Besides more people being vaccinated, which is good, things are worse this year than last. Cases are skyrocketing. Hospitalizations are going up while hospital beds are full and there isn't room for other needy patients. Healthcare workers are burnt out. Meanwhile, the CDC has cut the number of days for sick people to quarantine in half, and our government has done little to curb this surge, relying on people to just magically stop it themselves.
While it would be nice if more people took this seriously and were more proactive, governments can't and shouldn't just rely on people hopefully doing what's needed to prevent global pandemics. Consistent and aggressive measures need to be taken. Clear and universal guidelines and mandates need to be made and communicated. And they have to be enforced. Otherwise, things will continue to spread and mutate and spread until our current vaccines are effectively useless. Even if politicians lose elections, they should be focused on preventing the spread and saving lives. And the CDC needs to do more than adjust guidelines to appease political-economic demands and expectations. People are more important than the economy. People are the economy and should be the priority, but it sure as hell feels like corporate bottom lines and the opinions of obstinate opponents of strict quarantine measures have more weight at the moment. And I'm really pissed and disappointed about that.
Things didn't have to get this bad. This was preventable. But this is what happens when people in positions of power and authority don't give a shit because doing what's needed to protect people and saves lives costs them approval points and money and they just don't care enough about people in comparison to our GDP and the profit margins of corporate donors to do the right thing. This is just like Don't Look Up. Just replace comet with COVID. People have to demand better. We need systemic solutions to systemic problems, not reliance on every individual to do what's needed without material help and government coordination.
Every infection and death is a weight on my heart, and an indictment of our society and the unwillingness of those in power to do everything they can to help prevent them. I can't express how furious this makes me or that they've been making the same mistakes for two years. Our government's obsession with the economy and the hyper-individualistic morality that dominates both our culture and politics are murderous. I don't know how I'm mentally going to survive another year of this.
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Friday, December 24, 2021
merry x-mas
While having its roots in, and combining various elements of, pagan winter solstice celebrations, Christmas traditionally commemorates the birth of Jesus. And the more I contemplate what it is I admire about the life of Jesus, the more I think it boils down to the overarching theme of restoring community and repairing the brokenness we find in ourselves and the world. Almost every aspect of his example and message seems to point to this singular goal.
From the more abstract idea of the universal Christ manifested in the universal church (Gal 3:28), to the greater part of his words and actions and those of his disciplines, everything ultimately points to this idea of healing and restoration out of a seemingly inexhaustible source of compassion and love that we're encouraged to develop and tap into. Loving others as ourselves (Mt 22:35-40). Do to others as you would have them do to you (Lk 6:31). Forgiving seventy-seven times (Mt 18:21-35). Giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothes to the naked, and care to those who are ill or imprisoned (Mt 25:31-46). Leveling inequality, both social (Mt 25:31-46) and economic (Mt 19:16-30). Bringing back into the community all those who were reviled or pushed to the margins of society by dominant power structures, from marginalized ethnic groups (Jn 4:4-42), lepers (Mt 8:1-4), sex workers (Lk 7:36-50), and tax collectors (Lk 15:1-7) to sinners (Mk 2:13-17), the poor, and those with disabilities (Lk 14:7-24). Throwing down rulers from their thrones and lifting up the lowly (Lk 1:46-55). Etc.
The story of Jesus is a meditation on saving the world from itself and its contradictions, hypocrisies, and modes of oppression—an intersectional meditation that's supposed to inspire hope, reflection, and action. What we're asked to repent of is our unskillful actions, the harm that we directly cause through greed, anger, and ignorance or indirectly support with our complacency and nonaction. And what we're encouraged to celebrate is our own potential for goodness and the example of those both real and mythical who show us the way to fulfill that goodness—the prophets who light the way with their words, deeds, and warnings, the shepherds who guide us and lead the way forward as we work together to restore our community and repair our relationships with ourselves and one another. And I think this idea is reflected most beautifully and succinctly in Teresa of Avila's poem:
The spirit of Christ is resurrected in these moments. Every time we hold out our hand to lift someone up. Every time we care for another person who's sick, in prison, or in mourning. Every time we give of ourselves when others are in need. Every time we choose to forgive rather than to condemn. Every time we cultivate compassion and understanding rather than be overcome by anger and fear. Every time we seek reconciliation over estrangement. Every time we embrace peace over violence. Every time we make someone else's suffering our own and seek to do what we can to ease it or shoulder it ourselves. Every time we challenge modes of harm and oppression. Every time we elect to side with the oppressed. Every time we choose to include others into our lives and welcome them into our communities.
That's the moral of this story to me and what we're truly called to honour and celebrate. God is love, and love exists in our hearts when we're in relationship with others.
From the more abstract idea of the universal Christ manifested in the universal church (Gal 3:28), to the greater part of his words and actions and those of his disciplines, everything ultimately points to this idea of healing and restoration out of a seemingly inexhaustible source of compassion and love that we're encouraged to develop and tap into. Loving others as ourselves (Mt 22:35-40). Do to others as you would have them do to you (Lk 6:31). Forgiving seventy-seven times (Mt 18:21-35). Giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, welcome to the stranger, clothes to the naked, and care to those who are ill or imprisoned (Mt 25:31-46). Leveling inequality, both social (Mt 25:31-46) and economic (Mt 19:16-30). Bringing back into the community all those who were reviled or pushed to the margins of society by dominant power structures, from marginalized ethnic groups (Jn 4:4-42), lepers (Mt 8:1-4), sex workers (Lk 7:36-50), and tax collectors (Lk 15:1-7) to sinners (Mk 2:13-17), the poor, and those with disabilities (Lk 14:7-24). Throwing down rulers from their thrones and lifting up the lowly (Lk 1:46-55). Etc.
The story of Jesus is a meditation on saving the world from itself and its contradictions, hypocrisies, and modes of oppression—an intersectional meditation that's supposed to inspire hope, reflection, and action. What we're asked to repent of is our unskillful actions, the harm that we directly cause through greed, anger, and ignorance or indirectly support with our complacency and nonaction. And what we're encouraged to celebrate is our own potential for goodness and the example of those both real and mythical who show us the way to fulfill that goodness—the prophets who light the way with their words, deeds, and warnings, the shepherds who guide us and lead the way forward as we work together to restore our community and repair our relationships with ourselves and one another. And I think this idea is reflected most beautifully and succinctly in Teresa of Avila's poem:
Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world.
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good.
Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
The spirit of Christ is resurrected in these moments. Every time we hold out our hand to lift someone up. Every time we care for another person who's sick, in prison, or in mourning. Every time we give of ourselves when others are in need. Every time we choose to forgive rather than to condemn. Every time we cultivate compassion and understanding rather than be overcome by anger and fear. Every time we seek reconciliation over estrangement. Every time we embrace peace over violence. Every time we make someone else's suffering our own and seek to do what we can to ease it or shoulder it ourselves. Every time we challenge modes of harm and oppression. Every time we elect to side with the oppressed. Every time we choose to include others into our lives and welcome them into our communities.
That's the moral of this story to me and what we're truly called to honour and celebrate. God is love, and love exists in our hearts when we're in relationship with others.
Friday, December 17, 2021
the sky is falling
I don't want to sound like some sort of alarmist scaremonger here, but COVID infection rates are on the rise, there's little-to-no help from the federal government and many local governments are still pretty free and loose with mask and vaccination mandates, a lot of people are out and acting like the pandemic is over, people are going to be travelling for the holidays, and new variants are popping up because not enough is being done to vaccinate the global population and enforce protective measures. In addition, there's a growing crisis in our healthcare system beyond the fact that it's expensive and inefficient compared to universal systems, and I'm afraid that it's close to its breaking point. There are shortages everywhere. MAs. RNs. PAs. Doctors. Phlebotomists. Lab techs. Respiratory therapists. Pharmacists. Pharmacy techs. Etc. Wait times for everything are long and getting longer. Places are short-staffed and people overworked. Many are retiring or quitting due the stress and lack of appropriate compensation. And there aren't nearly enough new people coming in to take their place. This may not affect young/healthy people as much in the short-term, but it's definitely affecting people with chronic medical conditions and those with acute needs. On top of that, many other sectors are having issues finding people to fill positions, often because many aren't willing to work for the amount employers are offering, and there are massive supply chain issues due to this, COVID, and a number of other factors. What we need right now are strong, universal mandates for masking and vaccinations, an overhaul of our healthcare system, and a resurgent labour movement to help support workers and make wages for all these jobs worth the labour we must put into them. These are all big projects, but they're necessary if we want to stop huge numbers of people from dying and things collapsing. Because they're very close to it. Everything is so interconnected and tenuous that we're looking at something truly terrifying happening in the near future. People are still dying at alarming rates from COVID. The economy isn't as stable as they make it sound, especially with the debt market the way it is combined with lack of government assistance, labour issues due to low wages and overwork, and supply chain issues. And seeing as how our government doesn't seem to care about anything besides the military and stock market, we're going to have to rely on ourselves and mutual aid to weather this storm. So support unions, striking workers, and neighbours. Don't cross picket lines. Try to be as safe and proactive as possible. Wear masks all the time and make sure you get vaccinated. And hope for a miracle.
Sunday, December 12, 2021
sunday thought
Sunday thought. 🤔
One of the biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism is the institution of private property rights. Essentially, socially-created wealth is communal property, but it's treated as if it's not. All of our labour that goes into the production and distribution of the goods and services that are necessary to make our social life and reproduction possible — and which includes expenditure of our energy, use of our creative mental energies, use of natural resources that are all of our inheritance, etc. — creates the extra wealth that finds its way into the pockets of owners and that we measure through concepts such as GDP. That wealth is socially created, and logically should be socially accessible. But under capitalism, it's not—it's primarily accessible to those few who own and control it.
This leads to inequality since much of what we call profit is, in actuality, uncompensated labour kept by capital. And rather than equitably distributing this surplus wealth and/or giving the majority of working people a say in how it's used, invested, etc., it's allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few who own and control, though various legal fictions with the threat of state violence backing them, the fruits of our collective labour and the use of our communal infrastructure and natural resources. To counteract this and help resolve the worst of the inequality this engenders, wealth needs to be socialized, workplaces need to be democratized, and the institution of private property needs to be replaced by an institution of common property relying on democratic mechanisms for support rather than state violence.
In a perfect world, right? 🤷♀️
One of the biggest contradictions inherent to capitalism is the institution of private property rights. Essentially, socially-created wealth is communal property, but it's treated as if it's not. All of our labour that goes into the production and distribution of the goods and services that are necessary to make our social life and reproduction possible — and which includes expenditure of our energy, use of our creative mental energies, use of natural resources that are all of our inheritance, etc. — creates the extra wealth that finds its way into the pockets of owners and that we measure through concepts such as GDP. That wealth is socially created, and logically should be socially accessible. But under capitalism, it's not—it's primarily accessible to those few who own and control it.
This leads to inequality since much of what we call profit is, in actuality, uncompensated labour kept by capital. And rather than equitably distributing this surplus wealth and/or giving the majority of working people a say in how it's used, invested, etc., it's allowed to accumulate in the hands of a few who own and control, though various legal fictions with the threat of state violence backing them, the fruits of our collective labour and the use of our communal infrastructure and natural resources. To counteract this and help resolve the worst of the inequality this engenders, wealth needs to be socialized, workplaces need to be democratized, and the institution of private property needs to be replaced by an institution of common property relying on democratic mechanisms for support rather than state violence.
In a perfect world, right? 🤷♀️
Sunday, November 7, 2021
workers of the world, unite!
From The Guardian:
America's strike wave is a rare – and beautiful – sight to behold
Individually, workers are at the mercy of employers' whims. But when they combined their voices and the withholding of their labour power, employers find themselves at their mercy. Workers are stronger together, and strikes are a means by which workers can win their demands, whether it's higher pay, better working conditions, improved benefits, etc.
And strikes can also be a means of further radicalizing workers and make them see not only their strength in solidarity, but their worth and the worth of their labour power, emboldening them to throw off the shackles of capital and reclaim the ownership of that labour power and its fruits. Demands could (and should) go beyond things like pay scales and include things like mechanisms of meaningful worker control, ownership, and decision-making. That's one of the reasons employers and the state expend so much time and effort trying to bust unions and crush strikes—their interference with the realization of profit (the lifeblood of capital) and their potential for worker empowerment.
As Luis Feliz Leon wrote earlier this year, "The language of a strike wave is the language of radical optimism in the face of untenable conditions." And the more support these striking workers have, from us and from the people we elect, and the more radical their leadership, the bigger their victories will be and the more they'll inspire others to do likewise. Small scale strikes, like those at individual workplaces, can win better wages and working conditions as many of these strike victories illustrate. But large scale strikes, such as general strikes, can win us even more, like a better socioeconomic system. Our solidarity is our greatest strength, and our labour power is our greatest weapon to effect change.
America's strike wave is a rare – and beautiful – sight to behold
Individually, workers are at the mercy of employers' whims. But when they combined their voices and the withholding of their labour power, employers find themselves at their mercy. Workers are stronger together, and strikes are a means by which workers can win their demands, whether it's higher pay, better working conditions, improved benefits, etc.
And strikes can also be a means of further radicalizing workers and make them see not only their strength in solidarity, but their worth and the worth of their labour power, emboldening them to throw off the shackles of capital and reclaim the ownership of that labour power and its fruits. Demands could (and should) go beyond things like pay scales and include things like mechanisms of meaningful worker control, ownership, and decision-making. That's one of the reasons employers and the state expend so much time and effort trying to bust unions and crush strikes—their interference with the realization of profit (the lifeblood of capital) and their potential for worker empowerment.
As Luis Feliz Leon wrote earlier this year, "The language of a strike wave is the language of radical optimism in the face of untenable conditions." And the more support these striking workers have, from us and from the people we elect, and the more radical their leadership, the bigger their victories will be and the more they'll inspire others to do likewise. Small scale strikes, like those at individual workplaces, can win better wages and working conditions as many of these strike victories illustrate. But large scale strikes, such as general strikes, can win us even more, like a better socioeconomic system. Our solidarity is our greatest strength, and our labour power is our greatest weapon to effect change.
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
i guess i'm a spinozist now?
I've found it difficult to put my spiritual/religious beliefs into words, often relying on the words of others to articulate them. Recently, for example, I've been delving into Spinoza's Ethics (especially through the Seekers of Unity series), and I find myself very drawn towards this work, as many others before me have been.
I'd definitely say that I'm a believer in panentheism, i.e., the idea that what we call God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. and the world are interrelated and that, ultimately, they are of the same substance. What we perceive to be distinctions between things like mind and body, for instance, are merely distinctions between modes, attributes, or appearances of phenomena that arise and cease through the complex causality that our individual minds conceptually perceive. We see the movement of the parts but not the stillness of the whole. But just as the individual waves of the ocean — due to things like the movements of winds and currents and the gravitational pull of the moon — appear to be unique and isolated phenomena distinct from each other and the world of the ocean they inhabit, they are in reality all of the same substance, i.e., water, out which they arise from, return to, and are but modes of being of. In much the same way, our individual selves appear to be unique and isolated phenomena distinct from each other and the world we inhabit. And while the water itself can be said to have inherent existence, needing nothing else to exist or be conceived, the modes or properties of the waves cannot and need the substance of water to exist and be perceived.
From the perspective of the human mind, the world appears as one thing and we as another, and so too does 'God' or that which transcends it all. We are in the world, and ultimate reality lies outside even that. This ultimate reality or what we call God is something that seems alien to us and beyond our grasp. However, in truth, we are more like the waves of the ocean, passively unaware of our essence and the substance that makes our modes of being possible, an essence which is empty of inherent existence yet the same essence as the world as well as that which both lies beyond it and underlies it, or maybe better, contains it all. From the Buddhist POV, I think this idea is mirrored in Nagarjuna's line, "Samsara does not have the slightest distinction from Nirvana. Nirvana does not have the slightest distinction from Samsara" (Verses from the Center, 25:19). Samsara represents the world and nirvana represents that which transcends the world and lies outside of ordinary human experience. And while from our human POV there are noticeable distinctions between samsara and nirvana, conditioned and unconditioned, world and God, mind and body, us and others, or anything else we can differentiate, from the ultimate POV there's not the slightest distinction between them; the distinctions are illusory.
Interestingly enough, Buddhism also defines 'the world' or 'the all' in terms of our individual, sensory experience of it, i.e., "the eye and forms, ear and sounds, nose and aromas, tongue and flavors, body and tactile sensations, intellect and ideas" (SN 35.23). What we know is constrained in many ways by the nature of the human mind and where/how consciousness 'lands and grows' due to where "there is passion, delight, and craving for the nutriment of consciousness" (SN 12.64). But these sensory experiences locked into the apprehension of the modes of expression, being, or appearance of phenomena are illusory and comparable to a glob of foam floating down the Ganges, a bubble, a mirage, a hollow banana tree, a magic trick—i.e., empty and void (SN 22.95). It's as if our minds are conditioned to grasp the attributes of the waves, whose individual existence are inconstant, imperfect, unsatisfactory, empty and void because they do not exist from their own side, and not the substance they are an attribute or mode of. Nevertheless, understanding the causality of the conditioned world can act as a cause for the human mind's understanding of the reality of things as they are, abusing us of our notions of separateness and inherent selfness, thereby touching the deathless element through ceasing the mental processes of craving and clinging and 'I-making and my-making.' Clinging to our identity as an independent wave is ultimately unsatisfactory and stressful because it traps us within the causal modality of arising and ceasing, birth and death; letting go of that clinging 'unbinds' one and opens them up to experiencing the waterness of the waves.
The true reality, on the other hand, is one that can be said to be unborn, unmade, unconditioned, existing from its own side, stable, eternal. Spinoza reasons that this reality is analogous to God or substance, "that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception" (Ethics, I, Def. III). In Buddhism, this is somewhat comparable to nirvana, the "unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated" (Ud 8:3). This reality or substance or whatever you want to call it is akin to the primordial water that's modified into all the various waves the we conceive of and that form the basis for our subject-object dualism and the illusion that we are one wave distinct from all the others and the ocean we all inhabit, when in fact everything that we see, hear, taste, touch, feel, and cognize is of the same substance or reality that comprises what sees, hears, tastes, touches, feels, and cognizes. Its true essence is eternal oneness, while its attributes or expressions are infinite.
The Buddha demonstrates that through the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment, the human mind can cognize nirvana, the unconditioned, the deathless element, etc. making the mind into the mind of enlightenment characterized by 'consciousness without feature.' Spinoza, on the other hand, argues that "the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God; thus when we say, that the human mind perceives this or that, we make the assertion, that God has this or that idea, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he is displayed through the nature of the human mind, or in so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind; and when we say that God has this or that idea, not only in so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, but also in so far as he, simultaneously with the human mind, has the further idea of another thing, we assert that the human mind perceives a thing in part or inadequately" (Ethics, II, Prop XI, Corollary) and that "the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are as necessarily true as the ideas of God" (Ethics, II, Prop. XLIII), suggesting a rational means of achieving the same type of knowledge: "The knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God which every idea involves is adequate and perfect. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God" (Ethics, II, Prop. XLVI&XLVII).
I realize that the analogy of waves and water breaks down in the sense that the wind and gravity which represent the causal conditions that shape the waves aren't themselves water, as well as the fact that the element of water is comprised of atoms that in turn are further divided, while these laws of nature and all the particles within it are but part of nature itself, whose reality is said to be singular, self-contained, one infinite substance. But I think it conveys the general idea clearly enough, especially if we compare the wind in the analogy to the passions of the mind fuelled by ignorance and greed, hatred, and delusion churning the water of the ocean into waves, and which when stilled give rise to an experience of peace and an ending to the wave's rounds of rebirth.
That leads me to also say that I'm a perennialist in the sense that I strongly believe this reality — whether we call it God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. — is a unity that paradoxically contains or is capable of infinite modes of expression, being, or appearance. And I see in each spiritual tradition a sincere search for and genuine understanding of this unity through a combination of imagination, reason, and intuition, with the first two arising from our dualistic awareness, and the latter achieved through nondual consciousness. The human mind, as a dependently arisen product of causes and conditions, is the experience of samsara; the mind of God is the experience of nirvana (the deathless element often alluded to in Buddhism = Spinoza' one eternal substance). And they are one. We are ultimately one with all of the things we seek to know, understand, and love. The human mind, in so far as it is characterized by its particular mode of being, much like the temporal wave in the ocean, is finite and limited, and our ignorance of things are as they are blocks the light of this understanding from illuminating our mind. But the human mind, in so far as it shares its substance with God, strives to understand itself and seek truth in its existence.
Our salvation or enlightenment is achieved through the process of overcoming our ignorance of reality by releasing our mind's grasping of the appearances and letting go of our self-identity view, thereby opening ourselves up to an intellectual understanding and/or love of God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. and realizing our own nature, or as Ruksana put it in The Circle, "real recognizing real." In Buddhism, one is encouraged to develop selflessness in regards to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and sensory consciousness in order to achieve this realization. Judaism has a similar concept in Kabbalah called bittul, 'selflessness' or 'self-negation.' In Christianity and Islam, one is encouraged to die to yourself or 'die before you die.' Another method involves love, effectively doing the same thing. In Buddhism, for instance, metta or loving-kindness can also be salvific. And this method seems even more predominant in Christianity. Jesus says to love God and love others as ourselves (Mt 22:37-39). And we are all interconnected, so loving others as ourselves is also loving ourselves. And John goes even further, saying God is love, and it's that act of unconditional love which becomes the positive form of selflessness that equally removes the mental passions and clinging that cloud our vision and prevent us from truly seeing things as they are. So ultimately we're left with God loving God, which in reality is just the act of loving itself—a singular, loving or unbound state of consciousness free from misperceptions and passions and sense of self.
While I've spent a lot more time with Buddhism, I've also found myself drawn strongly towards Christianity in recent years. In Christianity, I see the inheritor of the Greek Mystery cults and Platonic philosophy that, in the ancient world, used both ecstatic and rational means to point practitioners towards God, the One, the Form of the Good, Logos. And in Jesus, I see a person who had such mystical experiences and intuitive realizations, seeing himself in God and God in himself, unifying his individual mode of being with the substance underlying it, reflecting and pointing towards this constant and eternal state of consciousness. And just as John states that God is love and whoever is without love doesn't know God (John 4:7-8), Spinoza states that, "The intellectual love of the mind towards God is that very love of God whereby God loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explained through the essence of the human mind regarded under the form of eternity; in other words, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself" (Ethics, V, Prop XXXVI).
What I find eminently important in all of this, however, is how each of these traditions and ways of talking about experience and reality agree on the reality and power of interconnectedness. Whether in terms of causality (such as in the focus of actions and dependent co-arising in Buddhism) or the oneness of reality (such as in the relational nature of the trinity), each of these approaches make interconnectedness a centerpiece. As Clare Carlisle puts it in an article for the Guardian: "Spinoza's world view brings to the fore two features of life: dependence and connectedness. Each wave is dependent on the sea, and because it is part of the sea it is connected to every other wave. The movements of one wave will influence all the rest. Likewise, each being is dependent on God, and as a part of God it is connected to every other being. As we move about and act in the world, we affect others, and we are in turn affected by everything we come into contact with." And this understanding not only gives us insight into the nature of our world, but in how to live a life characterized by virtue, freedom, and happiness through our knowledge of causality and, ultimately, love of God. Because the more still we, as waves, can make ourselves, the closer we are able to come to experiencing our own waterness.
I'd definitely say that I'm a believer in panentheism, i.e., the idea that what we call God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. and the world are interrelated and that, ultimately, they are of the same substance. What we perceive to be distinctions between things like mind and body, for instance, are merely distinctions between modes, attributes, or appearances of phenomena that arise and cease through the complex causality that our individual minds conceptually perceive. We see the movement of the parts but not the stillness of the whole. But just as the individual waves of the ocean — due to things like the movements of winds and currents and the gravitational pull of the moon — appear to be unique and isolated phenomena distinct from each other and the world of the ocean they inhabit, they are in reality all of the same substance, i.e., water, out which they arise from, return to, and are but modes of being of. In much the same way, our individual selves appear to be unique and isolated phenomena distinct from each other and the world we inhabit. And while the water itself can be said to have inherent existence, needing nothing else to exist or be conceived, the modes or properties of the waves cannot and need the substance of water to exist and be perceived.
From the perspective of the human mind, the world appears as one thing and we as another, and so too does 'God' or that which transcends it all. We are in the world, and ultimate reality lies outside even that. This ultimate reality or what we call God is something that seems alien to us and beyond our grasp. However, in truth, we are more like the waves of the ocean, passively unaware of our essence and the substance that makes our modes of being possible, an essence which is empty of inherent existence yet the same essence as the world as well as that which both lies beyond it and underlies it, or maybe better, contains it all. From the Buddhist POV, I think this idea is mirrored in Nagarjuna's line, "Samsara does not have the slightest distinction from Nirvana. Nirvana does not have the slightest distinction from Samsara" (Verses from the Center, 25:19). Samsara represents the world and nirvana represents that which transcends the world and lies outside of ordinary human experience. And while from our human POV there are noticeable distinctions between samsara and nirvana, conditioned and unconditioned, world and God, mind and body, us and others, or anything else we can differentiate, from the ultimate POV there's not the slightest distinction between them; the distinctions are illusory.
Interestingly enough, Buddhism also defines 'the world' or 'the all' in terms of our individual, sensory experience of it, i.e., "the eye and forms, ear and sounds, nose and aromas, tongue and flavors, body and tactile sensations, intellect and ideas" (SN 35.23). What we know is constrained in many ways by the nature of the human mind and where/how consciousness 'lands and grows' due to where "there is passion, delight, and craving for the nutriment of consciousness" (SN 12.64). But these sensory experiences locked into the apprehension of the modes of expression, being, or appearance of phenomena are illusory and comparable to a glob of foam floating down the Ganges, a bubble, a mirage, a hollow banana tree, a magic trick—i.e., empty and void (SN 22.95). It's as if our minds are conditioned to grasp the attributes of the waves, whose individual existence are inconstant, imperfect, unsatisfactory, empty and void because they do not exist from their own side, and not the substance they are an attribute or mode of. Nevertheless, understanding the causality of the conditioned world can act as a cause for the human mind's understanding of the reality of things as they are, abusing us of our notions of separateness and inherent selfness, thereby touching the deathless element through ceasing the mental processes of craving and clinging and 'I-making and my-making.' Clinging to our identity as an independent wave is ultimately unsatisfactory and stressful because it traps us within the causal modality of arising and ceasing, birth and death; letting go of that clinging 'unbinds' one and opens them up to experiencing the waterness of the waves.
The true reality, on the other hand, is one that can be said to be unborn, unmade, unconditioned, existing from its own side, stable, eternal. Spinoza reasons that this reality is analogous to God or substance, "that which is in itself, and is conceived through itself: in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception" (Ethics, I, Def. III). In Buddhism, this is somewhat comparable to nirvana, the "unborn, unbecome, unmade, unfabricated" (Ud 8:3). This reality or substance or whatever you want to call it is akin to the primordial water that's modified into all the various waves the we conceive of and that form the basis for our subject-object dualism and the illusion that we are one wave distinct from all the others and the ocean we all inhabit, when in fact everything that we see, hear, taste, touch, feel, and cognize is of the same substance or reality that comprises what sees, hears, tastes, touches, feels, and cognizes. Its true essence is eternal oneness, while its attributes or expressions are infinite.
The Buddha demonstrates that through the practice of virtue, concentration, and discernment, the human mind can cognize nirvana, the unconditioned, the deathless element, etc. making the mind into the mind of enlightenment characterized by 'consciousness without feature.' Spinoza, on the other hand, argues that "the human mind is part of the infinite intellect of God; thus when we say, that the human mind perceives this or that, we make the assertion, that God has this or that idea, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he is displayed through the nature of the human mind, or in so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind; and when we say that God has this or that idea, not only in so far as he constitutes the essence of the human mind, but also in so far as he, simultaneously with the human mind, has the further idea of another thing, we assert that the human mind perceives a thing in part or inadequately" (Ethics, II, Prop XI, Corollary) and that "the clear and distinct ideas of the mind are as necessarily true as the ideas of God" (Ethics, II, Prop. XLIII), suggesting a rational means of achieving the same type of knowledge: "The knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God which every idea involves is adequate and perfect. The human mind has an adequate knowledge of the eternal and infinite essence of God" (Ethics, II, Prop. XLVI&XLVII).
I realize that the analogy of waves and water breaks down in the sense that the wind and gravity which represent the causal conditions that shape the waves aren't themselves water, as well as the fact that the element of water is comprised of atoms that in turn are further divided, while these laws of nature and all the particles within it are but part of nature itself, whose reality is said to be singular, self-contained, one infinite substance. But I think it conveys the general idea clearly enough, especially if we compare the wind in the analogy to the passions of the mind fuelled by ignorance and greed, hatred, and delusion churning the water of the ocean into waves, and which when stilled give rise to an experience of peace and an ending to the wave's rounds of rebirth.
That leads me to also say that I'm a perennialist in the sense that I strongly believe this reality — whether we call it God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. — is a unity that paradoxically contains or is capable of infinite modes of expression, being, or appearance. And I see in each spiritual tradition a sincere search for and genuine understanding of this unity through a combination of imagination, reason, and intuition, with the first two arising from our dualistic awareness, and the latter achieved through nondual consciousness. The human mind, as a dependently arisen product of causes and conditions, is the experience of samsara; the mind of God is the experience of nirvana (the deathless element often alluded to in Buddhism = Spinoza' one eternal substance). And they are one. We are ultimately one with all of the things we seek to know, understand, and love. The human mind, in so far as it is characterized by its particular mode of being, much like the temporal wave in the ocean, is finite and limited, and our ignorance of things are as they are blocks the light of this understanding from illuminating our mind. But the human mind, in so far as it shares its substance with God, strives to understand itself and seek truth in its existence.
Our salvation or enlightenment is achieved through the process of overcoming our ignorance of reality by releasing our mind's grasping of the appearances and letting go of our self-identity view, thereby opening ourselves up to an intellectual understanding and/or love of God, the One, Truth, Nature, Substance, Universe, Dhamma, Brahman, etc. and realizing our own nature, or as Ruksana put it in The Circle, "real recognizing real." In Buddhism, one is encouraged to develop selflessness in regards to the aggregates of form, feeling, perception, mental fabrications, and sensory consciousness in order to achieve this realization. Judaism has a similar concept in Kabbalah called bittul, 'selflessness' or 'self-negation.' In Christianity and Islam, one is encouraged to die to yourself or 'die before you die.' Another method involves love, effectively doing the same thing. In Buddhism, for instance, metta or loving-kindness can also be salvific. And this method seems even more predominant in Christianity. Jesus says to love God and love others as ourselves (Mt 22:37-39). And we are all interconnected, so loving others as ourselves is also loving ourselves. And John goes even further, saying God is love, and it's that act of unconditional love which becomes the positive form of selflessness that equally removes the mental passions and clinging that cloud our vision and prevent us from truly seeing things as they are. So ultimately we're left with God loving God, which in reality is just the act of loving itself—a singular, loving or unbound state of consciousness free from misperceptions and passions and sense of self.
While I've spent a lot more time with Buddhism, I've also found myself drawn strongly towards Christianity in recent years. In Christianity, I see the inheritor of the Greek Mystery cults and Platonic philosophy that, in the ancient world, used both ecstatic and rational means to point practitioners towards God, the One, the Form of the Good, Logos. And in Jesus, I see a person who had such mystical experiences and intuitive realizations, seeing himself in God and God in himself, unifying his individual mode of being with the substance underlying it, reflecting and pointing towards this constant and eternal state of consciousness. And just as John states that God is love and whoever is without love doesn't know God (John 4:7-8), Spinoza states that, "The intellectual love of the mind towards God is that very love of God whereby God loves himself, not in so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explained through the essence of the human mind regarded under the form of eternity; in other words, the intellectual love of the mind towards God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself" (Ethics, V, Prop XXXVI).
What I find eminently important in all of this, however, is how each of these traditions and ways of talking about experience and reality agree on the reality and power of interconnectedness. Whether in terms of causality (such as in the focus of actions and dependent co-arising in Buddhism) or the oneness of reality (such as in the relational nature of the trinity), each of these approaches make interconnectedness a centerpiece. As Clare Carlisle puts it in an article for the Guardian: "Spinoza's world view brings to the fore two features of life: dependence and connectedness. Each wave is dependent on the sea, and because it is part of the sea it is connected to every other wave. The movements of one wave will influence all the rest. Likewise, each being is dependent on God, and as a part of God it is connected to every other being. As we move about and act in the world, we affect others, and we are in turn affected by everything we come into contact with." And this understanding not only gives us insight into the nature of our world, but in how to live a life characterized by virtue, freedom, and happiness through our knowledge of causality and, ultimately, love of God. Because the more still we, as waves, can make ourselves, the closer we are able to come to experiencing our own waterness.
Saturday, August 21, 2021
onlyfans fucks sex workers
So the news that Onlyfans is banning pretty much all sexually explicit content just dropped recently. While I know it’s still difficult for many people to talk openly about sex and sex work despite sex being a natural part of life and omnipresent in TV, movies, literature, and pretty much everywhere else in life, this is definitely worth pointing out and condemning, the main reason being the impact on sex workers, who are often placed in extremely dangerous and exploitative situations due to a combination of prudish western/Judeo-Christian sexual mores and laws specifically targeting them criminally and censoring their content. The generally negative cultural attitude towards sex work, laws like SESTA/FOSTA, and moves like the banning of sexually-explicit content on sites like OnlyFans only serve to push those who choose sex work — whether out of desperation or because they enjoy it — to do so under more dangerous conditions, driving them to work with predatory people or companies who exploit them due to the difficulty of finding safe and legal venues for their work, and making it more difficult for them to earn a living while compelling them to take more risky chances.
In the past, primarily due to the criminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work, most sex workers were at the mercy of shady pimps and porn companies that didn't pay well and often abused the women and men who made living as sex workers. While not quite the level sex workers owning the means of production and distribution, platforms like Onlyfans help to give sex workers a central place where they can safely sell their content and profit off of their own labour, putting them more in control of that labour and the fruits of it. But after Onlyfans grew into the giant online presence that it's become by catering to sex workers and their clients/consumers, building itself and its capital off of the former's labour, the site is bending to the will of finance capital and suspending all sexually-explicit content and citing the prohibitive financial and labour cost of verifying all content, putting many of the people who made this site into a very difficult financial position. Most seem to be saying the same thing, that the news hit them out of the blue and many aren’t sure what they’re going to do. And this may be true for other similar sites who use payment processors such as Mastercard.
These companies, along with Christian groups and hacks like Nicholas Kristof, have used the very real evils of things like sex trafficking and lack of moderation of large porn sites regarding things like revenge porn, non-consensual sex or release of private pictures and videos, sexually explicit content of underage women and men, etc. to target all sex workers and the platforms they use to produce ethical porn that's legal and consensual and that they themselves control and profit from. While all labour is treated unfairly under capitalism, what has made sex work so exceptionally dangerous and seedy has been the unwillingness of western capitalism to fully recognize people's bodily autonomy and the legitimacy of sex work as real labour. And while it’s certainly a good idea to try and make sure the people producing this kind of content are of legal age and doing so of their own free will, the means by which they are trying to achieve this is directly harming the very people it's supposedly intended to protect.
Besides the generally impact to sex workers in terms of negatively affecting their financial stability and safety, what stands out to me is the role finance capital itself is playing in all of this. As one person put it on Twitter, "Wow, [Mastercard] is basically forcing policies onto OnlyFans? Isn't it crazy that finance capital creates an authoritative relationship that allows it to assert itself politically?" Money is social power. Money is political. And money controls our labour. Moreover, the government itself, which primarily looks out for the interests of the wealth and capital, seems to be on the side of companies like Mastercard, and has harmed sex workers with laws such as SESTA/FOSTA. SESTA/FOSTA was ostensibly meant to combat sex trafficking but has instead led to sex workers being forced into more dangerous places/situations to make a living. This move only serves to exacerbate that problem by removing a relatively safe space for sex workers to earn a living and stifling their ability to do things like advertise and legitimize their very real labour. If we, as a society, are going to continue to consume this kind of content and avail ourselves of these services, then we should treat sex work as real work, and stop forcing these women and men to labour in the shadows.
In the past, primarily due to the criminalization of prostitution and other forms of sex work, most sex workers were at the mercy of shady pimps and porn companies that didn't pay well and often abused the women and men who made living as sex workers. While not quite the level sex workers owning the means of production and distribution, platforms like Onlyfans help to give sex workers a central place where they can safely sell their content and profit off of their own labour, putting them more in control of that labour and the fruits of it. But after Onlyfans grew into the giant online presence that it's become by catering to sex workers and their clients/consumers, building itself and its capital off of the former's labour, the site is bending to the will of finance capital and suspending all sexually-explicit content and citing the prohibitive financial and labour cost of verifying all content, putting many of the people who made this site into a very difficult financial position. Most seem to be saying the same thing, that the news hit them out of the blue and many aren’t sure what they’re going to do. And this may be true for other similar sites who use payment processors such as Mastercard.
These companies, along with Christian groups and hacks like Nicholas Kristof, have used the very real evils of things like sex trafficking and lack of moderation of large porn sites regarding things like revenge porn, non-consensual sex or release of private pictures and videos, sexually explicit content of underage women and men, etc. to target all sex workers and the platforms they use to produce ethical porn that's legal and consensual and that they themselves control and profit from. While all labour is treated unfairly under capitalism, what has made sex work so exceptionally dangerous and seedy has been the unwillingness of western capitalism to fully recognize people's bodily autonomy and the legitimacy of sex work as real labour. And while it’s certainly a good idea to try and make sure the people producing this kind of content are of legal age and doing so of their own free will, the means by which they are trying to achieve this is directly harming the very people it's supposedly intended to protect.
Besides the generally impact to sex workers in terms of negatively affecting their financial stability and safety, what stands out to me is the role finance capital itself is playing in all of this. As one person put it on Twitter, "Wow, [Mastercard] is basically forcing policies onto OnlyFans? Isn't it crazy that finance capital creates an authoritative relationship that allows it to assert itself politically?" Money is social power. Money is political. And money controls our labour. Moreover, the government itself, which primarily looks out for the interests of the wealth and capital, seems to be on the side of companies like Mastercard, and has harmed sex workers with laws such as SESTA/FOSTA. SESTA/FOSTA was ostensibly meant to combat sex trafficking but has instead led to sex workers being forced into more dangerous places/situations to make a living. This move only serves to exacerbate that problem by removing a relatively safe space for sex workers to earn a living and stifling their ability to do things like advertise and legitimize their very real labour. If we, as a society, are going to continue to consume this kind of content and avail ourselves of these services, then we should treat sex work as real work, and stop forcing these women and men to labour in the shadows.
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