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Thursday, February 28, 2013

Offense

Just cuz I'm not offended...

Doesn't mean I don't understand why it's offensive
and it doesn't mean I don't understand why others ARE offended,
and it doesn't mean I won't want to hold the person/people/organisation accountable for behaving in insensitive and offensive ways
and it doesn't mean that I don't want to support you/them work through the difficult experience of feeling offense

It may just simply mean:
I'm not offended.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Masters of Integrative and Transformative Studies

next week at the Oases Graduate School.




From their website:

*****
As A Participant In The Program You Will:

- Develop frameworks for social, environmental and personal sustainability.
- Work with and influence processes of social change.
- Engage multiple ways of learning and knowing, through the mind, imagination, heart and body.
- Become more conscious of the choices you make every day and reflect on their ecological, aesthetic, social, spiritual, ethical and other implications.
- Maintain integrity in situations that challenge your convictions and assumptions.
- Sustain spirit in the midst of potentially dispiriting social and ecological realities.
- Create learning moments in your everyday life.


At the core of the program are ongoing Integrative Conversations, creating spaces where you debrief, engage with, reflect on and share your learning and practice with other course participants and course facilitators.

Four other interconnected units (each of 4 days) in first year provide entries into the core foundational pools of knowledge which weave through all other units:


- Ecological; Remembering, discovering and enacting our part in nature
- Aesthetic; Becoming alive to the senses and wonder
- Social; Revisiting relationship – how did we become the way we are?
- Spiritual; Renewing and transcending our inner worlds


*****




My current intention is to do a systematic exploration, over the course of my Masters, of Developmental Justice.... that is, to explore waves of possibility around the metaphor of "justice" that include and go beyond materialist formations of justice... in other words, to include materialist formations (e.g. social justice discourse around economics and the regulation of bodies), AND also conceptions of justice which involve the (interplay between the) psycho-spiritual (e.g. the evolution of consciousness through its various states and stages of manifestation and dissolution), the ecological (e.g. the "world" of the cosmos and its history, which conditions and is conditioned by our sociality), and the aesthetic (e.g. the justice that is enabled through the radical practice of music, art, play, and not simply through a retrospective discourse on these)...

Assimilation // Integration

I am thinking about the differences between Assimilation and Integration.


Assimilation


Etymologically, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Assimilation comes
from Old French assimilacion, from Latin assimilationem (nom. assimilatio)
"likeness, similarity"


Here, I describe cultural and political Assimilation as the ways in which groups of people who are politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised (e.g. new migrants, colonised people) within a broader polity start to adopt the customs, language, and political ideals of dominant groups. To achieve as much as possible within existing normative frameworks of citizenship.

I describe Assimilationism as ways in which Assimilation becomes concretised as a goal for politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised groups of people. In other words, the goal of Assimilationism is not to challenge the dialectic of Assimilation nor to critique normative frameworks, but rather to succeed within them. To become "like" and "similar to" the dominant.

For a long time, I have self-described as "Anti-assimilationist". Anti-assimilationism is itself one possible attitudinal position I could take within a multicultural perspective. In other words, for me, and for a long time, the goal was for these individuals and groups of people to explore self-determination and develop their own frameworks and notions of success and community, beyond normative ideals, and capitulation to the demands of the dominant.





All that said, my stance has shifted somewhat...

Integration


Etymologically, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word Integration comes
from French intégration and directly from Latin integrationem (nom. integratio)
"renewal, restoration"


Here, I describe Integration as the ways in which individuals and groups of people, both those of us who are politically and materially disadvantaged/marginalised AND those of us who are privileged beneficiaries of our enfranchisement/citizenship actually shape one another.

I would thus describe Integrationism partially as the way that this process of shaping one another (both the dominant and marginal groups) becomes more aspirational, and indicative at least of the possibility for "renewal" and "restoration" of one another in this very shaping. One example could be the ways in which asylum seekers, through participation in broader host cultures, experience a "renewal" and "restoration" of their own self-capacity to maintain traditions or livelihood that would have been politically dangerous or unfeasible in their countries of origin, and simultaneously, that the host culture necessarily enlarges its own capacity to literally hold "the Other" within its self-concept.

Integration is also where the "Centre" and its "Periphery" (Other) both dissolve; are integrated.



Integration, from a few perspectives

In a sense, an Integrationist approach also includes the possibility of the Anti-assimilationist perspective. After all, the very frameworks of "self-determination" and "community" and so on require at the very least:

1. An inculcation into these values as part of an existent political possibility within the diversity of normative political frameworks within a polity.

2. A common language with which people can communicate with one another on these, and thus be also recognised by others as doing and enacting these very values.

When I am in a room full of other people of colour in Australia, as one example, communicating Anti-assimilationist viewpoints, the other presumption is that we are already integrated enough in existing normative frameworks that we could, for example, choose to speak with one another in English (which likely was not the mother tongue of many of our immediate families/ancestors).

With English as an inherited colonial language, which has also become my lingua franca (for better or for worse) in communicating political ideals, it necessarily means that all ideals are communicated within the liberational potential and limitations of that language. In other words, all ideals, along with the colonial English language medium itself, are "integrated" in their very expression, as well as in their intelligibility and coherence to others.

The other point here then, is that an Integrationist approach would also, by necessity, include an Assimilationist approach. In that: I have assimilated enough of normative cultural expectations of me (to, for example, engage the dominant political system, or to speak its language simply to survive), that I am enabled to then also challenge assimilation.



The "Problem" with Integrationism

For strict Assimilationists, Integration is unintelligible, and likely extremely confronting, to choose to hold onto value systems that are not kindly regarded within dominant society. Why choose to fight that battle, when you can play the existing game well and see enough role models of "success" that you could then escape conditions of bare survival? Here, Integration would be likely conflated with Anti-assimilationism, and disregarded as elitist.

For strict Anti-assimilationists, it is likely to be perceived as a cop-out to allow for political engagement to rest on the ways we have already assimilated... Far more viable, particularly for vulnerable and marginalised communities, to focus on the ways that dominant culture has to become more accomodating of difference and diversity, than to acknowledge that this very demand for accomodation is precisely a negotiation which, at its most powerful, compelling, and creative, involves mutuality in transformation and change. Integration would be conflated with Assimilation (the demand strictly for the marginalised person/group to change) and may be disregarded as "scab"-ish.

Another problem here as well is that the term "integration" is often used as synonymous with "assimilation" (so that to "integrate someone/a community" is equivalent to saying to "assimilate someone/a community into dominant society['s norms and values]".

Within an Integrationist perspective, Integration would also have to account for accomodating and integrating its very negation. In other words, a polity which is truly pluralistic and with the potential for integration of large groups of incredibly diverse and sometimes seemingly paradoxical cultural drives, must necessarily accomodate both Assimilationist and Anti-Assimilationist criticisms of Integration, while also necessarily protecting the sanctity of this very accommodational drive which conditions the possibility that such divergent views can even be in dialogue with one another.

In other words, not that X (marginal-individual/community) is "integrated into" Y (dominant/hegemonic-culture/community), but rather:
X & Y are integrated



Integration, Again

This very accommodation of divergent views, therefore, and indeed, the ability for a polity not only to "wrestle" with divergent views, but also to "accommodate" them (while strictly protecting the sanctity of the freedom for accomodation) is the very expression of Integrationism...

** Note: I have throughout this essay meant the word "accommodate" to connote "provide shelter for", rather than its other possible connotation of "merely tolerate"

In other words, Integrationism is not necessarily a "view within" or a "perspective on", but is an "orientation to" cultural politics. It is also a dialectical process that does not belong either exclusively to hegemonic groups nor to marginalised groups.

To "integrate" is to breathe with one another, to hold one another's views, to make room for them, to sleep on them, to make decisions of mutual benefit and with sincerity and a baseline recognition of our common humanity and common drive to alleviate our suffering in our lives.

Integrationism, to me, thus necessarily moves beyond the discursive... into the breath, the body, the bodily tensions and releases which are themselves "digestive" and integrative of diversity and universalism, divergence and convergence.

Thursday, February 21, 2013

HIV Prevention for Gay Men (in Australia)

I wrote this piece October 2010...

So the situation around the industrialised world
is that HIV seroconversion rates are generally rising again
in gay men (and other men who have sex with men, or "MSMs," to use HIV Educator parlance...)

I reckon that HIV prevention work has become stuck in a bit of a defeated, lethargic deadlock...
Our work needs to become more 'holistic'...
in that, even though we understand that the biological transmission of HIV
occurs within the context of specific ACTS,
and often confined disproportionately to specific 'at-risk' groups of people (MSMs, injecting drug users, sex workers (though not so much in Australia), and migrants from high-prevalence countries),
we cannot remain oblivious to the contexts and social circumstances
which condition the possibility for these acts to occur,
and indeed, precipitate the emergence
of even the desire to act in the ways we do...

In other words, we need to question the biological reductionism/determinism
implicit in hegemonic forms of HIV prevention,
which pay only lip service
to the idea that interventions should come in ways
that would be 'culturally appropriate' for the communities targeted

We know:
Unprotected anal sex with casual partners is increasing among gay men...
This is correlated with a rise in HIV infections,
though they have stabilised in the past few years here in NSW...

There is a lack of vision, I believe,
among the 'old guard' of HIV educators,
who see a reduction in HIV seroconversions as too lofty a goal
and who are content to celebrate the stability of seroconversions
at a rate that is EXTREMELY low, by world standards.

Yet, I believe:
If gay men are increasingly choosing not to use condoms,
our JOB as HIV educators is not only to help look for or name
other methods of HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS)
to assist these men in making safe(r) choices about their sex lives
given their CURRENT sexual decisions in the contexts and cultures they exist...

It is ALSO our job to question and interrogate
the cultures in which unsafe behaviours become desireable
the cultures which precipitate and give rise to the
desireability of these behaviours...
in particular, and especially
unprotected anal sex with casual partners.

No, our job is not to be moral police, of course...
However, we do need to start talking ethics.
Our work needs to be informed by ethical conversations.

Should we remain forever amoral about gay men's sexuality?

I suspect that many of us have become wedded
in significant and unacknowledged part
to the continuing existence of HIV
to justify continuing in the line of work that we have become most familiar with.
many of us have had the experience of being sexually active gay men
synonymous with HIV
and, as such,
may well perceive the discontinuation and eradication of HIV
as a legitimate threat to community.

I write this not to mock or to belittle
...
this is not a cultural trend that is unique to gay people;
it does not make us uniquely pathological...
the experience of victimhood-as-identity is a real, complex reality for many of us,
and indeed, there is even an intelligence in this:

For one, and this is the most obvious one,
we have been and are often still victimised...!
We are victimised by homophobia, internal, interpersonal, and institutional
that make it such that the unique health concerns we have
are stigmatised, marginalised, or ignored completely.
For some of us, perhaps even a whole generation of us,
many of our partnerships, friendships, and even the experience of full participatory citizenship
have been based on organising around this victimhood, and in spaces that existed BECAUSE we were marginalised.

There are REAL, psychological traumas that we can and will face
should we be willing to question this weddedness...
Though I believe that the time is right to do just this,
and rigorously,
we need to do it with a lot of patience,
naked honesty, compassion.

Should we be able to do this,
and by this, I reiterate to mean:
rigorously addressing our ressentiment identities with
patience, honesty and compassion;
we may arrive at some interesting insights.
I will share some that I have come to:



1. As gay men, we are male-socialised

This means that we are socialised into patterns of self-understanding and behaviour
which often take on the form which we believe
will legitimate our claim to rightful masculinity
this can look like
having a lot of diverse sexual experiences
with a lot of different people
which we may associate not only with physiological pleasure,
but also with masculine-gender approval... and these two pleasures
are not necessarily separable...
Some of our risk-taking behaviours
may conform with our own deepest notions and expectations
of ourselves as men...

At the same time, there is an increasing over-reliance
on certain types of technologies and discourses
in order to bolster this sense of our gendered selves
which may actually, in my opinion,
be becoming incredibly toxic.

For example, the increasing abuse of viagra to treat erectile dysfunction,
the chronic abuse of alcohol and other mind-altering substances in order to engage a sexual freedom/release from the social constraints that hold us back from what we believe to be our gendered/animal-authenticity,
in order to be and remain hard,
in order to associate our "presence" in sex to be deeply associated with hardness,
vigour,
athleticism,
etc.

Yes, these lead to high risk behaviours.
I believe we need, AS HEALTH PROMOTERS, to interrogate and question the ways that our culture has been forming around androcentrism, misogyny, and an unhealthy over-fetishism of hard, racist and sexist masculinity.
It is not enough to simply state, "these are the acts that men are engaging in... now how can we ask them to do it more safely?"
It is important for us to ask questions of Why?
and to not accept that the typical qualitative responses of "for pleasure" are enough...
We must be willing to dig deeper,
"And what is the role of pleasure in our lives? What, if any, is our entitlement to pleasure? Where does that come from? Is pleasure the most central goal in our sex lives?"


If we interrogate ourselves in this manner, we may find out some things, which will require further interrogation...:

a. As human beings, we are typically fettered by our attachments to pleasure and avoidance of pain. For gay men (in Sydney), these attachments express themselves in certain patterns unique to our experience here... We can trace patterns of consumption, attitudes, behaviours that may well indicate the nature of these attachments.

Are there institutions, spaces, and health promotion ideas that can be uniquely suited for gay men to address this issue in a safe way?


b. This interrogation is OUR JOB IN OUR OWN LIVES AS GAY MEN. We need to do this for ourselves first and foremost, and in an ongoing way, before we can even consider this as a viable stance for others.


c. This is also our job as HIV Educators.



2. The strategic mobilisation to promote the use of condoms among MSMs was revolutionary.

This revolution was based on a number of different circumstances:
--> People were dying of AIDS(-related illnesses),
and this was debilitating and confronting...
--> Condom use was NOT ALREADY NORMATIVE in our sex lives
--> Culture at large was not particularly accepting of homosexual sex in the first place.

Mobilising around condom use amidst these circumstances has led to several equally revolutionary outcomes:
--> Fewer and fewer people getting infected with HIV
--> The concept of the gay community increasingly being taken seriously by government (at least in Australia)
--> The concept of "gay health" being more accepted as a legitimate concern not only to public health officials, but also to gay men ourselves (that our health was worth thinking about and mobilising around)
--> A proliferation of the discourse of gay sexuality and non-normative gay relationships being taken more seriously

Given that this original mobilisation around HIV/AIDs and condom use was disproportionately headed by gay men ourselves (along with our wonderfully supportive allies), this was truly the synthesis and formation of a powerful new ethics and politics of sexuality.

We noted:
Our sexual behaviours, in their current, unfettered forms,
are killing us.
We need, thus, to CHANGE OUR BEHAVIOURS
and fuck what society thinks, we NEED THE MONEY TO FUND THIS MESSAGE.


Now that is some powerful stuff.

However, at this point, at least here in Sydney, I believe we have grown lethargic and complacent, even "impotent" in our efforts.
Now that HIV is less of a death sentence,
and, at least here in Australia, free/extremely cheap and highly subsidised anti-retroviral treatments mean living longer, healthier lives with HIV,
this is correlated with increasing risk-behaviour among gay men...
More and more gay men are engaging in unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners (UAIC) at least some of the time.

In Australia, although seroconversion rates have remained stable since 2007 (around 1000 a year),
they are about a third higher than they were at their lowest point in mid 2000s (the highest ever was in the mid-1990s).

What we do know is that gay men have been engaging a wide variety of different non-condom-based HIV Risk Reduction Strategies (RRS) to inform our sexual decision making around unprotected anal sex.

These include:
Serosorting (choosing partners of the same HIV sero-status as yourself)
Negotiated Safety (HIV negative partners choosing to have agreements in their relationship to have unprotected anal sex with just each other, conditioned also by getting tested both during and after the window period of their last unsafe sexual encounter, and with a commitment to ongoing communication and re-negotiation of the agreements in their relationship)
Strategic Positioning (choosing to top instead of bottom, as this poses a marginally lower risk of getting HIV)
The use of Undetectable Viral Load (in HIV+ guys),
and Withdrawal from fucking before ejaculation
in order to lower the risk of a seroconversion happening between partners.

This is all fine, and good, and important to engage and talk about as health educators.

But I believe that it is pathetic that we imagine, as health educators, that this is going to be either especially revolutionary, or even especially efficacious in our efforts.

Why?

One...
Gay men have been doing this from the beginning, albeit without naming these strategies with the 'industry' terms as I have defined them above. By simply naming these strategies as a reality, we are not exactly calling for a shift in behavioural patterns en masse into lower risk behaviours.

Two...
While the correct use of Risk Reduction Strategies may lower our collective risk for another explosion of seroconversions in our communities, I do not believe that this is a brave enough goal. Nor, if it is true that gay men are ALREADY employing these strategies, is this even a GOAL for HIV educators.

Of course, I recognise that circumstances have changed since we first mobilised around condom use:
--> Fewer and fewer people are getting, let alone dying of AIDS(-related illnesses) in Australia
--> Condom use IS NORMATIVE (a majority of gay men use condoms a majority of time with a majority of their partners)
--> Culture at large is increasingly accepting (though not fully) of homosexuality

It is NO SMALL FEAT that seroconversions are not only stable in New South Wales, but also at an incredibly LOW level... (at a rate of about 1:14, when we compare with what is going on in the USA)

Still, I believe we can have loftier goals for HIV education.

When Michel Sidibé, the Executive Director to UNAIDS, came to visit Sydney recently, he praised the Australian response to HIV for both our grassroots movement as well as our government's swift cooperation with gay activists and commitment to harm reduction.

Sidibé ended his speech by suggesting a goal for New South Wales:
To completely eradicate seroconversions.

I take this very seriously.

Is this possible?

Let us dream this.

What would it take?

It would take a revolution in our community, and this is, as I said before, not only about addressing sexual behaviours, but also interrogating the cultural reasons we are wedded to specific behaviours as some of the most authentic expressions of selfhood.

I am expediently taking the stance:
OK, let's not immediately make a commitment to behavioural change as a community.
But let us promote and FUND dialogue, not just in our gay communities,
but with EACH OTHER as health educators,
around the issue of ethics and pleasure.
Let us stop fetishising either extreme of sexual conservatism or sexual liberalism as inherently appropriate approaches to sexuality. We also know that condom-based harm reduction alone is no longer the middle way for health promoters.

So now what?

I believe we need to start focusing on advocating for many other things.
HIV should be one of a whole gamut of health concerns that we should consider in a broader umbrella idea of "gay health."

This means we need to address, AS HIV Educators, not only high risk BEHAVIOURS,
but also high risk CONDITIONS & CIRCUMSTANCES.
We need to dare to devote a lot more of our $ that is being designated to HIV prevention into SOCIAL JUSTICE and holistic health needs.
We need to address bullying, homophobia, legal barriers to full equality (in marriage, military, property laws, etc.).
We need to address our drug addictions, our sex addictions, our ressentiment.
We need to address ongoing oppressions from within and from without our own community, including homophobia, transphoba, sexism, ableism, adultism, racism, classism, and so on.
We need to address white supremacy, male supremacy, capitalist/bourgeois supremacy, etc.
We need to listen to the voices of young gay men
who are saying, quite loudly,
that we want not only the sexual freedom and liberation that we are grateful to previous generations for having won for us, in terms of the liberalisation of sexual choices,
but we also want emotional security, friendship, intimacy.
We are upset about the ways that urbanised, consumer gay culture is intoxicated by sex. We are upset about how young men's beautiful bodies are exploited for marketing and selling us gay badges. We are angry about entering a working world which demands our physical, emotional, and intellectual labour but promises us not satisfaction but exhaustion and intoxication.

If we are serious about HIV prevention
we must recognise that preventing HIV is only of marginal interest for most gay men in our lives. HIV no longer = Death, which is AMAZING.
At the same time, No-HIV does not = MORE LIFE either.

Far more important to me, as an HIV Educator
to promote a life worth living,
not just a disease worth preventing.

in San Francisco...

this is an old piece I wrote when I was visiting San Francisco, on June 13, 2011


In San Francisco ...

In San francisco, I feel playful.

One of my best friends in the world picks me up from the airport... and then suddenly the city sprawls before me like a lucid wet dream;

Testament to local investment in cool politik, the walls of almost every district are replete with effervescent murals showcasing the very finest of contemporary American urban psychedelia and art-activism. San Francisco is easily one of the world’s most muraled cities… A legacy which gifts the city's residents with their own ever-changing art gallery on their way to work and play, everyday.

Here, my heart beats calmly with the slightest tinge of melancholy, for I am both indigenous of and tourist to this land. I have ‘grown up’ here (in my unapologetically spiritualist rendering of the term: as a young adult coming into my own emotionally, sexually, intellectually, spiritually), and so the Bay Area is my HOME…

But I also am legally a tourist, without rights of residence, employment, healthcare, and so on… and then, and then… but still, but still…

In San Francisco, I feel desireable.

I need not leave anything out of my speech, my sway, or my strut: I am artist, poet, queer Asian man, boy, hippie, poseur, superstar, post-loser, young activist, musician, global immigrant. I can take identity politic or I can leave it, but I am blessed with options. On my first night out in the Castro, I am sweetly spoken to by a gorgeous 20something Latino man from central California, whom my compadres had previously checked out while I had been my usual, silently dismissive self…

“Him? A guy like him? He’d never go for a guy like me," I sullenly muse to myself, avoiding his gaze.

He walks up to me and buys me a drink.

And then a few more.

The next morning, we wake up in each other’s arms in an overpriced motel. We hold our foreheads and laugh with each other at the spoils of our drunken frenzy… I remember, a deep, bodily memory: How much I love this brand of foolish freedom. I relish the freedom of enjoying my body not being so rancidly racialised by fucked up, Euro-centric conceptions of masculinity or beauty, or exoticised ideas of who I am because I am Asian;

My skin is smooth. My eyes are black.

My accent is an amalgamation of being raised upper middle class in Anglicised Singaporean and international schools, Americanised by rural New Hampshire, and then Aussified by new citizenship. My tattoos are black and red colours that stand out against the negative space of a gentle tan. THIS is my race, THIS is my ethnicity: several generations diasporic Hakka Hokkien Cantonese Chinese, my thoughts appearing and disappearing in English, my politics maybe Anglo-phonic, but wedded to no nation-state, and my heart singing their constant praises to the beautiful men whom I have loved.

I walk around the grid-planned streets of the Mission and Castro districts sipping on a cup of Philz coffee (with cream and mint), a quintessentially San Franciscan experience… The commodification of drip-coffee cool.

Then I jam electronica with one of the most important people in my life: my ex-boyfriend and ongoing compatriot. We zone for two hours going nuts at his place, doing percussion on electric violin, orchestrating rhythms on synth keys, overlaying the voice of Slavoj Zizek on phat base beats, singing nothing in particular (and then renditioning Sufjan Stevens) while rapping syncopating fingers on nylon-stringed guitar...

I remember 2008, when we were sweeter with our music, so much more languid in the lush comfort of his home in the hills of Berkeley… where it was just me on acoustic guitar and him on violin. We made music as a correlate to how we made love; The strums, the plucks, the bows, our diaphragms sore with relentless outpourings of joy…the subtle intimacies that would grow and erupt from the practiced feel of our instruments that only we will ever understand.

And the sorrow of leaving…

But that was so many years ago, when I was just as foolish as I am now, but not quite as wise... This evening, I am calm and home alone in my brother’s place in Rockridge, Oakland, sipping chamomile tea and smiling...

"I am so lucky."

And yet another fresh, chilly summer's day in the Bay draws itself to a close.

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

photographs

Photographs are interesting.
What a powerful medium photography is.
To be able to "capture" a still of something that you have literally seen
or perhaps that was "viewable" from some vantage point
that your own eyes might never have otherwise met
such as microscopic imaging, or a view of the sky from Mars...

Photographs...

One evening, I was cuddling my lover, when he held out his iPad and scrolled through some pictures of things that intrigued him. It struck me how incredible it was to be able to "see what he is seeing", from what he is able to conjure from his own mind (tapping into the generative collective minds of everyone else who contributes on the internet) and then to make manifest on a screen so that I could now see too...

Of course we can drop into deeper philosophical trajectories (oh how do you know that you are seeing what he is seeing? perhaps one or the other of us is colourblind, or that he is himself a projection of my own seeing of the world and hence how can I ever really know for certain that there is an objectively existent man who is independent of my own thought? I am always at least partially implicated in my own thought of him for his existence (which is not known apart from the thought of it)).

Tuesday, February 5, 2013

the Four Brahma-viharas

This is a great list for me to keep in mind as I explore the contours of my spiritual and political explorations, commitments, and practices.



Four Brahma-viharas (Highest Attitudes/Emotions)

Heavenly or sublime abodes (best home).
"Near enemy" is a quality that can masquerade as the original, but is not the original. 
"Far enemy" is the opposite quality.

  1. Lovingkindness, good-will (metta): 
    • Near enemy – attachment; 
    • Far enemy – hatred 
  2. Compassion (karuna): 
    • Near enemy – pity; 
    • Far enemy – cruelty 
  3. Sympathetic joy, Appreciation (mudita), joy at the good fortune of others: 
    • Near enemy – comparison, hypocrisy, insincerity, joy for others but tinged with identification (my team, my child); 
    • Far enemy – envy 
  4. Equanimity (upekkha): 
    • Near enemy – indifference; 
    • Far enemy – anxiety, greed 



from:
http://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/dhamma-lists/

Friday, February 1, 2013

The evolution of Urinals, in concert with Homophobia



1. Piss on the same wall... piss dribbles down into a collective basin at your feet.




2. Piss into individuated urinals, installed into the walls.





3. Piss into individuated urinals, which now "cup" your crotch as you urinate.




4. Piss into individuated urinals, which cup your crotch, and which are separated from one another with dividing walls.





Voila!
The cock has been banished from public view.

Is this the end of an era?

Jeff Kripal: The Impossible Becoming Possible