because the world works in more than one way---just as we can use digital and analogue. Boots are not loafers but who's to say what's better when the world presents different circumstances.
Furthermore, māyā can be better than a more straightforward delivery---like the way myths convey things the long way around or create experiences that mere digital (1s and 0s) experiences like facts just can't. There is a more delightful experience of the stereo illusion when it is reproduced with more self-conscious attention to creating the illusion. But even that is not necessary.
We can enjoy the stereo illusion and sort out none of it. It can not care about the production of the illusion or its delivery systems. We can not care that the illusion is an illusion---the sound need I remind us is not coming from the center but it is. And we can just enjoy it, not care, not pay attention (and either care or not care, and otherwise get on with something else more interesting to us (if it is).
Mindfulness means sorting out the sortable and, in the Goddess's Tantra, sometimes reveling in the illusion both sorted and unsorted. Turn it up to 11. Wear your shades. This could be in stereo.
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