Sunday, December 20, 2009

On Community Response

Burn, Baby, Burn.

I saw the post by Robin and my first thought on responding was not to, reflecting an attitude of non-identification. It's important to see that drama is a vortex that can become so powerful it can override and dominate a person's natural gravity and ground of being.

However, I just got done viewing Jim Carrey's YES MAN on MAX, a beautiful film starring Carrey and Zooey Deschanel (girl in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), just a continuous series of scenes in which YES becomes a mantra to situations most would never say YES to nor find even remotely appealing. The beauty of it for me was the humor. So here I am saying NO, contemplating the universal YES to everything often chimed by Tantric sloganeers, and still laughing over the possibilities created in Carrey's film. How could I not take advantage of this GREAT OPPTY to say YES and do some personal lab work of my own. Huh? Are you kidding? LOL

So, after reading your post, my assessment was anything like disgust, in fact. I totally got your active transformation, and enjoyed reading your writing about it.

The only thing I guess I can contribute is that assessment is absolutely natural and critical to life and how we judge the relative value of anything and everything. Negative assessments are just as important as positive ones. From others, as unique as each of us are, it really is counter productive to enter into debates or engage people's assessments. There personal in nature and as one comedian said, "I don't like applause, just throw money!"

In response to Robin's question, which was way too open-ended for me, I think a little context would go a long way in shifting the conversation to being valuable on the level of community which is where it seemed she wanted to take it. My choice is personal responsibility. So how can I respond and be personally responsible with my negative assessments within a community?

It seems to me, by doing the work of transformation, practicing Tantra, saying yes - creating lemonade from lemons, and whatever cliche you have to add to the list - the most important bets are covered. But what about those negative assessments in which we are so identified that we begin to feel disgust, for instance? What I do is create some space, take a break, get a cup of juice, go look at the waves, you know...

And then, ask yourself what your committed to, and consider how relevant the negative assessment is to that context. For the most part, a person's associated disgust is NOT a relevant assessment to the context called OneTantra because OneTantra is like a wave, it only carries information, itself a "community" of relations. Work on the community (how relations are configured, energized, weighted, integrated, etc., etc.) is something that takes place on an entirely different level and is outside the scope of this question. But, for anyone who has ventured to this site with any background in online communities, LOL, disgust is pretty much the overwhelming assessment to include - and Moses is responsibly addressing the source of it. Nuff said bout that.

So, after establishing what rank a value has...  well there it is. This is in my opinion the way to "DO" something about negative assessment on a personal level. At the level of community however, the question for me is whether or not such assessments actually exist at all. 

Suffice it to say, if you have a community based on a negative assessment, your going to promote the transformation of it. The real chore comes when personal negativity corrupts a community promotion. Communities have mandates with purpose. Responding to negative assessment is only valuable then when the assessment is regarding the health of the community.

No comments: