liminal_luke

I do the same thing sometimes -- write out something I think is funny and then scrap it for being in bad taste or potentially offensive or just too much in one way or another. (If that´s what you mean?) On the other hand, what´s a little ribbing among friends? I´ve got the feeling Earl Grey can take whatever we might throw at him and throw it back in style.

Yeah, I noticed the section of Earl Grey´s post that you quoted too. I wanted to quote it as well with some sort of witty commentary but your post, ilumairen, sums up my sentiments exactly. Consider your "oh my stars!" seconded.

Yikes! I really hope we can stop talking about this. Not because I favor one side over the other or want to impose some sort of authoritarian rule against good-intentioned conversation. I´m not sure Jim D. meant any harm starting this thread but politics is like an invasive species -- it takes hold and crowds out everything else. OK, I´ll walk away now before I contribute further to the problem.

You´ll never see me hanging out in the philosophical taoism threads. Not my thing. But I do know that one line about the Tao not being something you can name with language. I love that. I think all deep truths are beyond language. For me, the essence of truth is paradox, mystery, the unknowable. I bring this up because I find myself agreeing with two seemingly contrary positions at the same time. In a rational universe both ideas couldn´t be true at the same time -- so thank goodness this isn´t a rational universe! Let me say from the get-go that I totally agree with Taomeow that Everything´s behavior has been abusive. He was really awful in her thread. Worse, he was awful in the guise of being loving. It´s the guise of being loving part that really twists it up into something awful. I don´t know squat about Sumeria and ancient history but if there was some sort of primordial paradise that was lost with the dawning of civilization, I´ll bet the downfall started with pretend sweetness. There´s really nothing worse. So to Taomeow and Earl Grey and Nungali and myself I say this: You have every right to be pissed. You have every right to shout your dissatisfaction loud and clear. You care about this place and the time you put into your contributions and it sucks that someone is allowed to come and...bleep, bleep, bleep. And then there´s @Silent Thunder saying in his wise way...no one is capable of ruining my experience here but me. And as much as I don´t want to, I find myself agreeing with him too. Even though it seems to go against everything I just said. I can´t tell you which of these perspectives is more right. I like them both, which I suppose makes me either a namby pamby people pleaser or a sage. Please don´t bother telling me which.

Hi moment, I didn´t mean for my comment to be taken as approval (or denigration) of Kar3n´s moderation style. Rather, I was making the case for a stronger moderation presence. Decisions about banning and suspensions ought to be made, in my opinion, on the basis of established policies. The question at hand is this: has Everything (or anybody else) violated clearly written rules of conduct?

I understand the frustration some members feel toward Everything and have felt it myself but I wish this was a quieter discussion. Remember when Kar3n ruled the moderation scene? Many have questioned the justice of her rulings; few questioned the fact of her authoritative presence. Threads like this one didn`t happen because the matter was referred to Kar3n or some other member of the moderation team; people understood that action would be taken or it wouldn`t -- and that would be the end of it. In the wake of Sean`s triumphant return, things feel a bit murky. Is Sean acting as a one-man moderation team? Do all the old rules still apply or have they changed? We need a stronger sense of where we`re at. Otherwise aggrievved Bums understandably take their grievances to the public portions of the board rather than dealing with things behind closed doors. Having been the subject of group meetings myself (what the heck are we gonna do with Luke?) I do not wish that experience on anybody -- not even on Everything.

The first time I read this I thought you were literally telling everything (the sum total of the universe, not the individual Bum) to fuck off. I thought that was a very impressive display of owned hostility indeed.

Do you mean to imply that my own words seemingly decrying hostility are themselves hostile? Touche! If so, you are not entirely wrong. Try as we might to appear more together than we are, our flaws are usually more apparent to others than we think. This is true for me and true for others. From an enlightened perspective such flaws might not be perceived as flaws at all. Perhaps my hostility (and yours, I dare say) is part and parcel of a perfect universe? Oh my gosh, I think I´ve started to talk like you, Everything. If ya can´t beat ´em, join ´em.

I think there´s also the matter of interpersonal sensitivity, being aware of other people, their needs and desires, and contributing in a way that furthers conversation and harmony.

I have an off-topic observation: loving words can be put to hostile uses.

Ishtar?

Thanks for your heartfelt share, Jim D..

Silent Thunder, What you say here strikes me as true and from the heart, and yet it´s also something I struggle with. Gay men aren´t known for their steadfastly monogamous ways and my own life hasn´t strayed far from the culturally recognized pattern: I´ve had my share of sexual experiences in which bodies connected without a corresponding connection of psyches and souls. My personal experience is that this feels icky. I don´t want to, as you say, demonize and fetishize individual inclinations and expressions into marginalized unacceptableness. I really don´t. And yet it´s hard for me to imagine that the icky-ness around just-body sexuality that I´ve experienced isn´t somewhat generalizable to the larger population. Some of my close gay friends think I´m rife with sexual hangups because I express my ambivalence about the casual hookups they reportedly find so fulfilling. I´m famous in my small group for my "touch issues." If friends ask for my opinion, I¨ll say that we are all different and what feels bad to me might well be great for somebody else. In other words, I lie. Because privately I believe that just-body sex hurts people on a soul level, though perhaps not everyone is aware enough to feel the hurt. (If this sounds condescending and judgmental I think so too, which is why I´m not more open about this.) Really, I´m a mess of contradictions. A slut who is also a closet prude. (Actually, I think sluttiness and prudishness often come together in a single package, though that´s a topic for another thread. Or not.) It´s enough to make somebody want to "retain jing."

My admittedly unscholarly take on Daoism is that it´s all about becoming whole, gathering up the parts of ourselves that have been split off into the center. This kind of integration is my spiritual goal, anyway. No area of human life so illuminates the issue of integrity/fragmentation as sexuality. Perhaps this is why issues of sexuality (and particularly male sexuality) are a perrenial topic here -- much to the chagrin of many. I thought I had nothing to say on this topic but maybe I do. Maybe much of what has gone awry in modern "civilization" has it´s roots in fragmented eroticism.

I like Yi Jin Jing as taught online by Robert Peng.

Were you here when witch was an active poster? Now there was a woman who enjoyed her sexuality! Story goes that she attracted the wrath of Max Christianson (the man who brought us Kunlun) by astrally tempting him with her feminine wiles. Witch says she was just playing; reportedly, Max was not amused. She had a whole program for boosting orgasms, even wrote a book. If I remember correctly her program involved downing massive amounts of fish oil and chocolate. There`s no comparable woman Bum posting at the moment but, as the song goes, nobody knows what goes on behind closed doors.

The way I learned you do the liver sound and then smile into the liver. It doesn`t have to be a long smile, could be just a few seconds, could be longer if you like. Then you do another liver sound and smile into the liver -- three, six, or nine times. And so on with all the other organs. A lot of practices have a yin and a yang aspect. I see making the sound as the yang active portion of the practice; the inner smile afterwards is yin. So first you shake things up with the sound, then listen/see/feel into the effects of the yang sound with your receptive inner smile. The inner smile can also be a separate practice all on it`s own. Does that make sense?

Me too! Well, maybe not the riot grrls so much (who are they?) but all the rest of it. The optimist in me thinks those days are coming back.

Hi Almaxy, I don´t think you can go wrong with the inner smile and six healing sounds. I would practice all six of the sounds each time you practice The order of the organ sounds follows the creation cycle of chinese medicine with each phase of energy giving rise to the next. On the other hand, there´s nothing so wrong with focusing on a single sound if you feel so inspired. The inner smile is actually part of the healing sounds, at least the way I learned. First you do the sound and then you smile into the organ. Of course the inner smile can also be a stand alone practice and any time you want to do it is fine. You could even do mini inner smiles throughout the day on an as needed basis. Say whenever a fear or anxiety comes up, just smile gently into the feeling. Send yourself love and acceptance Best of luck, LL

This whole topic seems humorous to modern sensibilities. Well, at least my modern sensibilities. Dog pee? Really?? Perhaps the power of dog pee was discovered empirically: some enterprising Daoist scientist rubbed it in her eyes and noted the effects. I wonder what it´s like to live in a world where people who do such things are not regarded as weird. Might be nice.

Would that you might!

This thread has taken an unexpectedly grammatic-y turn. Some might find this pedantic, but after all the attacking and counterattacking, the humoring and ethical stance posing, well...I actually find it refreshing.

I´m thinking of dropping by. What kind of crumpets?

I appreciate @steve´s post about coming from the heart. Often I´ll weigh in about moderation/board issues -- I enjoy doing so -- and I can get into a very heady analytical mode. So this morning I asked myself what a response from the heart to the topic at hand would look like. @Apech provides a heartful jumping off place: we are all to a greater or lesser extent incomplete. So true! (At least on the level of relative reality I´m functioning at; things might well appear differently from an enlightened perspective.) Almost all of us are struggling with a sense of incompleteness. We are all hurt. I don´t think there´s any topic more likely to touch on and trigger our collective wounding than sex. As Voidisyinyang has pointed out, even recognized gurus have gotten tripped up over sexual issues. We´ve got lots of words to express judgment of other people´s sexual expression. I lack the courage to write a complete list here but here´s a few that jump to my mind: prude, perv, dirty old man, harlot, slut. These words can be used to draw tight circles around ourselves and the people who we are willing to open our hearts to. Which is not to say that all sexual expression is OK. It´s not. Many forms of sexual expression hurt other people and are not OK at all. But the people who express themselves in harmful sexual ways are, at the end of the proverbial day, people. Often they are people shockingly like ourselves. They are not monsters, not perverts. They do not come from another planet. And so I think a heartful approach to this topic is one that recognizes our common humanity. We´ve all been hurt and hurt has a way of engendering further reactivity and trauma. Opening in compassion, we will perhaps find a way forward.

@Apech Reading some of what you´ve written, I´ve revised my postion. You´re right, I was wrong -- let´s not ban Voidisyinyang. I´ll share some of my previous thinking. To my mind, a ban represented a lawful, principled alternative to skewering him with jokes. While I appreciate the value of humor, I don´t think anybody should be subjected to the kind of demeaning treatment Void has received here. I thought...how can people voice their displeasure with Void´s position and past behavior without resorting to endless insults and hit upon the idea of a ban. Upon further reflection though, I realize that a ban isn´t the right approach either.