Beginner's Mind

Hola mi gente,

My Mets are slumping… nuff said.

Remaining Teachable

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's there are few.

-- Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

We don't look at things as much as we overlook them. When people are learning something new, for example, there is a strong temptation to try to make it into something they already know. This is a basic fallacy in how we view the world. We’re not comfortable with not knowing, so as soon as we hear something, we filter it through our personal experiences and make it into something we already know. In reflecting on this, I come to understand why so few of us ever truly make real changes in our lives.

Oh yeah… we can talk a lot about concepts but it seems to me we’re all just talking at one another, not truly listening. Have you ever tried just seeing what is without adding to it? It’s not that easy because of this habit of ruminating about everything. Right now, both you and I are engaged in this [mis]communication: I'm busy thinking about how you will twist this post, and you’re busy formulating concepts about it. None of this has anything to do with things as they are.

All of that shit going through your head? Shadows and illusions. This brings me to an ancient teaching popularized by Plato:

There were a people who lived their entire lives within a cave. After generations, they came to believe that their own shadows, cast upon the walls, were the substance of reality. To these people only myths and religious tales spoke of a higher possibility.

Obsessed with the shadow play, the people eventually became accustomed to and imprisoned by their dark reality.

We are no different from the people described above except for the fact that our shadows are in Technicolor and more dazzling than the shadows of earlier times. Still, however finely dressed they are, they are still shadows.

Before we can be guided into creating new possibilities of thinking, feeling, we have to become like a child in how we look at the world. We all think we’ve seen it all, and done it all, but the fact of the matter is we’re all imprisoned in our little caves, masturbating to the shadow play on the walls.

Wake the fuck up…

I was once informed that I needed to listen to learn and learn to listen. Some things are so outside our understanding that there isn’t a reference point. This can make us very uncomfortable and compel us to compare it with something we have done or experienced, but let it go – even for a little bit. If you knew that much then you wouldn’t be around here reading this crazy-assed shit because you would be out there doing shit! LOL I’m teasing, but listen: be stupid, even if for a little while. I promise you, your cave with its beguiling shadows will still be there when you’re finished playing out here.

 

Nowhere is this tendency toward reactionary thinking more evident when talking about the reality of white racism. It’s clearly evident in the majority of the responses: denial (“It doesn’t exist!”), projection (“You’re a racist!”) displacement (“You’re an asshole”), rationalization (“These things happen”), and intellectualization (“But we have a black president!”).

When I write on a subject, it usually means I’ve done my due diligence in research. Because my work entails advocating for social justice, I have to be on top of my game when it comes to facts. This doesn’t make me an expert -- not by a long margin -- but I can serve as a jumping off point for people looking to apply technologies for change. I refuse to entertain the hysteria from fools who don’t bother to read or understand. It’s a waste of time. And being “nice”? The majority of the people reacting to my writing would still react the same way no matter how “nice” I put it. Face it: if you’re denying racism, we all know where you’re coming from for the most part.

My experience has shown me that the thrust of evolution, whether personal or collective, happens with or without your participation. There’s no such thing as stagnation, dear friends -- life’s a train ride and you can’t get off. The choice, it seems to me, is whether to participate with your eyes open, or your eyes and legs wired shut.

Choose… now… this very moment.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…

Where the Heart is...

¡Hola! Everybody…
I can write… really. I can sit down, and under the right conditions, I can write prolifically (if not well LOL). However, I am easily distracted. Any change in my writing ritual, any distraction -- a phone call, for example -- will sidetrack me for hours. So, the move has taken away from the everyday ritual -- the familiarity -- and the back pain (at its worst today), has resulted in zero writing. As I settle in to my new apartment, the ritual will come back, but the back pain (exacerbated by sitting) will definitely put a damper on my blogging…

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(St. Michaels at 4th Ave.)

-=[ Home ]=-

A house is not a home…

My first morning here, a bright sunny Sunday morning, I was awakened by a hushed but insistent, not particularly good mariachi singing right outside my window. Annoyed, I got up to see who it was and to request they take their singing ass somewhere else. When I looked, I saw a short, older Latino, dressed in black, with black cowboy hat and boots. He wore dark wrap-around shades, and with the small accordion he held, he played the same three chords over and over again. He sang songs of heartbreak, of love lost and regained and lost again, in his hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

Next to him, stood a large shopping cart full of roses for sale and young Latino/a families on their way from church occasionally stop and purchase a few. Eventually, I notice he is blind, his cane pressed up against his armpit. He comes here most mornings to sing of love lost in that same hushed, not particularly good, but insistent voice.

I have moved from the largely upscale, yuppie Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope to Sunset Park. It’s not that far away, and still somewhat upscale, but there is definitely more diversity. It's a neighborhood first colonized by a wave of Puerto Ricans in the 50s and 60s and later revived by an explosion of Latin American and Asian immigrants. One avenue block up, on 5^th Avenue, you can walk the main drag and see scores of businesses offering their goods and services to the many different Latino/as that live here. Young Salvadoran teen girls and Mexicans from Puebla pass by Dominican hair salons, Puerto Rican and Mexican restaurants, or buy treats from sidewalk vendors selling everything from aguacates to mangoes, caña, and piraguas.

I live in a very young neighborhood of families with both parents, something you rarely see outside of a Latino/a neighborhood. My building, a six-family building, has one family from India, the old patriarch a hilarious character. On the ground floor behind me, lives a Dominican, a single mother of an adolescent girl. Above me, lives a Salvadoran couple with their young son.

Sunset Park is also home to one of the largest Asian communities in the city. Some say it’s larger than the more famous Manhattan Chinatown. So, in addition to the Latino/a offerings, you can also shop for all things Asian. On 8^th avenue (the number eight signifying luck) you can find Chinese businesses, including grocery stores, restaurants, Buddhist temples, video stores, bakeries, and community organizations, and even a Hong Kong Supermarket. And again, there is that unmistakable youthful energy rubbing up against traditional family structures, as young immigrant families work hard for The Dream. On Sundays, you’re lucky if you’re able to find an empty seat at one of the many different restaurants as families -- mostly young Latino/as and Asians -- all congregate to observe the traditional Sunday repast. Some days you’ll see two or three generations seated together as impatient teens, annoyed at being saddled with tending to their infant siblings, break bread with their parents and grandparents.

I see all of this and I am reminded of the America I knew growing up in New York and I smile, knowing I have arrived home…

Someone recently wrote me privately, asking why I am so angry about what’s going on in Arizona. I feel the answer to that question is self-evident. There are certain values I believe in. There aren’t too many principles I can lay claim to, but the few I value, I hold dear. Two of those principles are fairness and justice. I am light-skinned with blue eyes and I can probably pass for white in Arizona. But for me, racial profiling is deeply offensive to the values of justice and fairness.

And make no mistake about it, Arizona using race to demand that people produce “papers” to prove who they are is a police-state tactic diametrically opposed, not just to my personal values, but that shouldn’t be unacceptable in America. If we don’t stop this law now, similar ones will spread across the nation. Already, lawmakers in at least 10 other states have promised to bring similar bills to their legislatures. The land I was born in, America, is my home. And in my home, racial profiling is wrong. It is un-American is the most essential way.

And if you think you’re safe, or rationalize that this is an intelligent solution to the largely fabricated crisis of immigration, you should think again. And if you’re a person of color and think they won’t profile your black or brown ass, think again. And if you’re a light-skinned Latino/a with blue-eyes internally ashamed of your own kind and in your neurotic eagerness to assimilate, support Arizona’s apartheid-like strategy, think again. For if you allow it to be done to those you fear and loathe, what makes you think it won’t be done to you?

And if you can bring yourself to hate and dehumanize another human being, regardless of their citizenship status, perhaps what you really hate is a part of yourself.

Love,

Eddie

The TGIF Sex Blog (Cultural History)

Hola Everybody...
What never ceases to amaze me is how so many people who visited my sex blog, who vociferously claim to sexually “liberated,” often demonstrate what I can politely call “provincial” sexual attitudes. Aw heck, why begin being diplomatic and just call it for what is is: I’m sick and tired of people who like to claim they are sexually uninhibited (or even “normal”) when in fact they’re just some country-assed muthafuckas.

The thing is, they like to say shit that sounds nice, but their actions and attitudes actually contradict what they say! LOL!

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-=[ Sex and Taboo ]=-

“Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go it’s pretty damn good.”

-- Woody Allen

Until very recently, you lived your whole life isolated into the culture in which you were born. Today, technological advances have changed this. We live in an era rich in the exchange of information and cultural practices. I have a passion for cultural studies and I’m always fascinated by the vast range cultural expression. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of human sexuality. While many people still think sex is something you do in the dark and only in one sexual position, or that sexual fantasies are evil, even a cursory glance at a cultural history of sex gives us a different picture.

We often take our own cultural practices as being the most “normal” or morally righteous when they aren’t. In fact, even within our own culture, there are inherent contradictions and sexual hypocrisies. Moreover, those who are most rigid in their thinking are those who would be most rigid in any cultural upbringing. So it follows that if American homophobic men were raised in a culture in which taking it up the ass was considered manly, these very same men would be fighting about who could take it up the ass best. I’m not joking. Think about it: if you’re narrow-minded and culturally intolerant in this context, why wouldn’t you be the same in another cultural context?

Whatever…

When I first began seriously studying sex, I came across many different accounts from many different cultures. For example, in one Papuan tribe, young men are made into “boy brides” as part of a coming of age ritual. When boys reach the pre-teen years, they are taken away from the tribe to live with older men. During that time, the boys are made to play passive roles, sometimes even performing homosexual acts with their “husbands.” When the boys are deemed to be ready (i.e., become men), they are reintegrated with their tribe and married to the daughters of their “husbands.” The homosexuality has no bearing on the boys’ sexual orientation, nor is there any stigma associated with it.

The South Seas have forever stirred the sexual imagination of the West ever since early reports of lush tropical paradises of the flesh inhabited by beautiful people were disseminated. While this fantasy distorts the real sexual practices of this part of the world, it is true that many of the sexual practices found in the Pacific and the Americas differed greatly from Christian/ Judeo morality.

Sexual promiscuity, for example, was tolerated and native women who would swim out to the boats naked delighted early explorers. However, further study shows that this sort of uninhibited sexuality was part of a strategy to keep the white foreigners peaceful. Only women who had a reputation for sexual looseness were allowed to participate in this form of sexual diplomacy.

A Tahitian society traveled about the islands as singers, dancers, athletes, and sexual exhibitionists. They were permitted promiscuous relationships wherever they went. What early explorers did not understand is that this group represented a religious institution and that much of their sexual behavior had a religious justification; after all, a God of fertility founded the society.

The Polynesian Islands is the area par excellence of public copulation, erotic festivals, and sex expeditions. While they unfortunately disappeared with the advent of Western colonization, ceremonies involving sexual license had been commonplace. Naked dances occurred on Easter Island and the Marquesas, for example. At the close of feasts, Marquesans would hold public group-sex displays. The women taking part would take pride in the number of men they serviced. One anthropologist recalls a nice old lady who boasted about having made the entire crew of a whaling boat happy.

Throughout Asia, there are unique customs also. In my post on cunnilingus, I wrote about a tradition reportedly started by the Tang Dynasty empress Wu Hou. It is said that she required, by royal decree, that all government officials and visiting dignitaries perform cunnilingus on her in public. In Mongolia, among the Mongour, certain “fake” marriages occur. If a daughter is offered to a guest (as ritual hospitality sex) and she gets pregnant, she is married to a belt, which must be left behind by the guest. The belt is simply symbolic of the man, who may never return. Similarly, in Mongolia, if a woman gets pregnant outside of sex hospitality, she is formally married to a prayer rug.

I guess what I’m trying to convey in a short (an inadequate) piece, is that sexual expression varies greatly across the human condition. And before you start giggling, or wagging the morality stick, please remember that someone from another culture would deem your own sexual practices just as funny and just as immoral. And perhaps, they’d be right...

Love,

Eddie