Dealing with Life’s Decisions – (2) Innate Resources

 

In the previous article in this two-part series, I explained why, in a broad class of cases, the information we receive is likely to be a very poor guide to the actions we should take. This is the much-delayed part two; delayed mainly because I realized I didn’t have a satisfactory answer to my own question of what a better guide might be. In this post, I’ll put together the elements I now have even if I am sure there is much more to be said.

So what basis may we then have for decision, if science does not afford one and positivism is to be mistrusted? And a linked question: on what basis, descriptively, do we actually make decisions?

To the best of my knowledge, though both have grappled with it, neither science nor philosophy has an answer to this age-old riddle.

Derrida was fond of the claim – somewhat abusively attributed by him to Kierkegaard – that “the moment of decision is madness“. Decisions, claimed Derrida, are characterized by circumstances in which “it is not possible to know what should be done, when knowledge is not conclusive and does not have the vocation to be so” [1]. In this case “the only possible decision passes by way of the folly of the undecidable and of the impossible” [2].

Kierkegaard in reality was talking about the act of faith, characterized by the Christian apostle Paul as “foolishness to the Greeks“, i.e. outside the frame of logical deduction to which Hellenistic philosophy by virtue of its very precepts could lead. [3] Paul’s account of the conversion experience rings phenomenologically true: it is a moment in which a feeling of knowledge renders reason superfluous, one which subjectively appears to take place on another level of consciousness. This describes not only religious experiences, but many key moments in the life of anyone. It therefore seems to be at least descriptively accurate. The decisions one takes in such moments are experienced as beyond doubt, as led by a higher force, as apodictic: and therefore as right even if, paradoxically, they ultimately turned out ‘wrong’. And yet conversion presumably is, in fact, in our normal sense always wrong as it is interpreted to include the act of adhesion to a number of precepts which cannot be completely correct – as Kierkegaard rightly noted.

With the benefit of hindsight I can see many ways in which I might have improved, in my own life, upon decisions which I took under the influence of internal circumstances which might be compared to a conversion experience. They include matters related to relationships and academic choices. And yet although I am capable of imagining or even holding some of those decisions to have been wrong, I am incapable of regretting those same decisions, however unwise a seemingly “neutral” observer might find them to have been. There is therefore, it seems, a state in which certain decisions can be taken which, even if they are arguably unwise or suboptimal, are at least insulated from regret.

If such a sense of certainty can pervade weighty decisions, therefore, it nevertheless seems to be well worth examining them critically. Psychologist Arthur Janov has argued that conversion experiences display a universal psychodynamic pattern of ego collapse, but this is of course entirely separate from the specific meaning attached to these experiences by those who undergo them[4]. It follows that, even if in that moment the subject may indeed have been in contact with “truth” – a possibility which cannot be assumed away – nevertheless it is essentially impossible to interpret this “truth” in a way which is verifiably and intersubjectively correct[5].

De facto, even under less dramatic circumstances a number of people would doubtless cite not only science and values as a guide to decision making, but also hunches/their inner voice and self-observation. This “inner voice” represents a type of knowledge the nature of which bears further consideration, comparable in some regards to Spinoza’s “third type of knowledge” which he called intuitive knowledge [6], as well as to Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology.

Innate somatic intelligence

At one level, it seems to me that we can found the notion of an inner voice biologically. I will take the example of food. It seems (at least to me subjectively) that our body has some sense of the nutrients which it requires at any given moment – an innate, pre-conscious nutritional intelligence – and that when we make decisions related to procuring nutrition, for example when shopping, preparing food or choosing from a menu at a restaurant, this innate intelligence plays a role, together, of course, with many other factors which may be less nutritionally relevant (emotional associations with particular foodstuffs, physiological addictions, what we have been told about food, what our choices communicate …). The reality of such a sense is well illustrated by the phenomenon of cravings during pregnancy  – these appear to be informative of physical needs (although this has not been proven) even if there is unarguably merit to interposing a reflective act between the drive and its gratification, as the linked article suggests. Such an innate intelligence presumably also informs the hunting or foraging impulses of other animals. We, as other primates at least, also have an innate ability to learn from our experience of certain foods which, perhaps largely subconsciously, feeds back into future decision making.

At the same time, it is hard to believe that if he were left to make all the decisions himself, my son would naturally gravitate towards a healthy diet (unless, perhaps, I were to release him into the wild). Food behavior is learnt socially in our species, presumably a significant evolutionary advantage; although on a simpler level, this is also true of other primates [7].

Unfortunately, explaining how this innate nutritional intelligence works, distinguishing it from other neurophysiological mechanisms, and determining the confidence we can have in it in making nutritional decisions is a serious philosophical and neurobiological problem which we are not even close to understanding. Some philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Colin McGinn even argue that the mind-body problem, of which this is an instance, is inherently insoluble. Ramping this up to the next level to explain the role of intuition in complex decision making and the faith we should or should not put in it is therefore beyond the reach of any current theory, and quite possibly beyond even the reach of scientific enquiry per se. The most we can do is list instances where it goes wrong or is misleading and develop heuristics designed to avoid giving it excessive weight. This is perfectly valid and useful, and yet here is a core dimension of human existence about which we are struggling to say anything sensible.

Attitude

Faced with this situation, and with no way to resolve it, the philosophical tradition has focused on the question of the right attitude to adopt vis-à-vis our drives and urges. This tradition has tended, until recent times, to place in my view an unwarranted degree of trust in reason, the logos of Hellenistic philosophy, which presents itself as a metaphysical concept the boundaries of which (as with any socially constitutive concept) are inherently contested. The abandonment to reason urged on us by philosophers seems to lack practical value and to be value-laden, as I have previously argued. It inevitably leads to the tendentious classification of desires on a scale of value, with ‘base’ desires conspiring to lead us astray contrasted to lofty desires which lead to transcendence. This imposition of judgment can be labelled as at best arbitrary and necessarily leads to a bifurcated sense of self which is always in a state of internal conflict.

I therefore prefer a system of heuristics on top of intuition to a metaphysical belief that there is something called ‘reason’ which, if only I would listen to it, would direct my steps better than I might do myself; it sounds awfully like the superego. In my view, there is no need to sublimate desire or benefit from doing so; the contrary impression is merely the consequence of a parody of what constitutes human desire which incorporates unnecessary and ill-founded value judgments. However, I would still reason that the attitude to adopt towards desire is a question of both ethics and esthetics (in other words a question of consciousness), largely because these concepts capture a necessarily intersubjective dimension of desire which is missing in the atomistic Freudian account. This merits a discursus.

An important concept in this context is that of epoché or bracketing, popularized by phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl who argued that the question of the real existence of objects perceived by the mind, which Kant argued was inaccessible to inquiry, could be set aside without losing the possibility of truth and meaning.

Epoché played an important role in the Greco-Roman Skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism. Without actually claiming that we do not know anything, Pyrrhonism argues that the preferred attitude to be adopted is the suspension of judgment or the withholding of assent, since only in this way can the seeker achieve the state of ataraxia or tranquillity. This does not imply that we have no rationale to choose one kind of action over another; however, one kind of life or one kind of action cannot be definitively said to be ‘correct’. Instead of a life of inaction, the Skeptic insists (presumably for no compelling reason other than social convenience) that one normally ought to live according to customs, laws, and traditions.

The nature of desire as movement-towards, and therefore presupposing representation of an object, is one which Franz Brentano argued it shares with other psychosomatic phenomena and which distinguishes such phenomena from phenomena in the natural world, a notion referred to as intentionality. Although it is questionable whether consciousness can be fully reduced to intentionality, for present purposes this problem can be set aside since the category of impulses we are concerned with for the purpose of assessing their reliability is certainly intentional. This intentionality may be social in nature, either because it is directed towards another person as such or because it involves the representation of an act or project which would confer more than purely private benefits or inflict more than purely private costs. Because of this fact, it is obvious that ethics and esthetics enter into the question; these are in fact social means – constitutive of intersubjective modes of action – which allow for group intention. To my mind, the possibility of intersubjective intention is fundamental to the nature and experience of desire.

It might appear that individual and group intention would be prone, even frequently, to conflict, and that there is a trade-off between them which poses itself in win-lose terms. Do we not, indeed, speak of antisocial desires and of social tyranny? While certainly a part of the felt experience of desire, however, there is more to it than this: the participation in shared desires also expands the individual’s range of possibilities and constitutes a source of gratification which is unavailable to her as a purely atomistic actor.

The question of the right attitude to adopt to desire depends at least in part on the confidence we can have in its subjective manifestation. Given the phenomenon of neurosis, that is, of displaced desire, it would seem that this may sometimes require considerable powers of introspection. This statement would appear also to hold good in respect of intersubjective intention. If food cravings are problematic enough to interpret, sexual desires, consumerist impulses and other displaced manifestations of the will to power are surely even more at risk of being tainted and subverted. Is this distinction phenomenologically available to the mind? That is, is there some qualitative characteristic of mental representations of desire which allows the subject to determine their authenticity, their freedom from involuntary subversion?

Probably all I can say at this point is that it seems to me that there is. Not that I am entirely comfortable with a binary disposition of desires between authentic and inauthentic, nor indeed that even authenticity is sufficient to ground action, but nevertheless, all this being said, certain desires just ‘feel’ different from others, just carry within them more of a sense of growth and expansion which gives them greater appeal and authority.

So I think that this distinction can be made phenomenologically, but also that abandon and detachment can coexist. Readers will recall my earlier criticism of Buddhism on the grounds that it seems to preach an unwillingness to actually live life with full commitment. Nevertheless, the attitude of detachment is objectively a part of Dasein and required for its metaphysical consistency. Any identification with a project of ones life, or with ones sensory experiences, is necessarily a confusion since all of these things are perceived or shaped by ‘something’ which cannot be reduced to them, of a form of thought which precedes mind and possesses a potentiality which vastly exceeds its lived experience. It is the adoption of the perspective of this ‘something’ (for which of course a variety of names have been proposed, but I prefer not to employ them for fear of being misunderstood) which constitutes detachment in the sense of apprehending the finitude of ones temporal existence as an artefact of historicity and its subdimensionality relative to the perspective sub specie aeternas. In other words, there is a dimension to which even philosophy can painlessly accede, because it is required strictly by logic, but which cannot be reduced to individual experience and nevertheless is immanently present to being. This seems to me to be what Heidegger is saying in Being and Time: that the dichotomy between contemplation and celebration can actually be overcome, must, in fact, in the logic of things be overcome.

The attitude to be brought to desire is therefore both the serenity of ataraxia and the ecstasy of abandon, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, stillness and dance, the esthetic and the ethical, the perspective of being and the perspective of time; both, simultaneously.

To view this as an inadequate basis for decision is the result of a rationalist bent which I believe it is easy to show reduces to the absurd. The argument is on the following lines, but I will just sketch it out. Taking decisions is just a part of living life. In order to assess the quality of these decisions, it is necessary to determine their effect on the individual’s life. This is their sole yardstick, but it is inaccessible to anything other than the subjective experience itself of being. There is, in essence, no counterfactual and no possibility of error which we could speak about in intersubjectively meaningful terms. Given this, the only pain which is real and actually borne as a result of decisions is the pain of regret, a pain conditioned on having in fact taken a decision other than the one which one ‘knew’ at the time, or should have known, was the ‘right’ one to take. It follows that a strategy which insulates against regret is the best strategy available; there is nothing better, and certainly nothing better about which we can meaningfully talk.

Now, I may seem to contradict myself since the whole premise of my blog is that there are behaviors we are likely to engage in because of our biological nature which we would be better off avoiding. But this formulation, although clear and easy to understand, contains a subtle error : it is not our biological nature which prompts suboptimal decisions, but the way in which the available options are framed by social institutions. The error comes from the institutions, and not from our nature. When I insist that we need a better understanding of our biological nature, what I mean is merely that we need to adopt a standpoint which allows us better to detach ourselves from social institutions, to see their contingency, to reform them so that the act of making right decisions will require less of a superhuman effort than it does now, perhaps to see or consider options we otherwise would not, and to understand why our spirit suffers in the world as it is, that is, to attain to wisdom. This is an agenda of growth and it is part of life; it is not a precondition of being able to live or to live meaningfully.

Attaining a conscious perspective on the part of the individual will often not make additional social options available; the same menu of choices will be there. This is why taking a decision which is at variance with that which one would take if fully reconciled to ones biological nature is not wrong. It is because one cannot be fully reconciled to ones biological nature in isolation from ones peers. The range of decisions available even to a Buddha is a small subset of what would be the decision space of an enlightened humanity. Because I cannot take decisions for all of us, my decisions will never have the quality of plenitude which, if I criticize the decision framework I have outlined for being insufficient, I would be implicitly berating them for not having. It is simply the wrong yardstick.

If we manage to live without regrets from this point forward, we will have attained to the highest trajectory available to us within what remains of our lifetime given where we stand now. It seems to me that this should be our highest aspiration.
*****

Notes

[1] “Quand il n’est pas possible de savoir ce qu’il faut faire, quand le savoir n’est pas déterminant et n’a pas à l’être

[2] “La seule décision possible passe par la folie de l’indécidable et de l’impossible“.

[3] First letter of Paul to the Corinthians. On this paragraph see Bennington (2011), “A Moment of Madness: Derrida’s Kierkegaard”, in Oxford Literary Review, Volume 33, Number 1, July 2011, Pages 103-127.

[4] http://cigognenews.blogspot.be/2010/11/conversion-experience.html

[5] Janov speaks of the conversion experience as if it is necessary a solitary one. It seems to me likely that in so doing he significantly underestimates the importance of community – that is, of the tribal impulse – in religious conversion.

[6] Ethics, Part II, proposition 40

[7] Whiten, A. (2000), Primate Culture and Social Learning. Cognitive Science, 24: 477–508

Mononormativity

It seems certain that the habit of marriage has been gradually developed, and that almost promiscuous intercourse was once extremely common throughout the world.” – Darwin, The Descent of Man

Let me add a few more words of explanation to what I wrote yesterday on the subject of mononormativity, a term coined by Pieper and Bauer (2005) to refer to the normative social matrix of monogamy in its various cultural manifestations. Sociological research into mononormativity is very much in its infancy, meaning that unfortunately there is not a lot I can base myself on in order precisely to map the concept and its influence (I think we have some idea of the economic circumstances under which the monogamous norm developed, but little real grasp on the social mechanisms which maintain and enforce it).

When I was fourteen, the world around me, uninvited, started changing. The hitherto somewhat annoying subspecies known as “girls” suddenly became objects of intense fascination – and intense fraternal rivalry. Handicapped by my childhood emotional injuries, and with no manual to follow, I was ill-placed to play this game. It didn’t take long for this to become clear to me, and so, rather than make a fool of myself, I placed my erotic ambitions on hold; instead I focused on getting into a position of financial independence from which I imagined I would be better able to shape my life. At fifteen, I developed generalized fasciculations which, though it turned out they were benign, I was convinced were the onset of a muscular wasting disease. This was the state in which I spent all of my later teens and my college years.

My pubescent sexuality was born into a social context, one in which I knew, was linked to and cared about the objects of my affection; but it was soon divorced from it. Unable to develop in an integrated way, the sexual drive was transferred to images and fantasms, objects without social context and unable to receive love, with which I engaged in a perplexed monologue. I am sure I am describing here the sexual development of a majority of teenage boys of my cohort in our culture.

Several years ago I did quite a bit of work on my childhood traumas, but this particular, pubescent trauma I never paid much attention to. I have at least the impression that it is generally supposed in psychoanalysis that the resolution of earlier experiences will also resolve later ones and that these latter need no special attention. But this, I now think, is not true; this part of my life also needed to be revisited. Until recently, I had never given it much thought.

In fact I did not give it any thought recently either, but I received a gift of healing during a shamanic soul retrieval session which specifically related to this, and since then I have actively been trying to make friends again not only with my inner child, but also my inner fourteen-year-old : a much unloved and forgotten creature. That I suddenly adopt a caring attitude to him, asking him to contribute to my adult life, is, I am sure, a great and unexpected relief to him.

Pubescent male sexuality is a bubbling soup. The objects of ones affections are not chosen according to some fixed set of preferences: it is a time of experimentation, and tactical opportunism, a game in which one seeks to optimize a complex equation involving not only the girl one is dating and sexual payoffs, but also ones reputation and position in the group. Exclusive partnering, advocated usually by the girls, who to be fair also need a mating strategy, is discovered to be part of the rules of the game, adaptation to which is a pragmatic necessity; it is, however, absolutely alien to the subjective experience and every teenage boy knows it. We are by nature polyamorous, but once we discover the sweet pleasures of the union of body and soul, we dive deeply into it, forgetting, in the intoxication, that the circumstances which enabled it had a lot to do with pure chance and assuming that the rules we played by enabled the reward we obtained.

I think it is by now an established scientific fact that, even if sexual appetite may experience a monogamous phase at the outset of a relationship, this does not last for very long. Monogamy in the early days of a relationship may be natural, but subsequently it is only a choice – or no choice at all. Nevertheless, not only the myth, but the institutions of monogamy pervade society, compelling an unnatural compliance with their dictates on pain of social disopprobium, ostracism or worse. In the same way as society is androcentric and heteronormative, it is mononormative.

Mononormativity does violence to our biological nature and severely limits our extraordinary ability and desire to love. And as I have argued elsewhere, restoration of our biological nature is a prerequisite of sustained spiritual growth, at least at the community level, because human beings are not going collectively to be happy in an environment to which they are biologically unadapted.

In its origins, tantra was as iconoclastic in regard to mononormativity as it was in relation to other social institutions such as diet and the caste system. Tantric practitioners frequently did not even know the identity of the person with whom they entered into sacred union. All this though, of course, was devised in a world far removed from our own. Today, the central image of Shiva and Shakti in yabyum enjoys wide appeal in part because it can easily seem (although this is clearly an incorrect interpretation) to endorse the primacy of monogamy – these primal characters are indeed destined to each other and alone in the universe.

Now, while some schools of tantra orient themselves towards couples practice, this is certainly not generally the case: indeed I know few practitioners who are, by conviction, much less de facto, monogamous in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, I would maintain that societal mononormativity influences practice more subtly. People may embrace a rarefied, ritualized interaction with the opposite sex, even a very intimate one, but they do it in a spirit of dissociation from the biological foundation of their sexuality, in a way which is almost ascetic, and certainly unerotic.

My inner fourteen-year-old is mystified by this disenchantment. He wants a place at the table. He likes it messy and raw. Indeed, this for him is alignment with ecstasy; the ascetic, transcendent imagery is incomprehensible.

We can live a life in alignment with spirit only if we are aligned with our biological nature. Then life’s experiences wake us up, move us in new directions, bring healing and creativity; just as falling in love always has, the world over. We are in a state of bliss when we are constantly falling in love with all around us, the physical and biological world and also our fellow human beings. For me, if I review my life, my sexual instinct has always been the major driver of healing and renewal. But that instinct, like the spirit, blows where it will. I am not its master; and in fact I am not the master of anything about myself, I am more like a servant of myself, curious to discover who I am and what I can do and experience in the world. This attitude of humility and service towards ones own essence is, I think, key to the spiritual life and to alignment and abundance.

This is why I insist that all notions of mononormativity within a couple must be banished if its component parts are serious about their spiritual life, and indeed about living their relationship as an adventure in growth and healing. One simply cannot place any a priori constraints on where the breath of spirit may blow. Because we have absolutely no idea, not even the remotest basis for an idea. Radical honesty within a couple only makes any sense if it is based on radical honesty to oneself, a person one cannot presume to know but is always discovering. One cannot bind this unknown self. Indeed, the discovery of self, this unbinding of Prometheus, is the spiritual path.

I do not think this makes dyadic relationships impossible or even undesirable, but I think it is a very strict condition regarding which, at the level of aspiration and shared values at least, no compromise is possible. When desire taps on my shoulder, that is a moment of opportunity and rebirth. I owe it to myself, my partner, and the world, to greet her with open arms.

Why I am not a Buddhist

Buddha17For most people who have left behind theistic religion, there are only two widely understood alternative contemporary identifications, one being pagan/shamanic and the other Buddhist. Buddhist-derived thought is extremely influential in New Age spirituality, and many people in need of a comprehensible label will loosely describe themselves as Buddhist or Zen. These are rich traditions with many insights into the human condition, but in my opinion Buddhism also commits some ghastly errors to which many of its adherents remain blind.

As I have found an excellent summary of these errors here, I can summarize briefly. Many people loosely assume that by labelling themselves “Buddhist” they have chosen an appellation which does away with the dualist denigration of the body and earthly life which predominates in mainstream Christianity, Judaism and Islam. This is a profound misunderstanding, because Buddhism is closely aligned with other world religions in its promulgation of a belief system which promotes acceptance of the established order. Indeed, Buddhism owes a good part of its secular success to the fact that repressing it is entirely pointless.

Buddhism is a transcendentalist philosophy. This is epitomized in the core notion that desire is the root of suffering, and therefore desire needs to be overcome. Yes, you read that right: there is something wrong with man’s basic drive to achieve or accomplish anything at all. Absolutely everything is illusory; all that “works” is meditation, and a specific kind of meditation which is directed against our biological essence.

In my understanding, any true spiritual path is not transcendental, but restorative. What we are dealing with is not overcoming any inadequacy in our biological nature, but fundamental flaws in our social conditioning. We can trust who we are, and merely need to unlearn who we believe ourselves to be. This process comes completely from within and does not need any external goal to focus on, and certainly not the goal of elimination of desire. On the contrary, we very much need to cultivate desire, which is our life force. Desire, we can say, is the masculine aspect of love, and love is incomplete, indeed inconceivable, without it. This perspective I will continue to call non-duality; it is not Buddhism.

As a Buddhist you cannot live life, you can only renounce it. Sometimes in very subtle ways that may look like they affirm one or other aspect of human existence, but when you take a look under the cover, this is merely instrumental to a transcendent agenda. In a way, these aspects are not affirmed, but only admitted, because they are not important enough to reject, or because the war on biological nature also counts as a desire which undermines the attitude of strict passivity and acceptance. Even if it may be cognitively strained neither to struggle against a force nor its social counterforce.

In opting for a restorationist perspective, I am not of course arguing for a Flintstonian return to Eden. Such a call would be practically useless, but also spiritually flawed. I believe what we need to do to live a good life and heal our planet is to free our biological nature now, and that society is a transpersonal construct which is an inevitable and necessary part of our human existence, which can neither be abandoned nor simply refounded on a utopian (meaning inevitably dystopian) basis. It is clear to me that evolution continues through social institutions, even if it may take wrong paths. But it is also clear to me that nothing intrinsic to our biological nature is hostile to global welfare; on the contrary, it is precisely its repression which is at the root of all neurosis and cruelty. That is to say, society has not changed in ways which are simultaneously functional and to which our ancestral legacy renders us maladapted. This is because society merely reflects the attempt to achieve ancestral drive satisfaction under manufactured environmental conditions. This is all it does; and thus trying to inflect drives is inherently at odds with its purpose. Contemporary social reality is only one, path-dependent solution, and it lies well within the happiness production frontier. In other words, we can do very considerably better.

If there is no idea of revolution within a spiritual tradition, it is not human, and it is not fit for purpose. This social bias towards the status quo and the stigmatization of desire is what Bertold Brecht spoke of when he observed that “the rushing stream is called violent, but no-one so speaks of the riverbed which locks it in“. In fact, the embedded violence of social institutions is far greater than the observed violence of those who seek to break free of them. The centrality of embracing desire (Bejahung) also underpins Nietzsche’s philosophy, as for example when he wrote, in the Will to Power, that “if we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence… and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.

It is not that there is no transcendence; there is indeed transcendence but one cannot transcend that which one has not restored. In fact, it is the very restoration which is transcendence because, in that moment, the problem has ceased to be; the faculty is restored and reintegrated and the more complete woman or man is better equipped to find her or his way in the world. The idea of transcendence presupposes something which is lower and problematic; but there is no reason to believe that anything in the human biological constitution (any more than that of any other species) fits this description. I believe that the effort to transcend necessarily ties one into a dualistic samsara. Thus in fact that Buddhism cannot, by its very structure, solve the problem it has posited. Biological energy flows naturally in spiritual directions, but only if it is embraced in its totality, unselectively.

Let us be clear. Human beings are not unhappy solely because they have failed to resign themselves to the circumstances of their lives. They are also unhappy because social institutions frustrate the full expression of their biological nature. Somewhere, each of us has to come to terms with that part of this apparatus of repression which we can at a given moment not change. In this, there is an art, and Buddhist ideas can help us negotiate this path. They should not, for one moment, blind us or make us indifferent to all the horror embedded in our social institutions and all the suffering which they beget.

 

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”