Bootleg Dharma

Dance, Devotion & Dharmapala Vows; Nonbinary/Trans/Queer; Buddhist Futurism

[bootlegdharma]

Navigating Flirtations and Loneliness without Facebook

Around the Philz Coffee in Rockridge, I encountered a cute beary guy ... I think we were flirting with each other, but it is not entirely clear to me now, except in retrospect as the “Yes” ... 

...it is strange to lean into this “yes”, only insofar as I am allowing a sense of my own emerging embodiment, having played with Yumi + (bootlegged) Vajrayana envisionment, to really inhabit the sensitivity to attractions, that is as much about my own libidinal stuff as it is about an energetic attunement to the principle of magnetism, in that intuitive witchey sense, between peoples, between ideas, ideologies, in terms of crowds and spaces, etc. etc.

...and also between me and this cute beary man in the red shirt.

The sense in my self also as I was sensitive to my own gender presentation (non-binary femme, but visibly ‘male’, and potentially just ‘pretty-boy’-ish or flamboyant-pretty?)... 

In allowing for this sensitivity, which is also non-binary with my own attraction to this man, I could feel the dance between us, and not rush to escape it with facebook, as I might ordinarily once have, where there is more clear dopaminergic feedback about whether one’s person/presence is being seen, noted, or affirmed, and where the affect of being in dialogical connection is immediately more clear (e.g. when people quite quickly respond to my posts with “Likes” and “Comments”, etc.)

So, in the meanwhile... I am learning new social skills (learning how atrophied mine are, as both a generational thing, as well as a post-colonising habit, and one that has been conditioned by the disembodied poetics of online socialising through Facebook (which breeds a subtle-body, for me and over the long term, of angst-insecurity, even as it also provides tentative short-term respite from the very same...)

***

Before I even got to Philz, I had just finished a nap at my brother’s place, and then gone out for a walk to feel the body as a Body in Time/Space, and was noting the immensity of Loneliness as an affect... I called my friend Greg and spoke to him on the phone, and realised more and more how much I need, sometimes, to just pick up and call, and not rely on Facebook as my source of social life, given that it is mostly nutritionally vacuous sugared candy-cone of communal inter-activity.

By asking myself about the quality of the life I’ve been living, assessing the overall sense of purpose, depth, meaningness, and compassionate contribution of this life as it has involved and been significantly made/re-made via social media... It becomes ever clearer to me how Facebook has played a role in becoming increasingly lazy about friendship... substituting interactive one-on-one, non-performative vocal contact with distracted insta-messaged/newsfed dilutions...

...I am learning to pick up the phone again.

This loneliness, after all, was no longer anything I could immediately scratch away with the affirmations of Facebook. This is again, not to deny the value of the scratch (nor indeed am I making any comment about whether some scratched may well lead to longer term relief...), only to affirm the value of also attending directly to bodies-in-space, and the whole mandala of my immediate environs as also containing its implicit network-opportunities, through perhaps my ability, maybe, next time, to approach someone and just say more directly,

“Hello... You look like someone I’d like to say hello to.”

or, as my brother’s partner also put it, “Hello... You look like someone I’ve just said hello to.”

That future could’ve-been me is so cute.

[bootlegdharma]

Vanity // Self-Esteem ... ? Bothness

When I started my Instagram, the initial rush of the dopaminergic response became a full-blown addiction to being seen, as beautiful, as pretty, sexy,  which transitioned to wanting to be understood or perhaps this vacillating with being considered thoughtfully obscure, etc. etc. None of this is inherently pathological, though none of their pleasures are inherently lasting either... So a question that has arisen through the longitudinal excavation of my fluctuating intentions becomes ... Why would I have done these? All these Selfies of NoSelfies, all of them professing a passion for Dharma and so on and so forth. All of these stated motivations remain true; 

I return, prodigally, to writing here in this blog, renamed to match my Instagram account, primarily to actually take stock of how attention is instrumentalised, how social media technologies and platforms have become so much more sophisticated over time to really rope our attention and reward us in different ways, both in the reductionist biochemical/neurological sense, but then also in the lingual-affective, and yes, also spiritual sense...

***

So I compare now the differences in my Facebook and Instagram use, and I also want to note how these have necessarily impacted on my own self-concept, not to mention my developing concept of ‘self-concept’.

That is, given the bizarre gender-shifts and magical awakenings of the past year, especially because of experiments in gender, that were significantly engendered by the Gestalt of media consumption and cultural-informational-exchange as filtered through and structured by these social media platforms, to completely undo any sense of coherent singular egoic identity entirely... 

I find that while I may cognitively apprehend (via Buddhist meditation + study) the ‘notion’ of anatman (No Self), there is no sense that this was ever inhabited as a bodily truth until the manifest karmic neuroses of repressed subtle-body energies were allowed to finally burst forth, make themselves known as transmissions from some underlying force of empowered ‘nature’...

...constructing itself as ready for its own release, as a ‘transmission’, as fecund melody, singing herself “Yumi”.

***

I find myself now entirely ‘re-placed’ by an ecology of relations that make up (that have always made up!) the sense of who I ‘am’, and hence, realising also now that I would like to become far more judicious about this ecology directly and what it is most tethered to or conditioned by, as the font of its relational directive ...

... Less pretentiously put: I am interested in becoming more discerning about who my friends are, and how I make friends.

This is not at all an indictment on anybody whom I would have been friends with on Facebook before I deleted it (but with whom I may not have made any especial effort since to keep in touch, nor vice versa); Rather, I am noting already that the Body-Itself is a Social-Animal; and there is a sense that on the physiological level, it is peculiar to have an almost purely cognitive sense of the social without the physiological labours that would ordinarily be involved in connecting to such multi-personal opinions, perspectives etc. etc. 

i.e. “In the past,” (i.e. prior to the current blitz of using digitised peer-to-peer social media technologies), there is no sense that I could have ever engendered this kind of ‘awakening’ when the body itself could not possibly have allowed itself to be so psycho-culturally re-sutured from its cognitive exposure to so many others (whose lingual-bodies contact mine in image and text, forever shaping one another’s and potentiating peculiar outcomes...), and quite so quickly...

***

NoSelfies and Narcissism

At the moment, I am not afraid of such an ecological undoing and re-awakening. If anything, I must remain only totally subservient to the ground of gratitude that illuminates the sense of shamanic exposure to such diversity of spiritual messages (in the most crass sense of the meaning of this: the ways I have been influenced by all of y’all, throughout the ocean of inter-activities and communications, organising, etc.) that happened while I was on Facebook. 

At the same time, I am now wary of being any further seduced by the promises of remaining on platforms whose longer term outcomes have entailed my becoming molded by the neoliberal business prerogatives of these Silicon Valley algorithms, especially those that have, in their extreme libertarian form, have led to a significant under-mining of some of the fabric of that which would once have allowed for some modicum of ‘stability’ in my mental health. 

I cannot unsee what I have seen, cannot unknow what I now know.

And at the same time, I can refuse further influence, for a moment at least, for as long as I need or want, indefinitely, if I so choose, if only because now the sense of the need is of Consolidation, not fragmentation. 

Integration, not Dissociation, though with all of the (still-emerging) insights of important and necessary Differentiation (of my gendered / sexed subjectivities, about various forms of dysphorias that are gendered because of post-colonial acculturations into neither male-nor-female lingual forms that could match the gait of this body and how it wants to participate in collective meaning-making... Enabling self-actualisation as ‘no-self’-actualisation, so to speak...)

***

Now is the NextNess

[bootlegdharma]

I Quit Facebook Last Night

...and this was my last post * Mulling on Existing Social Media re: Deleting All Existing Social Media * Around this half-past mark of 2018,as the thesis, half-done, rests, digitised, awaiting invocation, revisitation, and submission from an already over-done, anxiously under-rested analog laughing stock of a 'self' (hi! <--- that's me), I sit here in an Oakland cafe assessing my use of social media, particularly Facebook and Instagram. I reflect here not so much on 'social media' per se, whose positive contributions to my person are undeniable --> the sense of opening up intellectual and existential possibilities, remaining in connection with people from around the world, especially in the 'marginal' aspects of me (e.g. meeting / streamlining connections with other racialised queer ppl), becoming awe-struck and inspired by myriad forms of creative production, new ways of being and thinking, as shared across platforms and networks... So, to be clear: I am not here to contest the fact of the positive contributions to the human condition that have been engendered by the availability of social media. However, I am becoming increasingly sceptical about whether any 'goodness' of social media can continue in their current incarnations, rooted as existing platforms are on algorithmic logics that sell our personal information to highest bidders who are never vetted for their legitimacy of business practice (and indeed, have turned out to include both shady corporate and local and foreign authoritarian state actors who absolutely do NOT have our best interests at heart), and to deliver bursts of dopamine in accordance with the lowest common denominator forms of behavioural habits that facilitate the wresting away of the seemingly ever-scarce resource of our personal and collective Attention. This means: It is outrageous lies that will fill our newsfeeds more than well-considered, gently, compassionately and persuasively-argued truths.This includes the lies, the half-truths, and the 'true facts' still dusted with subterranean intentions, of our own and of the folks on 'our side'.It is fearful reactivity and numbingly de-politicising libertine entertainments that will take the place of considered, rested contemplation, as the normalised habits-of-transmission. Genuine Dialogue, in such a form, is impossible. This means that, late at night, already under-slept and over-worked, the mind is still locked on flickering screens arguing with strangers in contexts not our own, losing the scope of life in 'real-time' and 'real-space', forgetting the indigeneity of our season and place, becoming lost in worlds of paranoid excitation. This means that those especially intelligent among us are not exempt, and perhaps are especially duped by the falsehoods that stroke our engorged egos of our genuine intelligence with the notions that we are somehow 'above' these algorithmic influences; The battles WE are fighting online are more important, more worth self-justifying, more worth keeping online to perpetuate in wild indulgence, the heroism of OUR endeavours transcends the matrix of limbic influence, we UNIQUELY are impervious to the insidious scale of the monopolistic, neoliberal, capitalist business logics of the private and corporate providers of the very platforms which are repository for our rants and reposts. ... judiciously data-mined to maximise the cycle of our ongoing isolation and disaffection. * Again: I do not deny the value of social media, as a technology, and as a principle tool in potentiating the radically positive transformation of human inter-activity. At the same time, I am increasingly cynical about whether the existing platforms are worth continuing any ongoing investment in. I particularly mean Facebook and Instagram, which I use and have used voraciously. Alongside the genuine connections I have made with people, the exposure to new ideas, etc. I ask myself:

1. Has social media, under current corporate management, made me, on aggregate, more or less lonely? 

2. Has it made me more or less accountable for my actions?

3. Has it deepened my connection to land and place, or has it deluded with intoxicating fantasies of escape?

Let me be blunt:

4. Are we really friends? 

** Is there a mercenary bent to the scale and direction of our networking on here, facilitating the transition from sacred moments of impermanent intimacies with strangers-cum-friends (in person) to the neoliberal whims of subjecting all my relations to my lusts for political cred, capitalistic opportunism, the desperations of momentary relief from bodily loneliness, collecting attentional bits and bytes as a database of networked-relations, forming echo chambers that make the slightest disagreements to any emphatically professed polemic intolerable, sensitised to the point where irrelevant paper cuts feel like intolerably gaping wounds? I announce nothing here, nothing to be announced. I am disinterested in defensive grasping for legitimations of my or your online presence, nor am I expecting to be relieved at any silence in the face of this investigation. Ego is ego is ego: I will of course experience the dopamine rush of the "Like" and the "Share", and I will also now reflect that I am not 'above' the psycho-physio-political implications of such a rush --> That which means that I am already (being) primed to remain (and remain biased in remaining) on this platform. There are many ways that addicts will rush to defend their addictions. The best hope for rehabilitation must involve neither denying the valid facts of the Good Things that have been genuinely engendered by the substance in question, nor denying the equally valid facts of the implications of addiction per se: On aggregate, I must confess that this addict's experience is leading me ever-increasingly toward the conclusion that, however surrounded by a chorus of comrades and increasingly self-assured in my own capacity for political popularity in the transient ego-dopaminergic rewards of recognition, how few friends I truly actually have left... In the lust to live life molded into the form of Perpetual Broadcaster in a marketplace of endless, cowardly argumentations, in which listening has been replaced by the assertions of competitive victimhood, in which yearning to heal and understand have been supplanted by addictive woundedness across political spectra, in which the insidious delusions of political arrogance damns only infinite *others* to the wrong side of history, and mob-choruses feed our worst impulses to righteous bullying and the thrill of vicious take-downs... ...have I actually remained faithful in attending to the obligations of vulnerable and fleshly humanity, mine and yours and ours, and of those whom I claim to be in any ongoing connection with, as 'kin' and 'community'? Or perhaps become molded in the very shape of the Other whom I am otherwise so right to criticise, as a mirror image of lonely, fascistic, fearful and bellicose narcissism?

[geometrymatters]

Fibonacci trefoil

© Rafael Araujo

[macgregor13mathers-deactivated2]

[bootlegdharma]

FAKE QUOTE

[photography-cnl]

4.5 Million Baby Blue Eyes Just Bloomed In Japan’s Hitachi Seaside by  Hidenobu Suzuki

Japan is known for its beautiful, vibrant, ethereal and enchanting spring. From its stunningly lush cherry blossom trees, we dare you to feast your eye on another one of its natural beauties.

Keep reading

[gif87a-com]

Street art in Mexico city

[betterskatethannever]

Tom Knox // Atlantic Drift

[mostlyskateboarding]

Tom Knox in Atlantic Drift.

[mostlyskateboarding]

Quim Cardona in Spirit Quest.

Get the DVD for $20 here or digital download or rental here.

[purplebuddhaproject]

Nothing that is can pause or stay; The moon will wax, the moon will wane, The mist and cloud will turn to rain, The rain to mist and cloud again, Tomorrow be today.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via purplebuddhaproject)

[bootlegdharma]

Post hipster

I'm so post-hipster that I am post-ironic, everything stated with a mixture of commitment to the dry and droll, while bearing traces of genuine sentiment and tenderness.

[bootlegdharma]

This body

This body is ripened karma (action), that is, this body is the consequence of a lot of actions, both conscious and unconscious, Of my own actions, from what I've chosen to eat or drink or do on any given day, whether or not it was healthful, nourishing, relevant... This body is ripened karma of culture and history and will, chemically constituted of elements left over from the very beginning of the universe; in plain physics this body, already cosmological and transcendental in its basic exchange of matter, from food to flesh, water to wee, dust to dust This body is neither superior nor inferior, both also. there are ways of making this body make amends, but why? Hasn't it been punished enough already, with all this Naming?

[bootlegdharma]

US-Saud

The US Alliance with Saudi Arabia is truly telling.

One nation's "Muslim" is another nation's "Terrorist" One nation's "Atheist" is another nation's "Terrorist".

Both invest in mischaracterisations rooted in trivial brushstrokes of the truth.

Both are in cahoots with obscurations from an interdependent hypocrisy

#IAmAmerica #IAmSaudiArabia

[bootlegdharma]

Bare Attention

Organise. Prioritise. Synchronise. There are no prizes for guessing who wins which battle whenever there is time, however many mistakes were made, there is time to correct and create new opportunities for rectifying with rogue rhetoric or internal rhyme Synchronise, Organise, prioritise. seek out and play the harmonics of a collective, hear the rhythms of each person's voice, other people's voices with particular resonances and familiar verses, an emergent logic of connection or disconnection, in waves and cycles the people, our Presence and our Ideas, Our pains and priorities, becoming evident. Prioritise. Prioritise. Prioritse. Get Organised. Synchronicity occurs in the practice of bare attention to the present, as it is, before ideas of what it is, before language and memory has a chance to name it, proclaim it, there is the naked truth of the fact of what is as it is, what are as they are. Then, all time is partially an unfolding of the consequences of actions already taken; A task for me now is to prioritise the actions which are most likely to lead to helpful outcomes, and to deprioritise the actions which are most likely to lead to harmful outcomes. And prior to helping or harming, there is bare attention.

[bootlegdharma]

the truthiness of those single stories

Have been thinking about Chimamanda Adichie's oft-quoted line from her TED talk on the "Danger of a Single Story". The line goes, "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." I often quote this beautiful line from Adichie whenever I myself am trying to articulate something of nuance, of complexity, of highlighting other stories that remain hidden and beg for our attention. That said, I have recently been revisiting this line to reframe it, in order to shed a different light on the phenomenon. It is also, in a sense, not only true that stereotypes are incomplete, but that they are not entirely untrue. In this sense, what of the stereotype, in its very "incompleteness", actually reveals something of the truth of what it is trying to describe? This is dangerous thinking, of course, but I also think it is a truth that is sometimes intentionally elided by progressive discourses, where a disproportionate amount of energy goes into debunking stereotypes, highlighting their partiality, and absolving ourselves of the particular, historically-constituted responsibilities for addressing the extent to which they are true.

[bootlegdharma]

Post Orlando Post Trump