Reading - Jan & Feb - "Life not lived to be safe..."

The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss: My Life with Terence Mckenna by Dennis McKenna

Sex, Sin, and Zen: A Buddhist Exploration of Sex from Celibacy to Polyamory and Everything in Between Paperback by Brad Warner

Graveyard of Memories (John Rain Thrillers) by Barry Eisler

Stretching Your Boundaries: Flexibility Training for Extreme Calisthenic Strength by Al Kavadlo

Jonathan Livingston Seagull: The New Complete Edition by Richard Bach

Ladyboys: The secret world of Thailand's Third Gender by Susan Aldous & Pornchai Sereemongkonpol

Robert B. Parker's Cole and Hitch Series - Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone & Blue-Eyed Devil

JSA Liberty Files: The Whistling Skull (Justice Society of America) by B. Clay Moore and Tony Harris

All Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely

Archer & Armstrong Volume 2: Wrath Of The Eternal Warrior and Volume 3: Far, Faraway by Fred Van Lente and various artists

Werewolf by Night: In the Blood by Duane Swierczynski and Mico Suayan

Jonathan Livingston Seagull:

“The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”

Sex, Sin and Zen:

"The key aspect that makes the Buddhist attitude towards sex utterly different is that the concept of sin does not exist in Buddhism...  As Westerners, our belief in sin is so deep that we tend to think of it as a real and substantial thing, even if we are not devoutly religious...  Our belief in sin runs so deep that even when we learn that Buddhism does not have this concept, we try to look for it anyway."

"Buddhism starts from the basic premise that neither materialism nor idealism is correct... [both] are manifestations of one underlying reality that is neither spirit nor matter."

"The idea in Zen is that the best way to truly do good for the world at large is to get yourself together."

"You can't rescue everybody, but you can make efforts to save them from yourself.  That's the one place where you can really be effective."

"The habit of attaching to emotions and incorporating them into the sense of self is so strong that we’ll grab on hard to even the most unpleasant feelings that come along. In fact, “bad” feelings are often much better at reinforcing our sense of self than “good” feelings. We hang on for dear life to these emotions, lest our sense of who we are should collapse. We very literally feel like we’ll die if we don’t. Habits like this have us abusing our bodies and minds in ways that lead to all kinds of trouble."

"...lots of people get rich pandering to base desires. And lots of us wouldn’t have jobs at all if it weren’t for them. When something sells, it indicates a need for human beings to explore that particular aspect of their collective consciousness. In and of itself, this is neither good nor bad. Sometimes we need to open up to stuff."

"I'm not a big fan of 'what-if' scenarios. They're fun in science fiction and may have some value when making contingency plans, but generally they mostly just cause the brain to start spinning out fantasies."

"...beauty is an expression of truth."

"Desiring less is one aim of Zen practice, but achieving some mythical state of desirelessness is not."

"...the Buddhist notion of emptiness refers to the world as it is when emptied of our preconceived notions, opinions, desires, and all the rest of the baggage we bring to any situation we encounter."

"...none of the Buddhist precepts is ever to be used as a means for judging the behavior of others, only for judging your own."

"...a lot of religion is based on making you feel guilty about something you can't possibly help.  They create the problem, then say, "Here, I'll save you!""

"NH: But everyone can be like me -- meaning, finding your truth and living it. Your truth wont look like mine. Your truth is going to be monogamous and heterosexual because thats true for you. In that way youre like me. My husband and I have a D/S RELATIONSHIP. That was a new kind of sex for me. I didnt know anything about bondage or sadomasochism. I'd never done actual, official power exchange. But its his sexuality. He doesnt have any vanilla. His sexual orientation is kink. I really loved him; I wanted him so I had to learn his language. So anybody can be like me, which is getting rid of guilt and shame about sex and your desires. You can have whatever desires you want once you stop repressing, being stressed over and suppressing and all the things we do when we dont want to face the truth of our desires. They are what they are. With my other belief systems in place, are there any parts of these desires I can actually express?  You have to make a choice. But it's easier to make a choice when you're not fleeing from shame, fear and guilt. I believe that what gets you off is what gets you off.  And that's biological. On top of that is the cultural condemnation of what it is. Youre not supposed to want someone of your own gender, youre not supposed to want someone out of your marriage, not supposed to want someone before marriage. We spend all this time going, 'What's wrong with me? Oh my God!'

...Actually the initial 70s feminism was very pro-porn. They were very pro-decriminalization of prostitution...  That was when they were working for sex workers rights. Back when the mainstream feminist movement thought women could think for themselves. In the porn wars of the mid-80s created the current split in feminism between the pro and anti censorship forces. Im a sex positive feminist. The so-called Left in this country has been completely hijacked by the anti-sex fanatics...  These women question a woman's ability, not right, a woman's ability to do informed sex work of any kind. For them, dirty pictures is such an over-riding issue that the feminist left is completely silent on anything to do with women's sexual freedom because "women are such victims and men are such pigs." This group of people think that women are oppressed as a class. Women are a gender, not a class. It's insulting. Sex workers have been willing to talk to people for 35 years. I used to go to NOW conferences and there'd be a dozen sex workers of different kinds and they regarded like we were goblins or trolls or hobbits. We'd be saying, As a woman, here is my experience in pornography and they didn't want to know. If you say, Dirty pictures skeeve me out and bug me, then we can have a conversation. On most other issues we agree, I'm against the war in Iraq, Id like to see national health care, etc. But I see men as human, I see men as equally victimized by the system. Men are also victims of the patriarchy. The anti-porn feminists are all about The Patriarchy. Its like they think they get together every Tuesday to talk about how they can use porn to keep women down.
BW: Oh! They know about us!
NH: [Laughs] Every country has its patriarchy. It's the same 200 families who've run the country forever. So you're no more a member of the patriarchy than I am. Most people do jobs they don't like. Most people work too hard for not enough money. Most people are humiliated in their day-to-day work by their horrible bosses and, quite frankly, men have it worse than women.
BW: We do?
NH: Yes, because at least women have the comfort of having girlfriends. I can come to a girlfriend and unload my feelings and get some support and some fucking compassion. You, if your'e lucky, might have a partner you can talk to about things. But the average guy cant go to his guy friends and say, I'm hurt, I'm scared, I'm nervous, I'm worried, frightened. You can be angry, pissed off, that's it...

BW: I think the problem is when you try to make a blanket rule for everybody.
NH: And this country does. Frankly I'd like to see less sex in advertising and more freedom in private. The idea that what you do over there harms me over here, I find very disturbing. How is my happy marriage the way we have with our sexuality hurting your traditional marriage? How does the existence of gay marriage harm your traditional marriage? It doesn't make any sense. Of course gays should marry; they should be as unhappy as the rest of us, as one comedian put it. A good marriage takes work. This is what I don't get about certain feminists. Actions hurt people. Thoughts don't harm people. Whatever you're thinking about me right now doesn't harm me.
BW: No, it doesn't.

NH: Early feminists went to Arabia and said how nice the burkha was cause it took off the pressure of the male gaze. For them, male desire was also desire to harm. You're conquesting us, penetrating us, conquering us! I thought we were having fun. It goes both ways. I like it. You like it. I objectify women and I look at them and I desire them without having any desire to harm so I knew from my own experience that I could objectify and not wish to harm... Besides, I liked having people look at me naked, even if they were guys. Guys are fun! And I found out that the more nudity there is, the better-behaved men are...  It's like, if you do this, the naked tits will stay. OK. I can do that! Men are very rule oriented. What are the rules for naked boobs being in the room? I'll follow those rules. Let me know what they are and dont change in the middle. Women do that sometimes. That can be very annoying. I realized that part of my power over men is in not hating him for wanting to look. Hes a straight guy; of course he wants to look at naked women! Duh! So instead of shaming him and taking his money, I was like [smiles], Hey look! I like to show off...

Men are hungry for information from an actual female who'll actually say something to them about it. I had instant compassion for them right away as equal human beings, equally beaten down by the patriarchy and equally lost and wandering. Men are shit out of luck if they need comfort or compassion or care. That just pisses me off. I'm always very physical with my fans. I hug them. I touch them. I squeeze their shoulders. I have to let them know that I really do mean it."

"Buddhism is about transcending your emotions...  Transcending emotions doesn't mean you have no feelings.  You have them.  But you recognize them for what they are and respond appropriately without letting them develop into what we call emotions, which are really just feelings that have been blown way out of proportion."

"Morality is a personal matter...  the precepts are a list of the common habits of Buddhists, not rules Buddhists must follow."

"A strong tendency to identify oneself as a member of some particular group tends to become a hurdle to overcome..."

"The real root of our problems as human beings is the way we fly off into imagining how things could, or should, be."

"No matter what the contents of your thoughts are, they are all just thoughts.  This is very easy to say but very difficult to truly understand because we've been taught since birth to believe in our own thoughts...  Once you've seen what these thoughts and memories truly are, you come to see that they have far less power than you imagined they did.  And once you've seen how powerless all thoughts really are, you can transcend these memories and the detrimental effects they've had on you.  The key is to see what's going on right now..."

"You can't really help feeling whatever you feel at any given moment.  But you do have a choice whether or not to pursue those feelings and roll around in them..."

"Any enlightenment that needs to be confirmed by an outside authority isn't really enlightenment."

"Without any followers, people who think they’re God’s messengers are just delusional."

"...its entire message could be summed up in three words:  Just be careful...  Don't be reckless with sex.  You can really hurt someone if you are, and you can really hurt yourself."

Graveyard of Memories:

"It’s funny to consider how important things like that felt to me then. Proving people wrong. Fighting stupidity. Wanting formal recognition. It took me a long time to learn that proving people wrong is purposeless, fighting stupidity is futile, and formal recognition prevents people from underestimating you—and thereby from ceding to you surprise and other tactical advantages."

"Making things harder as a way of fostering gaman—perseverance, endurance, fortitude—was a Japanese fetish, and I loved it."

"It was only later that I came to learn how dangerous it is to allow yourself to be seduced by that first attractive theory. If you don’t keep testing for alternatives, you might wind up satisfying yourself with, and proceeding on, what’s no more than a partial truth. And a partial truth, I would understand soon enough, can be more dangerous than a lie."

"I wonder if we ever recognize the forks in the road we sometimes come to. They’re not common in life, and they’re never marked."

"People talk about morality. Sometimes I think there’s just what you can do, and what you can’t. Well, I could. And I was going to."

"Every morning I woke up during the war was a day I might kill someone. But in the war, I had never known whom. And anyway, of course I was supposed to kill someone, even a lot of people—after all, it was a war. As Patton said, the point was to make some other dumb bastard die for his country. This was different. This was specific. And it wasn’t sanctioned. But did that make it worse? Killing someone specific was worse than killing someone generic? Killing someone for my own reasons was worse than killing someone for reasons I was told by some politician? It might have been another rationalization. But I couldn’t argue with the logic, either. And in the end, I was going to do it anyway."

"More than anything else, killing is about survival. About doing everything you can to deceive, and cheat, and stack the odds in your own favor. You don’t wait for the other guy to go for his gun; you shoot him before he has a chance. If he has his back to you, that’s even better. If you can call in an air strike, that’s better still. You don’t just do everything you possibly can to prevent a fight from being fair—preventing the fight from being fair is the entire point. Do you want the enemy to have as good a chance of killing you as you have of killing him? Or do you want to make sure he gets no chance at all? As far as I’m concerned, the people who think a fair fight is desirable can go ahead and die in one."

"I was too young to know that some memories don’t fade, or age, or die. That the weight of some of what we do accumulates, expands, coheres, solidifies. That life means coming to grips with that ever-present weight, learning how to carry it with you wherever you go, understanding and accepting that it’ll be with you and on you and in you for all your days, until you reach a point where all the energy you ever had is devoted just to shouldering its mass. And when you’re finally able to set down that burden, it’ll only be because it was time to set down everything else, too, everything you had, or have, or were ever going to have. And you better hope that’s really the end of it, because no one knows what happens after."

"...people think bravery comes entirely from within, but it doesn’t. It depends on a lot of things. Maybe one of them is just…where you live. Your culture, your surroundings.”

"Trying to stamp out payoffs to politicians is like trying to outlaw prostitution. Hell, it’s the same as trying to outlaw prostitution."

"I’d figured out there are no bad guys, any more than there are good guys. There are only smart people, and stupid ones; puppets, and puppet masters. Better a wise rōnin, I decided, than a naïve samurai."

The Cole and Hitch Series:

"Life not lived to be safe. Safe make you weak. Make you slow. Make you tired." - Pony Flores

"I liked whiskey. I didn't like how it tasted. But I liked the way it made me feel, unless I drank too much." - Everett Hitch

"So, we sit tight," I said. "See what develops."

"Be my plan," Virgil said.