taboos

You Are What You EatTake food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting.Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertising hired to sell more bacon, and the Dutch eat their fries with mayonnaise, not ketchup.Think it's rational to be grossed out by eating bugs? Think again. A hundred grams of dehydrated cricket contains 1,550 milligrams of iron, 340 milligrams of calcium, and 25 milligrams of zinc - three minerals often missing in the diets of the chronic poor. Insects are richer in minerals and healthy fats than beef or pork. Freaked out by the exoskeleton, antennae, and the way too many legs? Then stick to the Turf and forget the Surf because shrimps, crabs, and lobsters are all anthropods, just like grasshoppers. And they eat the nastiest of what sinks to the bottom of the ocean, so don't talk about bugs' disgusting diets. Anyway, you may have bug parts stuck between your teeth right now. The Food and Drug Administration tells its inspectors to ignore insect parts in black pepper unless they find more than 475 of them per 50 grams, on average. A fact sheet from Ohio State University estimates that Americans unknowingly eat an average of between one and two pounds of insects per year.An Italian professor recently published Ecological Implications of Mini-livestock: Potential of Insects, Rodents, Frogs and Snails. (Minicowpokes sold separately.) Writing in Slate.com, William Saletan tells us about a company by the name of Sunrise Land Shrimp. The company's logo: "Mmm. That's good Land Shrimp!" Three guesses what Land Shrimp is. (20-21)

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the lefthandpath seek liberation in this life.--About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the left-hand path seek liberation in this life.--About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

Zeena believes that the breaking of taboos creates access to blocked energy that is let loose in a forceful way. The left-hand path is about consciously breaking with a __leepwalker orthodoxy_ to be able to act as a fully awaken and conscious individual. In her book, George Orwell (1984) is quoted: __rthodoxy means not thinking _ not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness._ At the same time she notes that the left-hand path is the __ay of action_. It is not about intellectual contemplation, or worse, just reading about action.'About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger from: Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its backgroundand role within new Western religiosity, University of Stockholm, 2004

In Demons of the Flesh, Zeena describes how Shiva and Shakti are actually __wo sides of the same deity_. The goal of the initiate on the left-hand path is to become __his bisexual twin godhead_ and activate a state of perceptual sexual ecstasy within one's own consciousness. Zeena points out that a corresponding symbolism is found in the western hermeticism in the idea of __he inner androgyne._--About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

Nothing could be easier than disturbing a status quo instituted by others; the real work of the sinistercurrent is to break the rules we rigidly establish for ourselves._-Zeena Schreck for "Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity," University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

A unifying factor between the different traditions and lineages of Tantra, is that it is feminine in nature. It acknowledges the feminine as the basis from which all the practices spring. Therefore, Tantra is by its nature, the understanding that all phenomenal existence, the universe, or cosmos, that we experience is feminine in nature.

Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).

There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.

He had a sadness in his eyes that Carrie recognised as regret.

Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.

I__ a virgin Mr Cohen,_ Carrie said, ____e never been with a man before.

You are so beautiful,_ he whispered, kissing her softly on the lips. __ can__ believe I got to have you._ __ou__e the only one who has,_ Carrie smiled, __nd I wouldn__ have had it any other way.

He had a hungry look in his eyes and it frightened her.

I want to take you under the moonlight.

She loved the fact he was older than her and more experienced, he had so much to teach her and she couldn__ wait to learn.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

We would not be ashamed of doing some of the things we do in private, if the number of sane human beings who do them in public were large enough.