So last year while completing a course in an MA Psychology program, we came across the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. This is corporate sponsored campaign aimed at bolstering the self esteem of little girls who, as we all know, take such a serious hit to their body image from our media saturated society, a society where our media presents unattainable and airbrushed beauty standards that nobody can attain, and which are arguably behind the growing problem of eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, etc.) in our modern societies. Girls, as you probably know, are targeted from a very early with advertising messages designed to present a body form and ideal that they cannot attain, just so that they’ll feel bad enough about themselves to go and buy a product to make them feel good about themselves.
Harmless capitalist fun? Read the rest of this entry »
I think I’m going to be ill.
I’m sitting at my gym, working on The Book of Light, and listening to a small group of well dressed runners speak about how we should be beating our kids and making them afraid of us because this way they’d be easier to control.
“Positive fear,” said the effeminate male. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: child abuse
This one doesn’t require a lot of comment.
The idea that individual gain takes precedence over our health and the health of our families is, well, disturbing. We’d say wake up and smell the coffee but you just never know where that coffee has been.
g & m
We’ve added a new website to help promote the children’s books. The website has a few articles that discuss some of the spiritual “theory” behind the books (Vayda Jayne bean and Captain Tristan am I). There is actually a lot of theory behind these books. From the cosmology and theology that underlies the message of our shared divinity (see our Book of Light: The Nature of God, the Structure of Consciousness, and the Universe Within You), to the analysis of “old world dogmas” of limitation (briefly explained here) that form the basis for Captain Tristan’s message of empowerment, there is a lot of complicated spirituality wrapped up in the books. Read the rest of this entry »
We don’t make any secret that we are very spiritual people. This is not in the traditional sense of course. In our humble opinion traditional religions and traditional spirituality are quite oppressive. They usually come with some statements intended to diminish you (like you’re a dummy for eating the apple, your evil and need to be punished, you’re too stupid to live your life right and universal karma is going to get you for it), they often threaten you (i.e. you’ll go to hell, have bad karma, be “extinguished”) if you don’t do what you are told, and oftentimes pass right into the arena of physical (spare the rod…) and psychological abuse (threatening to burn somebody for an eternity simply for making a few mistakes is the definition of psychological abuse!). The message of old world spirituality is clear, you’re a dumb shit and you need to learn your lessons before you graduate and move on and if that means you have to suffer, live in poverty, endure war and hardship, then so be it. That’s the way “God” organized it. Read the rest of this entry »
We just watched a good movie. Pandorum. It’s a cross between a sci-fi and a horror film that, while it won’t win any academy awards for innovations, editing, special effects, or acting, was nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable. It had a great plot twist, kept you wondering what the heck was going on throughout, and had a great ending.
Tags: Old World Spirituality, Pandorum, Serenity, Sociology
Alright, so here is another one of our pet peaves, spiritual teachers without a social context.
Priests without a perspective or (as we like to say) gurus without a clue.
We’ve all read a book by this person, right?
Some of us have even met them in the temples and the ashrams and the “sacred” grounds. Heck, Oprah even promotes this person. This is the (usually) guy who presumes to speak about God and presence and being in the now and morality and virtue and karma and what’s expected from Spirit and all that other spiritual stuff without really having a clue about what it takes to live this life. They sit in their fancy chairs, or assume lotus position on some guilded podium, and prognosticate about karma, consciousness, the cosmos (sometimes) evolution, galactic alignment, and what have you without having a real clue about the day to day happenings of the world.
And the problem with this? Read the rest of this entry »
We just got up from sitting down to watch the “manpic’ The Hangover and I got so say, we are still reeling from it. Billed as a comedy, the movie follows the bachelor party antics of four friends who flock off to Vegas to “party hardy,” leaving their girlfriends to do all the wedding preparations two days before a wedding, and engaging in an amnesiac round of exploitative, immature, drunken, and dangerous behaviour–driving while intoxicated, stealing cars, kidnapping citizens and generally engaging in the type of behaviour you’d expect to see from jail-bound seventeen year old males coming from dysfunctional family backgrounds.
It was horrible to watch.
One of our big pet peaves is gendered activities. These are activities where an individual is excluded from participation based on a superficial external sexual characteristic. You know the drill right? Only boys allowed! Only girls allowed. You can’t come in because you have a vagina. You aren’t allowed because you got a penis. It is exclusion and sorting based on sex and gender and to be honest and frank, as two counselors and social scientists working on healing the emotional and spiritual damage done by patriarchy, and trying to create a saner and just world, it’s a real annoyance.
Why?
Well, because gender based exclusion, one sex only activity, is quite literally the root of all female (and male) oppression in this world. We’ll stop short of saying it is the root of all evil because as we all know, the root of all evil is love of money. But it is definitely the root of all gender based oppression. Read the rest of this entry »
Added some new pics of an old trip to Disneyworld. Will need to add more in the days ahead.
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