22 of 31 Questions for Reflection. Today’s question is inspired by reading Dṛg Dṛsya Viveka: An Inquiry Into the Seer and the Seen alongside Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown

What questions arise when I focus on “pleasure activism” as an object of Vedanta meditation?

This beautiful book is a collection of stories, essays, tools, art, poems, powerful gratitude spells, and much more. It offers an uplifting community of voices that engage the world through active enjoyment, bold creativity, and courageous attempts to communicate about pleasure. This book offers expressions of sexuality, celebrations of menstruation, intimacies with queer identity, pleasures after surviving sexual abuse, bad ass ways of coping with cancer, understandings of the magic of nipples, and much more. These expressions allow for often underheard voices and unspoken themes to scream and shout and laugh and cry and reveal what it’s like to live fully, experience fully, and express freely.  It is an enormous blessing to live in an era and a world where we can read Astavakra Samhita one day and Pleasure Activism the next! This life: what a wild ride!  

Meditating on pleasure activism, a Jnana yogi might ask, “Suppose I do not identify with the body and mind, but then pleasure activism arises in awareness, you mean to tell me that I am the ocean of consciousness in which all pleasures arise and dissolve? You mean to say Pure Consciousness makes it as easy to celebrate every being’s pleasures as it is easy to watch it all go? Oh Pure Consciousness, what’s your ineffable pleasure?”

#AdvaitaVedanta #stories