Y'dig?

Walking along St. Nick’s Avenue in Harlem with Shawn Hayes of HealthCorps – Shawn spotted this intriguing entrance. The sign reads “Promise Land” – one wondered was a “d” dropped off the Promise or what? It looked as thought it could be the entrance to a magic portal – admittedly unprepossessing but perhaps that was to deter the cynical, those with lost innocence or the faint-hearted?

We strolled along chatting with the enthusiasm of schoolboys, Shawn, as well as being an academic, knows a lot about construction and was fascinated by the ornate workmanship of the buildings we passed by, e.g. the hand carved in sandstone around a doorway and explained how it was done, with a template as a guide. We passed the apartment building where Coleman Hawkins lived, nondescript and hardly worth a second glance, unlike the Hawk, who walked through the streets of Harlem, a giant among men, a god amongst mere mortals. This is the land of aristocracy, the Duke (Ellington), his main residence for Mrs E and the little E’s, just by the A train subway, and it’s not hard to imagine the crowd or twenty or so disciples in the street listening as Bud Powell practiced piano in his first floor apartment – Sonny Rollins, colossus of the tenor sax, used to travel all the way from Brooklyn just to hear the great genius, mostly still unrecognized even now seventy years later, Bud, with the impossibly long fingers who could sight read anything, who’s influences ranged from the the great classical composers, to the modernists, Schoenberg etc, not to mention every genre of jazz.

And before we leave the Hawk, listen to his multi-million selling hit single Body and Soul where he doesn’t, apart from the first line, articulate the melody once in the three minutes or so that the take lasts – can you imagine that happening today? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q7J4PgrRsY

Sean and I talked about innocence and the power of innocence. Yeats’ The Second Coming sprung to mind:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

And everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned – how well does that sum of what we see in public high schools across the nation? Alice Maples, the HealthCorps coordinator from Manual Arts HS in Los Angeles was saying only this morning how you could see on the faces of some students the process of the loss of innocence over the course of a couple of months. What a tragedy, unremarked, unnoticed, unmentioned by the candidates in the race to be the nominee to challenge Obama in the November election.

Surely the big unasked question in our media, on our TV screens is this. Which of these men, if any, are fit to step into the shoes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt? And surely Yeats was right, the best, if we can locate them lack conviction whereas the passionate intensity of the inadequate, the deceitful, at the moment, in this day and age, wins the day.

Let’s go through the unprepossessing door to the Promised Land, or even the Promise Land if by that we promise to stand up for what’s right. Let’s stand up for our convictions.

And here’s Alexander Hamilton’s house in it’s new location, it’s third since it was first constructed in Harlem. He built it as a retreat from the hustle and bustle of life in the lower part of the island and it took an hour and a half by carriage to get to it, located as it was on a high hill with clean air and countryside all around. In the background you can see one of the towers of CUNY, built in 1910 from the schist dug out while excavating the tunnels that would be the NY subway system. Gothic beauty, if you like that sort of thing, and I do, CUNY, the working class Harvard.

Hamilton too, was an all-time great, a man who fought at Fort George in the Revolutionary War against the British, who almost single-handedly created the economic system in the USA that prevails to this day, a man who almost certainly would have been president had he not perished after a duel at Weehauken, NJ with Aaron Burr, who himself later became vice President but whose popularity never recovered having killed the much loved Hamilton.

Before this stroll, at 7.45 am in WestSide HS, on the final day of the HealthCorps PD course, there was an obvious problem. We’d demonstrated over two previous days meditating in thoughtless awareness and balancing the left and right energy channels. What to do about the third technique – how to demonstrate that in a meaningful way to the fifty plus people in the room?

Spontaneity always wins the day. Remembered Tom McGarry’s comment, “If you had a choice, would you like me to describe in detail why the pizza I’m holding is the greatest pizza ever made or would you like to try a slice?”

Ninety nine, point nine percent would prefer to try a slice. That being so, how come most of us, me included until brought up sharp by the following, insist on describing it?

A couple of years ago, when there were few enough coordinators to fit into a small classroom (now we overflow the large music room which is also a recording studio), on my first meeting with HealthCorps coordinators, I began by referring to a chart and describing the subtle system within the human body. Sarkis Kalashian, then a new coordinator, asked a serious of excellent, perceptive and difficult to answer questions, which had the entire group, me included, thinking in overdrive. Eventually I got around to leading the meditation and afterwards, Sarkis grinned at me and said, “If you’d started by just letting us experience this, I probably wouldn’t have asked any questions!”

Today, after a few minutes in thoughtless awareness, we balanced our left and right channels, then meditated another ten minutes or so.

After we opened our eyes, I asked the group why I’d started each day by asking us to silently say inside “Please take away my stress, please make me fearless”. No one hazarded a guess and I explained that it was because with this group, of which of course, I was a part, I could feel a strong tingling on both pinkies. I explained that the third stage, which admittedly very few students are yet at, by which you can decode on your fingertips information and relate it to the subtle energy centres that are place in the spinal column. I cautioned the group that it’s good to be skeptical, for the domain of the 19th century snake oil salesmen is alive and well and making money out of suckers in the 21st century, but that if, like everything else in Sahaja meditation, if they put it to the test, they’ll prove its efficacy to themselves.

Austin Cromartie, coordinator in Riverdale Academy in the Bronx rounded things off nicely by saying that he had congenital blood pressure and had to take medication to control it, and that since he’d started meditating regularly, the dosage had been reduced and he felt the overall benefits of this form of meditation.