I tried Thich Nhat Hanh's tangerine-eating exercise with a large zoom class today. I think it worked, if only as a way of breaking the zoom routine: five minutes during which I asked them to turn cameras off but leave microphones on. I'd sent a reminder to students on Monday to get hold of a tangerine, clementine or other fruit, and then nearly ended up without one myself because of the blizzard! A few students told me they used apples and it was fine.
What does it mean to eat a tangerine in awareness? When you are eating the tangerine, you are aware that you are eating the tangerine. You fully experience its lovely fragrance and sweet taste. When you peel the tangerine, you know that you are peeling the tangerine; when you remove a slice and put it in your mouth, you know that you are removing a slice and putting it in your mouth; when you experience the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine, you are aware that you are experiencing the lovely fragrance and sweet taste of the tangerine. The tangerine Nandabala offered me had nine sections. I ate each morsel in awareness and saw how precious and wonderful it was. I did not forget the tangerine and thus the tangerine became something very real to me. If the tangerine is real, the person eating it is real. That is what it means to eat a tangerine in awareness.
The aim of the exercise was to make our synchronous time together real - embodied and connected, transcending zoom distance by leaning into it. If a tangerine is really the sun, the water, the tree, the garden, the gardener, the supermarket, perhaps we're more connected than we seem.
But Thich Nhat Hanh's mindful tangerine-eating is also discussed in one of the assigned materials for class today, Andrea Jain's Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality, and not favorably! Jain rejects the blanket dismissal of mindful practices as capitalist distractions from and for further capitalism, but she takes as given that many practices promising to cultivate awareness, presence, etc. take the place of engagement with the problems of the world that they purport to connect us to. "Neoliberal spirituality," she argues, participates in a "governmentality" which rejects structural analysis and intervention, making individuals responsible for their own fates even in circumstances beyond their control. Claiming to maximize individual freedom, it instead permits us to ignore the claims of others: they're to blame for their misfortunate, as they're not trying hard enough to change.
For all of the peace and love it offers through yoga, health foods, mindfulness, and countless other commodities, neoliberal spirituality plays a divisive, capitalist, and sometimes right-wing game that thrives on nostalgia about lost cultural norms, demarcating outsiders, questing after purity and policing morality, as well as on narratives about self-care, personal improvement, and the pursuit of freedom. (45)
There are lots of other ideas here, too, which I tried to discuss - the role of "nostalgia about lost cultural norms" plays in contemporary culture will be a major theme going forward - but I found myself (or so it seemed to me) waffling. Appropriation of practices variously packaged as ancient, Asian, indigenous, natural are appalling in lots of ways, but what alternatives are there? The "authentic" traditions so cruelly bowdlerized by shopping-cart spirituality are constructions, too, whether constructed by tut-tutting scholars, self-aggrandizing gurus, ethnonationalist movements or savvy marketers.
[W]hen observers, scholarly or otherwise, assume that there is an original, authentic tradition to be preserved, they produce yet another representation that is out of touch with reality. In other words, these approaches mirror in problematic ways the essentialist arguments of spiritual consumers themselves. They reify other traditions in ways that simplify them and make them easier to contain, own, discuss, and sell. (87)
Jain is too kind to point out that many "religions" today are involved in the same games, too, conveniently playing into neoliberal understandings of religion as truest when it is centered somewhere other than in the shared struggle of the here and now. (Next week's topic is white American Christianity...)
So what do we do?
[I]t is more constructive to focus on understanding how appropriating practices and relevant discourses buttress dominant ideologies and social structures, for example, neoliberal capitalist ones, while silencing or containing others, especially those resistant or alternative to the dominant ideological or socioeconomic orders (87)
This is, needless to say, more easily said than done, since, in a way, everything is open to question. We live in history, and so do the traditions and practices which we think might give us an escape from or at least a view beyond it. Though it's important to appreciate how contemporary flows of media, people and markets have turbocharged things, folks have been containing, owning discussing and selling religion all along. This is part of what the turn to "lived religion" has long emphasized: it's alive, changing, fluid, contested. So what's new? The explicit disaffiliation not only from particular religious traditions but from religion tout court? The seeking, and finding, of religious sustenance in similarly disaffiliated places?
I guess I bring more suspicion of "spirituality" than of "religion" (showing my age!), but it's helpful to share the suspicion I perhaps too quickly feel for the one, the generosity I too quickly feel for the other. Maybe Thich Nhat Hanh can help.
Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow-minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattach-ment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.
I was peeling the tangerine without knowing I was peeling it...
