#this speaks to an increasingly pervasive attitude among the community

[whumpfish]

Let's talk scars!

I see so many posts about unprompted scar kissing/touching by caretakers and like. Not to be contrary but pretty much all of my whumpees would anything between sidle away and not be comfortable around that person for a While to straight up deck a person for that.

Avedis is the latter. She'll lightly swat someone touching her battle scars deliberately without her permission, but touch her Seward scars and you're getting a right hook to the face. The only person she lets have contact with those is Sasha, in a medical setting, and even he got hit the first time. And he's avoided them when at all possible ever since, because they're friends and that means respecting boundaries, not softly and gently stepping over them because you just care so much.

Molly honestly would be freaked out and wonder why such a "caretaker" would be so attracted to something she didn't want to be given and had to suffer to end up with. Why is this person attracted to my pain? she would wonder. Why do they find the artefacts of my torture so specifically adorable? And she would never trust or feel comfortable around that person again. She has a lot of scars, and a lot of friends and the occasional partner. She's fairly physically affectionate and doesn't have her sister's Fight response to her scars from that particular whumper being touched because touch is bound to happen at some point with how she shows affection, but she would not think highly of anyone who singled them out for attention.

Sasha is probably the softest whumpee (though he hates being called that, thanks Dmitry) I have, and that would freak him the fuck out. Unprompted pairing of affection with marks of pain is a Dmitry thing. He thought it was sweet when they were dating as teenagers, now he recognizes it as a display of ownership and a tool of manipulation. Maybe, maybe from a partner, with permission, but out of the blue? Especially in response to him being in distress? Nope. Nope, taking the nope train to Fuckthatville. Uh-uh.

Pityr has let little kids touch his scars because they are tiny and curious, and if they want to touch, then they're not afraid of him, and it's rare for people to not be afraid of him. He will draw a knife on anyone over the age of 10 touching them. He will kick away anyone trying to kiss them, then draw a knife and maybe use it. Moira never even thought of attempting that kind of thing with him (or any of her rescuees,) and she was basically his mom for decades.

Leigh would be offended at the "I love you in spite of this" of it all. As far as s/he's concerned, if you have to qualify it, it isn't love or care in the first place. Leigh values respect above everything when it comes to meaningful relationships, I mean hell, s/he knows Pityr's basically a serial killer and they're not friends anyway, they're friends because Leigh respects that part of him. If anything s/he has stuck by him because of it, not in spite of it. S/he also respects his trauma. Leigh often ends up caretaker to Pityr and the only time s/he touches him without permission is when he's unconscious and can't give it and needs to be moved.

Valor, bless his heart, is a card carrying member of the Straight Up Deck People Club. He whumpees like an injured predator. Probably due to the whole being a dragon thing. Neither of the girls would girls would take kindly to it, either. Not react quite that severely, but definitely be a bit dubious. Lily would mostly just demand an explanation, and Donna... honestly make fun of the person bc she has that dry sense of humor, too, but it would still be strange.

Even the canon characters from my fandoms with major scarring would not respond well to that.

I am begging y'all to think critically about how you write your aftercare. This is another one of those things where all the focus is on how much the caretaker adores and cares for the whumpee in spite of the ugly evidence of their trauma, and no thought is given to how somebody--especially somebody who is recently traumatized resulting in those scars--would realistically respond to being on the receiving end of such I'm sorry but frankly bizarre attentions. When you put all that emphasis on someone being loved anyway, it just underscores and reinforces the notion that this behavior is exceptional and special, and anyone else would recoil in horror. And again, the whumpee has no agency in this scenario. They are just a vessel for the caretaker's love and acceptance. 99.9% of the time, we don't see the whumpee's reaction at all. They just don't enter into it.

This is not a critique of "light whump," so please do not take it that way. I love light whump, I've written and read my fair share of it. It's great. It's also not what I'm talking about here. Light whump is what it says on the tin - whump lite. And just like more intense whump, it's principally about the subject and the object of the whump, not an optional side character trope. Even environmental whump is subject/object focused, because it requires you to at minimum identify and give some detail of the cause of whumpee's pain/injury.

This is the whump genre. If the object of the whump gets zero creative consideration relative to the person ostensibly assisting in their recovery, that is an issue, and not a minor one. Now, if you understand all this but that is your Thing and you wish to write it, have at... but I would respectfully suggest you reevaluate what genre you're writing for, and whether you might need to instead be in the hurt/comfort tag, where the caretaker can be the sole character of substance and still fall within the parameters of the genre. Just naming a character Whumpee doesn't make something whump if "Whumpee" is just a set piece.

[crimechannels]

By • Olalekan Fagbade We cant do it alone; CP seeks Traditional, Religious leaders’ support to end GBV The Kano State Commissioner of Police, Mr Mohammed Usaini-Gumel, has called for the support of traditional and religious leaders to end the menace of Gender-based violence in the state. Usaini-Gumel made the call while addressing youths of the Arewa Peace Ambassadors Forum (APAF), a youth and students’ movement, in Kano at the 2023 Peace conference in commemoration of International Day for Peace. The conference with theme: “Gender-based Violence From Religious, Western and Cultural Perspectives” was organised by APAF. Gumel expressed concern that gender-based violence was deeply rooted in the fabric of African society and increasingly affects many more individuals across religious, traditional and cultural backgrounds. “In our quest for a more compassionate and just society, it is crucial to explore these issues through diverse lenses, including religious, traditional, and cultural perspectives. “Gender-Based Violence is deeply rooted in the fabric of our society and increasingly affecting many more individuals across religious, traditional and cultural backgrounds. ” It is a pervasive issue that undermines the very essence of our humanity and keeps threatening the well-being and dignity of individuals,” he said. According to him, traditional and religious leaders have a vital role to play in ensuring cultural, traditional beliefs and practices to sustain the incidence of domestic violence are jettisoned in their respective communities. ” By embracing the principles of respect, education, and empowerment, we can create a society where individuals of all genders can thrive. “We must continue to address crime prevention, raise awareness, and provide comprehensive support to survivors to ensure their empowerment” Usaini-Gumel said The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the CP received an excellence award for outstanding performance in Policing Kano State. On his part, Sheikh Muhajjidina Sani-Kano, a Kano based Islamic cleric also got a special recognition award for Peace Icon due to his contributions to peace and humanitarian assistance. He appealed to women to always dress modestly based on basic Islamic code of dressing to avoid being molested. Sani-Kano also called on youths to always fear God and be ambassadors of peace. Also speaking, the National Coordinator of APAF, Alhaji Nura Ali-Abubakar, called on youths to go back to school and be advocate for world peace. “Education promotes knowledge,skills and attitude to help people prevent conflict,resolve conflict peacefully or creat condition of peace” he said Other award recipients are Amb. Surajo Dantata, Amb. Sunusi Musa and Abdul’aziz Umar-Ganduje among others.(NAN)

[riusugoi]

JESSE MCCARTHY Notes on Trap A world where everything is always dripping

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-32/essays/notes-on-trap/   A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant. 8.

TRAP IS THE ONLY MUSIC that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.

9.

THE MUSICAL SIGNATURE embedded in trap is that of the marching band. The foundation can be thought of, in fact, as the digital capture and looping of the percussive patterns of the drum line. The hi-hats in double or triple time are distinctly martial, they snap you to attention, locking in a rigid background grid to be filled in with the dominant usually iterated instrumental, sometimes a synth chord, or a flute, a tone parallel that floats over the field. In this it forms a continuum with the deepest roots of black music in America, going back to the colonial era and the Revolutionary War, when black men, typically prohibited from bearing arms, were brought into military ranks as trumpet, fife, and drum players. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, all-black brass bands spread rapidly, especially in cities with large free black populations like New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York. During the Civil War, marching bands would aid in the recruitment of blacks to the Union. At Port Royal in the Sea Islands, during the Union Army occupation, newly freed slaves immediately took to “drilling” together in the evenings in public squares, men, women, and children mimicking martial exercises while combining them with song and dance — getting in formation. The popularity of marching and drilling was incorporated into black funerary practice, nowhere more impressively than in New Orleans, where figures like Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet would first encounter the sounds of rhythm and trumpet, joy and sorrow going by in the streets of Storyville. This special relationship, including its sub rosa relation to military organization, persists in the enthusiasm of black marching bands, especially in the South, where they are a sonic backdrop of enormous proximate importance to the producers of trap, and to its geographic capital, Atlanta.

10.

But closer to home, Traplanta is saddled with too much of the same racial baggage and class exclusion that criminalizes the music in the eyes and ears of many in power. The same pols who disgrace their districts by failing to advocate for economic equity find themselves more offended by crass lyrical content than the crass conditions that inspire it . Meanwhile, systemic ills continue to fester at will. It’s enough to make you wonder who the real trappers are in this town.

— Rodney Carmichael, “Culture Wars”

The pressure of the proliferation of high-powered weapons, the militarization of everyday life, an obvious and pervasive subtext in trap, is also one of the most obvious transformations of American life at the close of the American century: the death of civilian space.

Trap is social music.

TRAP VIDEOS FOR OBVIOUS reasons continue an extended vamp on the visual grammar developed in the rap videos of the Nineties, a grammar that the whole world has learned to read, or misread, producing a strange Esperanto of gesture and cadence intended to signify the position of blackness. In the “lifestyle” videos, the tropes are familiar, establishing shots captured in drone POV: the pool party, the hotel suite, the club, the glistening surfaces of dream cars, the harem women blazoned, jump cuts set to tight-focus Steadicam, the ubiquitous use of slow motion to render banal actions (pouring a drink, entering a room) allegorical, talismanic, the gothic surrealism of instant gratification.

Like David Walker’s graphic pointers in his Appeal, one of the key punctuation marks of this gestural grammar is the trigger finger, pointing into the camera — through the fourth wall — into the consuming eye. The very motion of the arm and finger are perversely inviting and ejecting. You are put on notice, they say. You can get touched.

A preoccupation with depression, mental health, a confused and terrible desire for dissociation: this is a fundamental sensibility shared by a generation.

Among other things, it’s clear there has never been a music this well suited for the rich and bored. This being a great democracy, everyone gets to pretend they, too, are rich and bored when they’re not working, and even sometimes, discreetly, when they are.

19.

IMAGINE A PEOPLE enthralled, gleefully internalizing the world of pure capital flow, of infinite negative freedom (continuously replenished through frictionless browsing), thrilled at the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification, the value in the network of one’s body, the harvesting of others. Imagine communities saturated in the vocabulary of cynical postrevolutionary blaxploitation, corporate bourgeois triumphalism, and also the devastation of crack, a schizophrenic cultural script in which black success was projected as the corporate mogul status achieved by Oprah or Jay-Z even as an angst-ridden black middle class propped up on predatory credit loans, gutted by the whims of financial speculation and lack of labor protections, slipped backward into the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained. Imagine, then, the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet. Imagine finally a vast supply of cheap guns flooding neighborhoods already struggling to stay alive. What would the music of such a convergence sound like?

TRAP IS A FORM OF soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below.

A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant.

The grand years of the Obama masque, the glamor and pageantry of Ebony Camelot, is closed. Les jeux sont faits. The echo of black resistance ringing as a choral reminder to hold out is all that stands between a stunned population and raw power, unmasked, wielding its cold hand over all.

The deep patterns of the funeral drill, the bellicose drill, the celebratory drill overlay each other like a sonic cage, a crackling sound like a long steel mesh ensnaring lives, very young lives, that cry out and insist on being heard, insist on telling their story, even as the way they tell it all but ensures the nation’s continued neglect and fundamental contempt for their condition.

TRAP IS INVESTED in a mode of dirty realism. It is likely the only literature that will capture the structure of feeling of the period in which it was produced, and it is certainly the only American literature of any kind that can truly claim to have a popular following across all races and classes. Points of reference are recyclable but relatable, titillating yet boring, trivial and très chic — much like cable television. Sports, movies, comedy, drugs, Scarface, reality TV, food, trash education, bad housing: the fusion core of endless momentum that radiates out from an efficient capitalist order distributing itself across a crumbling and degraded social fabric, all the while reproducing and even amplifying the underlying class, racial, and sexual tensions that are riven through it.

“When young black males labor in the plantation of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy approves the violence and materially rewards them. Far from being an expression of their “manhood,” it is an expression of their own subjugation and humiliation by more powerful, less visible forces of patriarchal gangsterism. They give voice to the brutal, raw anger and rage against women that it is taboo for “civilized” adult men to speak.”

— bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

THE EMO TRAP OF LIL UZI VERT, his very name threading the needle between the cute, the odd, and the angry, might be thought, given his Green Day–punk styling and soft-suburban patina, to be less invested in the kind of misogynistic baiting so common to trap. But this is not the case. Like the unofficial color-line law that says the main video girl in any rap video must be of a lighter skin tone than the rapper she is fawning over, there is a perverse law by which the more one’s identity is susceptible to accusations of “softness” (i.e., lack of street cred), the more one is inclined to compensate by deliberate hyperbolic assertions of one’s dominance over the other sex.

THE QUIRKY PARTICLES coming out of the cultural supercollider of trap prove the unregulated freedom of that space: that in spite of its ferocious and often contradictory claims, nothing is settled about its direction or meaning. The hard-nosed but unabashedly queer presence of Young M.A; the celebratory alt-feminist crunk of Princess Nokia; the quirky punkish R&B inflection in DeJ Loaf; the Bronx bombshell of Cardi B: to say that they are just occupying the space formerly dominated by the boys doesn’t quite cut it. They are completely changing the coordinates and creating models no one dared to foresee. The rise of the female trap star is no longer in question; an entire wave of talent is coming up fast and the skew that they will bring to the sexual and gender politics of popular culture will scramble and recode the norms of an earlier era in ways that could prove explosive in the context of increasingly desperate reactionary and progressive battles for hearts and minds.

The boys are not quite what they were before, either. Bobby Shmurda’s path to “Hot Nigga,” before landing him in prison, landed him on the charts in no small part because of his dance, his fearless self-embrace, and his self-love breaking out in full view of his entire crew. People sometimes forget that for the latter half of the Nineties and the early Aughts, dancing for a “real one” was a nonstarter. Now crews from every high school across the country compete to make viral videos of gorgeous dance routines to accompany the release of a new single. The old heads who grumble about “mumble rap” may not care for dancing, but the suppression of it as a marker of authentic masculinity was the worst thing about an otherwise great era for black music. Its restoration is one of the few universally positive values currently being regifted to the culture by trap.

(sobre Young Thug) The music critic for the Washington Post writes that “if he lived inside a comic book, his speech balloons would be filled with Jackson Pollock splatters,” which is halfway there (why not Basquiat?). Thugger is more exciting than Pollock, who never wore a garment described by Billboard as “geisha couture meets Mortal Kombat’s Raiden” that started a national conversation. Thugger’s work is edgier, riskier, sans white box; if anything it is closer to Warhol in coloration, pop art without the pretension. It is loved, admired, hated, and feared by people who have never and may never set foot in a museum of “modern art.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE overdetermination of blackness by way of its representation in music — its tar baby–like way of standing in for (and being asked to stand in for) any number of roles that seem incongruous and disingenuous to impose upon it — is the central concern of Dear Angel of Death, by the poet Simone White. Her target is the dominantly male tradition in black literary criticism and its reliance on a mode of self-authorization that passes through a cultivated insider’s knowledge of “the Music,” which is generically meant to encompass all forms of black musical expression, but in practice almost always refers to a canonical set of figures in jazz. It’s clear that she’s right, also clear that it’s a case of emperors with no clothes. It may have been obvious, but no one had the courage to say so. Take these notes on trap, for example: they neatly confirm her thesis, and fare no better under her sharp dissection.

Let’s be clear: White’s larger point stands. Looking to trap music to prepare the groundwork for revolution or any emancipatory project is delusional and, moreover, deaf. If we start from the premise that trap is not any of these things, is quite emphatically (pace J. Cole) the final nail in the coffin of the whole project of “conscious” rap, then the question becomes what is it for, what will it make possible. Not necessarily for good or ill, but in the sense of illumination: What does it allow us to see, or to describe, that we haven’t yet made transparent to our own sense of the coming world? For whatever the case may be, the future shape of mass culture will look and feel more like trap than like anything else we can currently point to. In this sense, White is showing us the way forward. By insisting that we abandon any bullshit promise or pseudopolitics, the project of a force that is seeping into the fabric of our mental and social lives will become more precise, more potent as a sensibility for us to try and communicate to ourselves and to others.

34.

TRAP IS WHAT GIORGIO AGAMBEN calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists — completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music — assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology — a form-of-life.

the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

One result of this is that black Americans believe in the power of music, a music without and before instruments, let alone opera houses, music that lives in the kinship of voice with voice, the holler that will raise the dead, the power of the Word, in a way that many other people by and large no longer do — or only when it is confined to the strictly religious realm. Classical European music retained its greatness as long as it retained its connection to the sacred. Now that it’s gone, all that’s left is glassy prettiness; a Bach isn’t possible.

The people who make music out of this form-of-life are the last ones in America to care for tragic art. Next to the black American underclass, the vast majority of contemporary art carries on as sentimental drivel, middlebrow fantasy television, investment baubles for plutocrats, a game of drones.

Coda: What is the ultimate trap statement?

Gucci Mane: “I’m a trappa slash rappa but a full-time G

[garywonghc]

Accepting the Unacceptable

by Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Over the last century or so, death has been becoming increasingly institutionalised and removed from immediate experience. It is no longer a common experience in concrete terms. Where people used to die at home in the past, this is no longer the case, and the usual gathering of relatives and family no longer takes place spontaneously. It is no longer a communal affair, but on the contrary, it is hidden from public view, resulting in less actual contact with death and dying. Perversely, the literature on death and dying has been growing considerably, and people are actually talking about it more and more, while handling the practical fact less and less. The irony of this situation is described by Ray Anderson, a Christian theologian, in his book Theology, Death, and Dying:

There is then a fundamental ambivalence about death for the contemporary person. Death has been pushed out of sight and out of the context of daily life. No longer is death itself a meaningful ritual of family or social life. Yet, there is the emergence of a quite specific awareness of death as an existential concern quite apart from the event of death itself.

Strangely enough, awareness of death in the form of the psychological effects of death as a condition of life has grown in inverse proportion to the silence concerning death itself. Where death was once the unspoken word that accompanied communion with and commitment to the dead as a ritual of public and community life, there was virtually no literature on death and dying.

In contemporary Western society, it is quite the opposite now, with one author stating that he has reviewed over 800 books on death and dying and has more than 2,000 articles on the subject in his files. Overall, there is much more talk about death and dying and far less immediate experience of it, in terms of actually handling those who are dying, or having to witness death. We see a lot of simulated death on television and so on, but as a rule, we have very little immediate contact with it compared with people living in developing countries, or in the past.

For all these reasons — the ever-present fear of death and our lack of contact with it — it is all the more important to have a proper encounter with the facts of death and to deal with the fear of death, because, from the Buddhist point of view, coming to terms with death is part of making our life worthwhile and meaningful. Death and life are not seen as completely separate and opposed, but as giving rise to each other. They coexist in a complementary fashion. For Buddhists, the aim is not to conquer death but to come to accept it and familiarise ourselves with our own sense of mortality and impermanence.

According to Buddhism, we die because we are a product of causes and conditions (pratityasamutpada in Sanksrit). Whatever is caused is impermanent, is subject to decay, to death. Human beings are not exempt, as it is a natural process. Life without death is impossible, and vice versa, and therefore the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice incorporates an acceptance of death and a cultivation of an attitude that does not reject it as something ugly and menacing that steals our life away, and thus something to be pushed aside and ignored. Nor does a Buddhist think of living forever. The Buddhist view is that everything is transient and impermanent, and so death and life are inseparably bound up with each other, at all times in fact, even while we live, as the aging process itself is viewed as a part of the dying process.

There is the famous story of the Buddha’s being approached by a mother carrying her dead baby in her arms. She pleads with the Buddha: “You are an enlightened being; you must have all these extraordinary powers, so I want you to bring my child back to life.” The Buddha says, “All right, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do one thing for me first.” “I’ll do anything,” she replied. He responds, “I want you to go around and knock on all the doors of this town and ask each person who comes to the door whether he or she had anyone die in his or her family, and if he or she says no, then ask him or her to give you a sesame seed.” The woman knocks on every door she can, and returns empty-handed, saying to the Buddha, “I don’t want you to bring back my child now. I understand what you are trying to teach me.” The lesson here is that death is all-pervasive and not something that happens, sometimes, to particular people, but it happens to every one of us. Knowing this can lessen the sting of the fear of death. It is analogous to people sharing some kind of psychological or personal problem. Eventually everyone starts to open up and talk to others with similar problems, realising essentially that we are all experiencing the same thing. In this way, the problem becomes diffused. The Buddha’s point to the grieving mother, that everybody dies, is compassionate because to think “my child, my child, he has died, I want him back” is to narrow our focus in such a way as to generate an enormous personal problem. It is better to think of all the mothers that have lost children and experienced the same grief, whereby it becomes more encompassing. The problem moves beyond the personal into something much wider.

In terms of karma, it is an interesting question from a Buddhist point of view to ask if our death is in a way predetermined. In some ways, it is feasible to say that there is a preordained time to die, as our karma determines it. When the time to die arrives, we then die. This would be a result of our karma. On the other hand, our death is also dependent on a lot of causes and conditions, so it is not preordained in that sense. So it is predetermined in one sense and not so in another. Following form this, it is quite expected that Buddhists, if unwell, would seek medical attention and remedies, or go to the hospital if necessary. They would not simply acquiesce and say, “Well it must be my karma to die now,” and do nothing about the situation, for the time may very well not have come yet, so to speak: and if they are not careful, because of the causes and conditions set in motion, they might die before they need to. Even so, at times, no matter what we do in order to live, it will become impossible to do so.

People do not fear just eternal pain and suffering in hell, but extinction, not being around, not existing. This thought is very much disturbing in itself for many people, and so the removal of the idea of hell will not alleviate the fear of death itself. We have a fear of death, as do other creatures, but from a Buddhist view, ours is intimately linked to our notion of a self. While meditation or contemplation on death can be very confronting initially, we will be far better off for doing it than not, precisely because the fear of death is always there, underlying everything. The fundamental sense of anxiety is always there, so it is better to bring it to the fore and deal with it than suspend consideration, because it will continue to influence our life, often in a negative way, if ignored. We must remember, too, that this type of practice is done in the context of other Buddhist practices, which are all designed to incorporate and process the full range of negativities in the mind.

It is sometimes thought Tibetans have a different approach to death, having been raised among it perhaps, but the very fact of there being specific spiritual instructions especially designed for the matter indicates that Tibetans are no different. They fear, as we do in the West, not just for themselves, but they also fear leaving their children and loved ones behind, and they too wish not to grow old and die, or to die young, for that matter. Fear of death is all-pervasive and acultural. Everybody experiences it, but an important difference in the Buddhist tradition is the emphasis on working with that fear. Therefore Tibetans, if they choose to, have access to traditions and practices of this nature. Monks for instance, would go to charnel grounds, or graveyards, to practice and contemplate impermanence, which might seem a bit excessive to us. In Tibet the charnel grounds use to be in the wilderness, so they were a very eerie place to practice, especially on one’s own, and it was guaranteed to throw up all kinds of fears. Thighbone trumpets and other implements used on these occasions have horrified some Westerners, who have described these rituals as shamanistic, incorporating elements of black magic and so on. However, for Tibetans, living in primitive physical conditions, these bones had no magical qualities, but were merely reminders of impermanence, of transience. It would help them deal with their fear of death, and the fear of the dead as well.

There are Buddhist traditions, of course, like Zen, that do not have such elaborate rituals as are found in Tibetan Buddhism that involve mantras, visualisations, and so forth, and focus more on being immediately present with what is happening now, avoiding all mental constructions of what might take place, as the best form of preparation for the future, including the eventuality of death. The end result is the same. Both methods lead to greater acceptance of the event, and the ultimate aim is the same, which is to increase awareness and develop insight. In addition, of course, the Buddhist view is that life and death are inextricably bound to each other, moment to moment. The death of the past is happening right now, and we can never really see what is going to happen in the future. When one moment passes, that is death, and when another arises, that is life, or rebirth, we might say. Therefore, living in the present with awareness, links in a fundamental way with appreciating impermanence.

It does not matter how elaborate certain teachings or meditation techniques are, the fundamental aim is still to deal with immediate experience, here and now. It has nothing much to do with what might or might not happen in the future, or attaining some wonderful mystical experience in the future, because, as the masters have continuously emphasised, as important as the attainment of enlightenment is, it has to be arrived at through being in the here and now, dealing with present circumstances, not through indulging in speculation about what enlightenment might be. None of this is to say that we have to be practicing Buddhists to die in a peaceful manner. Ultimately one cannot tell, judging by people’s personalities, who will die peacefully. Some Christians die very peacefully, whereas others struggle; some Buddhists die peacefully, and some kicking and screaming, as they say, and some atheists die peacefully, and so on. A very mild-mannered person can become quite aggressive and obnoxious at the time of death, refusing to accept it, and others, normally obnoxious characters, turn out to be very accepting and amiable. We can never really say with certainty how anyone will react to death, but we can say that certain meditations, including those on death, will definitely help a person come to accept it more readily, although we can never be absolutely sure, and the moment may produce panic even in a dedicated practitioner. But if we know what’s going on, it is likely to be far less confrontational.

This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have.

Knowing in an abstract sense that everybody dies or that everything is impermanent is different from experiencing impermanence, coming face to face with in everyday life. If we have felt impermanence, then tragedies are easier to deal with because we fully grasp that all is impermanent and transient and nothing lasts forever. As the Buddha said, we come in contact with people and things that we wish not to come in contact with, and we get separated from people and things that we wish to stay among, and that is how things are, in reality. Similarly, when death occurs, it may still be a very fearful experience, but we may be able to maintain that sense of awareness. Fear may still be present, but maintaining a sense of equilibrium is very important. Buddhist meditators may get separated from their partner and experience great stress and grief, but they may not yield to that grief so completely that it overwhelms them, and this applies with respect to their own death as well.

[tribeworldarchive]

Religion and The Tribe Some facts about Religion Religion: Dictionary definition: system of belief in, worship of a supernatural power of god, system of faith and worship; human recognition of superhuman controlling power and esp. of a personal God entitled to obedience, effect of this on conduct. This is the worship system emerging from The Chosen, their level of worship of Zoot developing to hero/cult status…"Praise Zoot!` Religion ~ Is the human beings` relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is commonly regarded as consisting of a person`s relation to God or to gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are generally also fundamental elements of the religious life as practiced by believers and worshipers. The history of mankind has shown the pervasive influences of religion, and thus the study of religion, involving the attempt to understand its significance, its origins, and its myriad forms, has become increasingly important in modern times. Broadly speaking, the study of religion comprehends two aspects: 1) assembling information and 2) interpreting systematically the material gathered in order to elicit its meaning. The 19th century saw the rise of the study of religion in the modern sense, however, rarely has there been unanimity among scholars about the nature of the subject. This is partly because assumptions about the revealed nature of the Christian (or other) religion or assumptions about the falsity of religion become entangled with questions concerning the historical and other facts of religion. Thus, the subject has, throughout its history, contained elements of controversy. Nature and significance An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been made to find an essential ingredient in all religions (eg, spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an "essence" of religion can be described. The gods play a very subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though they may not be universal. The occurrence of the rituals of worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are not central. The fact that there is dispute over the possibility of finding an essence of religion means that there is likewise a problem about speaking of the study of religion or of religions. In practice, a religion is a particular system, or a set of systems, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other similar elements are interconnected. Thus, in order to understand a given belief that occurs in such a system, it is necessary to look at its particular context--that is, other beliefs held in the system, rituals, and other aspects. Even if an record of types of belief and practices can be gathered--so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion--the lack of a tight definition means that there will always be a number of cases about which it is difficult to decide. Furthermore, some ideologies, such as Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and Fascism, may have analogies to religion. Though there is no consensus on this point among scholars, it is not unreasonable to hold that the boundary between traditional religions and modern ideologies represents one part of the religious field to be studied. Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion Subjectivity in the study of religion Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of a God guiding the life of the devotee. Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. Religion may also be thought to be subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are obscure and hard to come by, so that there is no obvious "objective" test in the way in which there is for a large range of speculative claims in the physical world. The follower of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his/her own experience, but is not necessarily so in regard to the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which he/she participates. Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a rationale between participant observation and interpersonal relationships with such followers of the other faith. Basic aims and methods Religions, being complex, have different aspects or dimensions. Thus, the major world religions typically possess doctrines, myths, ethical and social teachings, rituals, social institutions, and inner experiences and sentiments. These dimensions lie behind the creation of buildings, art, music, and other such extensions of basic beliefs and attitudes. But not all religions are like Christianity and Buddhism, for example, in possessing institutions such as the church and the sangha (Buddhist monastic order), which exist across national and cultural boundaries. In opposition to such institutionalised religions, tribal religion, for example, is not usually separately established but in effect is the religious side of communal life (or way of life) and is not treated as distinct from other things that go on in the community. How does this fit to The Tribe??? In the Tribal instance, Zoot is now being held as the Divine being and his notion of Power and Chaos is being acted out and maintained by The Chosen, as led by The Guardian. Life was fairly normal for Martin (Zoot) until the virus came to the fore, he was jealous of his older brother (Bray) who seemed to have everything he didn`t, a popular boy in school, captain of the football team, popular girl wanting him. Eventually Martin got a bit fed up, cracked under the pressure and so a new persona Zoot - "Power & Chaos" was created by Martin. When the virus wiped out all the adults he used his theory of `force` and power to manipulate the chaotic situation in society and try to rule the land with his followers - The Locos. After he died it was left up to Ebony to maintain this `power and chaos`. She was a strong girl, and manipulative too. She was trying to take out vengeance on the Mall Rats for killing Zoot. "Be a victim of your fear or make it work for you", The Guardian (having been a school mate of Martin and often picked on by him prior to the virus) had learnt this philosophy from Zoot. Therefore, now he wanted power and the way to get the power himself is by making others fear him….and so this is how Zoot`s system/doctrine is carried on today….and the Religion of Zoot is borne!!!

[podcastsofpsa]

(Feel free to listen to the podcast via audio only, or follow along with the transcript if you’d like).

I realize that with much of the United States in a constant state of turmoil, it’s increasingly more difficult for us to grasp a firm understanding of how we are being influenced and persuaded by the information around us. Take this case of Theo Wilson, a human being (of color) that went “undercover” in a digital sense to explore and try to understand more of the attitudes and beliefs of the alt-right population.

Side note: The fact that I have to address Mr. Wilson as a person of color to even get my point (or his) across is the reason we are having this conversation in the first place.

This is the reason why we need to have the courage to engage in those face-to-face conversations with people we may disagree with, even if they truly that are difficult.

Here’s the thing - and you’ll have to bear with me, feel free to move further on if you want me to get back to the topic at hand. I have a tendency to run off on tangents that help to further explain my reasoning behind something.

Let’s take a fairly generalized concept that most people have a basic understanding of; evolution. We know (or may not believe for some of us) that evolution is the biological process that enables organisms to respond/react to their environment and their surroundings. The conditions and the limitations of “what they are now” (or rather, then) is the blank canvas from which their eventual masterpiece will arise.

Either way, evolution has been an incremental factor in how the scientific community has gained a better understanding of how the human race came-to-be. Evolution, for better or for worse, is not a selective process. This isn’t the idea or the argument that “natural selection” is how nature chooses one specific organism over another. It’s about adaptation, and in some cases, it’s about the probability of genetic mutation. We know that our genes are part of the stuff that makes us who we are. Genes are part of the big picture that gave me brown eyes and black hair. The kind that makes my Chihuahua/Dachshund mix have a bullet-shaped body and a tiny little face. These don’t just affect the outward appearances, but also the internal make-up of who we are.

These genes, this process of “evolution,” it’s why sharks can’t walk and why we don’t have wings that allow us to fly (e.g. unless we’re onboard a Boeing 747 or something like that). Say that there’s a planet that’s inhabited by little red blobs &  birds that like feeding on these red blobs. If you’re a red blob and a bird is circling overhead, it’s probably the last day you’re going to be a red blob. But let’s say a red blob family has a little-baby blob, and instead of being a red blob the baby is a green blob. (Like how you might have blue eyes but your parents don’t).

Imagine that the group of red blobs and little baby green blob are hanging out in a field of grass. Who do you think might be the hardest blob to find for a hungry bird flying in the sky? Now, this is an extremely generalized example of one way that evolution can influence organisms to “adapt” to their surroundings. However, this isn’t always the case - not every group of red blobs will have a little green blob baby. Some planets inhabited by red blobs might actually be extinct because they were eaten by all the birds in the sky.

Point is, change needs to happen for evolution to ensue. The change may be by random chance (like the little baby green blob), or it may be intentional. Maybe there’s a planet full of green blobs, and now the birds flying in the sky are the ones in danger. They can’t see during the day and spend all night sleeping. But let’s say that the green blobs glow in the dark, and their red blob relatives did not. So the birds are having trouble finding food to eat, so they search longer during the day and sleep later at night. No blobs in sight, nothing for them to eat. But imagine a few birds have trouble sleeping at night, so they decide to take a night-time stroll in the sky. During their flight, what do they see? Glowing lights on the ground. They don’t see red blobs, but they’ve never seen the glowing light like this before. What could it be, none other than the green blobs? So these birds in the sky, they learn to search for food during the night and try sleeping during the day. The green blobs could hide during the day but were much easier to spot during the night when the night birds were foraging for food to eat. Another extreme generalization, but another example of how evolution can influence genes which are enacted by a change.

This whole idea of evolution & adaptation as a means to respond to “life-or-death” situations is a large part of how the human race has made it this far on planet Earth. When faced with discomfort (or risk of extinction), most organisms have a tendency to err on the side of survival. It’s an innate tactic of living things to “continue to live.” Fish don’t decide to wash up on land because they don’t have lungs and cannot breathe oxygen - so they “continue to live” in the water, where they most appropriately adapted to.  

The really big complexity of today’s tension, or more specifically the grinding tension in the United States is largely a victim of this “inability/unawareness to change.” So I’m not trying to say that this is a bad thing. Just like the birds searching for food on little green blob planet, foraging for food during the day was something that they learned to do from the birds before them who hunted little red blobs. But when the planet was dominated by green blobs, the birds had one of two options: continue searching for food during the day and risk starvation (and eventually extinction), or adapt to their environment and their surroundings to “continue to live.”  

But I think that at this current time, the majority of the population of the U.S. is in a very similar situation to the birds on little green blob planet. We have become very accustomed to how things were and have been, and are minutely concerned with what could be a problem vs what we have been persuaded or misinformed to believe is a problem.

Hence the blog post title, “Positive Reinforcement of Polarized Biases.” We live in a world of convenient automation. Everything that our parents or grandparents used to do in person has been replaced/substituted (in some form or fashion) with an automated counterpart. No matter how you slice it, for better or for worse, technology has us completely invested in what utility and productivity we feel that we gain/get from it.

As is the case with most scenarios, emotional and attributed beliefs/meanings are what fuel our behaviors and actions in our day-to-day lives. This is a micro-response that we elicit when faced with challenging or difficult obstacles. Whether we choose to accept it or not, there are difficult decisions that each and everyone one of us has to make in our lives - it’s a variable of progress that inevitability turns the cogs of time. But here’s the kicker - while technology has enabled us with functionality and versatility like humanity has never had before; it has ironically robbed many of us from a quintessential part of what bonds humanity - communication.

Verbal, physical, mental, emotional - these ques and these channels of interpretation have been paramount in the development of the human race. From inscribed hieroglyphics on pyramids in Egypt to artificial intelligence between chatbots from Facebook, communication (e.g. primordially verbal) has given human beings an untapped potential for growth and development over millions of years through the process of evolution.

But our proclivity towards automation and the “future” of technology is also steering us in a direction that we don’t usually think about. Most of us associate technology with the “New-Age,” this era of prosperity and enhanced living that has allowed the human race to transcend the biological limitations that make us so. These are admirable qualities to envision for the future of society, but we underestimate the repercussions that this utopian dream can have on our very way of life.

That said, I am in no way attempting to discredit technology for the benefit and livelihood that it has brought us over the years - there is no denying that. But there is one thing that sticks out the most to me, something that I have also been subject to for as long as I can remember. The age of digital communication - of emails and text messages, even blog posts, and YouTube comments; the “convenience” and pervasive nature of this non-emotional conversation, it’s at the root of the battle that we as members of the human race need to address if we are to proceed forward in life as house-guests of this planet we inhabit.

Those “difficult” and “challenging” decisions in life that I referenced earlier? More and more I am beginning to see that face-to-face communication is becoming one of them. And if that doesn’t convince you that we are suffering from a deficiency in open dialogue - just keep in mind that in the United States, public-speaking used to be rated as the #1 fear among Americans. Unfortunately, the political stage in recent years has shifted that fear dramatically towards more present and subsequently prevalent issues. For more details, follow the link HERE.

But why was public speaking so largely feared by those who were surveyed? Just because our engagement in the “future of technology” has propelled society into a “New-Age” doesn’t mean that we are not still at the mercy of our genetic configuration. Our homo sapien ancestors invested an immensely greater portion of time (e.g. like millions of years to be more specific) to develop the basic framework we know today that is typically accepted as a universal axiom around the world. Verbal communication was of the last features to form during the evolutionary “refining” process of our ancestors. So much so, that humans developed the ability to speak (verbally) at the risk of dying.

You know about choking right?

Yeah, that’s how important the ability to communicate verbally was to our predecessors. We could have just had a mouth (e.g. with no vocal cords) to eat stuff with - but where would that have gotten humanity to now? The pharynx, that pocket of space that is essentially the fork in the road that leads to either our larynx (for speaking) or esophagus (for eating).

Interestingly enough, our windpipe (also where we conduct our voice) is just before our esophagus (as part of the digestive tract). So our bodies basically generated our ability to speak with the slight chance that we could choke while eating (and die - although hopefully, you know the Heimlich maneuver or someone around you does).

The big takeaway from this? Communication is key. And throughout the recent years, the importance of communication never dwindled in any way - but our perception and awareness of how it influences us and those around us have seemed to almost vanish completely.

(This is certainly not the last time that I will be addressing the implications and the inevitable downstream effect that our “absence” of communication has brought forth. My intention is to bring this idea to your attention and in so doing allow ourselves to get back in touch with the really fundamental aspects of what makes humans, human).