Silence8
Posts: 833
Joined: 11/2/2009
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Musicmystery
quote:
ORIGINAL: kyraofMists
I have to say that the idea of 'entitlement' on the slaves part can be very destructive to an M/s relationship. As a slave, the only thing I am entitled to is to not be intentionally harmed. After that, everything else is a privilege that he decides if I get it or not.
Letting go of expectations and feelings of entitlement can be extremely freeing and bring great peace. However, this is not a concept that originates with internal enslavement. I learned the most about letting go of expectations by reading about Buddhism.
Exactly.
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/western.php
The ultimate postmodern irony of today is the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when "European" technology and capitalism are triumphing worldwide at the level of the "economic infrastructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened at the level of "ideological superstructure" in the European space itself by New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises ranging from "Western Buddhism" to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism.1 Therein resides the highest speculative identity of opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known concept of "future shock" that describes how people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technological development and the social changes that accompany it. Things simply move too fast, and before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it has already been supplanted by a new one, so that one more and more lacks the most elementary "cognitive mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament that definitely works better than the desperate escape into old traditions. Instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of techno-logical progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination. One should, instead, "let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances that do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being. One is almost tempted to resuscitate the old infamous Marxist cliché of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement to terrestrial misery. The "Western Buddhist" meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism.2
Nowhere is this fetishist logic more evident than apropos of Tibet, one of the central references of the post-Christian "spiritual" imaginary. Today, Tibet more and more plays the role of such a fantasmatic Thing, of a jewel which, when one approaches it too much, turns into the excremental object. It is a commonplace to claim that the fascination exerted by Tibet on the Western imagination, especially on the broad public in the US, provides an exemplary case of the "colonization of the imaginary." It reduces the actual Tibet to a screen for the projection of Western ideological fantasies. Indeed, the very inconsistency of this image of Tibet, with its direct coincidences of opposites, seems to bear witness to its fantasmatic status.
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RE: Risks of internal enslavement aka TPE - 
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