Sunday Sermon [Dreams & Illusions]

¡Hola! Everybody…
What a beautiful day! But aren’t they all? It’s not a matter of “positive thinking.” The phrase “positive thinking” bothers me because it implies we must be “positive” in order to be happy. From that perspective, being positive means getting rid of the negative – all the people and situations we feel aren’t aligned with our “positive” (better?) natures. That’s called repression. No, the relevant issue is not positive thinking (or any type of thinking for that matter! LOL), but being able to stay here, right now, in this very moment, this very life and feel/ experience this very moment in all it’s glory -- whether it's perceived as negative or otherwise. Ultimately, this is all you have…

* * *

-=[ Dreams and Illusions ]=-

“Your sleeping and your waking dreams
have different forms, and that is all.”
-- A Course in Miracles

For many years I was plagued by a recurrent dream. I would call it a nightmare, actually. However, it wasn’t the kind of spine-tingling nightmare that wakes one up in a cold sweat. It was worse than that. The dream always seemed so real, that it would take quite a while after awakening to realize it was a dream. The premise of the dream is simple: I have been living a lie. In this dream, the life I was living was the complete opposite of everything I have worked for.

It’s difficult to describe the horror of waking up to that “fact” – that my life has been a lie. And the thing is that it’s so real. One woman I know used to tell me that it was the “Devil” trying to get at me. LOL! I truly abhor such thinking.

It’s been years since I’ve had this dream, but it had a devastating potential. What I learned from my sleeping dreams is that our minds have the ability to create worlds that, while we remain asleep, seem completely real ands appear to be outside of us. Yet, as in my recurrent nightmare, all the people and things in these dreams are in actuality creations of our own minds that we mistake for reality. It is only when we awaken that we come to the realization that none of the events that seemed to happen in the dream ever occurred.

The core teachings of all the great spiritual traditions emphasize that what we call “reality” is also a dream – a dream from which we have not yet awakened and therefore do not recognize. Modern science is proving these ancient traditions true. Cutting edge research in perception, knowledge acquisition, and “gathering data” show that, rather than perceiving in the pure sense, we actually create our world. We have to -- otherwise we wouldn’t have survived as a species. We create “schemas” (maps) so that we don’t continually have to process data. This is a good thing; it ensures that we can act swiftly to dangers and situations needing immediate action. It also has its downside in that it creates filters that serve as obstacles to perception.

I feel the aim of life is to awaken from both our sleeping and waking dreams. The aim of any effective guidance, spiritual or otherwise, is to help us recognize our dreams and illusions and to awaken from them. Dreams show us that we have the power to create the world – as you would perceive it. And because you want to see it a certain way, it becomes that. Because you perceive things in a certain way, you have no doubt that it is real. Yet, here you are in a dream within a dream, mistaking cause for effect.

If you want freedom, then the end of dreaming is the end of fear. Awaken to the reality of the here and now and you will awaken to a different universe. Ultimately, all you have is this eternal moment. You can’t even love without this moment: love in the past is but a memory and love in the future is but a mere fantasy.

Wake up…

Love,

Eddie

Desire

¡Hola! Everybody…
Busy day today… hope everyone is enjoying the weekend! In my early history I had relationships with many strippers and other types of workers in the sex industry. This poem brought back some memories…

* * *

-=[ Gig at Big Al’s ]=-

There is a special privacy onstage.
Wearing little, then less, then
nudity’s silver high –
heeled shoes, I dance to myself: the men

Posed below at tables
with assessor’s gazes and the paycheck’s
sure prerogatives are dreams
I’ve realized, my chosen

people, made-up eyes, my fantasies.
I pull down dark around the room.
I turn on sex’s juke two-step.
I set foot on the spotlight’s

isolated space and grease
my hips and lick my legs. With a whip
lash of gin in the first row anyone
can beat around the bush, can buy

my brand of loneliness, all possible
circumlocutions of crotch. No one
can touch me, by law
I cannot touch myself. So none

of it is public, not until
in one side door
on his soft shoes
my lover comes to watch.

-- Heather McHugh (1977)

The Friday Sex Blog [Religious Sex]

¡Hola! Everybody…
Do you realize that last night we were witness to history in the making? Obama’s speech was masterful, not only in its pragmatic and inspirational rhetoric, but also in its attention to detail to a map of an audacious vision. Finally, a democrat punched the bullies in the nose and they didn’t know how to react. My fave line?

“McCain likes to say he will follow Bin Laden to the gates of hell, but he won't even follow him to the cave he lives in.”

* * *

-=[ Religious Sex ]=-

“… Her truth, her altar,
forms at the
juncture of firm thighs
where a hallowed moistness --
a sticky-sweet dew --
exists solely to quench
my lustful thirst.
It’s where the stuttering
of my lips
offers prayers
from an unknown religion
to forgotten Gods.”

-- Edward-Yemíl Rosario
All rights reserved © 2008

According to The Big Three (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) the erotic impulse – the world of Eros, the body, and human sexuality – is the domain of the devil. From this perspective, the physical is sinful, bestial, a distraction from all things spiritual. Human sexuality, according to this view, is an obstacle from the high hallowed pursuit of God and everything that is good and ethical. From the moment we are born, we are told that the more we open to the erotic impulse, the more we listen and open to the needs of the body, the more we embrace and enjoy our sexual natures, the further we stray from moral rectitude and emotional well-being.

I write my Friday sex blog mostly because I argue that the opposite is true. I submit that the erotic impulse, honored and liberated from the shackles of guilt and organized forces of suppression, is a powerful path toward a profound psycho-spiritual awareness. The sex blog is a call for us to stop trivializing the erotic/ sexual world as we so often do, as if sex involved nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification, and the pursuit of an orgasm.

Some of my assumptions are radical. That there is more to sex than the giddy pursuit of carnal pleasure may be hard to accept in the aftermath of the sexual explosion of the 60s and 70s. It was an era when reliable birth control, combined with an awakening feminism, consciousness-raising, and the movements for gay, lesbian, and bisexual liberation released us from some of our legacy of sexual oppression and fear. However, it is my submission that that it is precisely our failure to recognize the depth of the erotic impulse that is at the root of our current dissatisfaction with our sexual nature.

Once we began to shake loose the shackles of repression, we were as the proverbial children let loose in candy store. In the time of so-called free love, we seemed to want nothing more than to consume as many erotic experiences as we could. We were, after all, sexually starved beings emerging from fifteen hundred years in the wasteland into a world of lush jungles bursting with exotic fruit. I was there, and it was an exciting time in the cultural history of Western sexuality, and an important first step in freeing ourselves from the repressive world on the 50s – the huge, white-picket-fence, clean and tidy, sexual suburbia of post-war America.

Released from decades of sexual repression, we had more sex in more ways (with your mouth, your ass, with a vibrator, within groups, or with people of your own gender). But even as we feasted on the erotic delights we also discovered, even as we celebrated breaking down the political, religious, and cultural inhibitions, that there were limits to the path were on. The new synthesis, to borrow from Hegel, had created a new antithesis. The crest of the wave was moving faster than the base and there were rocks up ahead. Jumping into the sexual realm, we found ourselves confronted with a landscape we could not have expected and did not know how to interpret.

As much as we would like to trivialize energies, we must realize that whenever we play with erotic energy, we engage both emotional and archetypal forces that have their roots in the very heart of who we are as human beings, in how we define ourselves and relate to the world around us. Entering consciously into the erotic world raises issues and feelings, for example, around usually unfulfilled desires rooted in infancy – desires to be held and nurtured. It touches our prenatal memories of being at one with another human being, around ego boundaries, and the blurring of personalities, and around surrendering control of our behavior. The erotic impulse always raises all the issues related to intimacy – the desire to be close to someone else, the fear of becoming lost or smothered, and all the past yearnings, wounds, and disappointments we have experienced. Being sexual brings us face to face with issues of our worthiness to receive love or pleasure, as well as when and how we want, or don’t want, to extend these ways of caring expressions to another.

Going deeper into the emotions released by deep erotic experiences, we are confronted with anger, passion, even rage which we may find embarrassing or disturbing. We find ourselves dealing with issues of power, and of trust. Going deeper still, erotic experiences takes us down to basic feelings about the balance of chaos and order, and even to an experience that many describe as a direct contact to the Divine.

As a sexual philosopher and explorer, I believe my perspective is very different. I see the sexual experience as path for exploring the very meaning of life. I see the attempt to pursue awakening only through an otherworldly mental exercise as wrongheaded and culturally biased. Perhaps it’s a consequence of a spirituality dominated by male spiritual teachers who defined an embodied feminine way of engaging the world as inferior.

Sex is a matter of energy. Once you have learned to experience orgasm as an energy event outside the sexual context, you take responsibility for your won well-being in sex. You realize that the true source of your pleasure lies not in your partner but within yourself.

Love,

Eddie

Summer Flings

¡Hola! Everybody…
Running very late!

* * *

-=[ Summer Loves ]=-

“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
-- Alfred Lord Tennyson

People may get today’s post twisted, but I think it’s simple enough…

Most of my regular readers/ partners in crime, know I’ve been “misbehaving” all summer. Most of you know of my summer fling with the lovely lady I affectionately call my “Russian Sex Kitten.” Yes, she’s less than half my age – young even by my own perverse standards.

Truthfully, I have had my own doubts about all this – assumptions, judgments, projections. But this woman has proven me wrong repeatedly. Fact is, as young as she is, she’s a lot more mature than some women I have known twice her age. Sure, our reference points are light years apart (a constant source of laughter for both of us), but we “get” one another. All my bullshit fears and projections have been unmasked for what they are – conceit disguised as “wisdom.”

With the close of the summer season, I was worried about how to make this end. I mean, I don’t think either one of us sees this as something long-term, but we’re both affectionate, demonstrative creatures and somehow I think we’ve both managed to go beyond the walls – behind “enemy lines,” as I like to call it. And being that intimate surely leads to emotional bonding – bonding that can hurt on both sides.

After all, isn’t that what having a summer fling is all about? LOL!

There’s a new, barely noticeable tingle in the air, a harbinger of the arrival of autumn, dressed to the teeth. And with that tingle comes the gentle reminder that we must go our ways. It is meant to be that way and we both somehow sense it. That’s why it’s ironic the way things are panning out.

I figured it would be left to me to bring up the subject and that I would have to utter the stupidest words in any relationship – some bullshit like, “It’s the way things are,” or that old standby, “It would’ve never worked out.”

GAWD! I hate those clichés! LOL

That’s why I was taken by surprise. We had planned to spend some time together this weekend and the RSK brought it up first. She’s going away for the semester and, she says, so she wants to make this weekend good. The implication being, of course, that the fling is over. Which should’ve brought me some relief. Oddly enough, it had the opposite effect: her ability and emotional presence to resolve matters in such a grown-up way is such a huge turn-on. The end effect being that, yes, there’s a tinge of sadness. I think we both see it, but we take it out in an intimate clinch.

Don’t get it wrong, this is a really cool thing, that we can be together in this way, fully conscious of our emotional needs and yet still able stand together – still sharing intimacy though we know this is where the train stops.

And I wonder when was the last time I was able to do this with a woman without the requisite drama and strife. Moreover, this from a woman who has barely broken her second decade.

Amazing…

So, we’ll be together this weekend both knowing that after we will slowly fade from each other’s lives and gawd, I’m thankful for her presence this summer. All the little crimes we committed together, the trips to the sun, skinny-dipping, and moonlit shores. She tells me, in that gruff Russian accent of hers, “We will fuck much this weekend, no?” LOL!

I guess what I want to give her more than anything is my friendship. Our relationship has moved across some interesting terrain, but it always ends with us entangled on cool, crisp sheets, a cool breeze, and a kiss.

Love,

Eddie

Great Lovers

¡Hola! Everybody…
Hard day today…

* * *

-=[ Great Lovers ]=-
“Listen to learn and learn to listen.”
-- Anonymous

We all like to pay lip service to this thing we call love. We like to say the word a lot, for example, we like to say, “I love you.” We like to be loved – or rather to have other people say the word in reference to us (“S/he loves me”). I find that what we don’t like is the action of love. I hate to burst your bubble people, but Santa Claus doesn’t exist and love isn’t a feeling. Nope, love is a verb -- an action word.

One of the reasons I am so amazed at some of the shenanigans on the internet is that I find it hard to understand how people can get caught up in the illusory trap of “falling” in love with someone they’ve never met. I certainly can understand developing some affection and having a feeling for a photograph and internet profile, but falling in love?

::blank stare::

In my book, that’s grounds for having someone committed.

Those who are “great lovers” know that within the framework of being in love there’s passion, desire, hope, wonder, appreciation, enjoyment, affection, ecstasy – the whole gamut of the most positive emotions and energy states. However, as I said before: love isn’t a feeling, it’s an action, an act of will. All the feelings in the world and $2 will get you on a NYC subway – which is another way of saying that feelings ain’t jack. Love isn’t texting someone a pic of your shaved vagina/ erect penis with the caption “thinking of you.” Love isn’t copying-and-pasting one of those cheesy email forwards to everyone in your Yahoo contacts. In fact, I would say sending me any email forward is actually an act of hate. However, I do appreciate photos of your poosie/ arse, so keep ‘em coming champ.

I’m somewhat kidding, but the point I’m trying to make is that when we truly love someone we extend ourselves to the person and for that person. That’s the act of love, or love action. It’s not clicking a mouse, or sending a text. Love is an act of will for the benefit of another person with no expectations. In more technical terms, when we love someone we extend our ego boundaries – close down our defenses – to include that other person as part of our identity. In a way, love impels us to merge with another individual, in the process creating an enduring bond. This is the part that scares many of us because severing such a bond can cause a lot of pain.

It’s the same when you experience a deep, knee-knocking, grand mal seizure-like orgasm: it’s a transcendent religious experience. All your ego defenses come tumbling down and for that brief moment, your sense of self expands to include so much more than the small, fragile, fearful mini me (ego). As a side note, this is one of the reasons why organized religions put so many taboos on sex, because ultimately sexual energy can be one of the most transformative, spiritual experiences.

But I’m getting off track here…

The first way, I feel, that great lovers express their love is through something simple and obvious. What is at the heart of the experience of love that's so simple, so basic that is so easy to bypass is listening – listening and attending. Sadly, at least in my experience, very few people attempt to hone their listening skills and at best listen at a very superficial level. There are very places that teach listening at deeper levels.

We are born to bond. Without bonding, infants literally wither and die. As adults it’s the same for us: without connection we die on all levels of our existence: physically, psychologically/ emotionally, spiritually. We are human and the defining experience of being human is bonding. We are wired for connection – we’re walking/ talking neurological feedback loops. We become human through bonding, and as adults, bonding doesn’t end. As we mature, we evolve to a stage where we can bond with a special someone in a healthy manner. This bonding demands we possess certain skills, skills that allow us to make contact, to establish relationships, and communication skills that promote understanding.

How do we do this?

The simple answer is by entering into our lover’s world. By matching and resonating with our loved one’s way of thinking and feeling, we begin to understand him or her. Empathy, a key emotional skill, is the ability to see the world through another’s eyes without losing ourselves in the process. This is part of the act of love -- or love action -- and great lovers fine-tune their empathy to high levels. On a superficial level, there’s listening, but at higher levels there’s listening in order to understand and that takes effort, time, and consideration. It takes a commitment to honesty and a willingness to become transparent (or translucent), so that the energy of love can shine through with as little distortion as possible.

Active listening is difficult, it takes practice. Like sex, it’s not a natural act, it must be practiced as you would practice a musical instrument. In my experience, too many people are too caught up in their small needs and neuroses to strive toward being a great lover. Most of us, it seems, would rather just sit back, send photos of our nether regions, and call that love.

Love,

Eddie

The Ludlow Massacre

¡Hola! Everybody…
On a political note, I loved Michelle Obama last night and I disagree with the unabashedly Clintonista James Carville’s “analysis” that Dems weren’t hitting hard enough. It’s the first night! Duh! I felt the tone for the convention was set to suit Obama’s personality and message. There’s plenty of “red meat” to feast on in the coming days. Really, people, are we better off today than we were eight years ago? No one will ague that point – we aren’t. It’s about setting the frame correctly placing Sen. McSame as an advocate for the very social policies that got us where we are today and how he (Obama) will make the difference.

Finally, they can call it what they want, but some people just aren’t comfortable with the notion of an African-American president.

Period.

So Monday is Labor Day and I’m thinking taking Friday off would be a good idea. It’s the last of the official summer season here in El Norte, might as well take advantage. A long weekend with the RSK sounds just about right…

* * *

-=[ The Ludlow Massacre ]=-

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
-- James Baldwin (1924–1987) US author, black civil rights spokesperson

I hope that you have had an opportunity to gather with friends and family to observe the many that died in order to make fair wages, the 40-hour week hour week, and vacations a reality.

That's OK, our Corporate Media and their bland whores – the well-paid, hair-sprayed teleprompt readers -- would never focus on such a history. No, I don’t blame you for forgetting about Labor and its impact on our lives. After all, there’s much more important stuff to think about.

The history of Labor in the USA is one that is rarely ever discussed and until recently, you would be hard put to find any historical documentation on the history of Labor. There is a good reason for this: it’s not a very pretty history. For those of us of a conservative orientation who like to mouth clichés about the “good ole days,” well, they weren’t so good.

Not unless you consider child labor, or the lack of responsible overview in the workplace leading to disease and death, as good. One school teacher, Samuel Yellin, wanted to teach Labor history to his high school students but was unable to find a textbook, so he wrote his own, American Labor Struggles. Until Howard Zinn and some others, this was the only book that documented the history of the US government’s and Big Business’ horrid response to the Labor movement.

One of the more heinous of episodes, now known as the Ludlow massacre, reads like something out of the history of a fascist state -- which is what corporatization (rule by corporations) is, in fact. When I first read this as part of a deal I made with my then high school-aged son, I was shocked that such things, with all our lip service to individual freedom and fairness, happened in the United States:

On April 20, 1914, 20 innocent men, women, and children were killed in the Ludlow Massacre. For some time, coal miners in Colorado and other western states had been trying to join the UMWA for many years. They were bitterly opposed by the coal operators, led by the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

As a result, for their striking, the miners and their families had been evicted from their company-owned houses and had set up a tent colony on public property. The ensuing massacre was a carefully planned attack on the tent colony by Colorado militiamen, coal company guards, and thugs hired as private detectives and strikebreakers. They shot and burned to death 20 people, including a dozen women and small children. Later, investigations would reveal that the tents were intentionally set on fire. The miners had dug foxholes in the tents so the women and children could avoid the bullets that randomly were shot through the tent colony by company thugs. The women and children were found huddled together at the bottoms of their tents.

The Baldwin Felts Detective Agency had been brought in to suppress the Colorado miners. They brought with them an armored car mounted with a machine gun--the Death Special-- that roamed the area spraying bullets. The day of the massacre, the miners were celebrating Greek Easter. At 10:00 AM, the militia ringed the camp and began firing into the tents upon a signal from the commander, Lt. Karl E. Lindenfelter. Not one of the perpetrators of the slaughter were ever punished, but scores of miners and their leaders were arrested and black-balled from the coal industry.

A monument erected by the UMWA stands today in Ludlow, Colorado in remembrance of the brave and innocent souls who died for freedom and human dignity.

Today, people enjoy taking potshots at Unions. Much of this is the result of a media controlled by the very forces that opposes unionization; some of it is the result of bonehead actions taken the union leaders themselves. However, the only thing standing between you (if you’re not a CEO) and complete servitude are unions, which is why Corporate Christianity abhors the Labor Movement.

I find it hard to write about individual improvement when there is so much denial going on in our country. To stay quiet during times of atrocity is to be complicit in its crimes. Ask anyone that lived in Nazi Germany. Most of those people weren’t evil, they just didn't act. There was too much to do, they were too busy, going about the time-consuming activities of daily living to do anything. So when they came to get the butcher, then the teacher, and finally the neighbor, there was no one around to help them because everyone had been taken already.

In the past, people have asked me to write about actions we can take to improve things. That comes later. Before we can act, we must become aware. I write in the hopes that even one person can gain some awareness. Mass movements of social change are founded in this notion of enlightening one mind at a time. History shows us, as Margaret Meade observed many years ago: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful people could change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

Finally, close-minded, willfully ignorant people will label me as unpatriotic. Indeed, conservatives love to label those that would point out their lies as enabling the “evil doers.”

Bullshit.

I will leave you with the words of someone who was a lot better at this than I will ever hope to be:

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty,” Edward R. Murrow said in 1954. “We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law.

“We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.”

Remember to give thanks to all those men, women, and children who had the cojones to lay down their lives in the workplace for their convictions, so that we could have better lives.

Love,

Eddie

Summer Reruns: Happiness 101

¡Hola! Everybody…
Well, it’s the start of the work week and all that blah blah blah. When’s the next holiday?!!

* * *

-=[ Happiness 101 ]=-

“Only one thing has to change for us to know happiness in our lives: where we focus our attention.”
-- Greg Anderson (1964– ) NBA basketball player

For many of us, being happy is a state of mind just around the corner. It will come, but only when we get that job, education, lover, shoes, or bag. We will be happy, we seem to be saying, only when we get our act together somehow. In essence, what we’re saying is that we don’t deserve, or cannot attain, that elusive feeling of happiness right at this moment.

I’m here to tell you today that’s all a bunch of crock. We can only be happy right now, this very moment, even in the midst of pain and loss.

If not you, whom?

If not now, when?

Yesterday?

Keep digging up those bodies of yesterday – the trauma and the hurt of your past -- and all you will get are memories. What about tomorrow, you ask? Won’t happiness come tomorrow when we get it together, meet the perfect lover, get the perfect job, find the perfect Coach bag? Find God?

What about tomorrow? Maybe we can be happy tomorrow! Dearest, tomorrow is but a fantasy, a figment of your imagination, and get this bit of news: it’s not even guaranteed. You could drop dead today, right in the middle of reading this, say, or crossing the street, or while taking a particularly challenging dump.

All you have, dear reader, is this moment – right here right now.

Here’s a revolutionary notion: Why not be happy now?!! What’s that you say? You have problems and I don’t understand? You have no food and are hungry. You have no home and are a broke, wretched soul? Welcome to the world. You’re not as unique as you would like to think. If you’re not happy this very moment it’s simply because you have chosen to be wretched. Face it: most of us are addicted to our sadness and our wounds, it’s what we know and leaving sadness and pain can be very traumatizing because then we come to the realization that our happiness must radiate from within. In leaving your default attitude of cynicism and sadness, you come face-to-face with your own accountability.

Go ahead, leave, but before you close my door, please know that sooner or later you’re going to have to face the fact that what you most want can happen today, not tomorrow, but right now.

If you want it.

Yes it is that fuckin’ simple... The issue is that we buy into the conditioning that somehow we’re incomplete. We practice being miserable. We’re even proud of it – proud of our cynicism and bleak outlook. It’s really cool to be in touch with your misery. We seem to be trying to outdo one another in just how miserable we can all be and how cool we can look while feeling it. My even pointing out that happiness is attainable at this very moment is the height of being uncool.

I’ll leave you with something today and I know 99.99% of you will be too busy analyzing it and miss the forest for the trees, but if even one person actually tries this, then my own life is richer because there’ll be one less miserable person on this little plot of greenery we call Earth.

Just do it…shut the noise for a second…

The Practice

Think of something you really desire. It could be a new pair of shoes, a Benz, or that Grand prize: the ever so elusive “The One” – your soulmate, the perfect lover! Or, it could be twenty million dollars. Whatever comes to your mind first, something you really want, but don’t have.

Think of that... Got it?

Now, imagine that you have it. How would you act, right now? How would you feel, right now? Act and feel as if you had what you desire, right now. Breathe, move, speak, and adopt the facial expressions as if you had it. Act this way for a few minutes; become comfortable with the feeling of abundance that comes with having what you want.

Don’t just sit there and think about it, do it! Go!

Back?

Is acting and feeling this way basically better than how you were acting and feeling before you imagined having what you desire?

If the answer is yes, then continue acting and feeling this way! Why not allow yourself to feel this abundance now?!! Why are you still waiting for an excuse?

If the answer is that feeling this way is not better, then ignore and forget about the object of your desire because getting it won’t make you feel or act any better than how you’re acting now.

The saying goes that there are two great disappointments in life: not getting what you want and getting it. I’ll disagree with that. I will submit that there are desires that can lead us to be happier, but why wait?

A better way of putting it would be:

1. Act like you feel as if you had everything you wanted. Or…

2. Ignore your desires because they don’t lead to happiness anyway.

Either way, it’s a no-lose situation: you are free.

Love,

Eddie

Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!

Sunday Sermon [Consequences of Sexual Repression]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I won't be surprised if someone reports me today... I’m simply dumbfounded. Here we are in the 21^st century and there are still people out here (men and women) who fear nudity and sex? Almost 100 years ago, people were all upset because women chose (at a great price, I might add) to show more than ankles in public. “It’s the end times!” the religious fanatics yelped. Yeah right! SMDH…

Today's blog photo depicts former Bush staffer, John Ashcroft, speaking in front of the statue, Spirit of Justice. In case you're not aware, Ashcroft's major claim to fame before Bush was that he lost an election... to a dead man! (I'm not kidding.) Ashcroft eventually spent quite a sum of money to cover the statue's breast. My question to is what was more obscene the statue or expenditure of money at a time when a child was probably dying of hunger in these United States?

I have written versions of the following post, but apparently, people need to see it again.

* * *

-=[ The Consequences of Sexual Repression ]=-
“Repression is not morality.”
-- Anonymous

From birth we are taught to be ashamed of and fearful of sex – all of us to some degree are repressed ma’fuccas! Even those of us who claim to have been sexually “free” in the past, use language to describe that experience that leaves me wondering. In many cases, it’s a past in which remorse and “youthful indiscretion” plays a prominent role. This isn’t the language of sexual freedom, it’s repression personified. People make the error that sexual repression equates to less sexual activity. Nothing could be further from the truth. Repression is a way to push things out of our conscious awareness where they then gain total control over our actions.

I have traveled to many places and I have never come up against the sheer depth of sexual hang-ups that I confront in this society. We fear, loathe, and at the same time crave sex.

I have previously written about the two-thousand year Christian campaign against sex. Add to that the three centuries of Puritanism and – welcome to America. Eroticism is considered an outlaw energy in this culture. I don’t know exactly why – maybe it’s a reminder of the Goddess, or because of the sheer power of this energy, or maybe it’s because it made sense thousands of years ago. Whatever the reason, Eros is taboo and our society spends huge sums of its precious resources every minute of every year to undermine, co-opt, channel, manipulate, ridicule, and distort it.

And we all pay a price for this.

The consequence when a religion fails to recognize our basic human need for pleasure and uses its power to influence what is considered normal in order to repress our God-given right for nurturing and sensual and erotic pleasure is violence. When we reduce sex to the mechanical interlocking of sexual organs and ignore the vital sustenance we can draw from the sexual rainbow of playful, loving, and intimate union, we distort our human nature.

Numerous studies of child abuse, for example, indicate that parents who abuse their children were often deprived of physical affection during childhood, and as adults experience extremely unsatisfying sexual relationships. Studies of child-rearing practices across cultures, and evidence of neurological damage in anti social humans demonstrate that deprivation of bodily pleasure during infancy and adolescence and the repression of pleasure promote adult violence. A case in point is the U.S.: compared to other industrialized democracies, we have some of the most repressive legal sanctions against sexuality and yet we have the highest sexual crime rates. That’s a fact, not a belief.

Patriarchal religions (i.e., Christianity, Judaism, and Muslim) that emphasize a high God who actively punish deviations in human behavior commonly endorse anti-women, anti-sex and anti-pleasure value systems. As part of their anti-sexual values, these religions promote negative attitudes about the physical nurturance of infants and children. They also severely punish adolescents and adults who engage in erotic pleasures considered outside the norm.

Deprivation of body pleasure throughout life – but especially during the formative periods of infancy, childhood, and adolescence – is very closely related to the amount of warfare and violence in a society. conversely, societies that promote nurturing in child-rearing, that are comfortable with the body and with sexuality and pleasure, produce adults who have little sexual dysfunction, who promote gender and social equality, and a society that does not glorify slavery or war.

There is a strong argument for the notioin that failure to celebrate the pleasures of the Divine presence in our erotic lives creates the compulsion to conquer and achieve pleasure elsewhere. One can see a clear causal link between patriarchal (Father-like) religions that deny the nurturance we draw from erotic pleasure and the anti-sex, anti-pleasure belief systems of religious fundamentalism and fascism.

Religious fundamentalism of any type relies on literal interpretations of texts by males who determine what rules guide human behavior and spell out punishments for those who deviate from those rules. Fundamentalism thrives when individuals become terrified of thinking outside cultural norms. For me, fundamentalism is patriarchy gone mad, fascism is the ultimate expression of father-dominance. Within this framework, moralizing and condemnation become more important than celebration and play. Self-centeredness and a preoccupation with power and laws become a substitute for adventure, pleasure, wonder, and a living spiritual ritual.

The repression of the erotic and pleasure makes for strange bedfellows. One only has to look at the Christian rationalization of slavery during this country’s shameful period. Christians used the bible to justify slavery, foe example. Want more proof? You can look at the early Christian support for Hitler who agreed on his attacks on contraception, pornography, and sexual permissiveness. Even more recently, Christians have supported neo-fascist attacks on gay bars, sex shops, abortion clinics and houses of prostitutions the world over!

But there is a change coming on and it terrifies many people around the world. There are fundamentalist forces clamoring for a return to the “good old times.” You know the good old times: the times when women were little better than property, where people of color “knew their place,” and gays were kept in the closet.

There is a culture war in full effect in these United States and there are those who want to drag us back to the Dark Ages where dialogues about sexual identity and alternatives to sexual monogamy didn’t exist. Fortunately, we can’t go back -- as much as these ignoramuses would like. We are in what the famous anthropologist Margaret Meade called a prefigurative stage. All the myths and symbols that gave meaning and direction to our culture have lost much of their significance (and with good reason), and we are only beginning to create a new cosmology, a culture that respects sex, pleasure, and sensuality, new myths and icons that provide relevant models for a new consciousness of ourselves and of the earth.

The other option, to cling to an outmoded book full of outdated myths, is to choose to destroy ourselves.

Love,

Eddie

The Heart of Darkness

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today is…

National “Go Topless!” Protest Day

This is no prank; I met some of the women organizing the event. The NYC protest, being held simultaneously in major cities across the U.S., will take place in Central Park at the lawn behind the corner of 59^th St. Central Park West/ South from 12:00 PM – 6:00 PM. Click here to visit the organizers’ site and to find out where it’s happening in your city.

* * *

-=[ In the Heart of the Heart of Darkness ]=-
“Exterminate all the brutes!”
-- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

An anti-imperialist treatise at a time when imperialism was “politically correct,” Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is considered one of the great masterpieces of the Western canon. And for good reason. While Conrad has been fairly taken apart by post colonialist critics, I have to say they’re missing the point. This is a brilliantly anti-imperialist, anti-racist work of an artist at the height of his power as an innovator in literary ideas and techniques.

Based on his own journey into Africa in 1890, this is the most brilliant of Joseph Conrad’s works. Audacious, experimental (for its time), satirical, and yet deeply humanistic, the novella has continued to provoke controversy and analysis.

The story takes the form of a story within a story. Charles Marlow tells a group of British friends about his journey into a part of Central Africa identified as the “Congo Free State,” which was then the private property of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. Known as “The Dark Continent” in the Victorian Era, with all the negative attributes of darkness attributed to Africans by the English, Africa was viewed as the ultimate “other” by Europeans: its inhabitants sub-human, the continent a vast untapped reservoir of riches to be plumbed. Marlow recalls the atrocities and absurdities he witnessed: A French warship bombarding the continent, the cruel, inhumane treatment of enslaved black laborers, and the brutal greediness of white colonialists driven by the insatiable lust for profits.

The initial goal of the narrator is to meet the great Mr. Kurtz, an idealistic European trader; but upon confronting the dying adventurer, he finds instead a deranged and depraved individual. Kurtz is virtually a savage god, who sums up his view of Africans in the phrase, “Exterminate all the brutes!”

We learn that the “heart of darkness” is not simply a jungle at the center of “The Dark Continent,” it also the corrupt heart of Kurtz, and maybe even European imperialism itself. In a telling statement Conrad writes, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” and depicts London as the center of ominous gloom.

Heart of Darkness proved enormously influential and one of its most famous adaptations was the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece Apocalypse Now, with Marlon Brando embodying “the darkness” at the heart of the Vietnam War.

Love,

Eddie

References

Free text of Heart of Darkness at Project Gutenberg (click here)

My fave edition of Heart of Darkness (click here)

Link to the film, Apocalypse Now (click here)

The TGIF Sex Blog [The Breast]

¡Hola! Everybody…
I have a confession to make: I just cannot watch a woman eat an ice cream cone. No matter her age – young or old -- physical appearance – fat or skinny, pretty or ugly – I cannot for the life of me watch a woman eat an ice cream cone without thinking of her blowjob style. In my mind, the way a woman handles an ice cream cone is indicative of her dick-sucking methodology. I actually become aroused watching a woman eat an ice cream cone! LOL!

* * *

-=[ The Breast ]=-

“Thy breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies.”
-- Song of Solomon, 4:5 The Bible

I am not a “breast man” in the normal sense of the phrase. In other words, my fascination with big boobs is not as ingrained as with other U.S.-raised men. However, if you were thinking of sticking your lovely tit in my mouth (probably to shut me up), please do! LOL I just want to state for the record that I have never turned down the sexual advances of any big-breasted woman!

Actually, I do love breasts, love to suck on them, marvel at their softness. While my preference is for smaller breasts (for a perverse reason), I love what are known as “puffies.” These are breasts with swollen nipples (the picture above is an example). GAWD! I love puffies! If you have puffies, you should be proud. I think they are one of the most beautiful sights on a female form (send pics! LOL).

Anyway, there’s probably never been a culture in history that has been blind to the beauty of the female breast. This is no surprise considering it has suckled civilization. More importantly, it’s also a powerful trigger of sexual arousal and pleasure.

The breast, nipple, and areola (the darker ring that encircles the nipple) are dense in nerve endings, which is why they’re so sensitive to all kinds of stimulation. In fact, sex researchers at the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis report that a tiny fraction of women (about 1 percent) are able to masturbate to orgasm simply by touching and stroking their nipples and breasts. Apparently, women have a much higher ability than men to “erogenize” areas of the body that are far away from the clitoris and vagina.” [On a side note, please remind me to post my critique on scientific research on the female orgasm.]

Conversely, many women simply do not respond to having their breasts kissed, sucked, or stroked. Studies have shown that although 90 percent of women say their partners like to fondle their breasts during sex play, only about 50 percent actually like it. Some women find it uncomfortable or even painful, especially just before or during menstruation, when breasts seem to become tender. According to researchers, the only real stimulation many women get in breast play is “watching the man enjoy it.” Whatever the case, communication is key in creating an intimate language. If you’re a woman, tell your partner if you enjoy it or not; if you’re a man, ask her if she does or doesn’t.

There are changes a woman’s breasts undergo during sexual arousal that are dependent on whether a woman has breastfed. In a woman with unsuckled (“virginal”) breasts, nipple erection is usually the first sign of arousal. Then the areolas swell, often so much that “frequently it looks as if she’s lost nipple erection,” says sex researcher Dr. Masters who has probably observed the process more than any man in history. Then the breast itself, engorged with blood, begins to swell – sometimes by 20 or 25 percent. It becomes so swollen that the blue traceries of veins can be seen and resembles a nursing breast.

[Note: not all women get erect nipples, though – and if your nipples don’t stand at attention when you’re aroused, you shouldn’t fear that you’re frigid. In addition, some women have inverted nipple – “innies” instead of “outties” – which are quite normal but make nipple erection impossible.]

The breast of a woman who has suckled a child goes through the same changes during arousal, except that it doesn’t swell as much. Nursing results in a changed pattern of blood flow.

Breasts are probably as much a symbol of womanliness to women as they are to men, at least in part because breast growth is usually the first sign of puberty in girls. Usually, breasts begin to bud after the age of 12, but in some girls, the process may begin as early as eight. Budding breasts are the first proud announcement of a whirlwind parade of changes that accompany puberty, usually followed by the appearance of downy straight pubic hair, then a generalized growth spurt, coarser pubic hair, menstruation, and finally the growth of hair beneath the arms.

The media obsession with large breasts and breasts in general has a huge impact on the way women view their bodies. For example, many women worry that their breasts are not the same size. The truth is that just as no two pairs of feet are precisely matched, no woman has a perfectly matched pair of breasts. In fact, some studies show that that more than half of all American women have breasts that vary so much in size that it’s noticeable to the naked eye. Nearly a quarter have one breast that is at least 20 percent larger than the other, reports the Kinsey Institute.

Many women long for bigger breasts in the belief that men will find them more attractive. Yet the truth may be that men are not infatuated with the Dolly Parton School of Female Beauty as women think they are. The Kinsey Institute reports that at least one study of what men find sexually attractive in women showed that only half even mentioned breasts at all, and of those, half said they preferred small ones.

I say this because many women buy into the image of those high, full, firm, breasts our culture idolizes. Over a million American women have had breast augmentation surgery, involving the implantation of envelopes filled with silicone gel or a saline solution. The vast majority of these procedures (80 percent) were done for cosmetic reasons. Just so you know, breast implants may pose serious medical side effects. So much, in fact, that the FDA has called for a moratorium on the procedure in the past. While there aren’t any conclusive findings either way, there are enough reports of health

problems associated with implants leave cause for concern. Secondly, there isn’t enough conclusive data to conclude that implants are completely safe. Most troublesome is the likelihood that implants interfere with early detection of breast cancer.

The point being that every breast has a potential admirer and we shouldn’t get so caught up in the barrage of media images where impossibly skinny women with huge breasts have become the norm for female beauty. Ladies? Those women are freaks, and while some may have great bone structure, a size “zero” with double-D cups you can hang your coat on is really not that sexually attractive.

Especially is she ain’t got no ass! LOL

Love,

Eddie

PS: Sex is good for you!

Surrender

¡Hola! Everybody…
As usual on Thursdays, I will be in prsion for most of the day running my women's prison workshop...

* * *

-=[ Surrender ]=-

“[A relationship] takes time and deeds, and this involves trust, it involves making ourselves naked, to become sitting ducks for each other.”
-- Eldridge Cleaver

I know, I know… I’m always going on about surrender. This time you can blame Jana...

The word surrender gets a bum rap in our society. It is often culturally interpreted as giving up, as weakness, as admitting defeat. And certainly this is one way the word can be used. When I speak of surrender, however I use to mean letting go of your resistance to the total openness of who you are. For me, surrendering is an expression of one of the cornerstones to genuine and lasting change: willingness. It means putting aside the little war of the mini whirlpool of who you think you are and embracing the realization of yourself as a powerful wave – as limitless and deep as the ocean.

To surrender is to love without limits, in the process bringing down the walls of fear and shame so that your lover can feel the very core of you – genuine, precious, fearless, and unhidden. In surrender your muscles relax, your breath becomes soft and full. In surrender, you tender your body and heart as a sacred offering. Yes, there is pain in life, but if you are hurt, you make the commitment to stay open and full – like the ocean – as limitless space.

Surrender isn’t an act; it’s a state of being often called “grace.”

Too often we practice surrendering to our fears, to the demands of others. And while this may be a gateway toward genuine surrender, it’s only a beginning. If you’re going to surrender to anything, it should be love. Surrender into love, as one of my teachers is fond of saying. The entire purpose of surrender is to break through the resistance and tension of your small sense of self. Beyond that mass of tension and neurosis you call your self is a vast ground of being known as love. Undergirding all the drama, all the hurt and anger, lies the desire to give and receive love.

To surrender is to practice being with whatever emotion –anger, fear, whatever – and committing to see through it, breathe through it, and relax into the love that lies behind it. And then, when in the presence of that light, committing to surrender to that love. To surrender is to open as love. Surrender magnifies love by loving.

True sexual and spiritual surrender is not merely adapting yourself in order to please your partner of master. Nor is it about surrendering to momentary emotional needs. Genuine surrender is about relaxing through these secondary needs, both your and your partner’s, and channeling and magnifying the primal desire to give and receive love.

Pure unbounded, limitless love.

Love,

Eddie

Summer Reruns: Friendship

¡Hola! Everybody…
Another rerun…

* * *

-=[ Friendship ]=-
“Friendship and community are, first of all, inner qualities.”
-- Henri J. M. Nouwen

Real friendship begins as an inner quality or attitude before it can truly be expressed outwardly. As a young man, I wasn’t careful about who I chose as companions because I always thought I was too fiercely independent to be affected by others. Not true... Oh yeah, I was independent enough, but the power of the group should never be underestimated.

My father loved to tell me “If you hang around the barbershop long enough, you will eventually get a haircut.” I didn’t fully understand what he meant at the time, but he was expressing an old truth about “birds of a feather... ” For Puerto Ricans it’s “Dirme con quien anda... ”

At fourteen I sought friendship and popularity as a way of validating myself because I felt small and weak inside. As a solution I created a persona people could like: humorous, crazy, outrageous, fashionable. It worked. During high school, I was one of the “popular” kids, becoming part of the “in crowd.” To this day, I still experience people I don’t recognize coming up to me.

But this all came at the price of losing my true self. Moreover, staying popular was work -- there are rules, you know. Eventually, I would break all those rules, but by then I was too popular to escape the popularity. Breaking the rules became part of my mystique -- the basis for even more popularity. LOL

Many years later, I would have to retrace my steps and befriend myself. In the process of becoming friends with myself, I was then able to connect with people in a more meaningful manner. Today I realize how fortunate I am because I can count many, many true friends. People who have been there for me through the years in good times and bad, who tell me what I need to hear rather than what I want to hear, and who accept me as I am -- a deeply flawed but loving man. These are people who help me be me, and not just the “celebrity” Eddie who is fun to be with, and who does and says outrageous things, but also the introspective (dare I say even shy) Eddie who cares about the world and engages it on a daily basis.

Truth be told, I like to say I’m a “people person” but I’m really not. I’ll never forget the day my mother turned to me while we were watching the Jack Nicholson movie, As Good as it Gets, and exclaimed, “That’s you!!!” -- referring to the Jack Nicholson character. LOL!!! Not the obsessive/ compulsive part, but the character’s penchant for saying and doing things everyone else was only thinking. LMAO! I could be mean at times. Today, I like myself a lot better than I used to, but there is a dark side lurking in here somewhere.

Back to my point: it is through relationships (with ourselves and others) and community that we create and recreate ourselves. If we can inhabit a space, both psychological and “real,” in which we can accept ourselves in a community or web of relationships that will accept us also, anything is possible. Ever notice how sticking to an exercise program is easier if you have a partner? Imagine building a community like that -- where the participants involved encourage you to be the “best person you can be” on a daily basis and accept you when you fall short (and you will).

There are people quicker to latch on to the negative and create a Jerry Springer-like atmosphere. These very same people are the first to point out the pathetic quality of such an atmosphere, but the true irony is they are the perpetrators. Ever notice the people who enter a fray only to express how childish it is?

::blank stare::

Such people often define themselves in terms of negativity. It’s all they know. A good case in point: let me get into it with one of the many cyber predators around here and watch the holy rollers come out and “find” where my words are not consistent with my actions.

Blah!

I am fortunate: I belong to a group of men and women who love me for me and who encourage me to realize my potential. The thing is that we can all do that, every moment of the day. Whether you’re stuck in a traffic jam or walking down the street, this kind of life exists only as a possibility until you grab the opportunity by the throat and decide to be part of this insane world.

True friendship should be an inner quality that exists as a mutual feeling of admiration, unconditional love, and a desire for fellowship. It should exist without demand. Sure, there are times some of my friends fail me in my expectations of them, but they’re human too -- they are bound to disappointment me! LOL shit, I’m sure I’m no walk in the park, myself.

The important thing is whether we can love each other unconditionally and without malice. And we can offer this for others when only we possess these qualities for our selves. Finally, maybe one more aspect about friendship is to accept another’s friendship without trying to change him or her.

Love,

Eddie