Gaia Community: Vanessa's Blog

Echoes of my Lineage

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:17:53 GMT

I see my Mother dancing through skies of ebony

Above me, Her body becomes enshrined by an alter of naked light

thrown forth from a reflection of the moon.

The stars become her sacred adornment

draped from galaxy to galaxy

a testament to Love's fullness in space.

I watch my Mother as She joyfully tumbles through the ocean waves before me

crowned high priestess by the Sun

who casts down warm glistening halos to the water below.

Bursts of bubbling white froth spill forth across the sand

cascading across Her feet like the delicate ruffles of a dress.

They follow Her as She steps back and forth from the shore

disappearing and re-appearing in rhythm with the ocean's breath.

I feel my Mother held in the vibrations of the mountains

wise women, of all ages

who once sang out to me

who once suffered unbearably for Love.

I touch my hand to the cold stone

and I feel my Mother's mantra reach past my skin

carving itself in untitled poems across my bone.

It is Her pain that reminds me why I pray

Her beauty that reminds me why I want to stay.

These are the echoes of my lineage.

Faint whispers

now melting into righteous roars

as my body begins to speak in tongues

and this speech becomes sacred text

written on the face of my palms and spoken in silent mudras.

Conveying back to the world

this one message from the Mother:

That we are only this Love

This Love that finds no beginning or ending in Her.

-November 26 2007

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Aurobindo's Beauty

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 04:28:24 GMT

I came across a passage tonight while reading Aurobindo's "The Divine Life" that was especially striking to me, both in the beauty of its prose and the profound and simple wisdom in its message. So I thought I would share it...

"States of consciouness there are in which Death is only a change in immortal LIfe, pain a violent backwash of the waters of universal delight, limitation a turning of the Infinite upon itself, evil a circling of the good around its own perfection; and this not in abstract conception only, but in actual vision and in constant and substantial experience."

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What is Philosophy for? You Have to Hear This One.

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 03:40:39 GMT

So I'm officially in the greatest slog of my academic career, my last year.

I'm in my senior year and I seem to have contracted what one of my profs calls "senioritis": the student in their last year who was once so eager to do all the readings and show up for every class, is suddenly skimming through the very bare bones of the reading text and planning out how much she can skip each week and still do well.

But I attribute my struggle this year to more than merely "senioritis". I ended up landing in 5 coarses with little interest in any of them, which is a new experience for me. The worst part is that the classes I was most excited about: The philosophy of art and the philosophy of mind, ended up being the most disappointing.

I love philosophy, as most of you can probably tell(-: But academic philosophy is soooo far out from the kind of philosophy that interests me that I feel a rush of anger and disgust nearly every class ( a great place to practice my meditation and acceptance and loving kindness(-:). I think my experience can be easily summed up in the one comment my professor made today that simply solidified my entire struggle with academia in a capsize quote.

Someone in my philosophy of art class ( largely a study in logic applied to art theory) asked the teacher what the philosophy we were learning about actually had to do with people's lives , and how it actually effected their perceptions when viewing art. This was my teachers response:

"Oh, absolutely nothing. Philosophy isn't about practical application. This stuff doesn't effect anyone when they actually view art, it is just a theoretical exercise. Philosophy isn't meant to actually mean anything, that is the beauty of it. If I actually thought my research and writing in philosophy had meaning and implications for people's lives I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Don't ask for practical applications, that is not the purpose of philosophy."

Wow... I couldn't believe he actually said it so bluntly.... what a waste in so many ways. To even think we can detach ourselves as philosophers from the everyday lives of people is to truly disservice the planet. No wonder people in other disciplines think we are all a bunch of pompous intellectual assholes.

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The "Male Gaze" as Female Shadow

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:39:24 GMT

I had an interesting conversation with two of my female friends the other day that triggered some new thinking and writing for me in regards to the problem of the "male gaze" in feminism.

I was specifically thinking about how feminism's attempt to extricate women from the "male gaze" has inadvertantly ended up cutting women off from some really fundamental aspects of their own experience. That is, in feminism's decision to reject the "male gaze" as an imposition and oppression of men onto women, they also renounced all responsibility for the many ways that women have co-created the "male gaze" throughout history.

There is a reason that women experience the "male gaze" so strongly; it is because it is a part of our own basic experience, part of something we have played a role in creating. When we repress that responsibility we end up projecting the "male gaze" onto men. That is, we experience the "male gaze" as something men are doing to us.

A repression of any aspect of a woman's experience inherently means she cannot recognize it as her own and thus transcend her unconscious embeddedness within it. The "male gaze" remains part of the female shadow, experienced as everywhere "out there" and no where "in here". This disowning of experience has severe consequences for the healthy development of the female psyche, something I would like to explore in depth in my book.

I have a feeling I am going to piss off a lot of feminists, I hope not... but so much postmodern feminism rests on women's vicitmization to the "male gaze" of objectification, when in fact the "male gaze" should be redefined as a male-female co-creation at the earlier levels of our historical development.

By owning it, women take back responisibility and also their power to dis-embed from previous passivity when it came to their own objectification. If we chose to blame instead of owning our part, women's power and freedom will always remain in someone elses hands (namely, men) rather than in our own. The "male gaze" is ours to reclaim, to be integrated back into the female self so as to be included in our experience and also transcended so we can develop into new horizons in how we veiw ourselves and our bodies beyond the "male gaze".

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Women's Enlightenment Quotes

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 23:47:45 GMT

"Women sometimes feel a separation and a confusion about who they are. This is experienced as a core wound of existence. It's a primal feeling that something is off, that something is missing. It creates a torque in your being, and women will try to find relief in many different ways--through relationships, for example, or self-help processes. But this core wound is one of the factors that also drives women to seek spiritual relief or awakening--to discover on a very fundamental level who they are as consciousness. And as women wake up and claim their presence here with the liberation of consciousness as their foundations, they will actually shift the dynamics of the world."
-Linda Groves-Bonder

"Many years ago, I found myself asking Spirit what it would take to save the world. And the answer came clearly and immediately: a lot of enlightened women."
-Lesley Temple-Thurston

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Feminist Bodies and The Beauty Taboo

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 01:03:18 GMT

I'm slowly coming up with the basic outline for the book I want to write over the next couple years (I say years because I'm still in full time school). After the positive reception to my article on beauty (officially entitled: Beauty and the Expansion of Women's Identity), I've been encouraged to start seriously fleshing out a full book.

I seem to be continually drawn back to the women/feminist artists of the 1970s for guidance on this path. The work done by these pioneering women for both the feminist movement and the art world at large was truly amazing, and has been largely forgotten (see: Hannah Wilke and Carolee Schneemann for two examples). Basically, these women were cultivating the emergence of a truly kinesthetic-based feminist aesthetic, one that made both female beauty and the female body central to their agendas of transformation; two categories that were completely ignored by the wider feminist movement.

Beauty and the Body. There couldn't be two more taboo and controversial topics within feminist theory. Beauty was basically exiled all together as the "myth of the patriarchy", and the female body itself became the most contested site of female oppression. Because the body had become so problematic for women, in the post modern era, many feminists tried to eradicate the female body all together. Radical feminist Shulamith Firestone, argued that biology itself was oppressive to women; that the way nature had made us (subject to pregnancy, menstruation etc.) made us inherently dependent on men. Her solution was thus: Eradicate biology as much as possible through all means of technology. Here is where we see the arguments for test tube babies (mothering is patriarchal). From this standpoint, the female body itself becomes seen as inherently patriarchal, including everything that goes along with that body (i.e., beauty). And we wonder why us women are so dissociated from our bodies!!!

Another radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon, is famous for saying that all sex is rape. In simplified terms, because all sex takes place within a fully pervasive patriarchal order, women can never truly consent to sex. Women are always being programed, brainwashed, etc. So now we are not only not allowed to have bodies, we are also mindless, brainless sheep!!

Obviously, these are the extreme ends of the spectrum, but the notions behind them pervade all feminist discourse, and they deeply effect the way women relate to their own bodies, their own beauty, and other women's bodies and beauty. We need a new language for beauty, and the feminist body. That is why I am going back to these couragous feminist artists of the 70s who used their beauty and bodies as a powerful social and political statement. These women saw the aesthetic as an essential part of any wider revolution for women, an aesthetic cry that went unheard (and continues to go unheard) by their feminist contemporaries.

In later posts I hope to bring in some photos of these artists work as I work on the project. It would be neat to hear others reactions, observations, repulsions, excitements, etc, to being confronted with these, at times, very provocative depections of the female body. My working title for the book title is: "Feminist bodies and the Beauty Taboo".

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Intimate Cartography

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 01:51:37 GMT

A woman’s body yields intimate cartography

maps of silent autobiography

Signatures of pleasure and pain

spiral her thighs like invisible veins

She attempts to lift her life from shame

A woman’s body bestows sexual geography

Gestures of love written in sounds of untitled cacophony

Movements of fire and ice

surge like waves across her chest

as her body awaits this moment

to finally unveil itself for itself

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Adi Da Samraj

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 03:35:54 GMT

The Grace of Suffering-- Adi Da Samraj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hK5NPJ5b2E

The Test of Human Existence-- Adi Da Samraj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l_PZGFQPYk

I am aware of the immense controversy that surrounds the spiritual Guru, Adi Da Samraj. Wilber is one case in point for acknowledging the shadow sides that runs within his community based in Fiji.
That said, I still greatly enjoyed these two short video clips on you tube taken from his talks in the 70's. The first clip, the Grace of Suffering, speaks to the different levels of resistance that we experience on the spiritual path, staring with the gross and moving to the subtle realms. As we are increasingly and painfully stripped of our identifications on each realm we finally become so overwhelmed with suffering and pain that we "Fall". It is in this fall, when we have nothing left to protect us, that we find God.

My favorite line from this clip is "There are no Winners in God" (-:

The second clip is of Adi Da talking about the Test of Existence which he says is only Love. I find this video especially full of radiant clarity and beauty.

Anyways, just thought I would forefront this controversial figure as I still have a deep respect for his teachings.

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Connecting Sense and Sound: Writing from the Body

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 05:17:09 GMT

I've been up against some interesting challenges the last few months in relation to being in my body and feeling grounded in the relative world. I've been working with my therapist on what she calls "connecting sense and sound", in the simplest sense, connecting my voice, speech and writing with a grounded experience in my body, my feet, my breath.

I'm very interested in cultivating what I often can touch into when I "write from the body", which requires a lot of extra awareness for me during my writing process. Keeping aware of my feet touching the ground, my body being completely held by my chair, my hands making delicate contact with my keyboard... all of it requires a slowing down, a willingness to feel into my direct experience in the moment and not just pull out references and ideas from my intellectual bank account.

Writing from my body also requires a lot more willingness to be vulnerable. I'm currently working on an article on Shiva and Shakti for a yoga magazine here in Canada and I've really struggled with falling comfortably into the narrative style that they use. I find it much easier in my writing to stay somewhat detached as a third person observer on my experience.

I think this is the result of two main things: one is my immersion in academia at this point in my life where the "I" in writing is encouraged not to make its presence. The other reason results from the remnants of self-restraint that I still carry after coming out of an Andrew Cohen based spiritual community two years ago. The experience was amazing but I also recognize that living in a community where the impersonal is all that matters and any discussion of personal experiences and feelings is in opposition to the purpose of spiritual life makes a girl gunshy to divulge her personal life with complete freedom.

It seems it is taking me time to really allow myself to write from the personal immediacy of my body while keeping the integrity of the impersonal present. I am working to continually give myself permission to feel into the contours of being in a uniquely female manifestation of the divine and letting my writing be informed by that space, by my own flesh and blood.

Of course, the challenge is to do this kind of intimate writing while always keeping my heart grounded in formless emptiness, where relative distinctions of gender and bodies remain transparent to the all pervasive light of infinity.

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Fear Education

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 01:39:31 GMT

http://www.ccfi.educ.ubc.ca/publication/insights/v11n01/exhibits/artist.html

Just wanted to post this link for anyone who may be interested. It links to an art show that my father put together utilizing his work on fear for the last 25 years and his interest in how fear is used in educational settings and national politics. He is quite the radical so be prepared(-: He has a deep interest in the Matrix films as well as Integral theory which comes through... he was a professsional artist for ten years and more recently finished his PhD in Education... but he still can't get a job...too radical(-:
Anyways, just thought I would put it up for anyone who might be interested in these themes.

The title is:

Fearology Of Technology: A Phenomenology Of “Educational” Weapons Of Mass Destruction

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Beauty: Not just cultural, not just biological, but integral

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Sun, 20 May 2007 16:27:50 GMT

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.

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What is Compassion?

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:02:40 GMT

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...

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Listen to the Poet

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 05:20:27 GMT

Caught between time and timelessness and all I can do is bite my nails and wonder what to do with the moment, a moment that teeters on the unstable edge between narcissism and divinity.

I wait in the in-between… falling back and forth, first into boundless grace before returning again to the other side of my face.

I search for words to uplift my ego, then for words to dismantle it…

From the standpoint of self my greatest fear is that I have nothing to say

From the standpoint of infinity my greatest fear is that I do.

I know how easily words can fall into, cover over, and continually hide this intimate space of We.

Instead of holding you in the embrace of recognition, I slip over, violently push through or prematurely ejaculate on You, on We.

So driven by a desire for my own orgasm all I can hear is my own voice, so intent to feel a sense of self through words, by saying the last word, by earning your love with my words… Words become my false hope for validation, a sense of proclamation, or some continual attempt for admiration.

If you want to see the face of my shadow, listen to my words.

If you want to witness the pained struggle of a nonexistence self attempting to stabilize existence, listen to my words.

If you want to know the circular torment of hell

Listen to the unconscious stream of my words, bordering on the schizophrenia of continual repetition.

And if you want to hear the voice of God…listen to my words.

For when time stands still and my own pleasure looses its allure, my words become a selfless offering to You, to We.

These words become a revelation, a divinization, a manifestation of sacred calculation unfolding the freedom of spontaneous co-creation.

If you want to see my light, listen to my words

If you want to come Home, listen to my words

My sentences become grammatically structured by Radha

My poetics become the loving cry of Allah

Krishna dances as he plays his flute on my empty page and begs me to write his song for You, for We.

Listen to my words and love will bind you

Listen to my words and your shadow will find you

And listen to what Rumi says because a poet is a prophet…

Invite it all in

laughing.

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The Importance of Beauty to Feminism

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 04:30:05 GMT

I've been writing my final paper for my Philosophy of Sex and Gender class and have been just processing and sorting through all the feminist approaches and theories around sex and gender. I'm using Integral theory and especially Carol Gilligan and Susan Cook Greuter's work to talk about the development of the feminine and I'm hoping to expand the paper in the summer into a publishable one.
The title is: Re-Imaging the "Essential Feminine": Moving from Static to Dynamic Conceptions of Beauty and Femininity.

I was just doing some writing/poetry on the whole process tonight and thought I would post it for any of you it might interest. It is just my sort of mix of thoughts put into poetry that speaks to the pain, struggle, appreciation and yearning for where feminism has been, where it is and where it could grow into.

When it comes to our bodies as women neither self, culture nor nature can be negated or forgotten in their essential shaping of our flesh. None can be refused existence or dissolved into essential fictions of the other. To be corporeal as “woman” is to hold both the painful constraints of our prison and the blissful possibilities for our freedom. It is through the canvas of our bodies that we reveal and express the creative gestures of our interiority. It is upon the vulnerability of our skin that we write and perform the unique signature of our culture. And it is within the formed embrace of our vaginas that we welcome the folds of the universe to penetrate the space of our unique physical form.

A woman’s body is not meant to be explained away by her mind in a way that deconstructs its mystery and renders it neutered to thought, to touch, to pleasure. A woman’s body is not meant to be taken control of by her fear of intimacy or a need for self-reliance and control. The heart becomes hardened by concrete wombs of self-enclosure, our movements become mechanical, we forget our feet, our breasts, and our anger that surges with desire, screaming to be seen as beauty.

A woman’s body is an offering of love, and cannot be reduced to an idea, to a history or to an image. A woman’s body naturally yearns to love uncontrollably, to feel love’s force opening its tenderness to ecstatic and unbearable surrender. This is what we are struggling to remember, the transformative possibilities of our own bodies. Women, Woman, Wimmin. I don’t want feminism to take away my language, my voice, my unique letters of communication. Please don’t reduce my body to neutrality or lifeless androgeny. Please don’t reduce my interiority to a side effect of social fabrication. Instead, touch me, remember me, kiss me, create me. Help me reclaim my gestures, my breath, my beauty. Help me unfold my femininity and embrace my masculinity. Be a mother, a sister, and the most intimate lover to my soul.

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The Rape of the Static

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 00:07:30 GMT

Photographs of myself, static moments captured by eclipses of time, moments of fabrication, holding the self, clutching to a nullified existence, unable to breath under the closed folds of claustrophobic space that surround a face no longer in relation to the other. Flesh bound to decay, plays itself off as immortal…eternal. The binding pulls of attraction and revulsion, the narrowness of my mirrored view finds no resting place in a heart torn by the dualist skew. It breaks the mirror into shattered moments, traps reflection in severed locations and begs masturbatory seduction, of the self on the self on the self… an infinite regress of perspectives on the self that is no one, that becomes the image I see, a self that adds ever subtler flavors of suffering to its own arousing delusion.

But static images are only a manifestation of static thoughts, a repercussion of our need to hold perspectives as substance. Fear is in abundance and leads us to continually play this game of self vs. mirror. This was why I repeated my own rape, the abusive infliction of objectification that I tried to use to break the static taste of this imagery. Break the object to find the subject, then rape the self to find the soul, one way to annihilate existence and open ourselves to ecstatic surrender, one way to blind ourselves so that we might perceive the beauty of God… I’m not saying that I recommend rape… nor would I recommend the flight to God as a form of good health. But it is God’s rape that every woman yearns for. The rape that undoes the image, the rape that forces submission of the static, the unconsented intrusion that tears open the strength sitting at the center of our most humiliating vulnerability.

-March 18, 2007

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The Challenge of Being Loved

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 19:53:30 GMT

For the last few weeks I've been re-reading "Grace and Grit", the book that first turned me onto Ken Wilber when I was seventeen. I've been loving re-reading the story and really savoring not only the beautiful life and story of Treya's death and her battle with cancer, but also the amazing way she had with words. She was quite the poet!

Anyways, I found myself really strongly resonating with Treya's shadow side. I too have many similar shadow struggles, namely, I have a really hard time asking for help, feeling loved and feeling like I'm good enough. These of coarse are just personality aspects and at some level I also feel my practice opens parts of my being which see through and beyond them, but they still play a relative role in my everyday existence and how I respond and reach out to the world in certain moments.

Treya found the act of letting in others love an extreme challenge and so one of her central practices while going through chemotherapy was to imagine herself in the center of a circle of people who loved her and breathing in their love like white light. When I first read this my reaction was "Oh my god I couldn't do that it is so narcissistic". That was when I knew immediately that I had to do it!

When I got home I sat down for my usual Tonglen meditation session but began with this visualization. I started placing all the people in my life who love me in a circle around me. Then I found it extending to teachers and leaders, some who were dead, some I'd never met. Then even people who I wasn't that close with started to sit down at my circle and offer this complete unconditional love to me. As each new person sat down I found the tears flowing more swiftly as I struggled with feeling both overwhelmed with unconditional love and also afraid and judgmental of myself for doing the visualization. I continued to just Witness the reactions and keep a clear, empty channel of clarity at the center of my heart. I started to feel more and more how everyone was exuding this unconditional love to me at all times, even when it looked quite the opposite in the relative, conditional world.

I found that day that I no longer felt the same clinging or wishing people to fulfill any criteria or say any specific thing in order to feel loved by them. It was like even if people were unable to listen to me that day or totally oblivious and caught up in their own whirlwind; I still felt their love for me on this totally deep unconditional level. The same love that I could then offer back without saying a word or "doing" anything.

I was interested in this because I think it will fit in well with this paper I want to write on the Levels of Love (Kierkegaard and Irigaray). For both our ability to give and receive love are developmental. I have often been really good at giving; I've always been the helper at the less developed stages, and in the deeper/higher stages, I've grown more inclined to Tonglen practice, to being the background which holds suffering with total clarity and compassion. But I've always struggled with the reception of love from others, it always circles around fear of rejection, fear of loosing someone etc. But the highest forms of receiving love from others are not separate from giving... I know most of you know this. I myself don't believe I truly understood this in a real bodily sense until this past week.

Anyways, I highly recommend this practice for anyone who struggles with receiving love or fear of rejection... It is an essential practice for sure and it really illuminates how we truly are loved so intensely at all times that it actually hurts to truly feel it....

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Kierkegaard on God as the face of the other

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 04:58:22 GMT

To continue with my emerging thoughts and ideas for the paper I wish to write on ethics using Kierkegaard and Irigaray (see second last post).

It suddenly occurred to me today why I wanted to write this paper and why I had somewhat unknowingly chosen to put together Kierkegaard and Irigaray as the two main theorists for the endeavour. First and foremost I feel the message that I am very drawn to emphasizing and reconceptualizing in light of a new integral awareness is the often neglected 2nd person relationship to God that Wilber discusses in "Integral Spirituality". I so agree with Wilber’s insight that in our post-modern Western world, due to our growing emphasis on Buddhism and Science we have come to greatly overprivelage the 1st and 3rd person relationships to God often at the expense of ignoring the 2nd.

Wilber argues that there are two main reasons for this neglect of the 2nd person relationship to God, the first is unfortunately due to boomeritis. His main point is that as the doctrines of Buddhism came to the West we liked to emphasize the parts that tell us we are God, the great I-I (1st person) but tend to overlook the devotional aspect of Buddhist religion. The other big reason he argues is that in the west we have been attempting to emerge out from under an oppressively 2nd person, mythic interpretation of God as the great "daddy punisher". But in throwing out the mythic structure we also threw out the great 2nd person devotional aspect of our relationship of the Divine; the great ego-leveller, the humbling of the heart at the alter of God, the duty of selfless service that the Catholic nuns, like Saint Teresa of Avila, so beautifully described and embodied.

So we have tended to loose sight of this 2nd person relationship and focused both on 1st person, the great I-I, and also 3rd person, Spirit as the great unfolding of evolution, Gaia, the web of life. Both these perspectives, without an inclusion of the 2nd person relationship, Wilber argues is the hiding place for a lot of unseen arrogance because we never have to truly give ourselves over.

So this is where Kierkegaard so beautifully comes in. His Judeo-Christian background of course emphasizes the 2nd person relationship to God, but unlike the mythic followers, Kierkegaard takes that 2nd person relationship to its highest forms and mystical expressions. In my opinion, he rescues the 2nd person relationship to God from a purely mythical interpretation and reframes devotion and surrender that is not just passively subservient to the "daddy God" but rather completely requires that we each own up to our own responsibility in this relationship.

Kierkegaard was very original in his emphasis on the existential and the need for each human being to individuate and find their own relationship to God outside of the dictates of society and institutionalized Christianity. In this way I believe he was taking Christianity and our ideas about love and duty out of the purely mythic and into the intense scrutiny of rationality and individual responsibility. He forces each of us to face up to our own responsibility to meet God as individuals and this takes a "momentary suspension of the ethical" as he described it. The need to unplug from the mythic interpretation of morality, at least momentarily, in order to ground in faith.

In my opinion Kierkegaard was one of the few truly nondual Christian philosophers because he saw two main paths that were part of the "Knight of Faith's journey", first was that of Infinite resignation, basically the resignation from all worldly things and duties, including ideas about morality. But this was not the end of the path for the Knight of Faith, for after this Infinite resignation had grounded the individual soul in the truth of the eternal, one had to make the most difficult leap of all and that was to receive the entire finite world back again, what Kierkegaard called "the absurd embrace". All the things, even those which had been greatly resisted in the first part of our journey, now had to be fully embraced.

It was through this process that Kierkegaard believed one came to find the eternal at the root of all things (beyond good and evil) and also how one came to really learn what it means to love God in the absolute sense. Loving God for Kierkegaard was never supposed to be the love for some abstract notion or otherworldly presence, loving God was loving others as God. Kierkegaard had this beautiful saying about how God constantly turns our love for him away from Himself and tells us that if we truly wish to love him than we will love others for Him.

It is in this awareness of realizing how loved we are, a love rooted in the truth of eternity, that we then finally grasp what Kierkegaard meant by our "infinite debt". And it is the painfully ecstatic awareness of this "infinite debt" that we come to love others without calculation, limitation or condition. This is not a mere human love; it is our love for God, for eternity. But Kierkegaard's point was that eternity can only be loved through finitude. Thus we can only directly experience God through the face of the other and can only love God by loving others. This is the sense in which God turns away our love and forces us to give it to every face that we see rather than directing it towards Him. This is the joy, the humility and heartache of what the absurd embrace really entails.

Why I think Irigaray would be such a great contribution to this article is because of her emphasis on the other and her beautiful articulation of the mysterious space that exists in the We space. It is these two writer's emphasis on the Other that to me could really bring back a revitalized view on the 2nd person relationship to God and what it means in a post-modern and integral context. I think this devotional relationship is inherently tied to the feminine (and I don't equate the feminine to women), and thus would be an attempt to recover the higher reaches of feminine surrender, devotion, beauty and love. Feminism still has much to untangle itself from in being able to articulate and appreciate these higher levels of Agape and communion that express our 2nd person relationship to the Divine, and I think Kierkegaard just might be the theorist to bring this new level of depth to the feminist discussions.

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The Confessions

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 05:16:08 GMT

His gaze reminded me of my fear, of my humiliation and indignation. His look alone held this body once posed for the purpose of perpetual lamentation or else some position of sexual intonation. He reminded me of when I used to lay down at confessors feet, the perditious fires that had burned my bedding sheets, the shameful blaze of my own heartbeat.

He reminded me of how I used to die inside, searching endlessly for his hand to guide, but somehow always slipping of coarse, with his guide down my pants and his hand always ready to enforce, a woman’s experience of intercourse. And what exactly was it that I had been expecting to find in my mirror’s reflection, through endless hours of self-inspection, perhaps the fearfully anticipated moment of God’s rejection. So I suppose this is why we pour our thoughts in confessional reach, and douse the vibrance of our hearts with lifeless speech, because we are searching for Home but always feel that we are the one exception on Love’s embrace, isn’t this why we always take out our umbrellas whenever it rains Grace.

His stare reminded me of how I learned never to trust the silence between my breathing, and how words came to displace the tears of my body’s grieving. But the truth is a sinner’s secrets should never be sold to the highest bidder, its taste will always be bitter, if our mouths are full of words that need a baby sitter. Or worse yet if our hearts fight the immediacy needed to experience our own life’s riddle, and we give our power away to a man who can stand in the middle. Yes I knew as a woman I was afraid to touch God with bare hands, forgive me Mother for I have sinned.

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The Command of Love

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 04:25:09 GMT

I wanted to post a poem I wrote a little over a month ago called "Final Theophany", but also felt the desire to preface it for some important reasons as it has come to spur a deeper intrigue and interest for me and my academic writing. The poem was originally written as a reflection on some strong feelings I'd carried for the last year around a specific woman in my life and how I had come to "interpret" or understand love in the face of my own illusions as well as the infinite/finite paradox that is inherent to our existence.

But the topic of love has become recently more interesting to me as I've been doing research in preparation for a paper I'm writing for my Christian History studies course next semester on Soren Kierkegaard. I've become really impacted by Kierkegaard and his very profound understanding of the human experience. I've decided to focus specifically on his philosophy of Ethics and Love for this particular paper and wanted to briefly touch on his thought with you for the purpose of the favor I'm going to ask down below.

I think the most important thing about Kierkegaard was that he was first and foremost a Christian and his existential philosophy was always grounded in the fundamental responsibility of the individual and his/her relationship to God/Love. He also had a very detailed understanding of ethical/religious development and the different stages of life including the struggles of individuation (existential fear and trembling), and on toward the process of transcending the self (Leap of Faith) that was necessary to reach the highest levels of Love's expression.

The reason I'm so interested in his work on Love is because he is a master at exposing in detail all the traps and illusions that humans face in relationship to thier experience of love as well as how we relate to our objects of love (the beloved). He sees most love relationships leading only to existential despair because we tend to try and make our beloved into the image of our ideal that only God can fulfill. And because of this we will always judge, compare and calculate the level of our partner's ability to love us. He argues that only the individual who has taken the Leap of Faith will be able to see that all calculations of how much we love compared to others is useless, for in the face of God we see that we are always in infinite debt to His Grace and that all He asks is that we love others unconditionally for Him (Yes I'm aware of the Judeo-Christian slant, but still important stuff!)

He goes on to speak of the Command of Love and our own commitment to absolute telos (our God relationship) as ultimately higher than any other familial relationship or moral duty. He argues that the command of Love offers a momentary "suspension of the ethical" in order that we might align our will with Gods. He uses the example of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac as a call to Absolute Love, a metaphor for the need to step beyond the love we have committed to as friends and parents etc etc. Not that that love does not return but it must be suspended in order to ground oneself in Faith so that all interactions become first and foremost relationships between us and God, every human must become God in our eyes before any other role, or God must become the ground of all our relationships.

I continue to feel Kierkegaard's philosophy to be extremely beneficial for illuminating different experiences and expressions of love at different levels of human development. My own interest as of late and why I'm posting all of this is because I would like to try to write an article using Kierkegaard and French feminist philosopher Luce Irigiray as grounds a for new interpretation of feminist ethics, rooted in the command of Love. I think love is something that women especially struggle with at the level of relationships and how that Love translates and transforms at the level of Faith. Mainly I think this is because our personal relationships are so immediately present and are a big part of how we form our sense of identity. I realize this is not necessarily a new insight but I think the idea and discussion could be more thoroughly fleshed out. I also think it's harder for women to make the existential transition and ground ourselves in the Command of Love because it looks very different from how we normally conceive care and compassion.

I'm hoping to generate some conversation on this topic here on Zaadz by posting different ideas in relation to this academic paper I would like to write. I mainly want to see if there is any interest to explore integral ethics and feminist conceptions of love in order to expand the scope of our approach to the issue of Love. Kierkegaard himself seemed to believe that you could distinguish ones level of development based on the way that they Love. I realize this is somewhat simplistic in the face of an integral awareness that takes in the complexity of lines and types etc. but I still find the simple statement to carry a lot of beauty and truth and perhaps something I often feel left behind in many of the discussions I have with others about second tier.

My idea for the title is "A New Ethical Horizon for Feminism: Kierkegaard, Irigiray and the Command to Love."
I do hope this generates some discussion to keep me on this extra work as I also enter into full time courses next semester. If not... than it will also tell me that perhaps the topic is not grabbing people. Either way it will be useful information for me.

So here's the poem, again any reflections on what it brings up in relation to Love feel free to share.

Final Theophany

A gaping abyss once opened in my heart.

It illuminated my cushioned cave of pulsating heat
with every curvature designed to the shape of your feet.

A crafted Home for Love’s respite
that only Sappho came to tend at night.

She laid herself against the cliff of my deepest yearning
and blinded any hopes for the skills of wise discerning.

It was in this private dwelling place that I would often dream of you.
The intensity of your touch scorching the secrets of my skin
a caress that always left me undressed
to a rain of butterflies descending deep within.

I would wake to feel the pleasure
of my inability to grasp the tastes of eternity.

and I would wake to feel the sadness
of this love that longed to apprehend itself through the particulars of a face.

It was in my waking that I held the paradox of pain
an emptiness that always reached out to form in vain.
My heart was clinging now to wisps of air
that I had come to mistake for the weight of my despair.

It was this pain that was destined to enfold in on itself
before offering its cool breeze through the surrendered passageways of my broken heart.
It sang no homilie as it traveled through these sacred caverns and draped itself across the resting place I’d kept so long in secret
just for you.

It is this imprint of grief that always traces our radiance.

You see it was your soft curves that had marked the lost temples of my divine
the remembrance that had once flowed forth from you fingertips to mine.
This was my final Theophany.
A symphony so profound that it shattered sound
and rebuilt this temple on empty ground.

It was the dangerously close proximity I’d grown to Love’s possession
that had finally dissolved the walls between me and its forms of obsession.

So now I understand this gift of separation
this hallowing of heart that was my preparation
my purification.

Given new eyes no longer encased
I knew I would have to replace
the image of your face
with empty space.

And now I wake every morning only to Die
so that Love Alone might live.

A life already given,
a heart so full that it is forever poverty stricken.

-November 18 2006

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The Artist's Possession

http://vanessafisher.gaia.com — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:13:53 GMT

I was looking through some old files the other day and found this one page piece I'd written a little over a year ago. It was interesting to read it again as it came out during a time when my writing spirit had just begun to take its "possession" ... I was writing about four to five hours a day at the time on top of full time school.

I remember the pain that I felt in my need to unleash each moment through words and to find some way to personally engage with the divine yearning for aesthetic offering. And then I remember the pain of having to face my inevitable inadequacies in the face of the ineffable beauty that I was attempting to describe through language. I thought I would post it as I felt it spoke to the struggle and the beauty that all beings feel when they first become "posessed" by the call for artistic expression, whatever form that may take for each of us.

Wishing you all blessings for the holiday...

Holding close my struggle with words, the expansion of infinity continued to trace itself in circles across the water below my feet. The crisp autumn air grabbed hold of a slender yellow leaf that had released itself from overhead and was now making its way down towards me. The leaf lifted and swept back and forth like a swinging hammock tied between two giant pine trees, rocking playfully through the gentle forces of the wind’s morning current. After a time of enjoying its cradled swim through space the leaf’s movement came to a rest with its smooth landing on the comforting bed of the pond.

Instead of sinking to the bottom, the thick layer of tension covering the water’s surface cushioned and held the leaf afloat as the pond willingly received the force of the impact, diffusing the small shock of pressure through translucent circular rings that extended outward from beneath. The ripples caught the reflection of the sun in their movement outward and grew wider as they reached toward the pull of their attraction, drawn to touch themselves against the yellow and white flowers that lined the surrounding grass. Eventually the circles began to fade as their movement fell back into the deeper rhythm of the pond, leaving behind no trace of the exuberant ripples of life that had just recently danced upon it.

The leaves continued their play; autumn colors of rich red and vibrant orange followed the swirl of yellow and brown that had already begun their wild hammock swing through space. As they all made their way along the flowing streams of gravity the pond soon began to jump and dance with hundreds of expanding circles, reaching past and into one another and blending their momentary existence with the energy of the circles that surrounded them. They were all rings of unique intention, set to send their impact out as far reaching as possible, but never once making a lasting dent on the overall stillness of the pond.

I had to smile at the parallels of this ill-fated activity to my own writing process. I suppose I chose to write because I’d hoped to assert my own unique ripple on the pond even though I carried a continual awareness of the ultimate futility inherent in such an act. But there was an open invitation in my heart to the pain and struggle that accompanied my attempts at writing because I carried the deepest desire to have that one meaningful dance over the waters of infinity.

I look to the circles that enfold and fall all around me, the writers who have created tidal waves, and then look at myself, a ripple, a small vein running alongside. The waves no longer intimidate my writing spirit because in the end it all falls back to the same stillness, to the one rhythm of the pond. In the end there was only one writer reaching for a thousand pens and I can no longer seem to distinguish between the waves and the ripples.

I’d never chosen to write because I was naturally gifted, I wasn’t one of those genius kids who started writing their first prose at two. The truth was that I had been an extremely slow learner as a child and hadn’t even learned to read or write until I was in the fourth grade. My passion to write for hours on end had not been because I was a brilliant writer or even a good writer; rather, I continued to write ceaselessly in an attempt to wear myself out. I’d learned that if I did this enough my hand had the ability to fall into momentary currents of spontaneous beauty. When I realized my passion for life resided in those moments of pointless creativity I knew that I was cursed to endure endless hours of terrible writing just so I could watch for that one rich sentence that would flow out from beyond the will of my fingertips and effortlessly grace itself in dark ink across my page.

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