Innovate with Love

Category: Humanizing Technology

  • On the YogaGlo video patent

    So there was a recently a spurious patent issued for shooting video of a yoga asana class from a particular angle.  From my view, this is the inevitable result of “yoga” not being about … well, yoga. Fortunately, there can never be a patent on the inner state of awakening that makes one lead a life of love and service, whether it is go feed the hungry, console the suffering, take joy in the good of others, help awaken the spirit of the downtrodden, or humbly serve in whatever ways one can. In my experience, many yoga teachers in America get this, and lead very simple lives for the privilege of teaching or otherwise serving full-time. However, many studio owners and corporations like YogaGlo are perpetuating the concept of the yoga “industry” — and it reveals deep ignorance of the yama of aparigraha — non-grasping, non-covetousness, non-possessiveness (aka generosity). For some reason, of all the yamas and niyamas, this one is the most freely dispensed with in the West.

    We cannot imagine it is yogic to have a lifestyle based in hurting others, lying, stealing, or lusting, but — yet this one, we hold on to. Of course we have to look out for number one! People won’t take us seriously if we don’t charge something! Americans don’t ‘get’ the culture of generosity — as a studio owner, what can I do? I have to survive??

    From the start, having a fixed price of entry for a yoga class begins a slippery slope — while not ill-intentioned — it can create a profound violation of this principle of aparigraha. Many of those who most need to experience mindfulness of their bodies — victims of childhood abuse, the trauma of war, homelessness and extreme poverty — see yoga culture as utterly inaccessible to because of the prevalence of fee-based yoga. I view all such classes as physical exercise classes which incorporate, selectively, and perhaps unwittingly self-servingly, only those elements of yoga culture which are convenient to the class of people who can afford them — and leave out the rest.

    This type of public legal battle over specious “intellectual property” claims is a natural consequence of ignoring this principle of aparigraha. Yoga need not be for wealthy studio owners to pay their extra jumbo mortgage or children’s private school tuitions — perhaps this may be a happy consequence after many years of dedicated service — but from the start, the purpose of yoga is to give away a kind of freedom, which if you experience, you could never imagine charging for the privilege of sharing, or ever suggesting you might deny anyone access to on the basis of money. Denying people the right to take a “money shot” angle of a yoga class is not so different.

    Until one personally experiences this freedom, the natural tendency is to seek control instead, which are what the fees, the “industry” and the patents are about at their base. As a community, it is time we moved away from all this needless grasping. It’s just getting in the way of our own freedom. There is beginning to be a movement for completely donation-based studios — LA has 4 at last count. This is yoga. I believe in it and I stand for it. Yoga is actually possible, here in America. And not just possible, but inevitable.

    Addenda: A little while after this was written, in October 2014, YogaGlo Inc elected to relinquish all claim on this patent.  I continue to stand by the inevitability of yoga.

  • Announcing TechnoTherapy

    Hi everyone,

    I have decided to focus my longer-form online efforts around a new org, TechnoTherapy.  The vision is to hold a space for the integration of mobile/web technology into the work of behavioral health professionals.  Please check out the site by clicking on the icon below.  Really excited about this new adventure!

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    This site will continue to be an archive for longer-form personal reflections and sharing.  To connect directly, and for shorter-form shares, connect with me via FaceBook, Twitter,  and LinkedIn.

    With love,
    Vikram

  • Bearing witness to modern warfare

    Like most, I am strong, decent, kind man. Flawed, but good.  And, like many, I have borne much in this life, but this – this, I can hardly bear.  I am nauseous as I write.

    Actual footage from an American Army chopper outside Baghdad.  The ill-informed, light-hearted murder of innocents by men carrying out orders, doing their duty as directed in the course of daily business. 

     

    Grown American men in the grip of the fog of war, seeing  those who they have no real information on — peaceful journalists, parents and children — as video game targets.  Slaughtering them, pushing a button from the sky. 

     

    Even with all my imagination, I can’t find another God-honest way to see this.

     

    America – wake up!  Half of our discretionary tax dollars — 700,000 military — 2.3M civilians — $900 Billion/yr — 8% of our annual GDP — helped to perpetrate this.  

     

    That chopper took billions of our dollars and hundreds of lifetimes of our brightest scientists, engineers and technicians to build.

     

    This is not just the men sitting in the cockpit pushing buttons.  All of us, together, have done this.  Their blood is ours to sop up.


    America! Do we recall our promise?  We are a covenant to the world.  My parents, like so many , left all they knew in the hope of its fulfillment, and I work, as so many do each day, in that same hope.   


    AMERICA! We the People are financing this every day — the one-third of our paychecks in taxes – a quarter of that money goes to pay for this — on average, about 40 minutes of your work day, even this very day, is STILL paying.  If you are blessed with employment. 

     

    It is our voice, our silence, our unwillingness to bear witness, and the hours and dollars we spend each day doing looking away – that has done this, just as much as the men pushing the buttons above Baghdad. 

    The men in the chopper are merely the symptom.  We are the problem – our ruthless, murderous silence. 

     

    Those men were just doing their jobs, clicking their mouse, just as you click yours. 

     

    And they were doing it in January 2007, knowing full well — as we all did by that time — that there were no WMD’s in Iraq – our whole rationale for military action there. 

     

    And yet we all just kept clicking.  What, in God’s name, what is wrong with us?

     

    America, may we never again abandon your promise!

     

    And, Mr. President Obama, you too made a personal promise us all to end this.  Why are we still there?!

     

    Please — no more!  The time is not someday, not soon — but now — to make good on your word.

    And most of all, oh dear God of Love, Sprit of Peace, Brotherhood of Man —  please hear our cries!

     

    Please, please let this be the real beginning of the real end to the illusive ill-defined war on terror.

     

    May we see the terrorists are really just murderous criminal gangs. 

     

    May we understand we must no longer dignify them as warriors.

     

    May we stop inflicting our fear and vengeance upon their innocent, decent neighbors.

     

    May we stop ordering our own best men to commit heinous crimes in our name.

     

    May we see that the War on Terror should never have been.

     

    May we see, there just should have been, and could still now be — the largest, most concerted criminal dragnet in the history of humanity – for which we would have the world’s unqualified support. 

     

    May we see that if the enemy really is terror, then we can win it now — when we put down our fears, and live in the clear-eyed faith that terrorists are nothing but criminals.

     

    And, unless we let them change us, they can pose no real threat to our way of life –the openness, integrity, generosity of a free people united and peaceful — only we can surrender that way, that promise.

     

    And may we see, in the name of stopping them, that is just we have been doing — abandoning ourselves!

     

    Oh Dear God — please relieve us of our blindness now — may we awaken!

     

    It is time to just go get the terrorists and bring them out into the light, into the full blaze of justice before the world’s gaze.  

     

    Every peace-loving person on Earth wants for that, only that.

     

    And, in our heart-of-hearts, we want to stop dignifying them and defiling ourselves with this erroneous war on terror.

     

    So all of us — American, Afghan Iraqi, and all others – may live amongst one another as brothers, in peace.

     

    Amen.

     

     

  • Quick Review of You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

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    At least, it works as a piece of creative pop philosophy, along the lines of Nicholas Negroponte’s Being Digital. Both books stimulate thought while affirming the conviction and creativity of its author and offering some fresh insight into the nature of our society’s relationship with information technology. Here is Chapter 2 of Lanier‘s book entitled “What is a Person?”.  And the overly glowing, albeit confused, Washington Post review.  The review is a bit confused because the book is, because there is a fundamental problem with the larger social discourse about the nature, meaning and impact of information technology. 

    We are not yet looking deeply enough into its intellectual foundations, which can be traced to the Greeks, to the interplay between Platonic idealism and Aristotle’s metaphysics — this was where the still-standing intellectual edifice of divorcing form and substance began. From it, we have now put ourselves in the strange posture of having ‘information’ be one of the most real, defining aspect of our day-to-day lives, but no clear notion of its right relation to reality in a philosophic or intellectual sense. Lanier’s work takes a worthy cut at the resulting hyperbolic claims that have been made about the power of information in the Web 2.0 age, but doesn’t get altogether to the heart of the matter.

    In the East, this divergence between form and substance never hardened.  It was a distinction held much more lightly, so that the term for the material universe, prakrti, encompassed, in addition to gross matter like earth and water, also mind, intellect and ego.I will have a good deal more to say on this …