I recently revisited this excellent interview with Jon Cobb in Shannon Laratt’s ‘Opening Up‘. You can download the 460-page PDF for free, and the interview I’m quoting is the second one that Laratt did with him. There’s so much wisdom in his words and so much that I really agree with and find true to my experience of life. I also really love the photos that went with the article so I’m reposting them here.
Here are some parts that resonated with me:
“People see my Om neck brand and they understand they aren’t dealing with something from their world, in the sense that when an Indian woman walks into a deli with a large nose ring and a bindi, most Americans aren’t going to walk up to them and say “didn’t that hurt? what’s your mother think?” Intuitively they know that she is not from around here. We are not cut from the same cloth.”
“Hair, nails, body language, body shaping — that’s all body modification. To a large degree, when a woman gets up and “puts on her face”, that becomes her face. You are speaking volumes about yourself, whether it is to embrace as one more facet of the business suit the potential for going farther down that road, so in a sense you’re trading yourself in, or to beautify yourself just for your own sake… that’s modification.”
“Western culture has made it so that in order to get ahead, it’s screw unto others, or let us prey, and that’s P-R-E-Y. What’s wrong? You get gray hair, you trade in, and you get your Volvo. Men haven’t been like that until the past two hundred years. We spent the previous years being mysticism and faith based and listening to that, because if not we’d be eaten in the wild, we’d get lost, any number of things. Instead of the house payment, the Volvo payment, the nine to five job, we spent a lot more time being creative, dancing, sharing, communicating.”
“I do need to be at work, but I’ve chosen to be where I am and I’m not trading myself in. I help people find themselves, decorate themselves, and embrace the one thing you get in a culture where you are what you do — the body. And people don’t even realize you can do that any more, and that’s a very natural human thing — to decorate and cherish. You are your own medium and it’s the only thing you’re going to get to take with you.”
“The most beautiful thing is the natural self, and I try not to think of it as enhancement so much as an extension of self, or a trade for an image that is representing something that was worth the trade. It’s a very big deal to me to trade in self, and it will not be taken lightly.”
“Everyone that I know that gets a neck tattoo that’s not a spider web, that means something to them, has found a way. Because if you don’t eat, you will die, and if you are working and eating with a neck tattoo, you are working for yourself, doing something for yourself. Itcommits you to you, absolutely. If you’re not prepared to walk a very hard road for the rest of your life you shouldn’t do it — Not everyone is on a spiritual plain high enough where they are able to struggle through those hardships. What do you do when you have a face full of tattoos and not even MacDonalds will hire you? The nice thing is, you will never be able to work at MacDonalds. As Jimi Hendrix said, “Hey there businessman, you can’t dress like me”. It’s a very tough road and you’d better be prepared to make sacrifices and not value material things, but people.
And my favourite:
“There is a security possible. You invest in happiness and you invest in people. All other things will crumble in time.”
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