Karma is "personality"---what is yours?
#SixWordSunday
Monday
Sunday
Thursday
"Commodification of the Spiritual Self"
Spirituality: The New Age consumer’s commodity, is a marketer’s dream. Spirituality costs nothing; it quickly attracts paying customers; a large percentage of the population wants it and it is a legislation-resistant product that no one has to create. What’s even more interesting is that just about anything can be marketed as something spiritual and New Age. Want a new car? How about God’s love? Why just settle for the American dream when you can have wholeness; get skinny and beautiful; become spiritually powerful; attain physical immortality; as well as emotional and mental healing—all for a substantial fee?
Someone started taking note of this and businesses started seeing the value of the spirituality market in the 1960’s—The country was in the throes of civil rights movements and Vietnam was raging on: There was a genuine need for consciousness; a genuine search for social changes and desire for spiritual enlightenment’s true benefits. Some truly found those benefits and they continue to uplift us all: Take for example how we've learned to advocate for the treatment of children as people; to challenge the rote-learning style of education here in the U.S. and its hegemonic ideologies and to honor the Divine in and around us all. Think about it: The entire world has benefitted from the promotion of Spirituality in its pure forms: Which are and always will be free of cost: Gautama Buddha did not outline a cost for something freely given, so how can we?
Sadly, it happens fairly easily; the "Spiritual New Age" movement and its authenticity were compromised with its increasing popularity. The genuine spiritual needs of the U.S. were exploited by exclusive retreats and package deals sold by gurus such as Maraheshi and Osho and other alleged “Satgurus”: All modules of Transcendental meditation still cost in the thousands to this day. The desire for spiritual community was also perverted with highly expensive cults and subservient ashrams who take every cent of its monastic's money upon their official joining. That’s not spirituality: That’s someone taking all your money.
Sadly, people who were concerned with relationship—concerned with their spiritual dealings with many communities-- were lost to the wayside in iconism and superficial “fast-fixes” that promised to appropriate the desired traits of commodified spirituality into their own lives. Consumerism and visual culture together have commodified the Spiritual Self in the western world.
In order to create a space for the successful guru—value had to be placed on the images that code what a guru is and most importantly, what s/he looks like. In having pondered deeply the human condition and the root of suffering—the buddha’s teachings were mainly aniconic—as were his followers until 1st Century A.D. This stressed the understanding and experiencing of the true benefits of spirituality. In closing off the mind’s need to see and judge, the Absolutes are revealed through pure experience and self-reliance; through maturing in the understanding of universality and ethics. In the pre-iconic history of Buddhism, no one was concerned with worshipping Gautama Buddha or what he looked like—they were concerned with becoming Buddhas themselves. They knew this to be a life-long journey— not something that could happen in a weekend or as a result of popular endorsements or just acting a certain way to attract blind followers.
Generally speaking, looking at physical representations of Buddha are distracting in that it would rely on the cultural codes of the viewer to mediate the content. There are some Absolutes in the representations that are of great importance: The main one being that Buddha’s eyes are half-closed, in a fixed, yet non-fixed gaze. This stresses the importance of how one explores this life in the physical body: Looking inward and outward, constantly, mindfully and contemplatively. Now, understanding this, would the imagery make sense if Buddha’s, or another enlightened person’s gaze were different and active? The dynamics are different when the subject is engaging the viewer; there is an active relationship based on pure or derived forms of intuition. The early representations of Buddha convey a pure understanding of what Spirituality is: He is not engaged in an active relationship with any viewer. The form was directly based on the characteristics found in the Pali Canon, which outline the Path and makes Buddhahood a possibility for everyone.
Now, in contrast, the image of Osho, a popular guru from the 1960’s, is attacking the viewer’s derived forms of thought and perception. His styled gaze evokes the concepts associated with successfully marketing yourself as a guru: It is policing and inspecting; as well as confronting. This was intentional: It is an identity-forming stare. Such a gaze seems to demand a psychotransfer of desirable qualities to him as a teacher; to recognize him as someone who is from some lineage; as someone who wants a strong relationship with you, as a subservient student. You do not feel comfortable in questioning his position in this picture, and this transfers to “real life” as well: That being the desired effect in someone lacking perceptual acquity.
Satyam Shivam Sundaram
http://www.rkhawaii.org/archivedpres/importanceofhalfclosedeyes.htm
www.dhamma.org
http://www.energygrid.com/spirit/2009/10ap-spiritualmarketing.html
Demonizing the "Other": "Mixed-Bloods and Half-Bloods", Smallwood and this "Racial Mixing" thing...
“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned...
Everything is war. Me say war.
That until the're no longer 1st class and 2nd class citizens of any nation...
Until the color of a man's skin is of
no more significa...nce than the color of his eyes, me say war. That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race me say war!”
------------------------
I thought it fitting to open this response with those lyrics. Very true, are they not? They were written almost 40 years ago, and sadly, they still describe our current sociopolitical affairs. Collectively here in the U.S., we are blinded by our indifference and obsession with war and politics. We simply cannot conceive another way to live-- because the current one is so hegemonic. It seems that U.S. can ONLY obtain resources by creating wars; ONLY obtain property by land-grabbing; ONLY have national and/or ethnic pride at the degradation of others; ONLY allow assimilation and not integration of other peoples.
We have been "taught" that this is "just the way things are" when, in actuality, we have been racially mixing since modern man stepped in the evolutionary timeline.
The interesting thing is that we are still on a Neo-Malthusian course of action in attempting to "preserve the superior race" and exterminate the "undesirables". We are doing it so much and creating tons of phenomena as a result of this biopolitics until we have a whole academic area of study dedicated to this: Critical Race Theory.
We are also mixing in many of the same ways still today: Expatriates living and working internationally; people immigrating; people emigrating; women being taken for harems and my favorite (as a feminist): sex-trafficking: all point to us being just as keen on mixing as we were centuries ago. These complicated scenarios continually create and perpetuate conflicts about "mixed-race" identity. Thus, it seems that "racial mixing" and the resultant problematics have all been the norm and not the novelty, as Smallwood brilliantly points out in his essay.
North Carolina A&T profile for Dr. SmallwoodThe Hapa Project - Kip Fullbeck
Asian American Literature Review's Mixed Race Project
Wednesday
Chloie Jonsson; Reebok CrossFit; Transgender Rights; Transphobia... and a Partridge in a pear tree
In March 2014, Chloie Jonsson, a transgender personal trainer, filed a $2.5 million suit against Rebox CrossFit because she was barred from competing in the women's division for the upcoming CrossFit games. The company's counsel responded to her application stating that:
“...We have simply ruled that based upon [Jonnson] being born as a male, she will need to compete in the Men’s Division. The fundamental, ineluctable fact is that a male competitor who has a sex reassignment procedure still has a genetic makeup that confers a physical and physiological advantage over women.”
Here, we see that CrossFit's counsel is saying that Jonsson's alleged X and Y chromosomes makes her a man-- no matter the interventions she sought out and went through-- no matter who she is today, she will only be “corrected” by anyone who “really knows” what defines “men and women”. The interesting thing is how we, as human beings, define “man and woman” in many contradictory ways, yet CrossFit tried to choose what they felt was most concrete about being a man in an attempt to marginalize Jonsson. Those with some background in genetics and biology know that there is not just one biological thing that universally defines what it means to be a man or woman or transperson. I am guessing they never head of people with more than two chromosomes, either-- it's termed “Mosaicism” in genetics and I would think that would be something CrossFit would concern themselves with seeing as they are so set on universally determining who is male and female in these competitions. Although the company's counsel goes on to claim that:
“Our decision has nothing to do with ‘ignorance’ or being bigots — it has to do with a very real understanding of the human genome, of fundamental biology, that you are either intentionally ignoring or missed in high school.”
It actually is based on their collective ignorance of transphobia. They said they would “create another category for transpeople if more transpeople started turning out to compete”. What's wrong here? Why is essentializing Chloie's gender at birth overshadowing the complexity of who she is today?
There is a genetic essentiality in the company's reply; here we see them claim to know of a “hidden reality or truth” of sex in the genes. In defining a “man” as “one possessing an X and Y chromosome, they are thus claiming to prevent a genetic male from infiltrating a female space. It is as if they are saying, “We are just letting the world-- and you-- know that you are actually a man.” CrossFit felt that it was revealing Jonsson's “true sex to himself as an immoral, unnatural and confused man."
This seemingly precultural, "natural attitude" about sex pervades CrossFit's counsel; it is as if someone who is born into and maintains a certain sex, is privileged in some way to judge the sex and gender presentation of someone who is not born into either category. This attitude also claims that whatever sex we are born into is fixed as either male of female. Such a binary view of sex and gender fails to take into account the actual complexities of sex and sex determination.
The “natural attitude” mentioned above was campaigned by Harold Garfinkel, a renowned sociologist and ethnomethodologist. In claiming that there is some natural attitude about what bodies should look like and how we learn what “strangeness” looks like when compared to this seemingly inherent sense of “naturalness”. In saying that something is unnatural, a person is claiming that the subject is not real, but fake. The “real men and women” in the counsel at CrossFit denied the narrative of Chloie Jonsson and given her one that they feel to be a better fit. She can never be a “real” woman: only a fake one. She can only be a man dressed up as a woman, according to CrossFit's counsel. The ironic thing is their ignorance on the difference between a “cross-dresser” and a transwoman, despite their claim to be quite learned on said topic.
In an essay titled, Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion, Dr Talia- Mae Bettcher confronts this supposed heteronormative right to abuse and the sense of “moral indignation toward transpeople”. She, as a transwoman, asks us to search ourselves, in light of a person's right to self-determination, and answer whether we truly can continue to oppress and sexualize transpeople through exposure and identity reinforcement. I mean, think about it-- this “natural attitude” has furthered sexist; transphobic; structurally violent; gender-based oppression against transwomen, and thus furthering the oppression of all women.
Because CrossFit has not been able to see Chloie Jonsson as she really is; they more than likely will serve as an example of what happens when you focus on marginalizing people because they are different. CrossFit's counsel has let its ignorance on transphobia, sexism and transgender people overshadow the basic fact: Chloie Jonsson is just a woman who wants to compete in the CrossFit games. She was a boy who grew up to be a woman-- it happens-- get over it.
They are missing the fact that she is an amazing athlete and trainer who has furthered the CrossFit cult following. They are missing the fact that she is not a man.
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