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Shrilita -> RE: Is a Dom a God? (4/8/2011 6:51:03 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Asherscorp1
Through my reading on this forum it has often occured to me that a lot of what is said could be switched directly over to say, a Christian chat room with almost no changes and fit right in. Submitting to "His" will, being obedient, suffering through adversity, becoming a better person through your relationship with "Him" etc. It made me wonder, do any of you think that we use a D/s relationship as a form of worship in our psyche, attaching the same fervor to it that zealots do to Christ? Now, I know these are very broad generalizations so please don't take this as something directed at anyone/thing personally, I don't mean to offend anyone, I'm just wondering from a psychological stand-point what everyone's thoughts on this are. As a side-note, I wrote a poem about my "love-life" and read it to my poetry class a few weeks ago. Those who didn't think it was about domestic abuse thought it was about God. I found that intruiging.
As someone with a lifetime of spiritual education and experience, this question (is Dom God?, and related issues) has been a deep issue for me. If the reader thinks of God as a the old man in the sky, or associates God with religion, then it's easy to laugh off the question and say the two don't mix. It is almost impossible to discuss spirituality rationally because it is so confused with religion (and all religions are so distorted because it is about non-divine minds defining something they have never even experienced For the religious, it becomes a big battlefield).
But consider this: One of the Christian commandments is "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." This implies that other gods DO exist, so the next question has to be, then what is a god? The simplest answer is that God is Love. St. Anselm, a theologian, described God as "The thought than which none higher can be thought." Who of us goes around all day thinking the highest thought of which s/he is capable? Who of us lives our lives devoted entirely to the highest ideas possible--things such as universal love, compassion, purification and meditation for the sake of discovering the living God within us? It raises the question, what is the most important thing in our life? Whatever that is, that is one's god. If the translation was correct, Chris ( who was only one of of the avatars in history) said, "One can look here or look there but lo the Kingdom of Heaven is within you." This means that God is within ourselves, so if we give up our will, our right to consult our own inner self, to a Dom, we then have given over our will to someone else so we then have what psychologist call an external locus of control. If the locus of control is shifted from one's own conscience and consciousness so that someone else has control and makes decisions for us, then has not S/He become a god? In the extreme, such as in slavery, I have seen/read and sometimes experienced that one's consciousness is so dominated by an "Other" that nothing else matters, and whatever that "other" is, then that is more important and dominate in one's consciousness that the Ultimate God, which must be defined (not everyone will agree with this but it is a scientifically practical way of describing it) must be the All, the furthest reach of one's consciousness, the most universal of Isness, the TRanscendent reality. If that is the case, then anything that gets us stuck short of the highest reality would not be God, but would be a god (small g) that was a barrier to the discovery of God (big G), or the god that we put before God.
What I have written may not make much sense to the average reader, but I think Aschercorp has raised an important question and made good observations, and that they are worth giving personal consideration to.
Before closing, I want to point out that even though I have quoted from the Bible, no religion is big enough to own the Truth of God. Religions carve out their particular viewpoint (and say theirs are better than all others) but religion is just a belief system that gives some aspect of God a name and then focuses on behaviors and beliefs that they say their God expects us to adhere to. (BTW, by this definition, Gor is a religion.) It takes a lot of work to make the distinction between opinion and truth.
As near as I can figure at this stage of my understanding, if one utilizes bdsm purely to gain pleasure, then it is creating bondage to lower forms of "god", comparable perhaps to the worship of Baccus (God of wine). The one way I see in which bdsm and M/s can be utilized as genuine paths to God would be as represented in the Tarot card of the sun, where the woman (sub) looks to the man (Dom) who is looking toward the Sun (God). In this case, the disciple (subs) devotion and discipline would be like that of devotion to God, and the Dom is the seeker and she the follower, so He, though his own surrender and discipline, takes them both to divinity/ enlightenment. This is a generalize concept in Christianity where Paul says to the wife to be obedient to her husband and for the husband to be faithful to the church. It is (or was) also a generalized theme in Hindu marriages. It's a beautiful concept, but if the primary goal is to experience pleasure rather than to discover true Divinity, then what?
I'm also aware that bdsm is based essentially on the lower three chakras--fear, power, and sexual sensation, and as such, it carries the essential danger of tantric practices, where the pleasure of the path creates bondage to the path itself before one awakens to the higher stages of growth and development.
There is much to consider on this topic, and I, for one, think it is worth considering.
Satara.
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