Seagal’s main aikido disciple. There is a desperation to these calisthenics. We know that Rinpoche is not in the building, and Reynosa knows we know. The routines are lengthened and repeated. What begins on Saturday morning as a fifteen-minute break between the exercises and Seagal’s arrival stretches by Sunday afternoon into three-quarters of an hour. I become quite limber.
When Seagal does lecture, it is usually at the primer level. (“It is the law of cause and effect—also known as karma.”) As the weekend continues, he shows that he clearly knows his stuff and is capable of elevating the discourse. (“We look at all phenomena as the miraculous activity of the unfolding of the divine. The only thing that’s common is what one makes common by one’s impure perception.”) Basic or sophisticated, however, what’s clear is that Seagal doesn’t have a whole lot of lecture in him; after thirty or forty minutes the sessions quickly devolve into Q&A. And, as anyone who has ever been to a film festival, stockholder’s meeting, or lecture can tell you, when a room is outfitted with microphones for “Q&A,” you will hear precious little of anything resembling an actual “Q.” So when the young man at the mike kicks off our weekend with, “I guess I’ll share something with the group. I recently took out a personal ad that read ‘Pagan Universalist Unitarian Buddhist seeks . . .’ ” I know this retreat will be no different.
It’s both fitting and sadly telling that the weekend’s discourse begins with someone talking about a personal ad. Unlike college, where a microphone was always an excuse for someone to either exhort the crowd to meet afterward to discuss alternatives to the arms race, decry American imperialism in El Salvador—or, in the case of Columbia University in the early 1980 s, for a tiny Trotskyite named Shirley to get up and spin out a jeremiad in support of “Soviet aggression in any form!”—the questions on this weekend devoted to compassion don’t get bogged down with a lot of heavy thinking about others. Only one woman asks Seagal what she should do in the face of hate speech. She hears so much of it, primarily against blacks and gays.
“Well, I’m black and gay, and I’m proud of it,” says Seagal. The straight, white audience laughs appreciatively and applauds. Racism eradicated, we move on. I find her at dinner that night and tell her how much I admired her question. She thanks me and tells me that she has switched seminars and gone over to the “Freeing the Fire Within” retreat.
Questions of compassion are now left up to the likes of the woman who says, “We had some lamas visiting down in Charleston, and they led us in a meditation where we took on all the pain in the universe. And I had to stop, because there’s so much pain in the universe.” To look at her, she seems no worse for wear for shouldering all the suffering of the cosmos. I forget to thank her. Later she will ask, “If we are all one and God is in us, does that mean we are God?” She poses it quizzically, as if she had a question about schedule B on her taxes.
But her questions speak to a larger truth about the Omega crowd. There is great concern for the universe here, with the skein of fate and predestination that enmeshes everything, and this concern affects even the most quotidian decisions and incidents: Meg bought a Lumina because “the Spirit told me to. And also the name. Lumina? Luminous?” (“Wait a sec! Lumina
does
sound just like Luminous! My God, do the executives at Chevy know about this?”) Behind me in the lunch line, a young woman tells her friends, “So I started to think, Am I gonna hear another song about angels tonight? And I turned on the radio and that song ‘On the Wings of Love’ came on. And you know the first verse is all about an angel, and I was like, I definitely did not plan this. This is so random. And
then
I thought, Maybe it’s not so random.”
Another
When Seagal does lecture, it is usually at the primer level. (“It is the law of cause and effect—also known as karma.”) As the weekend continues, he shows that he clearly knows his stuff and is capable of elevating the discourse. (“We look at all phenomena as the miraculous activity of the unfolding of the divine. The only thing that’s common is what one makes common by one’s impure perception.”) Basic or sophisticated, however, what’s clear is that Seagal doesn’t have a whole lot of lecture in him; after thirty or forty minutes the sessions quickly devolve into Q&A. And, as anyone who has ever been to a film festival, stockholder’s meeting, or lecture can tell you, when a room is outfitted with microphones for “Q&A,” you will hear precious little of anything resembling an actual “Q.” So when the young man at the mike kicks off our weekend with, “I guess I’ll share something with the group. I recently took out a personal ad that read ‘Pagan Universalist Unitarian Buddhist seeks . . .’ ” I know this retreat will be no different.
It’s both fitting and sadly telling that the weekend’s discourse begins with someone talking about a personal ad. Unlike college, where a microphone was always an excuse for someone to either exhort the crowd to meet afterward to discuss alternatives to the arms race, decry American imperialism in El Salvador—or, in the case of Columbia University in the early 1980 s, for a tiny Trotskyite named Shirley to get up and spin out a jeremiad in support of “Soviet aggression in any form!”—the questions on this weekend devoted to compassion don’t get bogged down with a lot of heavy thinking about others. Only one woman asks Seagal what she should do in the face of hate speech. She hears so much of it, primarily against blacks and gays.
“Well, I’m black and gay, and I’m proud of it,” says Seagal. The straight, white audience laughs appreciatively and applauds. Racism eradicated, we move on. I find her at dinner that night and tell her how much I admired her question. She thanks me and tells me that she has switched seminars and gone over to the “Freeing the Fire Within” retreat.
Questions of compassion are now left up to the likes of the woman who says, “We had some lamas visiting down in Charleston, and they led us in a meditation where we took on all the pain in the universe. And I had to stop, because there’s so much pain in the universe.” To look at her, she seems no worse for wear for shouldering all the suffering of the cosmos. I forget to thank her. Later she will ask, “If we are all one and God is in us, does that mean we are God?” She poses it quizzically, as if she had a question about schedule B on her taxes.
But her questions speak to a larger truth about the Omega crowd. There is great concern for the universe here, with the skein of fate and predestination that enmeshes everything, and this concern affects even the most quotidian decisions and incidents: Meg bought a Lumina because “the Spirit told me to. And also the name. Lumina? Luminous?” (“Wait a sec! Lumina
does
sound just like Luminous! My God, do the executives at Chevy know about this?”) Behind me in the lunch line, a young woman tells her friends, “So I started to think, Am I gonna hear another song about angels tonight? And I turned on the radio and that song ‘On the Wings of Love’ came on. And you know the first verse is all about an angel, and I was like, I definitely did not plan this. This is so random. And
then
I thought, Maybe it’s not so random.”
Another
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