Greetings Reader,

Huntsville, Alabama is famous for being the place where the rockets that shot the first American astronauts into space were built.

Unfortunately, the rocket scientist who built them, Wernher von Braun, was a Nazi war criminal.

But, thanks to him, the United States won the space race and Huntsville went from being a backwater garrison town to "Rocket City."

In recognition of von Braun’s central role in making Huntsville a literal boom town, the city’s municipal leadership named the civic center after him.

The Von Braun Center. Has a creepy ring to it, don’t you think? I saw Metallica there — they were awesome.

There were other benefits from my brief stint in Huntsville, but after three years, it was clearly time to go.

I’m actually kind of amazed that I stayed as long as I did. Huntsville is a marginally cosmopolitan tech town that’s geographically nested in the rolling hills of the Tennessee Valley and culturally moored in the weltanschauung of the deep south.

And, as anyone who knows me knows, I have New York City flowing through my veins so to say I was culturally displaced would be valde diminuta dictio.

So, I moved back to New York. Once I got settled, I reconnected with an old friend; an affable extrovert whose hangout of choice was his friendly neighborhood biker bar.

Anxious to speed up my re-entry into New York social life, my old friend invited me to a party.

Thus I went from being culturally displaced in a small conservative city that was a full five degrees south of the Mason-Dixon line to being culturally displaced at a motorcycle club block party on the lower west side of Manhattan.

It was loud: a chorus of revving engines complimented the clangor of classic biker anthems blasting out of a stack of speakers that were set up on a stage at the end of the street.

I couldn't help but notice the cosmic joke that showed up in the music mix: Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The main event was an odiously named game called “Whack the Jap,” where riders took turns swinging a sledgehammer at a sacrificial Suzuki street bike as they sped by it.

I can see how smashing something with a sledgehammer might be fun if you left out the jingoism.

The party was also purposeful: it was being held in honor of the motorcycle club’s president, who, I was told, had recently been released from prison. The crime for which he did time was left unspecified, but I got the impression that drugs and firearms were involved, at which point I began to question the wisdom of having accepted my friend’s invitation.

But there I was and my friend wanted me to meet the man of the hour so he brought me over and shouted introductions over the hullabaloo.

I don’t remember what I was wearing but it might as well have been Mr. Rogers’ cardigan sweater and a pair of penny loafers. Vinny Gambini blended better than me (at least he was wearing cowboy boots).

The MC president looked at me with precisely the kind of suspicion verging on hostility you would expect.

Referring to me, my friend yelled, “He just got back from Huntsville!”

“Huntsville?” The MC president asked through narrowed eyes that implied a measure of disbelief.

Thinking I was making a joke about how being in Huntsville was like being in jail, I shouted, “Yeah, I just got out.”

At which point the MC president’s face melted into a big warm smile as he shook my hand and said, “Welcome home, brother.”

He thought I was serious! And as the butterflies in my stomach took flight, I realized that he thought we were talking about Huntsville, Texas.

Huntsville, Texas is famous for being the place where the state’s oldest and most notorious prison is located.

In the Yoga Sutras, this kind of misperception is called viparyaya: a modification of the mind based on a cognitive error.

More specifically, my new BFF’s misperception laid somewhere between two subsets of viparyaya:

1. Anyathājñāna, where an object is correctly perceived, such as the name “Huntsville,” but an incorrect characteristic is attributed to it, such as the “Walls Unit” instead of “Rocket City.”
   • In yoga philosophy, the classic example is when someone looks at a clear crystal next to a red flower and thinks the crystal itself is red. Metaphorically, the clear crystal represents the self in a state of pure consciousness, the red flower represents the material world, the material body, etc., and the misperception of the red reflection in the clear crystal represents the misidentification of the true self (or spiritual reality) as being the illusory egoic self (or material temporality).
2. Viparitajñāna, where one object, like Huntsville, Alabama, is completely mistaken for an entirely different object, like Huntsville, Texas.
   • The classic example here is when someone looks at a rope but sees a snake. In this metaphor, the rope represents correct perception of the unchanging and blissful ultimate reality and the snake represents the illusory misperception of reality as consisting entirely of this fearful material world.

Whatever the technical specifics of his misperception may have been, he definitely thought I was someone I wasn’t.

I thought I had an obligation to be truthful, to say, “No no, you don’t understand; I meant . . .”

Fortunately, that thought only lasted half a zeptosecond before my smarter self chimed in: “Are you high? Let this guy think whatever he wants!”

Normally, untruth by omission is still untruth, but in this case, I deferred to the higher truth that I was obviously better off with him believing I was a newly-minted ex-con. I wouldn’t have gotten any points for integrity if I’d attempted to set the record straight.

The rest of the evening went without noteworthy incident. I survived. The Suzuki did not.

In yoga wisdom literature, some instructions are eternal, universal, and trans-contextual; principles that are always to be followed, no matter what.

Some instructions are dependent on context, with variable applications according to time, place, and circumstance.

And some instructions, like truthfulness, can be both.

Such are the paradoxes of yoga wisdom. I told the truth: I really had just gotten out of Huntsville. Was I obligated, in that situation, to correct the MC president's misperception?

I don’t think so.

He trusted who he thought I was.

And nothing else mattered.

Wishing you all good fortune,

- Hari-k

P.S.: I hope you'll join me next Saturday, October 10, for my next live online workshop: Beyond Belief — Yoga Wisdom for Discerning Truth from Falsehood. Yoga has a surprisingly practical framework for examining not only what we believe, but how we know what we think we know, and gives us a system for testing what we think we know to see if it's worthy of our belief. In this workshop, we’ll look at how these teachings can be practically applied in the here and now of competing viewpoints and AI-generated fake news. CLICK HERE for complete information and enrollment.