Mystical Hoo Hah

One of my neighbours is a avid practitioner of yoga, so much so in fact that she's training to become a teacher of that ancient and venerable art.  One assumes then that she must be quite good at it.  When not bending, stretching and contemplating, she is just your everyday London 30-something - i.e. likes a drink and a fag.  This dichotomy fascinates me.

I remember years ago, the husband of a friend of mine was something in the world of tai chi.  There was no apparent dichotomy in this chap.  He practised obsessively, ate nothing that he wasn't prepared to kill first himself (no, really), drank no alcohol and generally led the life of a trainee acetic.  He was very well regarded by the tai chi cognoscenti too.  There was talk of him being put forward if the old slow kung fu made it into The Oympics.  He was no slouch when it came to tai chiing then.  But there was a dichotomy when you got close enough to him: he was by far and away the most uptight human being I've ever met.  You could just feel the unease seeping out of him like sweat.

If he could become a master of tai chi, then all its claims to afford insight and calm to its adherents were clearly bullshit.  The truth of the matter is slightly more material and prosaic then the ancients would have us believe.  If you're born with some natural aptitude and practice hard enough, you'll get good.  You don't need to dismantle the ego and assume your place in the cosmic consciousness first either; you just need to get up early, put on a pair of jogging bottoms and get on with it.

This realisation was initially quite disspiriting for me.  They really doesn't appear to be anything beyond the objective material "out there" that our senses assure us exists.  Transcendence is very probably an accident of sentience, a result of neurons randomly firing-off, as many scientists also now believe dreams to be.  We used to ascribe great significance to dreams, didn't we?  But now most informed, rational observers of neural science agree that they almost certainly mean fuck-all.