ok--it was requested that i speak a bit more here re Chod. the following link is a good place to get an initial feeling for the practice, its roots and such: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C3%B6d
as a "mad saint" (Avadhūtas) is it not true that we are already aware that we are of more dimensionality than what is being reflected to us by any singular plane? in other words, i think what matters more than any singular dimensionality that is brought to us, is how (by way of our own volition and intuitions re our own myriad dimensionality) we engage what is given, toward--
I have some books here on Chod as well as an odd phurba made from resin (some sort of plastic), probably from Lagash. I agree with your comment. There are political issues though which have concerned me, maybe why the theme anorectic avatar also has an edge to it - issues of pain, etc. The human body is multiply-connected, densely so, in ways that digital bodies aren't. So the human body feels pain, _becomes_ pain, in a way becomes of this multiplicity. Digital layers can be 'healed' permanently if errors are perceived; every pixel is deeply independent of every other on a fundamental level. But tissue cells for example are not independent; what happens to one may directly affect others, and as the human organism dies, cell after cell is irreparable. So how to bring this knowledge, this fragility, into the digital domain? That's one of the things I've struggled with..
ReplyDeleteI just saw this response, am grateful for it and happy to respond now that I am getting the hang of this--
ReplyDeleteso, how to bring the awareness of the differences between forms of bodies into a place where bodies might share (in other words humans going into the digital realms--can it happen any other way? is an imagined avatar not also real, perhaps? if you fuck an avatar in your mind does the avatar have a real body? could it?)--this is very interesting. I would say that perhaps foremost there must be a consideration of what is 'real' and what is not in order to make any sort of statements about praxis for moving toward things like healing.
or, how much of 'healing' is the physiology of healing (as you speak of above) and how much of it is mental? psychic surgery, for example...
most fucking, masturbation or sexual fantasies, occurs in the mind anyway, without bodies altogether. I don't think an imagined avatar is real in any sense I can think of - it's an accumulation of files within databases where bits are inherently independently accessible and separate from each other.
ReplyDeletethe question of 'what is real' has to be answered I think, in this situation, not in terms of fundamental ontology (i.e. what exists), but in terms of domains, and the avatar exists in a domain where the healing can be trivial. when I log out of Second Life, my avatar is annihilated, non-existent, by which I mean simply not present anywhere in the (virtual) world; when I log back in again, s/he's literally reconstructed - you can see this unfold.
healing is both physical and mental among organisms, I'm not sure this applies here, though. there's a huge amount of literature on this and it goes into alternative medicine, etc. I haven't heard of an illness of a generated/completed deity in Tantra, but who knows?