(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

The comments on my poll of yesterday have been extremely thought-provoking -- especially those of lady_babalon and that of akaiyume. Thank you!

I wanted to summarize some of my realizations on this subject since yesterday and sum things up a bit from comments that I made on this thread and elsewhere.

The connection between BDSM and yoga (and, we should perhaps add, martial arts) seemed to be immediately obvious to some, while non-existent to others. This may be because people who practice BDSM derive a wide range of results from it. Some see it mostly or entirely as a means of deriving physical pleasure. Others, such as myself, see it as much more than that -- it provides for us physical, emotional, and even spiritual pleasure.

One parallel that I mentioned to cruelly_kind is between the redemption offered by worshipping a god or goddess, who redeems by "forgiving sins" or "clearing karma"... and the karmic release one finds in offering submissive service. Both create a "karma-safe" realm in which the worshipper/submissive is free to grow and explore.

Much of BDSM is of course tied into the way the human animal works; the physique, the breath, the chemical side of the emotions, the wiring of neurons, and so forth. But yoga, qigong, and perhaps martial arts (which I do not have first hand experience of) are also means of tying in the workings of the human animal with subtler aspects of existence. In my experience these are more than simply activities that work on the same parts of the human body; they yielded very similar results. For me, being tied up and flogged, being dominated and pressed into service, were profoundly spiritual experiences. I also had spiritual insights from even a single experience of being dominant.

Another possible reason for the resistance is that people do not want to see the spiritual as tied so innately to the workings of the flesh. Certainly my chosen tradition of Gnosticism is very disparaging in this regard. Yet, karma, as experienced through the workings (and failings) of flesh, provide the only means by which we learn.

Throughout this topic I have been thinking of John of the Cross, who was able to grow spiritually from his experiences of torture at the hands of the Carmelites. He wrote, in "The Dark Night of the Soul":

2. In darkness, and secure,
by the secret ladder, disguised,
- ah, the sheer grace! -
in darkness and concealment,
my house being now all stilled.

3. On that glad night,
in secret, for no one saw me,
nor did I look at anything,
with no other light or guide
than the one that burned in my heart.

4. This guided me
more surely than the light of noon
to where he was awaiting me
- him I knew so well -
there in a place where no one appeared.
translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, revised edition (1991).

Perhaps, too, it is simply because I am trained as a mathematician to find patterns that aren't immediately obvious; this might lead me to readily conjecture patterns that don't exist.

Comments

The funny thing about Nietzsche

[anarktikos.livejournal.com]

is that, by his very nature, he jibes with no-one's ideology. He despised systematizers - indeed in his estimation the "will-to-system" is a sign of a lack of integrity. From this (http://www.frostburg.edu/dept/phil/forum/PhilFilm8.htm) page which I'm still reading:

"Nietzsche explicitly refused to develop a philosophical system, suggesting that individual, seemingly disconnected analyses, expressed in short, well-written aphorisms, are more honest and insightful than lengthy, scholarly treatises which tend to bend everything to fit a pre-conceived theory. (Thus, his writings may sometimes be self-contradictory. The way to read Nietzsche is not to figure out how the many things he wrote can be fitted into one abstract formula, a procedure that would be more appropriate for such philosophers as Plato or Kant, but to consider every one of his pieces as a thought experiment which succeeds or fails on its own.)"