America’s Identity Crisis

America’s infatuation with masculine values is expressed in capitalism. In contrast, the USSR’s infatuation with feminine values expressed as communism. These two super-powers played off each other – each despising the other – causing them to go further to the left and right.

Now that the USSR has gone, there is nothing pushing America more and more to the right. Naturally, it is moving back towards equilibrium at the centre. America is now having to own what it previously disowned – its feminine nature: socialism.

This is terribly offensive to the American identity – as demonstrated by loud groups like the Tea Party which cling to their masculine values: independence, autonomy, look-after-yourself mentality.

America’s demonisation of the left in the past is making its road to equilibrium in the present a difficult time.

David Frawley on Emotion

Great Tantrics like Abhinavagupta teach us the secret of all the rasas. In this regard, all emotions are rasas. The nine emotional rasas are love, anger, disgust, courage, joy, fright, compassion, wonder and peace. Like a great artist or performer one must come to understand and be able to express all these rasas in their full scope. Then emotion becomes a tool of divine feeling and eternal joy which raises us up, not a poison that brings us down. These emotions belong to the Divine artist. When we expropriate them at an ego level, they become poisons. We must not be incapable even of negative emotions like anger or fear, but we must touch the energy behind them, not contract in the circumstances which create them.

In Tantra, emotion is the main area in which our life energy, our prana or Shakti is held. Suppressing emotion is like suppressing life. It causes death. But expressing raw emotion at an ego level is also destructive and disintegrating. The key is to go to the rasa of the emotion in the dance of Shiva, in which the Shakti will naturally be released.

Continued here.