The Friday Sex Blog [Childhood Sexuality]

¡Hola! Everybody...
I have to work this weekend (again!). But I do look forward to visiting with my mother, as I haven’t seen in quite some time.

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-=[ Childhood and Sexuality ]=-

Truth, Fictions, and Myths

We do great harm to children when we withhold sexual information from them. Today, thanks to Neanderthal conservative voices, sexual education is a joke. Sex Ed, under the new Victorian era, has been reduced to reading from a two-line script: “Don’t do it. Get married.”

This is a crime...

Freud saw childhood sexuality as a relentless quest for knowledge. The desire for information didn’t play as a substitute for physical pleasure, it balanced it. From the very beginning, sexuality seeks a language to explain itself. Freud was treated as an outcast for daring to endorse providing children with that language -- with information about their body parts and how they worked, about how babies are made and born.

At the beginning of the 21^st century, as AIDS still threatens and kids need information most, the pendulum has swung toward telling them less. A strategy of censorship has emerged and it wears a particularly scary disguise: advice to parents to speak more, to embrace their responsibility as children’s primary sexual teachers. This is a “family value” that the conservatives can get behind and very few can disagree with. However, a seemingly harmless parent-friendly idea can have a less than child-friendly effect.

I expect the sexual prudes who rally against school-based sexuality education are aware of what would happen if the task of sexual enlightenment would be left entirely to parents: almost nobody would do it.

And the studies bear out my suspicions. Parents do talk the talk: most agree that sex education is their job. However, when it comes to talking the sex talk, few can bring themselves to do it. One survey by the national Communication Association showed that parents identified sex as the subject they were least comfortable talking about. Similar research with kids shows that they rate their parents’ efforts less generously than their fathers and mothers. The first pattern that stands out is the difference between the perception of parents and teens, one study showed. When interviewing both generations of the same families, the kids consistently remembered talking about fewer topics than their parents did. One longitudinal study found that more than half of teens believed their parents understood them pretty well. The bad news was that almost half thought mom and dad got it somewhat or hardly at all.

Even someone such as myself, “Mr. Sexual Freedom” himself, didn’t have a problem-free sex pass. I remember once entering my son’s room full of 12-13 year-old males and bringing up the subject of masturbation. My son never forgave me for that one. LOL! Which leads me to state that while teens might tell researchers that they wish their parents would discuss sexuality more, I believe given the choice, they would rather talk to a different confidante (an “aunt” or other trusted adult, for example). I chalk it up to the incest taboo: children don’t want to know about their parents’ sex lives (or masturbatory tendencies LOL!) and, from the minute they might conceivably have a sex life, they usually don’t want their parents (ewwww!) to know about theirs.

What’s interesting is there is little talk about the dynamic of how trusted adults become substitute sex education teachers for children. I know that if I hadn't been able to get through my son I would’ve welcomed a trusted friend or family member to step into that role. In fact, sex education teachers are the professionalized version of trusted adults.

Children absorb their attitudes toward love, their bodies, authority, and equality from their families. They are trained in tolerance and kindness or their opposite. Few live in families comfortable enough to discuss the nitty-gritty details of sex. And when we (we meaning all of us -- society) don’t teach our children, guess who they learn it from? They learn it from others who are themselves ignorant (i.e., their peers) or those who may not have their best interests at heart.

So, if parents aren’t talking and federally funded sex educators aren’t being allowed to talk, to whom will our children turn? I’ll tell you where, on the internet or on the street. And most of the information there is geared toward selling sex. In other words, sex on the internet is mostly treated as it is elsewhere in our society: as something to use to buy and sell -- a commodity.

Then you guys bitch and moan about the supposed lack of moral character our children? Pfffft!

The myth that exposing children to sexual information before they are ready is detrimental to them was exploded when I took the time to actually listen to and talk with kids. People? They get it. Some of them get it better than you, believe it or not. Kids get the wide range of emotions embedded in concepts such as jealousy and desire, for example. Why not prepare them? What consequences do we suffer as a society when we choose to leave the most important discussion about the most powerful force known to humankind to random chance?

Love,

Eddie

Moral Reasoning

¡Hola! Everybody...
One can tease out political differences quite simply -- how individuals view the role of government, freedom, and a just society is directly related to their level of moral reasoning...

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-=[ Consciousness Unfolding ]=-

Not too long ago, I participated as part of a college panel with a woman. We were addressing college students, and what struck me about this particular woman was the extent of her self-centeredness. I found it interesting because she sought me out before we spoke and mentioned that she too was a “practicing Buddhist.” Her version of Buddhism, it seemed to me, was simply meditation. I had a teacher who once joked that practicing Buddhism without ethics was like trying to row a boat without first untying it from the pier.

From what I gathered her whole existence centered on her and she was oblivious to how she was connected to her environment; how her actions reverberated and caused ripples. In her world, what mattered was the conscious cultivation of her ego. In fact she could actually see the “logic” in the needless death of an infant. This is what happens when you mix Ayn Rand with meditation! LOL Nothing could be further from my vision of Buddhist practice.

Two people, two different worlds.

This got me to thinking and I have come to realization that “practicing meditation” or any set of practices isn’t enough. I have come to realize that we create our world according to our level of consciousness/ awareness. It’s the same with love. For some people, love’s reason is the satisfaction of the individual. Love is something that you go “out there” to get in order to satisfy a hunger for connection. Similarly, religion and everything else is filtered -- distilled -- according to where you stand in terms of growth.

I’ll explain. Let’s look at moral development as a starting off point. Let’s say, for the sake of this post, that moral development has three distinct stages. At birth an infant hasn’t been socialized into its culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as the egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely consumed with self -- self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that it’s focused on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how religion (or love) will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be just as devout (or “in love”), but spiritual practice will evolve according to any one individual’s level of moral development.

To further illustrate, imagine love from a morally egocentric perspective. Love at this stage resembles a yearning -- something like an addict's need for a fix -- an ego boost. Same thing with almost anything you look at in life: perception and meaning changes according to what level you are engaging the world. Religion from an egocentric perspective resembles the global wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone says, “I love you.” Perhaps we need to know a little more about others and ourselves as we travel on our journey. For what may sound like “I love you” may in actuality mean “I love me.”

What would our national or global dialog resemble as people moved up the ladder of the stages of moral reasoning?

Love,

Eddie

Morality and Social Policy

¡Hola! Everybody...
I have said it before and I’ll say it again: the fRight-Wing Morans really pose a profound challenge to my spiritual practice. It’s hard for me to muster compassion for bullies. Case in point is the historic health reform bill passed last night. Among the immediate impacts: Children can remain on their parents’ HMO until age 26; small business can get up to 50% of their insurance premiums as tax credits; people who have been denied coverage by their insurance company can appeal to the government; seniors not covered by Medicare Part D drug benefit will get $250 to pay for scripts; Insurance companies will not be allowed to set coverage caps for major illnesses. Put simply, lives will be saved -- literally.

Yet, visit any fRight-Wing site, or talk to that goober right wing friend/ relative and you are immediately bombarded with ridiculously unbelievable hatred and ignorance...

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-=[ Reason, Morality, Social Policy ]=-

I don't give a damn about semi-radicals... This is not a time of gentleness. It is not a time for lukewarm feelings. It is a time for open speech and fearless thinking.
-- Helen Keller

For some people society’s ultimate reason for existence is to serve the individual. Government, religion, and everything else is filtered according to where you stand in terms of personal growth.

Let’s take moral development as a starting off point. Let’s assume for the sake of argument moral development has three distinct stages. An infant at birth hasn’t been socialized into its culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as egocentric, in that the individual’s awareness is largely concerned (consumed) with self -- self-absorbed. As the child begins to assimilate culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that this level of moral reasoning is focused on the individual’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. At the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how a vision of society will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be “nice” people, but their vision will manifest itself in accordance to their level of moral development. In addition, their worldview has divergent consequences.

Imagine a society from an egocentric or ethnocentric perspective. Society from a lower level stage perspective resembles much of the world today. It certainly conforms to what America looks like. Such a society would be concerned with the individual at the expense of the larger society. It’s the same with almost anything you look at in life: it changes according to what level you’re able to engage the world. Religion from an egocentric perspective probably resembles the scary wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone speaks about civil liberties. Freedom, from an egocentric perspective, looks a lot different from freedom from a worldcentric level of moral reasoning, for example.

Last night, the US legislature did more than pass a lukewarm health reform bill. Yes the bill is an ugly stepchild of too much compromise and too little real reform. To say it needs work is an understatement. But more important than the actual law, is the shift from seeing health as a privilege to recognizing it as a fundamental human right. It’s something even some third world nations take for granted. We’re not there yet, but this legislation is a first step toward moving from an egocentric/ ethnocentric level of moral reasoning to developing a collective and enlightened view that care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, gender, sexual orientation, or creed is what is needed if we’re going to survive as a species.

And in a real way, that is what happened last night as you were distracted by something else on TV.

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Arguing With the Future]

¡Hola! Everybody...
If you’re ever in NYC, make sure you include The Museum of Sex as part of your itinerary. It’s a fascinating place and they always have great, thought-provoking exhibits. I took pictures during Halloween (I was a pirate and I went out with a wench), but I just found out yesterday that I lost my camera...

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-=[ Fear ]=-

Better to die once and for all, than to live in continual terror.
-- Aesop, (620-560 BCE), Aesop's Fables

I always remember a particular incident when I reflect on fear. I was visiting a friend and he had his five-year-old son bring me a glass of water. The kid loves the heck out of me and he was happy to do something that pleased me. His father, an intelligent and well-educated individual, filled a glass, gave it to his son, and instructed him to bring it to me. As the child was about ready to comply, his father warned him, “Make sure you don’t spill any of the water... ”

You know what happened right? No sooner that the father put the negative into the child’s head, he went and spilled a large amount of the water. I tried to explain to my friend later that in order to erase a negative the mind first has to entertain it. The only way to get rid of the negative is to think about it.

Don’t have recipient anal sex with Eddie!

See?

LOL!

I’ve been told that fear is having an argument with the future. If we would only remain mindful that the future is essentially uncertain, we would lessen our impulse to predict what could go wrong, and fear would end right there.

The other say, I was was reading something that reminded me of an episode from the old television series of the early 1970s, Kung Fu. I used to love watching that show, as that was about the same time I was introduced to the Buddhist martial art, Wing Chun.

Anyway, one episode clearly articulates the essence of fear. In this episode, the young apprentice, Grasshopper, as his blind teacher called him, was taken into a back room of the temple. In the room was an acid filled indoor pool about 20 feet wide. A narrow wooden plank served as a bridge from one side to another. The master warned the young apprentice to avoid the pool’s edge because he could fall in.

“In one week’s time,” The blind master told the Grasshopper, “you will be tested. You will have to walk across the pool of acid by balancing on the wooden plank. Be careful! Look at the bottom of the pool.”

The Grasshopper looked over the edge and saw many bones.

“They used to belong to young apprentices such as you,” the blind master informed.

Finally, the blind master too Grasshopper out of that dreadful room and into the sunlight of the courtyard. There, the other monks had erected a plank of the same measurements as the one over the acid pool, except it was raised on two bricks. For the next seven days, the apprentice’s only chore was to practice walking on that plank.

It was easy walking that plank in the courtyard. In a couple of days he could walk with perfect balance, eventually even doing it while blindfolded. Then the day of the test arrived.

The apprentice was led by his master into the room with the acid pool. Grasshopper could see the bones of the other apprentices who had fallen at the bottom of the pool. Grasshopper got up onto the end of the plank and then looked back at his master. “Walk!” the master commanded.

Now, truth be told, a plank over acid is a much narrower plank of the same size in a temple courtyard. Grasshopper began to walk, but his step was unsteady -- he began to sway. The more distance he covered, the more he wobbled and things looked bad for the young apprentice. As he continued, he lost more confidence and his balance faltered until amid a flurry of flapping of arms and a desperate cry for help... he fell in!

The old blind master laughed hysterically as Grasshopper splashed about in the pool. You see, the pool was filled with ordinary water, not acid. The old bones were thrown in as props to lend some authenticity. They had fooled Little Grasshopper, as they had fooled the TV viewers.

“What caused you to fall in?” asked the master once they had fished the young apprentice out of the pool. “Fear made you fall in, Little Grasshopper, only fear.”

Love,

Eddie

Sunday Sermon [Moral Inventory]

¡Hola! Everybody...
Today… Three for the price of one…

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“If God lived on Earth, people would break his windows.”

-- Yiddish saying

If Jesus were on the internet, someone would be blasting about him being a socialist, or some other inane bullshit. Honestly, people, anyone who finds internet drama entertaining doesn’t have a life.

Period.

That’s one…

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I detest chain emails because people who send them are often seeking to exonerate themselves from action. Instead of clicking a fuckin’ mouse in order to feel good, why don’t you try the following instead: the next time someone does a good deed for you, do ten good deeds. Do as in act, not click.

That’s two…

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-=[ Recapitulation ]=-

The secret of a warrior is that he believes without believing… to just believe would just exonerate him from examining his situation. A warrior, whenever he has to involve himself with believing, does it as a choice.

-- Don Juan Matus (Carlos Castaneda)

I’m almost afraid to post this one, but I think some people will benefit. Others might use it to torture themselves, caveat emptor (“buyer beware”).

Carlos Castaneda’s Yaqui teacher Don Juan illustrated an exercise that he called recapitulation. I’d read about it a long time ago, and had forgotten it. However, as part of my own inner work, I do a similar exercise at the end of my day.

At the end of your day, place your chin on your right shoulder. Very slowly swing it until it’s resting on your left shoulder. As you do this, review the significant events of the day in chronological order. Don’t do this as a way to relive blame or justify your actions of the day.

If you do this with an open mind and heart, resisting the impulse to judge, you will uncover habitual patterns, perhaps even see future developments, and confront your rigid belief systems (i.e., I’m always right, I am worthless). This exercise is meant as a conscious effort to transcend your defense mechanisms and perhaps obtain a glimpse of your genuine or Higher self.

I would add that when you find you have acted wrongly or unwisely just admit it; don’t waste time defending it, or compounding it, simply admit it.

Alternatively, you can ignore all this until you grow old and realize it’s all been an elaborate sham -- this internet and real-life persona you mindlessly create and defend.

Either way, you’re gonna haveta confront this ma’fucca sooner or later.

That’s three...

Love,

Eddie

The Shadow Knows...

¡Hola! Everybody... Whew! Because I suffer from an incurable curiosity, I turned on the TV machine this AM to a show I normally refuse to watch -- Morning Joe, on MSNBC. I wasn’t expecting anything new from these media jackals, but I was curious to see how far they would contort themselves in order to spin Gov. Sanford’s philandering and Gawd-awful press conference. I have to say I was disgusted. While readily admitting the sins of this neocon creep, their gist was, “They were out to get him.” “They” being everybody from SC GOP hacks who hated him for being a “maverick,” to a media all too willing to engage in “gotcha!” journalism. WTF?!!

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-=[ The Unbearable Darkness of Light ]=-

That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate.

-- Carl G. Jung

Mark Sanford, Newt Gingrich, Mark Foley, Larry Craig, catholic priests as serial buggerers of boys... Ahhhh... the long and storied tradition of right-wing religious hypocrisy! Reflecting on the most recent neoconservative moral crime wave, I am reminded of how simple conceptualizations of “good vs. evil” often lead to a perversion of morality. By separating evil from good, the light from the dark, we condemn our dark sides to the recesses of our unconscious and in that way they gain power over our actions.

Take the Iraqi war, for example. The rationale for that war was framed in simplistic terms of the “evil doers” versus us. It’s the “us” against “them” mentality. Such language means we’re busy creating an enemy, oftentimes an enemy with no grounding in reality.

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and all that was necessary is to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them!

::sigh::

It’s a child’s moral understanding of the world, people, that stands in contrast to a mature, evolved sense of morality that understands that the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who among us is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?

I like to say that repression is a poor substitute for morality. Behind the repressed darkness lies that which has been rotting inside of us. You witness this when a member of the Morality Police is caught with their pants down (or their hands in someone else’s pants/ panties). A great example here is the Clinton/ Lewinsky affair (referenced these past 24 hours more times than I can count). After Clinton was vilified for the “BJ heard around the world,” it was discovered that his greatest critics, those who moralized most vociferously, were themselves engaging in adulterous affairs while they were sermonizing the rest of us! Newt Gingrich and Mark Sanford come to mind, both of whom had more than a few choice words for Clinton and anyone else caught fuckin their cabana boy.

One primary purpose of religion is to define wrong and right and to prescribe human moral behavior accordingly. Every religion has its way of slicing the moral pie into good and evil; the more razor-sharp the slice, the more “clear-cut” the ethics.

In a black and white universe of “evil” versus “good,” right and wrong are two distinct paths, one leading to heaven (and virgins!), the other to hell (anal sex with “been-there-done-that sluts” LOL!). The so-called true believers of any tradition say it’s an either/ or choice. As the Dylan song famously says, “You got to serve somebody. It may be the Devil, or it may be the Lord. But you got to serve somebody.”

We vilify the dark at our own expense, because light and darkness aren’t separate, they define one another, the light contains darkness, and darkness contains light. In other words, we must learn to love even that which we like least in ourselves or suffer an existential alienation. Growth -- true growth -- means integration. Christians have not done well with integrating their dark sides. This is part of the reason we see so many Christian fundamentalists failing to live up to their own ideals.

Christian theology has not always done well in acknowledging the darkness. This influences the capacity for higher-level stages of moral reasoning. If you are striving to be perfect and pure, everything depends on achieving absolute purity and perfection. In this way, we fall into the trap of adhering to a perfection that leads to a rigid perfectionism. This form of speculation creates an image of God that is foreign to the human heart. A god thoroughly purged of anything that we consider dark. When we try to live up to the standards of a God that is purely light, we take away from our ability to handle the darkness within us. And because we can’t handle it, we suppress it. And the more we suppress it, the more it takes on its own life, because we have not brought our consciousness to bear upon the dark. Before we know it, we’re in serious trouble.

Just ask mark Sanford...

Love,

Eddie

Right Wing Hysteria & Moral Cowardice

¡Hola! Everybody...
Life is a celebration -- each day is another opportunity to deepen that celebration... or not. LOL

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-=[ Moral Cowardice ]=-

Man, you are a died in the wool dumb ass. Please tell me that you do not consider the killer of DR Teller a move by a right wing extremist.....it was a crime by a CRIMINAL, plain and simple, and ALL efforts to make it into something it was not, the lone action by a lone gunman, not associated with any conservative movement, have failed.

-- An example of “reasoning”

This was the opening salvo from a twat who, when confronted with facts tying recent killings to the White Nationalist Movement, ran crying to his site, wrote a blog about me, and then cried and whimpered that I was mean (and a racist to boot! LOL I just love it that neocons are now experts on racism). I believe this individual and individuals like him are moral cowards...

But before I continue, I must admit to a huge mistake. After some thought, I have come to the conclusion that classifying the perpetrators of recent hate crimes by white supremacists as “mentally unstable,” does a disservice to all those Americans who suffer from mental illness. The vast majority of citizens suffering from mental illness never go out on killing sprees. Most, in the face of debilitating illness, go out and function just as the rest of us, never harming a soul.

These so-called “lone gunmen” are not crazy, psychotic, or mentally imbalanced. They knew exactly what they were doing. They are definitely angry -- but they are angry about very specific things, and in very specific ways. For example, each one picked targets that suited their political goals -- political goals shared by massive movements. They stashed weapons and they carried out their premeditated acts of violence.

There’s a consistency to the ideology of these angry, armed, white males and the common thread that ties them together is white supremacy and right-wing hysteria.

If we heard the exact same story of a black or Latino/a and it was discovered that the individual had ties to a Black or Latino/a Nationalist movement numbering in the tens of thousands, I’m willing to bet this fool and people who think as he does would be shooting black and brown people on sight, no questions asked.

They are not crazy, solitary gunmen and women; they are part of a fascist movement composed of moral cowards. No... These fascists -- America’s homegrown terrorists -- are not unhinged; they are perfectly sane individuals taking neoconservative ideology to its conclusion. In this way, they are an extension of fascist ideology in the same way that groups of Klansmen are extension of that ideology. It is an ideology undergirding a well-organized and sizable political movement in America.

In the coming days, I will show that the neocon movement is predicated on racist notions of white superiority. The core thrust of modern conservatism comes from modern-day pseudo-scientific “research” no different in empirical validity from 19^th century eugenics and head measuring. Furthermore, these attempts to scientifically validate racist ideology have been given almost free reign on the editorial pages of some of the most influential newspapers and journals.

Georges Santayana famously said that those who refuse to learn from the past, are condemned to repeat it, and we ignore the actions from the well-organized far-right at our own expense. One need only take the lessons Santayana was referring to -- the lessons of fascisms and the hell they wreaked during WW II. Hanna Arendt wrote extensively of the symbiotic relationship between propaganda and fascists movements. One cannot breed without the other. Even shit needs flies...

Speaking of which, here’s an interesting response to my link on the White Nationalist Movement (quoted verbatim):

By and large it is liberals who have as much in common nowadays with this guy than do most conservatives. After all it is popular to be anti Israel, and pro hama's. -- An Idiot

I chose this particular nugget of “reasoning” because it is a prominent meme running rampant on the neocon blogosphere these days. It is really quite simple (or simplistic):

Right-wing propagandists are pro-Israel.

The American Left is anti-Israel.

Therefore, a white supremacist is a left-wing extremist!

Or as one responder put it:

All cats die.

Socrates died.

Socrates was a cat.

The dire lack of logical reasoning by the talking heads and their sheeple on the right is par for the course. Limbaugh has made millions using logical fallacies, as has O’Reilly and the rest of their hate talk comrades. Recently Glenn Beck of Fox News stated that, “What they’re missing is: The pot in America is boiling. And this is just yet another warning to all Americans of things to come.”

Actually, Beck has it right: the pot is boiling, but it is boiling because of people like Glenn Beck, ranting hysterically every night about impending apocalypses of various forms -- looming “liberal fascism,” the “economic meltdown.” Obama, every white supremacist’s nightmare, is coming for your guns and a class of inferior people has stolen the America that you once knew. In this way, fascist ideology, interchangeable with neocon principles, gets credence and emboldens those on the far right. Guns sales since Obama’s election going through the roof -- and it ain’t happening in East LA or Brownsville, Cabrini Green, or Harlem.

Propaganda and fascism -- one cannot thrive without the other. In creating the black and brown face of evil, we help dehumanize those faces, making it easier to justify their extermination.

This is taking neoconservative ideology to its logical conclusion. In this way, frequent MSM commentator Pat Buchannan, a Holocaust denier himself, can advocate setting up snipers on our southern borders with nary a whimper from journalists.

Combine hate radio, hate websites, hate podcasts, and a crisis economy where people feel they are losing all they have, and we see the beginning of a perfect storm of hate crimes and murders committed by a significant percentage of millions of stable, hate-filled who have been primed to move from sullen bigotry and anger to violent criminal action

A social security check arrives late. A bounced check starts bank charges that end up costing hundreds of dollars and the movement gains momentum, blaming immigrants, blacks, Jews, gays, war protester-- and the next thing you know we are seeing dead people on national TV. And those millions of other Americans afflicted with fascist hate are seeing one more case of a person letting go, unleashing the hate that the extremist media has built up...

Anti abortion people attempted to put on a “shocked” face, publicly denouncing the murder of Dr. Tiller.

The Washington Post reported that John de Nugent, white supremacist friend of the Holocaust Museum murderer James W. Von Brunn, “called von Brunn a genius but described the shooting as the act of ‘a loner and a hothead.’” “The responsible white separatist community condemns this,” he said. “It makes us look bad.”

Yeah, right... Sounds like my man up there in the epigraph, doesn’t it?

What it does is it exposes such thinking as the moral cowardice that it is.

Eddie

Monday Madness (Moral Reasoning)

¡Hola! Everybody,
Happy St. Paddy’s day, people. great day to take advantage of a drunken lass! ::grin:: Today an mad prelude (really a poem) and a map!

* * *

Nows [no. 2]

You’re fighting me I find,
and you will fight me all the way
to that painful
instant of surrender
we can both already sense.

You will fight
my instant messages
my postcards
my presents
and my desperate calls.

You will fight
the endless affections of my tongue
and I will ignore
your enormous eyes
and that unbearable smile.

I can buy you
jewelry,
airplane tickets,
roses,
dinners in San Juan,
and clothes you must learn to
love yourself to wear
and still you will fight me.

Because I have taken away
your practiced old
game of giving,
and made of you
an honest trader again.

-- Edward-Yemíl Rosario

* * *

-=[ A Map ]=-

Not too long ago, I sat beside a woman on a panel. We were addressing college students, and what struck me about this particular woman was the level of her selfishness. I found it interesting because she sought me out before we spoke and mentioned that she too was a “practicing Buddhist.” Her version of Buddhism, it seemed to me, was simply meditation. I had a teacher who once joked that practicing Buddhism without ethics was like trying to row a boat without first untying it from the pier.

What struck me about this woman was that her whole existence centered on her and she was oblivious to how she was connected to her environment; how her actions reverberated and caused ripples. In her world, what mattered was the conscious cultivation of her ego. She could actually see the “logic” in the needless death of an infant. This is what happens when you mix Ayn Rand with meditation! LOL Nothing could be further from my vision of Buddhist practice.

Two people, two different worlds.

This got me to thinking and I have come to realization that “practicing meditation” or any set of practices isn’t enough. I have come to realize that we create our world according to what level we operate from. It’s the same with love. For some people love’s ultimate reason for existence is to satisfy the individual. Love is something that you go “out there” to get in order to satisfy your hunger for connection. similarly, religion and everything else is filtered -- distilled according to where you stand in terms of growth.

I’ll explain. Let’s look at moral development as a starting off point. Let’s say moral development has three distinct stages. An infant at birth hasn’t been socialized into the culture’s ethics, standards, and conventions; let’s call this the preconventional stage. It’s also known as egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely consumed with self -- self-absorbed. but as the young child begins to learn its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also known as ethnocentric, in that it’s focused on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the post-conventional stage, the individual’s identity expands to include care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex, or creed, which is why this stage is also known as worldcentric.

If you’re still with me, you can see that moral development tends to move from “me” (egocentric) to “us” (ethnocentric) to “all of us” (worldcentric). This is an example of unfolding waves of consciousness.

Using this consciousness “map” one can see how religion (or love) will manifest itself differently in a person who’s at the egocentric stage than a person who’s at a worldcentric stage. Both people can be just as devout (or “in love”), but spiritual practice will evolve according to any one individual’s level of moral development.

So imagine love from an egocentric perspective. Love at this stage resembles a yearning -- something like a need for a fix -- an ego boost. Same thing with almost anything you look at in life: it changes according to what level you choose to engage the world. religion from an egocentric perspective probably resembles the scary wave of fundamentalism currently threatening our existence. And I mention fundamentalism in all its manifestations -- including our own home-grown Christian fundamentalism.

I find all this quite interesting because a lot of my work involves helping people move from one stage to another. But it’s also interesting because it helps me tease out the idiosyncrasies when someone says, “I love you.” Perhaps we need to know a little more about others and ourselves when we travel the terrain of the heart. For what may sound like “I love you” may in actuality mean “I love me.”

I would like to start using this “map” as a way to discuss different issues.

Love,

Eddie