The Sexual Freedom Project: A Personal Awakening

David Castillo writing for Bilerico talks about his realization that he was playing a part in repressing his own sexual freedom. It’s true, self-discovery never ends, there is always something new and wonderful on the horizon.

Freeing Myself from Sexual Regression 

Those moments when we realize that we are always learning are the most humbling and most important for me.

I’ve been out of the closet since I was 22 and it’s safe to say that I’m very secure in my identity and very open-minded about sexuality, which I have explored ad nauseum. I have always carried this open-mindedness as a badge of honor given the often sex-negative society we live in today. Imagine my surprise this past weekend when I discovered a new side of my sexual awareness I never knew existed. I had a sexual awakening.

Fittingly, my sexual awakening happened in the Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend exhibit hall, which was on Capitol Hill and within a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol. I had never been before so I was excited about what was in store for me, but I certainly didn’t think I was going to tap into an unexplored area of my sexuality. To be sure, there was a lot to take in, and I saw many things, (the most intriguing for me was the leather cocoons) which I had only ever seen online.

While casually strolling through the many rooms in the exhibit hall, I found myself captivated with all the live demonstrations going on, especially the wrestling demonstration. Picture two attractive and fit men, both in singlets and both quite obviously aroused, wrestling for passersby as a crowd begins to form. It was certainly a spectacle. Of course, grabbing attention is the point of any expo, but I was completely turned on and it wasn’t only because of the demonstration itself, but because I was also engaging in voyeurism. And, I wanted to do more of it.

VenusPlusX September Expansion Announced

Visitors! Let us know what you think of our expansion to fulfill VenusPlusX’s mission to help usher in “The New Age of Sexual Freedom” – a world free from the global culture of racial, sexual, and gender oppression and violence driven by governments, religions, commerce, and social customs

We aim to do that through multiple and international voices participating in our campaigns, initiatives, educational and advocacy programs, and grassroots organizing, all expanding this month with venusplusx.org’s new utilities and capabilities.

We are especially proud of our new roster of Feature Editors, Guest Editors, and Guest Bloggers, such as…

  • Zain Rivzi, Adrianna Midama, and other international activists join Kushaba “Moses” Mworeko in widening response to the imprisonment, sexual mutilation, and murders of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, the severe curtailment of women’s rights, and the steady eradication of anyone who is HIV+ 100s of countries. And, keeping up-to-date a useful annotated bibliography as a resource to anyone who will get involved. Fundraising to support LGBT US asylum seekers is also on deck.
  • Dan Massey will continue to write on the broad topic of Transhuman Erotic Freedom, adding to his large archive developed over the last 6 months, with an annotated Table of Contents for your use. Prepare for The New Age of Sexual Freedom.
  • Jack Diehl will be giving us his wry take on his favorite news stories everyday. And be sure to check out our new Sexual Freedom Project: LilMike will bring us videos, poems, essays, artwork and other original submissions from readers on the topic of sexual freedom, or anything else that is covered by VenusPlusX. If your submission is featured on the site, we’ll send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt for participating.

One of the good results of expanding our online presence, and the new staff to support all these editors, is that I will at last have the time to devote myself two subjects that tie in with all this.

For one, reporting out my research into self-styled American Fundamentalists groups (that include, sadly, current U.S. Senators and Representatives) involved today in exporting hate and homophobia in the name of religion to boost their own (and their associate’s) commercial interests. And it’s all courtesy of your tax dollars.

Second, my passion, is bringing to life the real victims of sexually-motivated violence against women and people who are LGBT, and honoring their sacrifice by putting grassroots “boots on the ground” to bring public and media attention around concerns and demands for immediate relief from police bias, full federal equality rights, and the passage and enforcement of trans-inclusive legislation throughout the United States.

We hope you will find our new features and expanded utilities both interesting and enticing, To help expand our reach, please Like us on Facebook, Like-Favorite-Comment-Subscribe to our YouTube videos, follow us on Twitter, and email your uncensored comments to us at columbia@venusplusx.org.

Grassroots: Take action (updated 10-25-11)

This is a 10-25-11 editor’s update.

Washington, DC’s TLGB Police Watch Coalition of concerned citizens and organizations has now scheduled the first street action, a Transgender Day of Action (TDOA, November 7) in conjunction with the planners of DC’s Transgender Day of Remembrance (TDOR, November 20), to end DC police bias against trans folks.

While the TDOR has been held for two decades to honor those who have lost their lives in the struggle for full equality, this year everyone is cooperating to express in unison the community’s urgent need to rid itself of discriminatory practices in the police force and in city government. The trans community’s leaders have worked ably through the years, and we are starting to see some significant changes but the pressure from the public must remain strong until these practices are irradiated completely from life in our nation’s capital. AG

Recent coalition partners are Rainbow Response, Transgender Health Empowerment, and Gender Rights Maryland, who join DC Trans Coalition (DCTC), Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), GetEQUAL DCThe DC Center for the LGBT Community, Gays & Lesbians Opposing Violence (GLOV), Woodhull Sexual Freedom AllianceCedar Lane UU Church LGBT Task Force, and VenusPlusX.

Please let us know if you would like to be a part of this coalition to end police bias in DC. 

The grim numbers attest to the cost of unregulated hatred of vulnerable minorities when civil government fails:

  • Over a ten year period, eight trans women were murdered in Washington, DC, out of a population of 600 thousand. No place in the nation had a larger proportion of its population murdered in anti-trans assaults.
  • In the same period, ten trans women were murdered in California, out of a population of over 37 million. No other state in the union had a larger number of trans murders.
  • One in seven trans murders occur in DC. One in 500 Americans live in DC.
  • DC’s clearance of murders is a paltry 50% and in the trans community it is only 20%.

Local DC activists working in coalition have launched “TLGB Police Watch” to plan and strategize around concerns of the TLGB community-at-large. Their goal is to put well-aimed and -vetted “boots on the ground” to bring pressure on city government, the Metropolitan Police Department, and Congress (because we don’t have Home Rule in DC) and draw the attention of the public and the media to this gruesome national tragedy.

The coalition is expanding daily and we invite you to join. It consists of individuals and local and national organizations, such as DC Trans Coalition (DCTC), Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance (GLAA), GetEQUAL DCThe DC Center for the LGBT Community, International Socialist Organization (ISO), Woodhull Sexual Freedom AllianceCedar Lane UU Church LGBT Task Force, Rainbow ResponseTransgender Health EmpowermentGender Rights Maryland, and VenusPlusX,

Everyone is working together to complement inroads community leaders are making in direct conferences with Mayor Vincent Gray and Metropolitan Police Chief Cathy Lanier, while making it perfectly that the entire community is unified in its rejection of anything short of instituting an emergency response plan to bring relief to these murders. DC has the best in the nation human rights laws for LGBT residents, but this alarming murder rate against trans and gender-nonconforming residents reveals that we cannot .

The Office of the Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) must be forced once and for all to disrupt the existing anti-LGBT culture which every day leads to their employees’ non-compliance with the D.C. Human Rights Act, the standards for basic cultural competency, and existing police procedures and special orders. As Alison Gardener previously reported elsewhere, “Chief Cathy Lanier calls this, ‘willful negligence,’ on the part of her officers, and admits that police discipline and training has fallen short and endangers public safety.” We already know this pathological, undisciplined, willful negligence increases the likelihood of even greater violence and discrimination against our community.

TLGB Police Watch is putting the “T” first, in demanding systemic and sustainable change throughout Washington, DC. If you would like to work with us or familiarize yourself with what we are doing for problems in your own city, please contact columbia@venusplusx.org and reference TLGB Police Watch.

Change must come now, before more lives and families are shattered because of TLGB discrimination and violence against our community.

Global Sexual Freedom Watch

The struggle for the civil rights for women, sexual minorities, and people who are HIV+ outside of the United States, in hundreds of countries, involves fierce protection against imprisonment, mutilation, violence, and death. The abuse of power is monumental, and first world countries mostly sit idly by while this miscarriage of humanity is put forward by governments, religions, commerce, and often vile social custom.

This alone should make every American care about this silent genocide, the systematic “disappearing” of people who are HIV+ or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender and gender-nonconforming (LGBT) and severe restrictions on the rights of women.

But, there are still other reasons, all very troubling, that should lead every global citizen to be concerned with this tyranny which causes the unnecessary shattering of people’s lives on every continent.

American foreign aid supplies all or a portion of the budgets of many foreign governments but we fail to do enough, anything, to interrupt the associated civil corruption which swallows sometimes half and mismanages what is supposed to be benefiting their populations. This has the most severe impact on women, sexual minorities, and people with HIV+. When will the United States live up to its own principles and condemn these practices and add more safeguards for our US tax dollars? Quiet and overt diplomacy and more public statements from President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton must be forthcoming, not just occasionally reactive or opportunistic sound-bites.

The US has a great opportunity to save a whole class of people in other countries, but looks away. Are we to look back on this period and say we stood quiet instead of interceding to prevent the mass murder of thousands and thousands we could have saved?.

To stand by not only misses that opportunity, America sends the wrong message, attitude, and philosophy out to the rest of the world, whose eyes are fixed on what we are or are not doing to make the world a better place. Will the US just perpetuate the global culture of sexual violence or do something about it?

Worse, and complicating this terrible worldwide problem, is the direct manipulation of dishonest, hypocritical, and greedy past and current US elected and appointed officials. These men very unofficially and unlawfully earn millions for themselves and their cronies on the backs of foreign populations. They are connected and primarily loyal to secretive christianist corporations/organizations, such as “The Family” (aka “The Fellowship”), the Family Research Council,  and to religious leaders whose congregations comprise primarily of honest people who may be blissfully unaware that their financial and moral support of their church is being funneled into the pockets of these commercial adventurers.

Like past charades and crusades, these zealots come in the disguise of acting “in the name of Jesus” and today use fear of women’s rights, fear of people who are HIV+, and fear of anyone who is LGBT to terrorize entire populations. This is a ruse to distract because they are chiefly concerned with who gets the contracts, for roads, schools, hospitals, and especially the extraction of national resources, and most important, “What is the margin? Their profit, how much can they get their hands on?

They lobby at home to unadvisedly turn out more foreign aid, even to countries under dictatorships, to keep the revenue stream pregnant with multiple opportunities to make even more money. One U.S. Senator has boasted of hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel and security he received as senator to fund his “Jesus work” in Uganda.

More in the weeks and months to come exposing the voting and lobbying histories of these current elected and appointed US officials (virtually all Republican, white, and male) which will disclose this egregious mishandling of US tax dollars for spreading homophobia and hate abroad, lining the opposition’s own pockets, and working to blur all lines separating church in state everywhere.

How about a round up and forced resignations of a few dozen members of the US Congress?

We will delve deeply into the cause which motivates these christianist corporations/organizations which advocate adherence to a duty they place higher than any civil duty whatsoever, including government service. Their shared cause is to bring about a world where the rule of law is replaced by the rule of [their] God. And their rule of God includes putting women in their place, and erasing sexual minorities that make them uncomfortable or scare them (itchy about one’s own sexuality, really) and any evidence of HIV+.

This goal to erase the rule of law is foundational to their political and private lives, as Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachman are showing us right now (don’t they know we can see them??). To me, this parallels the oft-disdained mission of jihadists. As for our the members of the US government involved in this cause, ahead of their oath to the US Constitution, this is a vile form of organized crime secretly draining our treasury and ought to be considered sedition.

Are we going to just sit by and let them do that? Their mayhem here and abroad must come to an abrupt end.

If we fail to get involved and act, these self-styled American Fundamentalists, these abusers of powers, will continue their mission of eradication of what they find unacceptable, bringing their theocracy to Main Street USA and every continent on the globe.

These forces are engaged in a worldwide, well-organized attack on all countries’ governments and their populations to extend their exclusionary religious beliefs and unreckoned homophobia and hate, all in the name of their religious cause.

We are broadening out contacts with foreign groups representing women, people with HIV+, and LGBT rights, and will be regularly reporting here, organizing grassroots activism in Washington, DC, and working with watchdog groups to expose the secretive disloyalty of US elected officials. We welcome new contributors.

Let us know what you think? What are you doing to right this terrible and shame wrong being perpetuated by our hard-earned tax dollars?

Where is the outrage?

Call for Justice

In 2006, I went to Congo and was fascinated to see observe what I had been taught in school about the eruption of volcano mountains.

People in this part of the country have been experiencing unending wars. Wars in and out, whether they are from within or out, or their own making or imposed on them. On top of the wars, then the eruption of the Virunga Mountains covering the whole city, ending in Lake Kivu. Luckily enough, people didn’t die because they were warned in advance but nothing of the property left behind was recovered.

The airport was very busy not with local passengers but the MONUC –United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The so-called peace keepers.

I still don’t understand the UN’s role, if it’s to protect citizens, why people are still dying in large numbers without anything being done. Why doesn’t the UN declare DRC a crisis area. People in this area have suffered for too long!

Much attention has been put on the Ivory Coast, North Africa, and the Middle East, crises that are just months old. The only thing they are good at is changing the mission’s name, which I think becomes more confusing to the local people. It’s now MONUSCO, United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Silence has killed people and it’s high time people stepped up — the media, the International community, every person. Listen to the outcry of the Congolese. Remember, their’s is one of the richest African Countries in minerals and natural resources, and war, famine, and poverty enable those in power who would exploit us and the others who stand by silently. Just my opinion.

Please take a look at this documentary for more.

Our Call to Action

These grim numbers attest to the cost of unregulated hatred of a vulnerable minority when civil government fails:

  • Over a ten year period, eight trans women were murdered in Washington, DC, out of a population of 600 thousand. No place in the nation had a larger proportion of its population murdered in anti-trans assaults.
  • The DC trans murder rate is 75 times the national average.
  • In the same period, ten trans women were murdered in California, out of a population of over 37 million. No other state in the union had a larger number of trans murders.
  • The DC trans murder rate is 50 times that of California.
  • One in seven trans murders occur in DC. One in 500 Americans live in DC.
  • DC’s clearance of murders is a paltry 50% and in the trans community it is only 20%.

A social and governmental emergency exists in the District of Columbia. Neglect and overt hatred of our city by rubes in congress, fools in the bureaucracy, and ignoramuses in the judiciary, who beat us down as a scapegoat for deficiencies of civil government that they are too greedy and lazy to correct when it is within their power, have taken their toll for years on the quality of civilization, the actual practice of social justice and equality, in this city. We have now reached the point that breakdown in the legitimacy and standards of law enforcement in our nation’s capital threatens government stability as surely as the recent earthquake, which cracked our national monuments.

Law enforcement and legal justice are essentially non-existent in DC for the transgender community, in spite of this city having an outstanding record in legislating civil rights and equality for all its residents. Nowhere is this more evident than in the prevalence of transgender murders here, compared to other parts of the country.

No one understands the injustices suffered and the social costs borne by the transgender community so well as transfolk themselves. As the members of society most intimately familiar with the individual and collective challenges to the expression and enjoyment of gender freedom, no group is better qualified to lead the liberation of human society from a failed vision of civil devotion. The time is now for transfolk to unify around, and seize, their privilege as the logical leaders of the quest to achieve TLGB justice and equality.

VenusPlusX has been created to serve and expedite the emergence of this New Age.

The Sexual Freedom Project: Make Your Voice Heard

The Sexual Freedom Project is a series that will highlight your original and creative efforts around addressing the question, “What does sexual freedom mean to you?” It will feature your videos, stories, poetry and artwork exploring the role sexual freedom plays in your life today, how the media covers sexuality, gender, and popular culture, or anything else that comes to mind when you think of sexual freedom. Send us your personal take on these questions, or on any of the other varied topics covered by VenusPlusX.

We will also feature works created by the VenusPlusX staff, including video interviews filmed on the street, in parks, restaurants, over the Internet, and anywhere sexual freedom is being discussed.

To thank you for the submission of your original video, story, poem or artwork that we feature on the site, we will send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt. It’s easy! For instance, you can use your videocamera, phone, or computer to make a 1-2 minute video sharing your thoughts. You could also write a short story or an essay in response to a post you read here on the site, write a poem, or create a piece of art. We look forward to your creativity!

Jack and Adrianna model our fabulous t-shirts

VenusPlusX’s soft cotton t-shirts feature the Statue of Freedom, Columbia, as it appears atop the U.S. Capitol Dome in Washington, D.C., a deeply embedded, gender-nonconforming American icon that inspires us to work harder for universal equality and sexual freedom.

For more information on how to submit your videos and stories, click here or contact us directly at columbia@venusplusx.org.

Be a part of the conversation, let your voice be heard and shared all over the world, and make us your digital platform of choice — a place where your views can have great impact. After all, isn’t expressing yourself what freedom is all about?


Newly designed and greatly expanded website coming

Just thought I’d let everyone know that we have been working hard all summer to develop campaigns and initiatives to help usher in “The New Age of Sexual Freedom” – a world free from the global culture of racial, sexual, and gender oppression and violence  currently supported by governments, religions, commerce, and social customs.

In a few days, we will go dark for 24 hours to upload our newly designed website with expanded content and new resources. We are especially proud of our new roster of Feature Editors, Guest Editors, and Guest Bloggers, such as . . .

Kushaba Moses Mwreko and Adrianna Midama will be writing more about global sexual freedom, and keeping up their annotated bibliography for anyone needing a quick education on international issues.

Dan Massey will continue to write on the broad topic of Transhuman Erotic Freedom, adding to his large archive developed over the last 6 months. Prepare for The New Age of Sexual Freedom.

Guest Editor, Jos Truitt, will moderate a national conversation on Transunity and Transleadership, addressing lots of challenging questions. And, later this month, Jos, Alison, and Dan will be hosting several live twitter chats at Atlanta’s Southern Comfort Conference later this month.

Jack Diehl will be giving us his wry take on his favorite news stories everyday. And be sure to can check out Tiye Massey‘s daily post of one of our latest YouTube video (or guest blog) featuring anyone of you who can answer, “What does sexual freedom mean to me?” If you send your written or video story or call us up on Skype-record, we’ll send you a free VenusPlusX t-shirt for participating.

One of the good results of expanding our online presence, and the new staff to support all these editors, is that I will at last have the time to devote myself two subjects that tie in with all this. First, reporting out my research into American fundamentalist groups (that include, sadly, current U.S. Senators and Representatives) involved today in exporting hate and homophobia in the name of religion but only for their own (and their associate’s) commercial interest, all on your tax dollars. And, bringing to life the grassroots’ boots on the ground fighting for immediate relief from police bias and full federal equality rights.

We hope you find these new feature interesting and enticing, and look forward to getting your comments on the new site once we go live next week. In fact, we crave your criticism so we can do a better job.

Alison Gardner, co-founder of VenusPlusX

 

Avatars in Second Life?

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español You can refer back to our last post talking about Krishnamurti as an example of two concepts of avatar as they played out in the life of one person. Initially, Krishna was publicly identified as an avatar representing a fixed system of belief, Theosophy. When he renounced this role that he had been thrust into, his willingness to sacrifice the false social foundation of his life to honor the truth he found in his own mind made him into an avatar of the living truth, the only thing humans can achieve or become avatars for.

he word avatar has a much more recent meaning in the universes of virtual reality (VR). There are a number of virtual realities in which vast numbers of people cooperate and compete, design and build, and interact with each other in all manner of visually simulated environments and actions. Best known is probably Second LifeWorld of WarcraftMinecraft, and others built on variations of theme and system architecture. Among these, the avatar concept is most fully developed in Second Life.

In Second Life (SL), you are called a resident. Your presence is represented by a visibly displayed 3-D figure, you as an avatar, at a location within the simulated world that is visible to all participants within visual range. Your avatar has a great many basic and inherited characteristics, as well as the ability to accommodate a virtually unlimited number of visible, functional, and interactive augmentations.

When you view a scene in SL, you see the shapes and surface textures of the avatars that are located within your view. When this data is combined with a representation of terrain, including elevation and vegetation, structures and oceans, a composite scene can be rendered that places three-dimensional images of the avatars in a three-dimensional terrain context.

SL avatars are most often humanoid in form, some in animal or human-animal hybrid forms. and are often equipped with alien, gender-variant, and species-variant erotic organs.

One of the virtues of the use of artificially constructed forms for the avatars is the ability to give the avatars any shape, articulation, and surface texture desired, as well as the ability to animate parts of the avatar body or face, given sufficient scripts and code. At all times the avatar is under the control of a human being through a viewer that connects to the SL servers and provides local interfaces and image generation. Your avatar can walk, run, and fly around, observing an entire simulated patch of earth.

As the resident of the avatar, you have complete control over everything it says and does. You can hear what other people say or communicate by text. You can see the world from the avatar’s viewpoint, or from any other accessible place. You can hear ambient sounds in the simulated environment. The avatar is an extension of your self into the virtual world. As such, the acts of the avatar in dealing with the virtual world and its inhabitants are your acts for which you are ethically, if not legally, accountable, to another avatar and its resident (who can be physically located anywhere in the world).

In the relationship of the SL avatar to its resident we find a metaphor for the relationship of the human avatar to living truth. An avatar in SL can have default behaviors which cause them to be in a state of motion appropriate to each situation, e.g., still when seated and in a constant “dance” when standing. This level of behavior is akin to motor and reflex functions of a human body. The avatar performs a great range of simulated actions under the direction of its resident. The human body similarly performs actions in Real Life (RL) under the direction of higher mind functions. This division of mind levels in humans and avatars is conceptually similar, though the actual human mind content is a universe  greater than the most elaborate of all present day avatars.

A major theme of Transhumanist thought is the future emergence of Artificial Intelligences (AIs) that can simulate human thought faster and more accurately than a biological human. Any part of one’s mind that could be accurately modeled in an AI could, in principle, be immortalized by simulation in an artificial substrate. If this can be done, there would be no problem in endowing an SL avatar with the same human mind function.

We have no idea how far this idea might be carried because the first necessary steps to move beyond mechanical mind to minimal cognitive functionality by a machine are not yet well understood in humans. In the meantime, experimentation with AIs in VR interfaces like SL seems likely to help identify “low hanging fruit,” such as augmenting apparent avatar autonomy, while retaining a control link to the mind of the resident. The definition and implementation of such an interface would itself be a major accomplishment.

Coming up: What would it be like to live inside the world of SL?

 

Becoming and Being an Avatar—Choosing the Transhuman

For more on Transhuman Erotic Freedom…

También en español “I think when one sees something true and beautiful, one wants to tell people about it, out of affection, out of compassion, out of love. … Can you ask the flower why it grows, why it has perfume? It is for the same reason the speaker talks.”                                            —Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti was “discovered” at age 14 by Charles Leadbeater, a prominent Theosophist, who proclaimed him destined to become a spiritual teacher and a great orator, likely to be the “vehicle for the Lord Maitreya,” an advanced spiritual entity, according to Theosophical doctrine, who periodically appears on Earth as a World Teacher to guide the evolution of humankind.

Krishna was removed from his family and educated by the Theosophists, preparing him to assume the great role for which he had been chosen. His education in colonial India was followed by the worldwide development of the World Teacher project, of which he was the nominal head. Apparently he had more serious and personal thoughts about this matter than his sponsors in the Theosophical Society, for in 1929, at age 34, he publicly repudiated the project and Theosophy.

The remainder of Krishna’s life suggests that Leadbeater’s recognition of the boy’s destiny as a spiritual teacher and great orator was entirely correct, at least after he was educated and prepared by the Theosophists to be their messiah. Krishnamurti denounced the concept of saviors, spiritual leaders, or any other intermediaries to reality, and urged people to directly discover the underlying causes of the problems facing individuals and society. He declared allegiance to no nationality, caste, religion, or philosophy, and spent the rest of his life traveling the world as an independent speaker. In the end, he came to be recognized worldwide as a noteworthy teacher and advocate of Truth.

Krishnamuti is unique among those who have claimed to be avatars, literal embodiments, of Truth. His story shows us that an ordinary person may become an avatar of Truth if only one’s potentiality is understood properly. Krishna truly embraced the concept, even though it overturned the entire foundation and supposed purpose of his life and education. By refusing to be proclaimed an avatar to serve a human dogma, he demonstrated the very quality of being a genuine avatar in the service of Truth.

But what do we really mean by avatar? The word comes from Hindi and refers to a deliberate descent of a deity from heaven to earth, or a descent of the Supreme Being. In the New Age of sexual freedom we are revealing through VenusPlusX, the supreme ideal of Truth holds a position comparable to that of a deity in legacy human religion and it is entirely reasonable to use the word avatar to describe a person who chooses to become an embodiment of living Truth. An avatar is most definitely not a messiah. True avatars arise as ordinary human beings who become sensitive to the living Truth that is always present in their minds, and resolve to live their lives in service to its direction.

Why would anyone want to be or become an avatar? There are plenty of wrong reasons born of  the temptation to imagine oneself to have been “chosen” by some cosmic force to perform some heroic function, as is the case with the avatars known through the distortions of myth alone. Of course, as Krishamurti’s case shows us, there are two sides to this quest and its personal experience. Krishna received the material bounty and attention of being the publicly recognized avatar chosen to bring Theosophical truth to humanity. But Krishna did not take this on as a label of himself, so much as a life task to be lived out. By rejecting the distorted image of himself, overburdened with Thesophical doctine, he was able to live the Truth.

In effect, the path of personal development for one who would become an avatar is basically the same as the path of one who would transition to become fully Transhuman. The human state is hardly transcended by the installation of new body parts. The human state is also a shared consciousness—a common story of what our life experience is about or if it be about anything at all. Transition of this consciousness from simple reliance upon myth and fact to incorporate vision and truth makes the human mind become more than human, indeed, it becomes Transhuman. And this phenomenon is what separates visionaries like us from the simply human. Initially, this is simply a change of viewpoint, a commitment to a certain way of approaching challenges; however, with experience, as the response becomes automatic, completely new modes of coordination with physical reality are opened up to us.

In the virtual reality known as Second Life, each participant makes their selves visible to other participants in the form of an avatar, a three dimensional model of a human body or some other form that can be manipulated by an operator (who is, of course, a real human being). This experience is a powerful addition to the original avatar concept, which we will explore in our next post.