Satsang
PODCAST
EPISODE NO.
146

Cultural Appropriation and the Porous Self

Cultural Appropriation Spirituality
May 15, 2019

Shambhavi talks about cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation in the context of spirituality. How can we understand cultural appropriation from within traditions that experience the self as porous and inclusive of various times and cultures? A podcast from Satsang with Shambhavi

SHAMBHAVI
When I was 27 years old, I walked into a very new agey place in Soho in New York City, where I was living, and took a workshop that had the title something like Develop Your Intuition. It was completely uncharacteristic. I've written about this and talked about this.

To this day, I have no idea what propelled me to do this. I have no memory. It was almost like fate was propelling me, and I was on some sort of autopilot because I can't remember anything about why I went there. And I was a snarky, punky, bookish kind of a person who was completely allergic to anything flowy or woo-woo or anything like that.

And the teacher was flowy, but she also had a kind of fierceness that I recognized and responded to. And she was teaching what I later realized were classical kriyas—working with your internal channels and chakras and using your breath internally. She didn't use mantra, but they were pretty standard kriyas as I later found out.

Since I was very small—I don't know when this started, but maybe from the moment I opened my eyes, I don't know—I had this deep perception that there was more to reality than I could see or experience or understand. And I was filled with longing and outrage and a sense of desperation to find out what it was that I couldn't experience in my condition.

When I walked into that workshop and started to learn these kriyas, something in me just identified. This is it—this is what is going to get me to a place where I can actually really perceive what is happening here. What is this world? What is going on here?

The teacher talked in a new agey way, she had flowy purple skirts, if I remember she had a very large belt with a sunburst thing in the middle of it. She had other things that she taught that I didn't go to where people sat around in a circle and held hands and spoke aphorisms to create abundance of a very ordinary sort in their lives.

All of this is something that, in any other situation, I would have completely turned up my nose at and immediately left and never looked back. But because she was teaching these kriyas, and because I did experience her as being somewhat fierce, and she had a kind of a confidence which appealed to me, I stayed.

I'm telling you this because from that day forward, I have never had a moment's discomfort or feeling of being out of place or feeling that I might have made the wrong choice or feeling that I don't belong in this kind of tradition because I'm not Indian. I've never had a moment's feeling about— like that.

And many people, in bringing up the issue of cultural appropriation, which students do regularly— or even if they don't use that phrase, they will just say I don't feel comfortable with all these deities. Or I don't feel comfortable with ritual or, you know, something that just sort of indicates they feel at odds with the cultural trappings of this tradition.

Those who do have the language of cultural appropriation, to my experience, are asking these questions in a very conceptual way. They're actually worried about doing something wrong. They're worried about how they are meeting the tradition. They're worried that they might be doing something that isn't politically or culturally sensitive.

And until recently, I tried to talk about that with people in those terms. I tried to use the same language that they were using—a language that I'm highly trained in, having been in academia, in cultural theory, having worked in social activism and human rights since I was a teenager.

This is language that is familiar to me, and these are arguments that are familiar to me, and it's anxieties that are familiar to me. And until recently, I don't know why, but it never occurred to me to just say look inside and see how you really feel about it.

Because my own experience is it felt immediately like home. And I realize that's not everybody's experience. I'm not saying you have to have that experience in order to be here and far from it—far from it.

The only thing that I'm pointing out is that as intellectual as I could be back then and as politically engaged as I was back then, what I actually navigated with was my feeling response.

So that's one thing I want to say about this question of being here and not being Indian—or maybe even being Indian and not having grown up with being in a tradition like this, that's possible too. How do you feel? Do you feel drawn to it in an authentic way? That's the first question that you should ask yourself, I think.

Then the other field of inquiry, personal inquiry, that I want to bring up is related to what I began to notice, especially online and online discussions between people who are involved in yoga communities mainly, who are politically active and doing yoga of some sort or teaching yoga or involved in something like that—yoga in the narrow American sense—is that there was a complete divide between the language they were using to talk about race and gender and cultural appropriation, etc., etc., and the language of their tradition, of their yogic tradition, of the view of their tradition.

It was an absolute, complete divide because the categories, for instance, of country—India, the United States—were just taken for granted as if those things were real on some absolute level. The categories of east and west are taken absolutely unquestioningly.

And even, given my academic background, that is just uninformed, completely uninformed. The categories of east and west are so porous that to even say there's something called west and something called east is almost meaningless in an ordinary historical sense. I'm not talking esoteric—just an ordinary historical sense.

Almost everything we consider to be foundational about Western culture, Greco-Roman culture, from what I've studied and read, 50% of it has come from India or Persia. And the Indians and Persians were stealing like crazy from so called Western culture back then, and they still are.

There is what I recently said on Facebook, which I had never actually— it was sort of a very off hand remark, but I think it's useful in some circumstances. There is cultural call and response, right? We live in an open world. Seeds go around the world, genes go around the world, rats and plants and dogs, and everything is just traveling around, and people are using what travels around.

So cultural appropriation is something different from cultural call and response. Cultural appropriation is when a culture where people have cultural and economic power literally just steal something from people they think won't find out about it and claim it's theirs.

So there's an awful lot in European philosophy that was stolen from India and China and Tibet. Just outright stolen, repackaged, renamed, relabeled. And then someone like Deleuze and Guattari get fancy academic jobs because they stole a bunch of crap from Indian [...] and Buddhism. That's cultural appropriation.

We can very simply avoid that by, first of all, looking inside and being authentic in our connection to the tradition. Cultural appropriation is easy to avoid in my view.

And you're free to disagree with me, anybody. A—by being authentic in your own engagement with a culture that you didn't grow up in in this lifetime. B—finding out about that culture, not engaging with it in a stupid way, but finding out about the history of the culture and studying it—studying the culture from which your spiritual tradition came.

And if you have an authentic connection to it, you're going to want to do that anyway. You're going to want to know where it came from, right? You're going to want to know how it came to be, whatever we can know of that.

Like Ayurveda and Jyotish and Trika Shaivism, we should do our best to learn. That's part of avoiding cultural appropriation. It's really learning, honoring, valuing where these traditions come from, having respect for them. And this goes in an ordinary sense just as a student—that you are privileged to be participating in these wisdom traditions.

This is an astounding fact that you all, here in the United States, have this weird white woman teaching you these wisdom traditions, right? Isn't it astounding that me, coming from a secular, falling apart Jewish family living on the outskirts of Philadelphia, somehow discovered this tradition and has devoted her whole life to it and is now sharing it with you?

It is very, very weird if we look at it in an ordinary sense. If we look at it in an unordinary sense, which I think is the real sense, we aren't products of just this lifetime. We don't live in these countries.

The teachings are not married or laminated to the cultures from which they came. They were given to us by wisdom itself.

These teachings are given to us by primordial wisdom for us—for human beings and other beings to self-realize. And they will survive, because this is how reality is playing the game of waking up, and it's playing it with us.

So we need to understand that, but we also need to understand the ordinary history as far as we can and feel a sense of wonder. Allow yourself to feel a sense of wonder that here, in this time, somehow these teachings have reached us.

It is a mind-boggling, inexplicable circumstance for those of you that actually feel connected to the tradition, to these teachings, to Ma! You know? You know, Ma just started coming in my dreams. It's inexplicable. I didn't have any fantasy about her. I knew nothing about her.

So wisdom comes and gets us, wherever we live and whoever we are, in certain circumstances, and we should honor that. So when you are studying Jyotish or when you are studying Ayurveda, or when you are studying in Trika Shaivism or any other wisdom tradition, you honor it by being a good student—by being diligent, by letting yourself feel that sense of wonder and having a reciprocal relationship with the tradition.

I had to cancel the second part of the Jyotish teaching because people weren't studying. That is entirely unacceptable when you are in this position if you have real respect for what's happening, if you have a real sense of wonder.

All that indicates is that people are treating their circumstance in a very ordinary way. You might as well say I just didn't feel like going to the movie tonight. You're having that attitude towards things like Jyotish and Ayurveda.

You have to let yourself feel the extraordinariness of your circumstance that somehow, out of the 300 million people in the United States, you get to study these things.

So then there's the fact that we aren't individuals, that we don't end at our skin, that we aren't just a product of our mom and dad coming together in this lifetime. You are an amalgam of many, many, many different lives. And you don't have to remember those lives, but for those of you thinking about cultural appropriation, you have to factor this in.

But you need to start with your real feeling about practicing in this tradition. If you have an authentic feeling about being here, something that seems incontrovertible, inevitable and unavoidable, no matter what ordinary objections your mind brings up, then you have to at least entertain the possibility that you were preconditioned to be here before you got here in this form.

And I don't know what more to say about that. I don't want anyone developing a story about that. I'm not asking anyone to cultivate any stories or memories or try to remember anything. I'm just saying it is a fact that we are more, as I like to say, we are more of a jumble sale than we are a unified self.

And as you go along in the practice, you are going to have direct experiences of this more and more and more. You're going to have more experiences of how porous you are, of how various you are, of how there's just so much here that is coming from you don't know where.

So really, the most important thing is how you feel being here in this tradition. You have to start— I think you have to start from there.

And then if there's an authentic connection, try to think through—if these issues are important to you—think through from that beginning point. Work it through from that beginning point. I've never had any direct— that's not true. I was going to say I've never had any direct memories of past lives in India, but that actually isn't true.

I've had more other kinds of direct visions and memories. But I'll tell you a couple of little funny things. And again, I don't want to put too much emphasis on this, but I think it's funny.

So when I was little, like I love to cook, even from the age of four and five, and there was a smell that I remembered that I was trying to recreate in the kitchen. And my mom had a spice shelf. And I would start mixing things, trying to recreate this smell. And you know what the smell turned out to be? Fenugreek. The smell of fenugreek.

The other thing is, one time after I'd already started practicing, I was living in California, I went to this big festival day at Shree Maa's ashram in northern California.

And that ashram was mostly closed to visitors. It's really just a place where people do sadhana and live. And they don't like a lot of people traipsing around there, but they opened it up for this. They were doing puja and having this big festival.

And I walked into the grounds, and I walked into the temple hall, and the nine goddesses were there in these giant paper mache figures. And people were waving lights and singing. And I started sobbing.

And this thought just popped in my mind—I am so happy to be seeing this again. These aren't big things, but they're indications of our porousness. There are indications of that we're not just from here and this.

At some point, the reservoir of memory begins to open. And it's not coherent. It's not like you're constantly being treated to little narratives. It's just flashes of things that you don't even know what your connection to them is.

Sometimes I go through periods when I just have those flashes many, many times a day, and then other times it sort of subsides. Your mind starts to pour into the mind and so you're more connected to things like that, and then your sense of yourself really changes.

And it's probably a good thing. There's not really any story that it's possible to attach to those things. Because who needs more stories about oneself, right?

So the way that you can tell if you should be here is if you feel you should be here, and we want to be as authentic about that as possible. And if this doesn't feel like home to you, but there's still things here that you need, that's fine too.

Just don't claim more than is actually true for you. That is very important. Don't try to make more out of something than it actually is, and don't try to push something away if it's actually overwhelmingly more than you were expecting.

Authenticity is really important. Being honest about one's place and what one should do and how one should engage is very important.

ABOUT THE PODCAST

Satsang with Shambhavi is a weekly podcast about spirituality, love, death, devotion and waking up while living in a messy world.