Tuesday, June 28, 2016

II. SOME THOUGHTS ON OUR BEING EMBEDDED IN A MYRIAD OF FIELDS & IDEAS

ights Reserved.

La segunda parte en la serie de diez ensayos de poeta Mike Mahoney presentados como contestaciones al libro La chispa azul por nuestro socio el filosofo J.P. Kruse. Cuadro realizado por pintora Gracia Salvaje.

Part two of poet Mike Mahoney's series of essays responding to The Blue Spark by J.P. Kruse. Painting by artist Wild Grace from her Ever Present Series.




Just as we are embedded in fields within fields of electromagnetic frequencies carrying their own cosmic oceans of information nurturing, toxic, and neutral to us, we are also embedded in many layers and strata of time: energetic and vibrational time, biological and metabolic time, seasonal and star time, evolutionary time, business time, etc.. We’ve built our entire cultural model, however, on just one kind of time: human time, or more specifically, the abstracted digital time of our techno-linguistic financial economy; the frenetic, bordering-on-panic, rush-hustle time of trying to keep up with perpetual distraction within the “rat-race” of working our life away to buy simulations of our misdirected desire in order for a few to monopolize the many and establish a global oligarchy of management within the homogenized landscape of our illusory “freedom” and government granted right to the “pursuit of happiness,” which can never actually be achieved from the inside since the realization of deep happiness would signal the end of the pursuit on which our entire cultural economy is based, and the population-wide realization of true freedom and happiness would probably end historical time as we know it altogether.
We are encapsulated, enwombed, interwoven and encompassed by many fields and layers of time, of many cycles of rhythm, which we remain blind and deaf to, remain unaware of within this cultural bubble of our historical simulacra. The rhythms of Earth and Her seasons of growth, death and transformation, slip & pass by unnoticed to most of us, which when we do see them it’s mostly for the commodity and sale of Her fruits, or in the clothes and fashions corresponding with snow or spring flowers, autumn leaves or summer beaches. The rhythm time of the stars and constellations, the time and special awareness of mountains, minerals, rivers and forests remain silent to our ears, invisible to our eyes and, perhaps most importantly, absent from our stories, and therefore appear lifeless, meaningless, here simply as our resources. The sacred cycle and spiritual time-consciousness of life-&-death as a single miracle of transformation, and as two sides of the same Grace, seems to be the most difficult aspect of time for us to accept, to perceive in its divine light with any clarity of understanding, and thus we continually suffer, & in a million different ways, from our collective-yet-unspoken cultural avoidance of this central mystery.
We live within the consensual hallucination of linear history, where in the current century of cultural date-keeping, “time is money,” & if you’re not making money or buying your own distraction, you’re wasting your own time & the time of others. But by operating on just this one mode of time, this digital-financial time of distraction and interruption, we’ve shut ourselves out and cut ourselves off from any perception and relationship with life that’s deeper than a surface-reflection, more subtle than an explosion, or which lasts longer than the average commercial spot. We become ignorant of, (or if aware, then spooked by), any experience of time not compatible with the frenetic yet dull pattern-cell of work/consume/work, or slower than the hyper-acceleration of our ever-spawning forms and variations of communication and super-computing technologies. The human world of material capitalism now spreads like a cancer sprawled out across & encompassing the globe, recognizing neither day or night but one seamless and bland blend of time of “expansion and profit,” or of “reduction and debt.”
As with layers and dimensions of different frequencies of time we don‘t notice, we are embedded in thousands of different forms and variations of unheard language, as well. The languages of frogs and birds, of trees, rivers and stones which are slower, of the moon, forests and weather patterns, slower still, of the days and nights, oceans and seasons, years, dreams, generations and millenniums – all of these things have their own languages which we cannot understand as long as we dwell only within the bubble of our own alphabet. And just like those fields of time we move in & through, only seeing & processing within one of the billions of different types and layers, & thus labeling & ignoring as “not real” all of our experience of everything outside of our thin slice of the time spectrum, we do the same with language. We’ve packed all our belongings & moved into just one or a handful of languages, completely oblivious to the voices of Earth crying, or worse, falling silent.
This language we live in seems to be dictated by whatever the predominant “portal” of the cultural era is, itself usually directed by the latest technological inventions, and though it’s safe to say that money and financial value are still the main doorways to our sense of meaning and truth, with the passing of the 20th century those doorways transformed from a million different physical shapes, forms, services and materials, into the singular, world-wide & hyper-compatible, digitally-connected doorway of our techno-culture’s economy, while its binary-shaped & homogenized algorithms gobble up the diversity of species and ecosystems, ideas and even other cultures in its globalizing spread, like a cancer.
A couple thousand years now into the process of cultural abstraction and the symbolic games of our linear and linguistic march through a collective dream we call History, our ears have fallen deaf to the crying world we’ve half-destroyed, (& totally de-story-ed), while we look away to anything that will distract us for a little while, reminding ourselves that the Earth, (that mute lump of dead rock and ocean), doesn’t speak, let alone sing or sob.
The language we choose to live and play out our games in, to think and express ourselves with, adds to & strengthens another field, the field of ideas. The Earth as mute lump of dead rock and ocean is a virus of an idea that propagated itself through a few thousand years of human agriculture and patriarchal religion, of male-dominated cultures filled with Taboo & the Myth of Separation, Law, Ritual & Class Structure, Technology and Abuse of Resources.
In present times, we walk and dance, (or mope and trudge), through a million-plus year-old morphogenic dream-world of all the ideas and currents of awareness every person of our species who ever walked the earth ever had. “We stand on ground that is the whole human adventure,” (Pearce), and whether we’re ever taught it or not, made aware of it or not, it seems to be one of our powers as human beings to tune in to these currents like a radio to all the different stations beamed across the epigenetic sky of our historical trip, and in fact, if we widen our lens of attention through sacred silence & other forms of magic, it seems we can tune in not only to every station in the human spectrum, but to all the different stations beamed across all of the Earth and even the Universe, from protozoa to pulsar, from plants to planets.
We seem to live, however, only within the slim band of attention of our own cultural field & heritage of human ideas. (Are we noticing a pattern yet?) Each day we wake up inside of our culture, inside of the awareness expressed and sustained by our culture. We open eyes inside the thousands of ideas it takes to build a house or apartment building, get out of the idea of bed, go through ritualistic performances of ideas about hygiene and dress, and decorate ourselves in ideas called clothes, jewelry, shoes & identity, drive to the idea of work in the millions of ideas collectively called a car, and generally spend our days moving from one collection of ideas into another – ideas infused into material objects & structures, architectures & automobiles – rarely touching the Earth or experiencing it beneath our layers and layers of virtual realities.
Not only is each object and reified thing of human design we see and use a fossilized fusion of probably thousands if not millions of ideas – some going all the way back to our primate ancestors and before, blobbed together over time and solidified into existence by our use and expression of them, by our inheriting and carrying them over from previous generations through our individual thoughts and behaviors – but even the singing forms and diverse beings of the natural world we share this living planet with are contorted & distorted into the images of our ideas about them; are barely seen or heard through the thicket of stimulus and noise, of concepts and beliefs we lay over top of them as a massive brickwork topology of words and symbols. Of facts, categories, beliefs and assumptions. Of nouns and verbs, hallucination and delusion. Of separateness and fear.
Often times, the longer and deeper the chasms of time and history these ideas span, the more solid they become as a field-effect of culture, they more they take root, grow and expand, and simultaneously the more they evolve and transform, (or further stiffen and harden, fossilized into lifeless artifacts at best, truths at worst.)
The idea of shelter and lodging is a very old idea, hundreds of thousands of years old, hundreds of thousands of years of man’s full attention and ingenuity, although the variation of this idea I pay rent to live alone in, the "studio apartment," is quite a recent style of living in human history. (Note how, as a recent or newer variation on the idea, it’s resonant with an ancient form – the cave.) The chair I sit in is an old composition of who knows how many individual’s ideas based around carpentry, mathematics, upholstery, comfort, zippers, cushions, physics, body mechanics, aesthetic and design, symbolism and myth, fatigue, necessity, etc., all expressing a field or cluster of attentions revolving around the human activity of sitting. The personal computer i will type this poetic essayling into – itself a cannabis-catalyzed litany of ideas being spun out of a web of countless others' ideas, culled and gleaned from a rather wide stretch of time and reading – is a technology of tremendous depth and breadth of ideas; a massive nexus point of millions of ideas, themselves made up of millions of ideas, big and small, brilliant and obvious, psychedelic and synchronistic and profound at every level and scale from every twig, root, bud, leaf and branch of human knowledge and study; a magical machine condensated out of the human imagination (with a chemical dash of help here and there), which took all of human history and the millions of years of stirrings of our creativity & intellect beforehand to come to, and in fact much longer than that, as the rare earth metals and elements used for its construction were initially cooked up who knows how many stars ago?
Perhaps it’s helpful to see ideas as a type of mental technology, and, in some sense, as the cognitive offspring of all of our languages, whether they’re expressed in “a linguistic, pictorial, architectural, mathematical or musical guise,” (Kruse). (Note: I’m entirely avoiding here the type of ideas which are nonverbal, not language-based, even though upon further examination this type of wordless thinking and feeling may buttress, if not underlie and to some degree spark, every language-based idea we entertain.) Just as our technologies, (material objects embedded with ideas), have shown ideas can be as life-affirming and heart-opening as they can be dangerous and deadly. They can destroy empires as well as build them up; can manifest complex labyrinths around us in which we get lost, or they can safely lead us out of them. They can make gods & healers, saints & mystics of men and women as easily as devils and tyrants, savages & worms. They can perform miracles like saving the Earth or illuminating some of Her mysteries just as easily as they can infect and infiltrate our organism, culture and planet with toxicity & disease. (For the past few human generations, at least, it seems this planet has been choking & sputtering on a few of the undigested ideas of humanity’s western materialist culture – undigested by both the planet and by humanity. Similarly, most of our human cultures have an awful time trying to swallow a few of the planet’s ideas, specifically those of her sacred, psychedelic plants – strange, brilliant, poetic and funny though they may be.)
Sometimes an idea, or cluster of ideas, (ideology, belief, technology), becomes so powerful, its basin of attraction so deep, that it nudges the entire trajectory of the human adventure. It releases a charge or “current capable of carrying away generations in its slipstream.” (Kruse). When the true depth of power ideas contain to influence, destroy, create and transform realities is understood in this light, it seems appropriate, perhaps, to consider ideas as mediums which both extend and amputate elements of our reality, and to ask of them the four fundamental questions put forward by McLuhan in his Laws of Media: What is gained? What is lost? What is brought back from an ancient time? And what will come of this if we let it go too far?

Erected and sustained by which ideas they let in and which they aggressively stamp out, ideas are the glue of culture. In looking at the various cultures of Earth throughout history and our present day, we can catch a pretty clear glimpse of what happens when ideas are allowed to go too far – usually through initial success – and what becomes of the cultures built upon such mutations. We see this by the exaggerations of what was gained by those ideas being preserved and distorted, generation after generation; of what was lost by this junkie-like addicting to possession of specific culturally inherited ideas, inherited modes of behavior and attention; and what behaviors or ideas are brought back from previous times, dressed up and redesigned to fit the culture, of course. This is easier to see in cultures than in their individuals simply because of the large scale it takes place on. When ideas are inherited on a cultural scale, below the level of our personal awareness, they are expressed, animated, and reinforced by the unconscious behavior of the entire tribe or community, and folded over again into yet another layer of reinforcement by the compulsive need everyone feels to comply and fit in to their group. These ideas become so deeply ingrained that we often only experience them in our unawareness. As a field of our reality we never question. They become the water we swim in, so to speak, the air we breathe, and the epigenetic field we grow and live within. They become the eyes we see with, and as a result they’re ideas which people barely even notice anymore, let alone consciously engage and play with, or participate in, but rather submit to as pillars of reality, as basic facts and tenets of the fabric of life. As the condition of human nature. ‘The way it’s always been.’

Thursday, June 23, 2016

DE LAS RELACIONES SEXUALES


SEXO y RELACIONES HUMANAS

Decimos muy a menudo que el Ser humano se convierte en humano con las relaciones que establece con sus semejantes. Estas relaciones se sustentan en la comunicación por medio del lenguaje, palabras o gestos, y se definen usualmente como políticas, sociales, laborales, económicas y familiares. En este último apartado, como una especie de sub-categoría, se suelen englobar las relaciones sexuales.
Sin embargo, entre todas las formas de comunicación que un Ser puede establecer con otro Ser parece evidente que ninguna sobrepasa, en intensidad e intimidad, la que se deriva de un contacto físico entre dos cuerpos animados por un espíritu inquieto y espoleado por el deseo sexual.
Porque el deseo sexual, que aparece como algo principalmente instintivo y destinado a asegurar la perpetuación de la especie, es algo que todo ser humano, macho y hembra, experimenta a lo largo de su vida y, en algunas épocas de una manera singularmente intensa e insistente.
Es el caso evidente en la juventud cuando el Ser empieza a sentir este deseo de manera consciente y anhela realizarlo con urgencia por tratarse de algo nuevo y desconocido. Y es entonces cuando el Ser humano se enfrenta con una larga serie de prejuicios y convenciones sociales, propias de la sociedad en la que vive, que lo sumerge en un mar de dudas, contradicciones y frustraciones con consecuencias demasiadas veces desastrosas para su salud mental y física.
Basta echar un vistazo sobre todo lo que concierne el sexo en nuestra sociedad para constatar el gigantesco descoloque en él que viven nuestros contemporáneos, en su mayoría incapaces de disfrutar de una vida sexual plena, armoniosa y totalmente satisfactoria. Abundan así los hechos que revelan una profunda confusión que conduce muchas veces a dramas tan tremendos como la violencia de género, la pedofilia, la homofóbia o la explotación sexual.
Hace ya siglos que nuestra sociedad abandonó los sabios conocimientos del paganismo para someterse al dictado de una concepción de la sexualidad, derivada de los dogmas judeo-cristianos, que prevalece todavía en la mente de los ciudadanos a pesar de los importantes cambios introducidos en el ordenamiento jurídico de nuestro país a lo largo de los últimos 40 años: divorcio, aborto, matrimonio homosexual, violencia de género.

 

SEXO y CONVENCIONES SOCIALES

El hecho de englobar las relaciones sexuales dentro de las relaciones familiares es ya de por sí, muy esclarecedor del enfoque sesgado que preside en las mentalidades comunes. Se debe a la evidencia de que la copulación es, o ha sido durante mucho tiempo, la única manera de procrear y por tanto de iniciar una familia. Y de hecho todas las religiones monoteístas, (judía, cristiana y musulmana) han estado enseñando a sus seguidores, con más o menos insistencia, que la práctica de las relaciones sexuales debe de tener como única finalidad: engendrar. El practicar sexo como forma de relacionarse o por pura afición al dar y recibir placer, está considerado como pecaminoso y moralmente rechazable. Esta terrible idea sigue muy arraigado en grandes sectores de nuestra sociedad y se trasmite de generación en generación, de forma sistemática, en muchos lugares.
 
Como consecuencia, la primera característica del ámbito donde se coloca las relaciones sexuales es su restricción a la relación de pareja que deriva, en la religión judía como en la cristiana, en la normalización de la monogamia, sancionada por el matrimonio. Un matrimonio que ha sido, y sigue siendo en muchas comunidades, indisoluble e irreversible. La práctica de relaciones plurales, la poligamia y el sexo en grupo que prevalecieron durante muchos siglos entre las comunidades humanas, ha quedado doblemente estigmatizada como perversa e inmoral, tachada de libertinaje; lo que no impide que se siga practicando en mayor o menor medida en todas las esferas sociales. En la religión musulmana, en razón de las circunstancias vitales del profeta, la poliginia sigue aceptada pero sin embargo, en el ámbito de las tres religiones, podemos decir que la poliandria ha quedado en la práctica, reducida a la mera prostitución.

La segunda característica universal, que marca todavía las relaciones sexuales en todas las sociedades, es el machismo es decir la preponderancia del macho sobre la hembra y es el fundamento de lo que algunos prefieren llamar el patriarcado. Se trata de un prejuicio que no es patrimonio exclusivo de los hombres sino que es compartido por un alto porcentaje de mujeres. De él se deriva de que la mujer es considerada como una propiedad del hombre, sometida a su voluntad, incluso cuando las leyes proclaman la igualdad de los géneros. Por eso son tan frecuentes los dramas provocados por la violencia desatada contra las mujeres por parte de sus parejas que se otorgan sobre ella derecho de vida o muerte.

La tercera característica dominante es la condena hecha a todo deseo que no se enmarque dentro de la heterosexualidad, es decir el rechazo a la homosexualidad, tachada de antinatural y tratada por muchos como una enfermedad. Aunque paulatinamente los derechos de los homosexuales se vayan reconociendo en el ordenamiento jurídico de muchos países, el rechazo que padecen es todavía omnipresente y profundamente arraigado.

Estos tres prejuicios son los principales causantes de los traumas padecidos por los Seres humanos a la hora de intentar realizar sus deseos sexuales. Y esos traumas están en el origen de comportamientos realmente aberrantes como la pedofilia que está tan presente en los colectivos que predican la castidad absoluta como regla de vida, imponiendo a sus miembros una sexualidad contra natura. Son también los causantes de un fenómeno considerado universal que es la prostitución o explotación sexual de las personas, consecuencia de la doble moral y de las contradicciones que la religión impone inevitablemente a sus seguidores.



SEXO y DESEO

¿Es realmente reprobable desear varias personas o considerar que todo hombre y toda mujer tiene derecho a desear a otras personas sean o no del mismo sexo? Por supuesto que no. Y no solo que tenga derecho, sino que tales deseos son totalmente naturales, sanos, ética y moralmente respetables. Todos (o casi todos) hemos experimentado el deseo de compartir relaciones sexuales con varias personas, de manera simultánea o sucesiva, y muy raramente la atracción sexual está dirigida exclusivamente hacia una sola persona a lo largo de toda una vida. El deseo de abrasar, acariciar, besar y dar cariño o placer, es un deseo absolutamente natural que ni está ni tiene porque estar limitado a una única persona, tanto en el marco de una relación heterosexual como en una homosexual.
Sabemos que históricamente esta imposición de la relación de pareja como la única socialmente válida tenía un objetivo principal: asegurar la paternidad y en consecuencia la transmisión de la herencia. Hoy en día, una mujer puede decidir con total seguridad cuando quiere o no quedar fecundada, y en caso de alguna duda sobre la paternidad, las pruebas genéticas convierten este objetivo en fútil. Se puede pensar que, entre otras cosas, se mantiene también la preeminencia jurídica del matrimonio para facilitar el control de las instituciones sobre las personas y los bienes.
Pero la opción de una relación de pareja excluyente debe de considerarse como una decisión libre de dos personas, temporal o permanente, que, posiblemente, puede ser muy beneficiosa a la hora de crear una familia y conseguir mantenerla unida. Sin embargo en ningún caso debe de convertirse en una norma obligada, ni considerarse como la única relación social y moralmente válida. En la satisfacción del deseo sexual solo hay una norma de obligado cumplimiento y es la participación voluntaria de cada uno, la aceptación consciente de la relación por parte de los interesados, es decir la reciprocidad del deseo. No hay otra.



SEXO y AMOR

Muchas personas opinan, en consonancia con los prejuicios anteriormente expuestos, que no debe de haber sexo sin amor. Pero todos sabemos que no es necesario amar una persona para poder sentir deseo sexual hacia ella. También puede haber amor sin atracción sexual ya que el amor tiene una importante componente espiritual que puede bastarse a sí misma. Sin embargo, generalmente, el amor nace de una doble atracción, física y espiritual, entre dos personas. El amor va mucho más allá del simple deseo sexual y se convierte en un sentimiento que exige la continuidad en el tiempo de una relación basada en una afinidad espiritual y que conlleva el deseo mutuo de compartir las experiencias vitales, de caminar junto por la vida.
No hay, como bien se sabe, fuerza espiritual más potente que el amor, que consiste esencialmente en buscar sin descanso la felicidad del Ser amado y encontrar en ello su propia felicidad. El dar y recibir placer por medio de las relaciones sexuales forma parte de esta felicidad que persigue todo Ser humano. En una relación de pareja, amorosa, procurar felicidad al otro pasa por satisfacer, en la medida de lo posible, todos sus deseos, deseos sexuales hacia terceras personas incluidos, cuando estos se dan. La posesión, los celos, los “cuernos” y demás “infidelidades” no tienen nada que ver con el saber amar, sino que son reveladores de todo lo contrario: la falta de amor y la ignorancia. La comunicación libre de todo prejuicio, la franqueza, la claridad, la sinceridad absoluta, son requisitos indispensables para preservar y fortalecer día a día una relación amorosa. Ser infiel no es tener sexo con otras personas sino engañar y mentir a su pareja respecto a sus propios deseos, es no saber amar. La persona enamorada que cae en mentiras o en reproches a los deseos de su pareja, sencillamente no sabe amar porque está contaminada por los prejuicios que acabamos de denunciar. Cuando dos personas se aman y saben cómo amarse, solo experimentan felicidad a lo largo de su vida y por eso se puede decir que el amor es la fuerza que mueve el universo o, como dicen los religiosos, que Dios es amor. Pero, ¿cuántas personas saben amar?



LO QUE ES URGENTE DECIR A LOS JÓVENES RESPECTO AL SEXO.
Resumiendo de forma didáctica lo dicho hasta ahora, nos parece importante recordar siempre que para amar, eso es lo que hay que saber y nunca olvidar respecto a las relaciones sexuales:
- Cualquier clase de deseo sexual tanto del hombre como de la mujer es totalmente respetable, sano y natural. Tener relaciones sexuales es una hermosa manera de comunicar de forma profunda e intensa con sus semejantes.
- La relación de pareja exclusiva y excluyente es solo una opción entre muchas otras que no debe de ser considerada como la única norma socialmente, moralmente y jurídicamente reconocida y aceptada.
- Desear a varias personas de otro o del mismo sexo, de manera simultánea o sucesiva, es tan natural como desear a una sola. El sexo puede practicarse con una o varias personas según se desea y se presentan las circunstancias en cada momento.
- Nadie se convierte en propiedad de nadie por tener una relación sexual. Hombres y mujeres son absolutamente iguales y libres de realizar sus deseos más íntimos como le apetece y de satisfacerlos plenamente.
- La única norma de obligado cumplimiento es la participación voluntaria de cada uno en las relaciones sexuales que mantiene. Nadie debe de tener relación contra su voluntad, ni abusar de nadie por su edad o desconocimiento. No hay más normas que cumplir.
- El amor es libertad y dedicación total a la felicidad del Ser amado. No debe de implicar nunca frustraciones de los deseos del otro sino, todo al contrario, una contribución activa a su realización más armoniosa.


 VERSION FRANÇAISE:

DES RELATIONS SEXUELLES


SEXE ET RELATIONS HUMAINES
 
On affirme souvent que l´être humain devient humain par les relations qu´il établit avec les autres. Ces relations se basent sur la communication à travers du langage, les mots et les gestes et se définissent habituellement comme politiques, sociales, de travail, économiques et familiales. Ces dernières englobent comme une sous catégorie: les relations sexuelles.
Cependant, parmi toutes les formes de communication qu´un être peut établir avec un autre, il paraît évident qu´aucune surpasse en intensité et intimité celle qui provient d´un contact physique entre deux corps animés par un esprit inquiet et stimulé par le désir sexuel.
Ce désir sexuel, qui apparaît comme un fait principalement instinctif et destiné à la procréation de l'espèce, est un sentiment que tout être humain, mâle ou femelle, connaît au cours de sa vie et à certains moments d´une façon particulièrement intense et insistante.
Dans le cas évident de la jeunesse quand l´être humain commence à sentir ce désir de façon consciente et désire le consumer avec urgence car il s´agit de quelque chose de nouveau et inconnu. C´est alors qu' il se trouve confronté à une longue série de préjugés et de conventions sociales propres de la société dans laquelle il vit qui le plongent rapidement dans une mer de doutes, contradictions et frustrations avec des conséquences trop souvent désastreuses pour sa santé physique et mentale.
Il suffit de jeter un coup d´œil sur tout ce qui concerne le sexe dans notre société pour observer la grande confusion vivent nos contemporains, la plupart incapables de jouir d´une vie sexuelle pleine, harmonieuse et totalement satisfaisante. De nombreux faits révèlent cette profonde confusion qui conduit régulièrement à des drames aussi terribles que la violence sexuelle, la pédophilie, l´homophobie ou l´exploitation sexuelle. Notre société a abandonné depuis des siècles les sages connaissances du paganisme pour se soumettre à une conception de la sexualité, dérivée des dogmes judéo-chrétiens qui prévaut toujours dans la mentalité des hommes en dépit des importants changements introduits dans l´ordre juridique de nombreux pays tout au long des dernières années: divorce, avortement, mariage homosexuel, violence de genre...

SEXE ET CONVENTIONS SOCIALES
Le fait de placer les relations sexuelles entre les relations familiales est en soi très explicatif de la projection particulière qui préside les mentalités communes. Il se doit à l´évidence que la copulation a été pendant longtemps, la seule façon de procréer et donc de former une famille. De fait toutes les religions monothéistes: juive, chrétienne et musulmane, ont enseigné à leurs disciples avec plus ou moins d´insistance que la pratique des relations sexuelles doit avoir un seul et unique but: engendrer. Faire l´amour comme un mode de relation ou simplement pour le goût de donner et recevoir du plaisir est considéré comme un péché et une pratique moralement répréhensible. Cette terrible idée demeure très enracinée dans de nombreux secteurs de notre société et se transmet systématiquement de génération en génération, dans les lieux les plus divers.
 
 
Comme conséquence la première caractéristique du milieu où se déroulent les relations sexuelles est sa restriction à la relation de couple qui aboutit, dans la religion juive et chrétienne, à la normalisation de la monogamie et à l'institution du mariage. Un mariage qui a été et continue d'être dans beaucoup de collectivités indissoluble et irréversible. La pratique des relations plurielles, la polygamie et le sexe en groupes qui ont prévalu pendant des siècles entre les collectivités humaines, est restée doublement stigmatisée comme perverse et immorale, tâché de libertinage; ce qui n´empêche pas qu´on continue de les pratiquer dans toutes les couches sociales. Dans la religion musulmane, en raison des circonstances vitales du prophète, la polygamie continue d´être acceptée mais en revanche, dans le milieu des trois religions, on peut affirmer que la polyandrie est restée dans la pratique réduite à la simple prostitution.
La deuxième caractéristique universelle, qui marque encore les relations sexuelles dans toutes les sociétés, est le machisme, c´est à dire la prépondérance de l´homme sur la femme. C' est la base de ce que quelques uns préfèrent appeler patriarcat. Il s´agit d´un préjugé qui n´est pas le patrimoine exclusif des hommes si non qui est partagé par un grand pourcentage de femmes. C´est ainsi que la femme est considérée comme une propriété de l´homme, soumise à sa volonté, même quand les lois proclament l´égalité des sexes. De ce fait découlent les drames si fréquents provoqués par la violence exercée contre les femmes par leurs partenaires qui se croient en droit de vie ou de mort sur elles.

La troisième caractéristique dominante est la condamnation faite à tout désir qui ne soit pas exclusivement hétérosexuel, c´est à dire le rejet de l´homosexualité tachée d´antinaturelle et traitée par beaucoup comme une maladie. Bien que peu à peu les droits des homosexuels soient reconnus par l´ordre juridique de nombreux pays, le rejet qu´ils subissent est toujours omniprésent et profondément enraciné.

Ces trois préjugés sont les principales causes des traumatismes qui affectent les êtres humains au moment de tenter de réaliser leurs désirs sexuels. Et ces traumatismes sont aussi à l´origine des comportements réellement aberrants, comme la pédophilie qui est si présente dans les collectifs qui prêchent la chasteté absolue comme règle de vie, en imposant à leurs membres une sexualité contre nature. Ils sont aussi les causants d´un phénomène qui est considéré universel comme la prostitution ou exploitation sexuelle des personnes, conséquence de la double morale et des contradictions que la religion impose inévitablement à ses fidèles.

SEXE ET DÉSIR
 
Est-ce vraiment blâmable de désirer plusieurs personnes ou de penser que tout homme et toute femme a le droit de désirer d´autres personnes qu'elles soit ou non du même sexe? Bien sur que non. Non seulement on a le droit sinon que de tels désirs sont totalement naturels, sains, éthiques et moralement respectable. Tous (ou presque) nous avons expérimentés le désir de partager des relations sexuelles avec plusieurs personnes,
simultanément ou successivement, et beaucoup plus rarement l´attraction sexuelle est dirigée exclusivement envers une seule personne tout au long de la vie. Le désir de toucher, de caresser, d´embrasser, de donner tendresse ou du plaisir, est un désir absolument naturel et qui n´est ni doit être obligatoirement limité à une seule personne, aussi bien dans une relation hétérosexuelle comme homosexuelle.
On sait que tout au long de l´histoire cette imposition de la relation de couple comme la seule relation socialement acceptable avait un objectif principal: assurer la paternité et par conséquence la transmission héréditaire. Aujourd’hui, la femme peut décider en toute sécurité quand elle veut être ou non fécondé. Et en cas de doute sur la paternité les preuves génétiques rendent cet objectif futile. On peut penser également qu´entre autres choses on maintient la primauté juridique du mariage pour faciliter le contrôle des institutions sur les personnes et les biens.
Mais la possibilité d´une relation de couple exclusive doit se considérer comme une décision libre de deux personnes, temporaire ou permanente qui incontestablement peut être très positive pour former une famille et pouvoir la maintenir unie. Cependant en aucun cas cela doit être une norme absolue ni être considéré comme la seule relation socialement et moralement acceptable. Dans la satisfaction du désir sexuel il y a une seule norme indispensable et c´est la participation volontaire de chaque partenaire, son acceptation consciente de la relation, c´est à dire la réciprocité du désir. Il n`y a en pas d´autre.

SEXE ET AMOUR

Beaucoup de personnes pensent, en consonance avec les préjugés exposés auparavant, qu´on ne doit par pratiquer le sexe sans amour. Mais nous savons tous qu´il n´est pas nécessaire d´aimer une personne pour la désirer sexuellement. D'autre part il peut exister amour sans désir sexuel car l´amour possède un important composant spirituel qui peut se suffire a soi-même. Cependant, généralement, l´amour naît d´une double attraction physique et spirituelle, entre deux personnes. L´amour va beaucoup plus loin qu´un simple désir sexuel et se convertit en un sentiment qui exige une continuité dans le temps d´une relation basée sur une affinité spirituelle et qui implique la volonté réciproque de partager les expériences vitales, de cheminer ensemble tout au long de sa vie.

Il n´y a pas, comme on sait, de force spirituelle plus puissante que l´amour, qui essentiellement consiste à chercher sans répit le bonheur de l´être aimé et de trouver en cela son propre bonheur. Donner et recevoir du plaisir à travers les relations sexuelles fait partie de ce bonheur que poursuit tout être humain. Dans une relation de couple, amoureuse, procurer le bonheur à l´autre passe par la satisfaction, autant que possible, de tous ses désirs, y compris les désirs sexuels envers des tiers, quand ils surgissent. La propriété, la jalousie, les "cornes" et autres infidélités, n'ont rien à voir avec savoir aimer, bien au contraire ils dévoilent le manque d´amour et l´ignorance, La communication libre de tout préjugé, la franchise, la clarté, la sincérité absolue, sont des conditions indispensables pour préserver et enrichir chaque jour une relation amoureuse. Être infidèle, ce n´est pas maintenir des relations sexuelles avec d´autres personnes mais tromper et mentir à votre partenaire au sujet de ses propres désirs, c'est ne pas savoir aimer. La personne amoureuse qui ment ou reproche à la personne aimée ses désirs, simplement ne sait pas aimer parce qu´elle est contaminée par les préjugés culturels que l´on vient de dénoncer. Quand deux personnes s´aiment et savent réellement comment aimer, ils n'expérimentent que du bonheur tout au long de leur vie. Et c´est pour cela que l´on peut dire que l´amour est la puissance qui anime l´univers ou, comme disent les religieux, que dieu est amour. Mais en vérité, combien de personnes savent comment aimer ?


CE QU'IL EST VRAIMENT URGENT DE DIRE AUX JEUNES AU SUJET DU SEXE :

En traçant un résumé didactique du texte antérieur, il nous paraît important de rappeler que pour aimer, ce qu´il faut savoir et ne jamais oublier au sujet des relations sexuelles est que :
- Tout désir sexuel de l´homme ou de la femme est totalement respectable, sain et naturel. Avoir des relations sexuelles est une belle manière de communiquer profondément et intensément avec ses semblables.
- La relation de couple unique et exclusive est seulement une option et choix entre plusieurs qui ne doit pas être considéré comme la seule norme sociale, morale et juridique reconnue et acceptée.
- Désirer plusieurs personnes du même sexe ou d´un autre sexe, simultanément ou successivement, est tant naturel comme en désirer une seule. Le sexe peut se pratiquer avec une ou plusieurs personnes selon le désir ou les circonstances du moment.
- Personne ne devient la propriété de personne dans une relation sexuelle. Hommes et femmes sont absolument égaux et libres de réaliser leurs désirs les plus intimes comme il leur plaît et de les satisfaire pleinement.
- La seule norme obligatoire est la participation volontaire de chaque partenaire dans les relations qu'il établit. Personne ne doit avoir des rapports sexuels contre son gré ni abuser de personne en raison de son âge ou de son ignorance. Il n´y a pas d´autre norme à suivre.
- L amour est liberté et dévouement total au bonheur de l´être aimé. Il ne doit pas entraîner de frustrations des désirs de l´autre sinon, tout au contraire, une contribution active pour atteindre une réalisation des plus harmonieuse.



Vincent – Septiembre 2015

Monday, June 20, 2016

I. SOME THOUGHTS ON ‘TIME’ AND THE MIS-PLACED DREAM OF ‘GOING BACK by Mike Mahoney


Esta publicación va escrita por el poeta americano Mike Mahoney, poeta que lleva palante el legado espiritual del gran Walt Whitman, y amigo de algunos de los artistas que pululan nuestro taller. Se presenta como una contestación a The Blue Spark, o La chispa azul, por J.P. Kruse, libro escrito de un socio nuestro y publicado con la colaboración especial de nuestros artistas y pensadores. 

The following piece, written by poet Mike Mahoney, is part of a ten piece series of posts in response to The Blue Spark by J.P. Kruse. We will be posting one per week for the next ten weeks. The Blue Spark can be ordered here: www.swamplanternbooks.com



A painting from artist Wild Grace's 'Loosened Pane Series'
inspired by T.S. Eliot's line: 
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane.

On the northeast coast of America i sit with coffee and Erik Satie playing, fully entrenched in the times, in the waves of turbulence and echoes of history on both sides of the present. With windows open to the crisp early November air, i sniff the sky for incoming scents from the future floating all around us. Whether from the esoteric folds and hidden dimensions of the winds or up from the murky recesses of my mind, (you decide), after a moment of silent & amplified presence, the words bubble up from somewhere:

There is no going back...”

Perhaps, perhaps…
Among our many contradictions and perceptual problems contributing to the static we must sift through to pick up reality's signals is our issue with time – time as objective and time as subjective. Time as our creation and time as our master. Time as our inheritance. Our linear mask slung over the non-linear face of reality. Time as the product or perceived creation of the metabolic systems embedded within the sense-luscious surroundings of the geology, biology, imagination & life surrounding us that we call earth. That we call home. Time as the seasons and time as cycles of moon. Time as circles and stars. Time as money. Time as deadlines. As debt. Time as a motivator, as dread, as celebration, as mystery. The mystery of impermanence. Of flow. Change and transformation. Of life, sex and death.
As one of the standard measurements we use for telling time, a ’year' is our word for each complete circle the earth makes around the sun. Today, we in the West recognize & name the year as 2016. Without ever being fully aware of it, by using this date we’re literally saying we live in the 2016throtation the Earth has made around the sun. Whether it’s meant literally, which we know not to be true, or as the number of years since “God’s Son” walked on Earth, which as a secular nation shouldn‘t matter to us, it‘s a silly date picked at random we all use and never really think about. This only encourages our dim collective misunderstanding of our time and place, of who and what we are, and where and when we are. We know the planet is somewhere around four and a half billion years old, but we say it’s 2016. We know people just as intelligent, tender and alive were walking the Earth 400,000 years ago, and probably for at least a million years before that, and yet we say the year is 2016. (On Dec. 4th, 2013, the NY Times even published an article on this, stating: “In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 year, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.”) We know our ancestors have been taming fire for over a million years, (there's evidence for 1.9 million); we know our ancestors have been sailing the seas for hundreds of thousands of years, (there’s evidence for 800,000) – humans just as creative, smart and conscious as us. Humans that probably survived their own cultural & mythical end times just as surely as we survived ours: the infamous Y2K, the various dates of catholic fire-&-brimstoners, and of course the much heralded Winter Solstice of 2012, as well as all of the other dates and transcendence points put forward by various religious zealots, cracked fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists, starry-eyed New Agers and crystal-dolphin channelers scattered throughout the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries.
12,000 years ago, at the close of the high Paleolithic, the human species tore a rip in the fabric of time with the invention of agriculture & domestication. Around 5,000 yrs ago, the gradual domestication of symbols & signs into the divine creation/gift/curse of the origins of our alphabet proved another rupture in time. Then again around 2,000 years ago, there seemed to be yet another rupture in time based around the thoughts and actions of one counter-cultural mystic from Bethlehem, 500 years or so after which a monk named Dionysius in Rome claimed to have calculated the exact number of years which had passed since "The Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ", and thus began the upward-counting Anno Dominicalendar, the linear-clock narrative of history’s time, with speech, writing, farming, mythology, spirituality, science, politics, the arts, technology and warfare already in full swing. Interestingly, there are also signs which imply Dionysius created his revised version to dissuade people from a popular idea of the times that the end of the world was just over the horizon, and according to his new calendar its predicted date had already passed, thus proving it false. In his time and place, it was a commonly held belief, it seems, that the earth would reach its end 500 years after the birth of Jesus, which according to the older calendar in place, was coming up. (In our human world, the past can always be changed.)
A sidebar here, why don't we at least use one of those dates, those high-watermark years of massive novelty, as the beginning of our calendar instead? If we have to count our years upwards, why not make the date of our “year 1" one of what are now roughly 3,500B.C. (the beginning of our written language), 12,000 B.C. (the beginning of the rise of domestication & agriculture), or even 40,000 B.C, (what we think we know as the beginning of human cave art)? Wouldn't one of those at least be a bit more rational? And while we're at it, maybe we should add another million or so years to that calendar to account for the controlled use of fire, such a human behavior.

"There is no going back…"

There are many ideas of what going back would mean or entail. It has different points of destination on the linear timeline of our history to different people. To some, it means going back to the "good ole days” of segregation & slavery. To others, it's going back to an era before some technologies, but not others – before the Internet and iPhones but not cars & electricity, before the combustible & steam engines but not the printing press. To some, it would involve returning back to a mind-space before written language took root around 5,000 years ago. (Or more accurately, forward to a post-historical & future primitive mind-space without written language, but probably altered by the species' recent 5,000 year obsession with it.) And to others still it means traveling back/forward even further, 12,000 years into a past-future human existence pre-agriculture nomadic tribalism.
Among these viewpoints, of course, are various exceptions of what scraps & rare gems we should keep of any of the trashed technologies & ideologies, habits & practices we're leaving behind us with the cracked eggshell of human history.
To me, part of "going back", it seems, if we have to use that label, would involve going back more to a different perception of time than any actual date or place. A different consciousness – more the mental space of our ancestors who lived without clocks and wrist watches, laptops, cell phones and tablets. Who lived without careers, jobs and deadlines, without the four-year election cycle and a 30-second attention span. Who lived with a lunar & cyclical calendar, not the 365 & 1/4 day, linear calendar as we know it, & with minds and spirits not reigned in and tamed by technologies and by childhoods 12 years full of “chair-time” and forced “education.“ Part of it would involve going back from the time of tax & election seasons to the deeper measure and rhythm of earth's seasons. From the seasons of TV shows & sports to the seasons of our uninhibited desires and bodily energies. From the virtualized spacetime of social media & finance to the immediate voice & flesh of relationship and direct experience. Part of it would definitely involve going back to a perception of time unchained from the "vicious circle of work for wages and imposed leisure, to escape symbolic dominance and cultural entrainment, the "reality" of everyday life and the flatlands of binary logic." (Becker, Tactical Reality Dictionary).
It would be going back to an immediate experience of life stripped of all the debts & abstractions the techno-linguistic algorithms which run our global economy & psyche have programmed into it; from the suppressed and shizoidal PTSD fear-symptoms of living in a shattered double of the world – it's doppelganger & our multi-cultural cognitive cocoon of myth & history, of linear narrative & deep, deep subconscious guilt of what we've done to the place – to the calm & confident, jubilant self-knowledge and acceptance of mystery that comes with human life lived in the perpetual rhythm of balance with each other & with the earth & the trillion shapes of life we share the planet with. It would involve our transformation from the steel-&-oil hypercomplex awareness-manipulated landscape of coercive sense-oversaturation & disinformation, half-truths and small print, back into the poetically immediate & aesthetic sense-surround-system of body-rooted Eros splendor, of diversity of ecosystemic climax of every kind, of grass beneath our feet & ears full of night music cricket rhythms, eyes gorging on the infinity of pastpresentfuture constellated above day's end in astral complexity, in galactic epiphany, erotically spread from horizon to horizon, stripped of the usual smog-cloud of culture's light & pollution. It would be based around or built upon a shift from our consumer-fear culture of direction-following competitors, to a community of creative-thinking, love and collaboration.

"There is no going back…"

We should be careful about using these words “going back.” Any mobilization of the concept of “going back” would most likely have to include the worldwide implementation of martial law to enforce it, as there is probably no way to convince every single human on earth to either A) agree on how far back we’re going, or B) give up the toys and conveniences our modern technologies and private riches have provided a few of us in lavish & godly ways, and all of us in not so wonderful ways
We must accept as a species there is no going back, and as Dave Abram writes about renewing oral culture in his book Becoming Animal, “It is not a matter of 'going back' to an earlier way of life, but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present, expanding awareness beyond the gleaming veneer of our mass-produced artifacts, dropping our attention beneath the recently sedimented strata of commercialized civilization (beneath the inert, plastic layers of tossed-out toys and discarded water bottles) to make conscious contact with the darker humus in which our humanity is still rooted. The soil at that depth is made of dances, and songs, and the hushed cadence of spoken stories. By remembering ourselves at that depth, by tapping the nutrients in that timeless soil, we draw fresh water up into the stems and leaves of the open present. We re-create civilization by tapping the primordial wellsprings of culture, replenishing the practice of wonder that lies at the indigenous heart of all culture.”
Perhaps by re-planting ourselves into the magic soil and earth under our feet, by re-vegetable-ing the astral play-thing of our minds and bodies, we can slip back down & deeper into our planet’s local rhythms and rediscover our voice in the music of it all: the playful one, the harmonic one.
Perhaps through a proper & psychedelic sinking back into the melodious present all around us, the past and future will resolve themselves in their own mysterious way in the Ouroboric dream curves of our smiles, in the rhythmantric songs of our hearts and in the twinkle of our wet-star eyes.