I see my Mother dancing through skies of ebony

Above me, Her body becomes enshrined by an alter of naked light

thrown forth from a reflection of the moon.

The stars become her sacred adornment

draped from galaxy to galaxy

a testament to Love's fullness in space.

I watch my Mother as She joyfully tumbles through the ocean waves before me

crowned high priestess by the Sun

who casts down warm glistening halos to the water below.

Bursts of bubbling white froth spill forth across the sand

cascading across Her feet like the delicate ruffles of a dress.

They follow Her as She steps back and forth from the shore

disappearing and re-appearing in rhythm with the ocean's breath.

I feel my Mother held in the vibrations of the mountains

wise women, of all ages

who once sang out to me

who once suffered unbearably for Love.

I touch my hand to the cold stone

and I feel my Mother's mantra reach past my skin

carving itself in untitled poems across my bone.

It is Her pain that reminds me why I pray

Her beauty that reminds me why I want to stay.

These are the echoes of my lineage.

Faint whispers

now melting into righteous roars

as my body begins to speak in tongues

and this speech becomes sacred text

written on the face of my palms and spoken in silent mudras.

Conveying back to the world

this one message from the Mother:

That we are only this Love

This Love that finds no beginning or ending in Her.

                                                                                                -November 26 2007

I came across a passage tonight while reading Aurobindo's "The Divine Life" that was especially striking to me, both in the beauty of its prose and the profound and simple wisdom in its message. So I thought I would share it...

"States of consciouness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal LIfe, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience."

So I'm officially in the greatest slog of my academic career, my last year.

I'm in my senior year and I seem to have contracted what one of my profs calls "senioritis": the student in their last year who was once so eager to do all the readings and show up for every class, is suddenly skimming through the very bare bones of the reading text and planning out how much she can skip each week and still do well. 

But I attribute my struggle this year to more than merely "senioritis". I ended up landing in 5 coarses with little interest in any of them, which is a new experience for me. The worst part is that the classes I was most excited about: The philosophy of art and the philosophy of mind, ended up being the most disappointing.

I love philosophy, as most of you can probably tell(-: But academic philosophy is soooo far out from the kind of philosophy that interests me that I feel a rush of anger and disgust nearly every class ( a great place to practice my meditation and acceptance and loving kindness(-:). I think my experience can be easily summed up in the one comment my professor made today that simply solidified my entire struggle with academia in a capsize quote.

Someone in my philosophy of art class ( largely a study in logic applied to art theory) asked the teacher what the philosophy we were learning about actually had to do with people's lives , and how it actually effected their perceptions when viewing art. This was my teachers response:

"Oh, absolutely nothing. Philosophy isn't about practical application. This stuff doesn't effect anyone when they actually view art, it is just a theoretical exercise. Philosophy isn't meant to actually mean anything, that is the beauty of it. If I actually thought my research and writing in philosophy had meaning and implications for people's lives I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Don't ask for practical applications, that is not the purpose of philosophy."

Wow... I couldn't believe he actually said it so bluntly.... what a waste in so many ways. To even think we can detach ourselves as philosophers from the everyday lives of people is to truly disservice the planet. No wonder people in other disciplines think we are all a bunch of pompous intellectual assholes.

I had an interesting conversation with two of my female friends the other day that triggered some new thinking and writing for me in regards to the problem of the "male gaze" in feminism.

I was specifically thinking about how feminism's attempt to extricate women from the "male gaze" has inadvertantly ended up cutting women off from some really fundamental aspects of their own experience. That is, in feminism's decision to reject the "male gaze" as an imposition and oppression of men onto women, they also renounced all responsibility for the many ways that women have co-created the "male gaze" throughout history.

There is a reason that women experience the "male gaze" so strongly; it is because it is a part of our own basic experience, part of something we have played a role in creating. When we repress that responsibility we end up projecting the "male gaze" onto men. That is, we experience the "male gaze" as something men are doing to us.

A repression of any aspect of a woman's experience inherently means she cannot recognize it as her own and thus transcend her unconscious embeddedness within it. The "male gaze" remains part of the female shadow, experienced as everywhere "out there" and no where "in here". This disowning of experience has severe consequences for the healthy development of the female psyche, something I would like to explore in depth in my book.

I have a feeling I am going to piss off a lot of feminists, I hope not... but so much postmodern feminism rests on women's vicitmization to the "male gaze" of objectification, when in fact the "male gaze" should be redefined as a male-female co-creation at the earlier levels of our historical development.

By owning it, women take back responisibility and also their power to dis-embed from previous passivity when it came to their own objectification. If we chose to blame instead of owning our part, women's power and freedom will always remain in someone elses hands (namely, men) rather than in our own. The "male gaze" is ours to reclaim, to be integrated back into the female self so as to be included in our experience and also transcended so we can develop into new horizons in how we veiw ourselves and our bodies beyond the "male gaze".

"Women sometimes feel a separation and a confusion about who they are. This is experienced as a core wound of existence. It's a primal feeling that something is off, that something is missing. It creates a torque in your being, and women will try to find relief in many different ways--through relationships, for example, or self-help processes. But this core wound is one of the factors that also drives women to seek spiritual relief or awakening--to discover on a very fundamental level who they are as consciousness. And as women wake up and claim their presence here with the liberation of consciousness as their foundations, they will actually shift the dynamics of the world."
                                                                             -Linda Groves-Bonder

"Many years ago, I found myself asking Spirit what it would take to save the world. And the answer came clearly and immediately: a lot of enlightened women."
                                                                             -Lesley Temple-Thurston

I'm slowly coming up with the basic outline for the book I want to write over the next couple years (I say years because I'm still in full time school). After the positive reception to my article on beauty (officially entitled: Beauty and the Expansion of Women's Identity), I've been encouraged to start seriously fleshing out a full book.

I seem to be continually drawn back to the women/feminist artists of the 1970s for guidance on this path. The work done by these pioneering women for both the feminist movement and the art world at large was truly amazing, and has been largely forgotten (see: Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann for two examples). Basically, these women were cultivating the emergence of a truly kinesthetic-based feminist aesthetic, one that made both female beauty and the female body central to their agendas of transformation; two categories that were completely ignored by the wider feminist movement. 

Beauty and the Body. There couldn't be two more taboo and controversial topics within feminist theory. Beauty was basically exiled all together as the "myth of the patriarchy", and the female body itself became the most contested site of female oppression. Because the body had become so problematic for women, in the post modern era, many feminists tried to eradicate the female body all together. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, argued that biology itself was oppressive to women; that the way nature had made us (subject to pregnancy, menstruation etc.) made us inherently dependent on men. Her solution was thus: Eradicate biology as much as possible through all means of technology. Here is where we see the arguments for test tube babies (mothering is patriarchal). From this standpoint, the female body itself becomes seen as inherently patriarchal, including everything that goes along with that body (i.e., beauty). And we wonder why us women are so dissociated from our bodies!!!

Another radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, is famous for saying that all sex is rape. In simplified terms, because all sex takes place within a fully pervasive patriarchal order, women can never truly consent to sex. Women are always being programed, brainwashed, etc. So now we are not only not allowed to have bodies, we are also mindless, brainless sheep!!    

Obviously, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum, but the notions behind them pervade all feminist discourse, and they deeply effect the way women relate to their own bodies, their own beauty, and other women's bodies and beauty. We need a new language for beauty, and the feminist body. That is why I am going back to these couragous feminist artists of the 70s who used their beauty and bodies as a powerful social and political statement. These women saw the aesthetic as an essential part of any wider revolution for women, an aesthetic cry that went unheard (and continues to go unheard) by their feminist contemporaries.

In later posts I hope to bring in some photos of these artists work as I work on the project. It would be neat to hear others reactions, observations, repulsions, excitements, etc, to being confronted with these, at times, very provocative depections of the female body. My working title for the book title is: "Feminist bodies and the Beauty Taboo".   

A woman’s body yields intimate cartography

maps of silent autobiography

 

Signatures of pleasure and pain

spiral her thighs like invisible veins

 

She attempts to lift her life from shame

 

A woman’s body bestows sexual geography

Gestures of love written in sounds of untitled cacophony    

 

Movements of fire and ice

surge like waves across her chest

as her body awaits this moment

 

to finally unveil itself for itself

 

 

The Grace of Suffering-- Adi Da Samraj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hK5NPJ5b2E

The Test of Human Existence-- Adi Da Samraj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_PZGFQPYk


I am aware of the immense controversy that surrounds the spiritual Guru, Adi Da Samraj. Wilber is one case in point for acknowledging the shadow sides that runs within his community based in Fiji.
That said, I still greatly enjoyed these two short video clips on you tube taken from his talks in the 70's. The first clip, the Grace of Suffering, speaks to the different levels of resistance that we experience on the spiritual path, staring with the gross and moving to the subtle realms. As we are increasingly and painfully stripped of our identifications on each realm we finally become so overwhelmed with suffering and pain that we "Fall". It is in this fall, when we have nothing left to protect us, that we find God.

My favorite line from this clip is "There are no Winners in God" (-:

The second clip is of Adi Da talking about the Test of Existence which he says is only Love. I find this video especially full of radiant clarity and beauty.

Anyways, just thought I would forefront this controversial figure as I still have a deep respect for his teachings.

I've been up against some interesting challenges the last few months in relation to being in my body and feeling grounded in the relative world. I've been working with my therapist on what she calls "connecting sense and sound", in the simplest sense, connecting my voice, speech and writing with a grounded experience in my body, my feet, my breath. 

I'm very interested in cultivating what I often can touch into when I "write from the body", which requires a lot of extra awareness for me during my writing process. Keeping aware of my feet touching the ground, my body being completely held by my chair, my hands making delicate contact with my keyboard... all of it requires a slowing down, a willingness to feel into my direct experience in the moment and not just pull out references and ideas from my intellectual bank account.

Writing from my body also requires a lot more willingness to be vulnerable. I'm currently working on an article on Shiva and Shakti for a yoga magazine here in Canada and I've really struggled with falling comfortably into the narrative style that they use. I find it much easier in my writing to stay somewhat detached as a third person observer on my experience.

I think this is the result of two main things: one is my immersion in academia at this point in my life where the "I" in writing is encouraged not to make its presence. The other reason results from the remnants of self-restraint that I still carry after coming out of an Andrew Cohen based spiritual community two years ago. The experience was amazing but  I also recognize that living in a community where the impersonal is all that matters and any discussion of personal experiences and feelings is in opposition to the purpose of spiritual life makes a girl gunshy to divulge her personal life with complete freedom.

It seems it is taking me time to really allow myself to write from the personal immediacy of my body while keeping the integrity of the impersonal present. I am working to continually give myself permission to feel into the contours of being in a uniquely female manifestation of the divine and letting my writing be informed by that space, by my own flesh and blood.

Of course, the challenge is to do this kind of intimate writing while always keeping my heart grounded in formless emptiness, where relative distinctions of gender and bodies remain transparent to the all pervasive light of infinity.

http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v11n01/exhibits/artist.html

Just wanted to post this link for anyone who may be interested. It links to an art show that my father put together utilizing his work on fear for the last 25 years and his interest in how fear is used in educational settings and national politics. He is quite the radical so be prepared(-: He has a deep interest in the Matrix films as well as Integral theory which comes through... he was a professsional artist for ten years and more recently finished his PhD in Education... but he still can't get a job...too radical(-:
Anyways, just thought I would put it up for anyone who might be interested in these themes.

The title is:

Fearology Of Technology: A Phenomenology Of “Educational” Weapons Of Mass Destruction