The Great Search for A Cool Poster

Well, the search was probably less than “great”, but the article wouldn’t sound as interesting as if I would have called it “the nearly antiquate search for a cool poster.”  In any case, I looked for a cool poster on the Internet today, this is the story of what I found. –DV

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Earlier, I was reading the two assigned chapters in the book for our SL Buddhism Discussion group and came to a mention of this poster that was published sometime, probably in the late sixties or early seventies. The poster had this old white bearded yogi, in a “tree of life” yoga pose, on a surf board.  Here is an image of the pose:

The pose looks fairly difficult, especially sustained over a long period of time.  I could probably sustain this particular pose for all about 5 seconds before falling over.

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf

So, this old bearded yogi in the poster is performing this pose on a surf board, on a large wave.  Below the image of the surfing yogi, the caption reads “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

Sounds like a cool poster, no?

So I went a-surfing on my current favorite board, Firefox.  I was not in the “tree of life” pose, it was more like “crouching geek, hidden laptop.”  As I switched from one browser window to the next, I doggedly Googled many a twisted and tortured form of the poster’s caption.  I even found myself searching the many small and smokey poster stalls at e-bay, looking for this long lost treasure.

As I searched, I did find out a few tidbits of information about the poster, one of which was that, interestingly enough, most people attributed the quote on the poster to the wrong people.  What was kind of interesting:

The yogi on the poster was of Swami Satchidananda, he was about the age of 70 at the time the photo was taken.  He is often credited with the quote. Sorry, he just had the rock’n pose.

The quote seemed as if it was originally penned by a man named Jon Kabat-Zinn, son of Howard Zinn, and Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts. Wikipedia says he had made a life’s work of bringing the subject of mindfulness to society and teaching its uses, amongst other things to reduce stress. Certainly a noble pursuit. In the book he wrote called “Where ever you go, there you are.” the surf quote can be found, but no one seems to look closer and notice that he only references the poster with the quote.  Nope the quote is not his.

So I searched further.

After a bit more tapping of the keyboard I found that the quote’s true credit may well go to Joseph Goldstein, one of the first American vipassana teachers. It just so happens Joseph is a friend to the author of the book we are currently reading in our discussion group (and who has also wrongly been given credit for this same surf quote on many a website), Jack Kornfield.  With this information, the search seemed to come full circle.  It was Jack’s reference, in his book, that got me started on this search in the first place.

Poster, Poster, Whose got the Poster?

It is a wonder to me that there is an image of a fairly known poster that can’t be found on the Internet.  Maybe, my masterful surfing skills were just lacking this evening.  Alas, my great search for the cool poster ended in some disappointment. I may just need to find a better surf board to find this mystery poster, or perhaps just a new surfing pose.

Dharma tries one last Google Search… “How do you keep a Zen geek in suspense?”

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(If someone can find a picture of this mysterious poster, please send me a link. I would certainly love to see it. )

Namaste

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