I went to a really interesting Master's thesis defense today here at UBC in Vancouver.

This woman, who was a Buddhist and a professional theatre performer, was culminating her Master's work in the faculty of Education, focusing specifically on "Youth Education" and "Spirituality". Her project was entitled: 9 questions to the Dali Lama. 

For her original project, she was acting as a co-coordinator for a group of youths that were part of the "Nurturing Compassion" conference we had here in Vancouver quite a while back, with the Dali Lama as the focused guest. It was a conference that was designed as an opening for the "Dali Lama Center of Compassion" that the Dali Lama had helped establish here in Vancouver; a major center of attention for our Canadian province.

But as she went deeper into this project and research she found many areas of the organization for the event extremely disturbing. Thus her final thesis project ended up provocatively challenging what we might call the "green meme" form of spirituality, or the postmodern, politically correct model that has become the dominant discourse in our understanding of "Compassion".

Her challenge was clear, and for her, was never directed at the Dali Lama himself but rather at the co-coordinators of the "Nurturing Compassion" event. First of all, the event was advertised as a youth focused gathering, where youth only were supposed to interact with the Dali Lama and ask questions. The woman doing her thesis had taken on the project of head co-coordinator for the youth who were supposed to document the whole event and be a major part of its establishment. On the day of the event, this woman and her youth crew were supposed to be allowed in to do exclusive interviews with the Dali Lama. Instead they were forced to stay outside on the sidewalks, apparently because they posed a "security risk". 
The main event organizers then proceeded to allow in all the media crews to interview and capture pictures of the Dali Lama before and after the conference. 

Another major hit for these youth was that they had originally been asked to write and make a documentary of the life and struggles of the Dali Lama that would be played at the event as an introduction to his Holiness. They ended up cutting the video last minute because it was "too political". I had the privilege to actually view the documentary and it was beautifully done. The controversy was simply around mention of the Tibet crisis and the Chinese invasion. Apparently they didn't want any mention of Tibet at all! (Vancouver prides itself of its multicultural acceptance and did not want to offend any Chinese people). They also then argued that the video was "too Buddhist", again they didn't want the conference or the center to reflect any bias of religion or tradition. Therefore it would be politically incorrect to even mention that the Dali Lama was a Buddhist (not to mention the rich history of Tibetan lineage within which he exists!). 

The woman doing her thesis was deeply torn because she was a staunch supporter for the center but felt that the pedagogy for the event and the institute itself was deeply problematic. So she asks: What is Compassion? This was the main concern of her whole thesis and she had to deal with a lot of her own feelings of doubt about even questioning this amazing center. In my eyes she was questioning the "boomeritis" form of Compassion, or the completely de-politicized, de-religionized form of Compassion. A post-modern game of extracting the word from its roots and its lineage and trying to make it some neutralized and unproblematic teaching that can mean whatever we want it to mean, or what feels most right to me about what it means, etc.  

She also raised so many deep concerns about the way we use "youths" to advertise events and then never give them a voice or the ability to ask their own questions, instead we feed them scripts. The scripted nature of the whole event was very palpable. 

Before the event occurred, the Dali Lama was asked why he wanted this youth centered conference. This was his answer (not exact quote): Because we adults are very stuck in habitual patterns that often make it difficult for us to see reality as it is, youth have the flexibility to see things in new ways and this is why we have to listen to them, this is why I want to speak with them. 

Well, the event was anything but youth centered... it reflected what this woman so rightly argued as the adult need to "manage space" in a way that pushes out spontaneity and actual dialogical possibility for youth in an educational setting. For her this only reflected the wider problem of fear and control that pervades our wider educational and academic atmosphere. 

Just food for thought...   

A large scale body image study done in 1997 found that 24% of women were willing to give up more than 3 years of their life if they could achieve their goal weight (Garner, 1997)... a percentage that I would speculate has sharply increased in the last 10 years...

Each year Americans spend nearly $40 billion each year trying to loose weight and approximately $45 billion on cosmetics and toiletries ( Sawer et. all).

As many of you know I have a deep interest in beauty and body image and how the struggles with beauty that women go through (both young and old) can be better understood using an integral framework. (This is not meant to exclude men; I imagine that will come out more in my later work, but right now I am pretty focused on women's relationship to beauty as it has been such a deep part of my own struggle and spiritual path).  In the article I wrote on Integral beauty (currently in editing with AQAL journal), I delve into the many contentious issues surrounding beauty and try to make sense of them using the AQAL map. I was and continue to be really interested in the interrelationship of the four quadrants and how they effect and "construct" how we see the beautiful.

One of the biggest divisions that we see in our modern and post-modern world in our theories on beauty today is the division between the feminists and those of the evolutionary biologists. The feminists tend to favour the position of beauty as  pure socio-cultural construction (i.e., Naomi Wolf's "The Beauty Myth"), and the evolutionary biologists tend to favour scientific explanations (i.e., Darwin's notion that beauty is a biological recognition of desirable reproductive traits, what he termed sexual selection).  These are very roughly the LL/LR and UR perspectives on beauty. There are also, of coarse, the "Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder" theorists (UL) These theorists tend to be more the philosopher types who believe that beauty is generated by one's own subjective experiences and biases and that subjective perception often fluctuates with the shifting of psychological or spiritual states (i.e., you can notice that your perception of beauty in the exterior world shifts with the movement of your own interior states and moods).

My point is that all of these are true, but of coarse partial. I am currently doing a paper for my Psychology of  Sexuality coarse and I'm investigating the discourse of the UR quadrant. Looking at a lot of psychological studies that show how certain physical attributes certainly do effect many areas of our lives, everything from everday social interactions to getting hired for a job, and even getting lighter jury sentences. There is no doubt that things like Waist-to-hip ratios (a sign of reproductive capacity) do effect our "attraction" scale. But to me this perspective on its own is so limited in that it not only misses taking into account the huge effect of the other three quadrants but also excludes development.

This is why I am so interested in really teasing out the Aesthetic line of Development in Wilber's model, something which is still in its baby stages. I am interested in both how we develop in what we are attracted to as well as in what we feel is attractive about ourselves. This accounts for both the masculine and feminine poles of the aesthetic experience (What is attractive to me? is more a masculine question of the watcher and What is attractive about me? is more a feminine question of the dancer, and of coarse these are not to be conflated with men and women, we all have both). Development is both a dynamic affair between the masculine and feminine and a four quadrant affair.

When we miss asking or exploring any of these dimensions we immediately suffer from our own limited perception of the beautiful. When we try to either elevate beauty as a purely objective reality(UR) or when we reduce it to a pure socio-cultural construction (LL/LR) we do injustice to the breadth of beauty's embrace and when we ignore both masculine and feminine aesthetic development we stifle the natural unfolding of beauty's expression.
 
All that said, I would love to hear (either as public comments or through private message sending) about your own relationship to beauty whether you are male or female. I would love to get others insights into this issue and also hear about your personal experiences if you wish to share them.