Pleasure’s Shadow – Female and Male Circumcision

beyond reason

We are attracted to experiences that feel good and turn away from those that hurt, pleasure and pain. Both are driven by millions of years of natural intelligence.

Themes: 
abuse-neglect
circumcision
culture
pleasure
sensory deprivation
violence

DNA Remembers and Expects

dna remembers

“The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice.
The dullness is itself the consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making.”

Gabor Mate, MD, Author,
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction

More on Pleasure, Pain and the Developing Brain

The development of each new human being involves the complete evolutionary process of life on the planet. Native traditions recognize and honor this fact. Western civilization, driven by an anti-feminine passion for male intellect does not, thus the classic mind-body split. One self-world view nurtures the deep ecology that we are, the other attempts to dominate and control nature, including our own.

In each of us is the entire process of creation, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls Evolution’s End. Each stage of development anticipates the past and creates the necessary foundation for the next unknowable leap forward to unfold. The developing fetus in the liquid world of the womb, for example, has no use for lungs and yet creates lungs anticipating an oxygenated environment it ‘knows’ nothing about. The entire spectrum of human development implies this unfolding anticipation and unknowable expectation.

Themes: 
birth
bonding
brain
breastfeeding
culture
environment
play
pleasure
pregnancy

Patriotism Is An Act Of Violence

memorial day 2011

 

For my sons, Memorial Day 2011

God Bless America blared from the flag waving Harley as boy scouts, soon to be men, marched between white lines. Memorial Day, a national glance inward to mourn the lives mangled and lost ‘serving’ freedom and civic liberty. I almost wept, not out of patriotic duty and honor but for the deep feeling of shame and betrayal that this and past pageants endure.

While I honor the ultimate sacrifice brothers and sisters have made through the ages, some urgent, some heroic and necessary, so many lives, however, have been mangled for reasons – that had they known – they would have wept too.

Themes: 
culture
education
freedom
parenting
violence

Mentoring A Real Man In Today's World

Hi Lisa…
Interesting and common challenge.
Mentoring a real man in today's world.
 
Every young man is unique. One shoe definitely does not fit all.

I do not know of a rite of passage group that might fit the need.

What does it mean to be a man in today’s world?

I think we need to know where we are pointing before drawing a map.

What are the skills, wisdom and capacities needed to be such a thing?

The Way of the Superior Man : A Spiritual Guide to Mastering the Challenges of Women, Work, and Sexual Desire by David Didea
And
Fire in the Belly by Sam Keen
Would be good reading for you and your partner to help you formulate your own views.

How can you draw a map if you don’t know where you are going?

Themes: 
adolescence
culture
freedom
homeschooling
parenting

There Is No Business Like Show Business

It is amazing that it takes an assassination and senseless mass murder to rile tolerant people. What follows are excerpts from today’s Climate of Hate by New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman.

As David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, has put it, “Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we’re discovering we work for Fox.”

Please understand – if there wasn’t an egger market for violence it would not appear in the script. While in India I discovered that at least one rape in most films was mandatory. Joseph Chilton Pearce was to be a consultant on children’s TV programming until the sponsor insisted on a steady stream of violence or there would be no show! That’s show business.

Themes: 
culture
democracy
freedom
media
television-computers
violence

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