how to cultivate mindfulness of the media?

I’ve seen this several times. This is a common perception of what meditation is about: emptying the mind (cue Christian panic about the Devil entering). Certain 禅/Chán/Zen approaches do speak of the empty mind, but the guiding doctrine for this is not nothingness but the idea that form is not exclusive of emptiness and emptiness is not exclusive of form (色即是空，空即是色). Today the buzzword is mindfulness. Mindfulness requires and is nourished by concentration, but it is not reducible to concentration. It’s more like the appropriate use of concentration to ardently observe and clearly comprehend the conditionality of psychosomatic processes and the ethical implications of how we relate them in condition and effect. On its own, concentration can gather attention one pointedly as deep absorption. This can allow consciousness to be suffused with feelings of joy or bliss, or to abide in the seeming voidness of infinite space. When it is action-oriented it can allow for the performing of acts without the perception of a doer behind the deed, as was the objective in WWII Japanese Zen militarism, or more recently, the Norwegian mass murdering terrorist Anders Breivik’s claim that he found meditation helpful (this non-dualistic performativity also enacts selfless giving, merit-making, and service).

But to go with the tech-geek theme here, if it is neither about the interpretation or discursivity of representations nor the deleting of representational content, how might mindfulness of the media be cultivated in our digital environment framed and mirrored by screens gesturing touch gesturing screens gesturing touch…?

porn curiosity

Source: http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/dick-picky/

The follow excerpt from this article, ‘Dick Picky, in The New Inquiry articulates what would be a basic understanding for queer persons. It is also part of the reason why I am curious about porn. I would go one step further and say that it is not just about the gaze; the gaze is just one aspect, and not necessarily the deciding factor, of an embodied encounter involving multiple registers of visceral responses. Because even if one doesn’t touch oneself, there’s the quickening of the heart, flushing of the face, etc, and all these happen without one’s active control as such (Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography is an interesting book that tries to think beyond the notion of the gaze, if you are interested).

And if you are curious, yes, I do engage with porn, but much less frequently than the ‘average’ hetero-male porn user identified by statistical studies that pop up every now and then – because, look, it gets pretty fucking boring, doesn’t it?

If I am curious about porn and refuse to take any simplistic anti-porn stance, it is not because I think it can be ‘liberating’ (the sexual repression-liberation is precisely the trap to break away from) but because it is dangerous. As the following observes too, the productive lines of flight enabled by desire and pleasure cannot be contained within the paradigm of straight-cut, white abled body heteronormative desire and pleasure.

When you take an interest in porn produced for women, you start to notice a pattern. A couple of years ago, I watched keenly as a woman launched a porn magazine for a female audience. She argued that most women aren’t turned on by what little porn is available for us and that few people were designing porn with us specifically in mind. (A lot of porn “for women” is actually repurposed gay porn for men.) I was in such strong agreement with the magazine’s ethos that I subscribed from the very first issue. Despite my best efforts to love it, though, my enthusiasm waned: I noticed that the magazine was gradually replacing old stereotypes of what women like (beefcake, white Fabio types with raging horse dicks) with a slightly fresher set of fixed ideas about what women like (slim, white Jared Leto types with star tattoos and ponytails). Neither of those things were my thing, and that’s a problem that’s bound to crop up with any material that purports to cater to the female gaze. There is no one thing that “a female audience” likes looking at, and any attempt to cover a category as impossibly broad, multifaceted and diverse in desires as “women” will always fall short.

It’s transgressive to be aiming to please women in the first place, and women who like ponytailed Jared Letos are still woefully sidelined by mainstream porn companies. But even more woefully sidelined—so far sidelined they’re off the court—are women who are into other women, or men who aren’t white, or fat people, or women with dicks, or men without dicks. And even the smorgasbord of porn available for men who are turned on by black and fat and trans people is usually gross and fetishistic, treating an attraction to people in these groups as a guilty and deviant desire. So magazines for women who like ponytailed Jared Letos are great, but they’re not enough. If the female gaze ends up boiling down to a collection of stereotypes about what heterosexual cis white women like looking at, then it isn’t radical; it’s a hollow rhetorical device that promotes the desires of a narrow group of privileged women while purporting to include us all. So while we shouldn’t stop putting women in the position of gazers, what we really need to cultivate is a plurality of gazes.

embodied in custom

Tricycle reposted on Faecbook this old article from 2007, ‘Selective Wisdom’ by Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano, and highlighted the following:

That the Buddhist religion has survived so long in the world is a result not so much of the durability of manuscripts as of the power of ideas embodied in custom; and custom, for all our abundant sources of information, is what we lack and cannot in the long run do without.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long before a commentator came along to ridicule the idea of custom, or at least to insist that it is superfluous:

I almost responded but I shan’t feed the troll. Because of course it is always others, especially the non-West, who are steeped in superfluous custom. The West, on the other hand, has liberated itself from custom, and thus quite a few steps ahead in grasping the essence of the Buddha’s wisdom. But where would the Buddha’s wisdom be today if not for inheritors of custom who have passed down the Three Jewels from one generation to the other, and in recent times, passed it on to the West for safekeeping (not ownership)? Perhaps we should also pay attention to the other aspect of what is being said by Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano: ‘EMBODIED in custom.’ Now, that’s a tricky, messy affair isn’t it: fleshy (and thus sometimes uncomfortable or painful, as is the nature of the body) encounters and interactions with other bodies, objects, and spaces?