Joseph Bean

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Joseph Bean

Joseph W. Bean is the author of "Flogging: The Basics and Beyond"

Book Review

In what promises to be a very exciting series, noted lifestyle presenter Joseph W. Bean has been enlisted to launch a series of instructional DVD/Book combinations that will provide safe and easy to follow instructions in BDSM play.

When I recieved the book and DVD (if it is not clear this is a Book and DVD SET) I instant put in the DVD and sat down expecting a very dry tutorial; This was so far from the reality though. J.W. Bean is definately entertaining while getting across crusial information and safety tips.

The book is a quick read but is really an over view of the DVD, which is nice to have, but do not just look at one or the other. However, I strongly suggest reviewing both the book and DVD.

Product Description

With 62 Titles planned, of which this title is the second, under the overall editorship of Joseph W Bean, Nazca Plains has created the SM/Tech series. This series is focused on the Leather BD/SM community and features many nationally known presenters well recognized to significant and well-known audiences. This title is a life presentation of Mummification by Joseph W. Bean and includes two different demonstrations. Pansexual Material


In this excerpt from Joseph Bean's book, Leathersex,
he discusses the role of spirituality in the S/M scene.

Personal ads of leathermen seeking partners, articles published in leather magazines, and conversations at leathersex parties all suggest that the past several years have been a boom time for spiritual interests and practices in leathersex circles. Men are often seeking not just a flogging, but a ritual flogging, not just an S/M scene, but a ritualized scene, meaning a scene more likely to involve spiritual experience. The magazines, obviously both responding to and guiding the community they serve, are publishing pieces about transcendent experiences, the spiritual movement, and the meaning of leathersex in psychological and spiritual terms. And, discussions that were once about how good a man felt after a particular scene are often conducted now in the vocabulary of spiritual practice which, only a decade ago, would have raised eyebrows in most leathersex circles.

It isn't that new kinds of inner experiences have recently begun to occur in the leathersex playroom. What has changed lately is that leathermen are according one another a greater degree of freedom in the discussion of their experience. This, very likely, has to do with the relaxing of the Old Leather attitudes. (It was considered inappropriate or foolish, perhaps even ridiculous, for bottoms to speak of enjoying the abuse they begged for as recently as the early 1970s. And any discussion involving the word "spirit" was certainly unlikely in most circles.) Tops have always been pretty much at ease talking about their desires, and with their very closest friends they have talked technique freely, but the Old Leather attitude toward any discussion of inner experience-particularly in terms that suggest a spiritual connection-has traditionally been, "Can it! I have no idea what you're talking about."

Bottoms also talked to bottoms even in the strictest leather, circles, and what they mainly talked about in the old days was the Tops they knew. One of the inhibiting factors on bottom to bottom conversation in Old Leather was the certainty that anything said to a bottom could be repeated to a Top if demanded, meaning that even when no Tops were present a bottom was riskmg eventual ridicule by Tops for mentioning the unmentionable.

Throughout the 1970s there were numerous independent movements and individuals working out and exploring the spiritual possibilities in leathersex. Geoff Mains, author of the classic Urban Aboriginals, was a very serious student of the spiritual implications of both submission and pain-bearing. Fakir Musafar (publisher of Body Play magazine and presenter of workshops all over the world) was very actively pursuing the pain-related spiritual practices of traditional cultures, from the Native Americans to the Hindus of the Indian subcontinent. Purusha Larkin, author of the infamous The Divine Androgyne, was narrowly but very deeply focused on the self-realization and spiritual liberty he discovered in fisting and other intense ass play. Also, small circles of leatherfolk were turning to Wicca (traditional, nature-power religions), to the resurgent religions of Native Americans, to Caribbean religions involving Christianity but hardly related to the mainstream of that faith, and in larger numbers to New Age spiritual practices, often personally, even eccentrically defined.

What everyone was attempting was much the same. They wanted a framework within which to understand, to communicate, and to facilitate the repetition of spiritual experiences they had (or had heard of) in leathersex. They wanted to validate their experience, and to be able to predict it or cause it to recur. Another major force involved here was the implication that experiences as intense as the ones people had with S/M-usually completely unexpectedly-could be dangerous as easily as they could be a transformation in a positive sense. So, as with so much in leathersex, safety became a motive for change.

Black Leather Wings, a network of men and women involved in leathersex and related to the Radical Faeries, emerged in the late 1980s as a social forum in which people could bring their various experiences and interests, their extremely divergent backgrounds, and their hopes. At gatherings (sort of faerie versions of the bike run) and at in-town meetings, the "leather faeries," as Black Leather Wings folks are often known, have given at least a certain segment of the leathersex population a comfortable context, an accommodating intersection rather than a set of doctrines.

In recent years, presentations on the spiritual dimensions of leathersex have become very popular at NLA International's annual Living in Leather conferences, in the programs of major leather/S/M organizations like GMSMA | in New York, and on the schedules of businesses like San Francisco's QSM set up to provide leathersex education.

The word is definitely out that, although some people continue to resist the possibility of spiritual experience in the leathersex arena, it is a genuine and acceptable interest shared by a growing segment, perhaps even a majority, of the community.

WHAT ALL THE TALK IS ABOUT

While the popular forms of the world's major religions :ii stress various codes of behavior to the exclusion of any active, personal search for truth, there are deeper levels of even the great faiths where direct experience is valued.

These include the monastic mystics in Christianity and the Dervishes in Islam for instance. Many of the saints of the Catholic Church, for example, largely excluding those beatified by the earliest traditions and those recently canonized for doing good deeds, achieved their sainthood by recording ecstatic experiences. A lot of these saints-usually living under vows of chastity-expressed their vision in sexual terms, none more heatedly perhaps than Saint Theresa of Avila.

That same type of experience, not to depreciate the visions of the saints, is what leathersex players sometimes encounter. Placing the body at the center of one's own attention and pushing it to levels of intensity in physical experience that are not normally encountered, we discover incredible responses and "see" remarkable things. First balancing, then pushing the mind beyond the recognition of balance and imbalance, where the dominant and submissive, active and passive, self and not-self seem to be very arbitrarily defined, we enter into a peace and a sense of wholeness not available underordinary circumstances.

There, memory and expectation, regret and hope, ability and incapacity are resolved and irrelevant.

In ecstatic states, however they are arrived at, there is an inescapable sense of personal well-being based on the vision that one is intimately related to, integrally a part of, a wholeness that is perfect. The spiritual seeker-leatherman or not-is seeking to do three things above all else: He wants to experience this ecstatic condition often; he wants to grasp the meaning of the "higher" state in terms of his ordinary life; and he wants to improve himself by becoming continually more like the "perfect" self he experiences in ecstasy.

Some men, calling themselves by various names but most properly shamans, also seek to teach others to achieve these visions. In leathersex circles this is often done by facilitating S/M scenes, usually by Topping in highly ritualized scenes.

Some people believe that to pursue spiritual experience in S/M is a mistake, and their position makes sense. There is always the danger that experience as intense as this might leave a person psychologically damaged if nothing else. And, ; in S/M, there is also the danger that the scene may be allowed to go too far or too fast when j physical pleasure has to take a back seat to spirij tual intentions. Furthermore, there is a real danger that some men who claim to do leathersex for spiritual purposes are just attempting to sanitize their erotic propensities, leading to all kinds of confusing and unsafe dishonesty.

For safety's sake, then, it would seem that the right way to deal with the spiritual implications of leathersex is to understand what might be experienced in a way that makes the fear of it manageable, and stop there. Knowing what can be known without personal experience sets the psychological stage for being able to accept what happens when it comes, but it does not set up the dangerous compulsion to push toward anything. Doing S/M for the right reason-because it is a joy-will sometimes lead to a surprising experience, and sometimes that experience will be best understood in spiritual terms. That is all.

Shamans and guides, like Fakir Musafar in Northern California and Stuart Norman in North Carolina, promise a degree of safety that may be what is called for when a man wants to do S/M for the sake of the spiritual experience he may achieve. Unless a seeker also happens to be able to enjoy S/M for its own physical and erotic attractions though, and already has some intimation of the ecstatic state, it is doubtful that even the experienced shamans can create a space in which this will actually take place.

WHY LEATHER SEX INVOKES SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

The twin engines of human spirituality are sex and death. In the mainstream religious businesses (the Christian churches) these are dealt with in bizarre ways.

Death is the threshold between life and the hereafter, reduced to a dimensionless barrier with no discernible characteristics of its own. Sex is also managed by reduction. Anything that might be sex but is not within the prescribed procreative limits is simply taboo. End of discussion. To be able to do this, Christians must ignore the first book of the Bible in which sexual awareness and the knowledge that they would die were presented to Adam and Eve. They were suddenly on their own to accomplish whatever they might with their lives.

Sex and death, creativity and dissolution, are the most persistent themes in spiritual practice.

Meditation is, for instance, a form of ego-stilling that tends toward dissolution of the known self.

Tantric practice takes erotic ecstasy to the limit with the intention of evoking the orgasmic level of experience as a sustainable event. Even the Lord's Prayer involves the promise of some level of personal "dying" in the wish to have a higher will than one's own take over-"The will be done."

In intense enough leathersex scenes involving dominance and submission, the effects prayed and meditated for are acted out and realized. "Your will," the bottom is saying, "not mine. I am nothing, you are all." The "death" implied by the erasing of personal importance, the liberating effect of having no need to choose or decide, judge or prefer, carried on long enough, honestly enough, and intensely enough evokes states that are understandable only in either spiritual terms or those of the most sophisticated psychology-a distinction that has more to do with modern linguistic history than anything else.

Pain scenes that reach a certain level also connect us to our mortality. In fact, one way of understanding pain is simply that it is a warning signal-this way lies the danger of dying, retreat or resist.

Like submission, the intentional bearing of stimulation that the body has been trained to avoid becomes a sort of handshake with the outer edge of death, proof that although death is the threshold of eternity or oblivion, there is also an inner territory there, not just an immeasurably fine line.

The role of the erotic in all of this is somewhat harder to pin down in genuinely comprehensible words, but it is important. Put simply, when a man approaches death, whether the momentary death of his ego or physical extinction, he is likely to be overcome by fear. When he approaches the same psychological and spiritual reality of death, with its physical implications as well, in a state of sexual arousal, he is in the presence of the creative force, the balancing and mitigating energy of becoming. The peak of spiritual experience, in one way of describing it, is to be in a state where the creation and destruction of everything existing are seen-as constant. Not merely canceling one another out, but working in such a way as to force what is created to be always an improvement on what was destroyed so that destruction is one of the powers driving more permanent and perfect creation. At its most mundane level, this understanding is expressed (however blindly) by parents who want to see their children have a better life than they have had. At a much higher level, in the mystical visions of the saints, it is the building of New Jerusalem, the making of new heavens and a new earth. And, in the experience of a leatherman, it is the sense in which what happens to him in the dungeon results in spiritual growth. Leathersex works, even for its simplest reasons and most trivial pleasures, with creation and destruction, sexual energy and the possibility of one sort of death or another. Without both forces, the scene is unlikely to achieve anything satisfactory for either party. Still, ecstatic states worthy of description in spiritual terms are rare. They happen when the scene is sufficiently intense, when time enough is spent on the more ordinary conditions of creating a good scene, and when, to put it bluntly, the men involved are expressing enough love to create an environment where the bottom will feel completely safe "letting go," embracing the destruction side of the power exchange.

If spiritual ecstasy is rare for leathersex bottoms, it is many times more rare for Tops. Nonetheless, it is accessible. A Top who is satisfying no urge but his own need to dominate another man or a sadist who is beating a masochist with his own joy in mind to the exclusion of giving pleasure to the bottom will never experience what is sometimes called "the S/M orgasm" or any cathartic, transformative, and visionary condition which can be called spiritual. The same is true of a man who is so deeply engaged in the process of pleasing the bottom that he is working at it without recognizing his own needs at all. The breakdown of the power exchange for whatever reason cripples the scene.

On the other hand, a Top who is intent on expressing his love for the bottom, who dominates as much in response to the bottom's submission as in answer to his own needs, who stimulates for his own pleasure without losing track of the pleasure he is also giving, can be swept up in the energy changes the bottom is experiencing in such a way that he too snaps into an ecstatic state. Even if the two players are strangers, it is possible for the leathersex to be love-making, and for the power exchange to be well enough grounded in their mutual interest in pleasing one another for the distinction between the Top and the bottom as such to blur, tacitly giving control of the scene to the force they create by working together. The effect of working together for the satisfaction of both men in a scene is that, to use a description coined by Fakir Musafar, the Top who would ordinarily have sent the bottom on a journey is now riding with him on his journey. Fakir usually speaks of this in terms of the Top either launching a boat that will take the bottom "elsewhere," or getting in the boat with him and rowing it, meaning he arrives at the destination with the bottom. The image captures the essence of the options perfectly, and the Native Americans even had a word for the shamanic position of the rower, one which Fakir uses: Kaseeka, meaning an experienced person who works at helping others acquire the experience he has.

WHAT IT ALL MEANS

It would be easy to come to the conclusion that leathermen are probably better people because of the sexual and potentially spiritual experience they have. In one way, that conclusion would be accurate. That is, the men who desire leathersex are better people if they do it than if they make a point of not doing what they want.

After all, those desires are born in the complex of mind, emotion, body, and spirit that is a man's self. Getting what he honestly feels a need for is very unlikely to be bad for anyone. On the other hand, what is true of leathersex is true of other things a man can do. Anything at all, done with the appropriate intensity and focus, can become a spiritual discipline or lead to spiritual insight. The Japanese developed the art of serving tea as a spiritual practice. Karma Yoga, by definition, is the performance of the requirements of ordinary life in such a way that sweeping, cooking, or running errands can lead to insight or even Nirvana. So, if leathermen run a higher risk of experiencing spiritual ecstasy, it is only that their pleasure-driven desire happens to pull them in a direction where achieving extremely intense experience is more likely than it is, say, for a person serving tea.

The spiritual existence of human beings is inevitable. Put another way, in a phrase that is sometimes heard in leathersex circles, we are not human beings seeking spiritual experi' ences, but we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Whatever the underlying truths may be, this conception of what it means to be human is useful for grasping and ordering experiences that are otherwise incomprehensible. If we are spiritual at all, then we are spiritual all the time. Just as we continue to exist physically when our center of attention is mental, and we continue to exist emotionally when our attention is on physical activity, we continue to exist spiritually when we think, feel, or do anything. All our various parts, visible and invisible, are constantly being reshaped and influenced by all our other various parts. So, it is impossible to think that anything we do is not related to everything we are. Our experience in every realm of thought, emotion, action, and spirit both depends upon our previous experience in all realms and changes the possibilities for future experience in all areas.

Sex is no exception. In fact, because mental, emotional, and physical (not to mention spiritual) energies are tightly interwoven in sex, it is a kind of experience that contributes powerfully to the changing and growing we do constantly. This is all the more true with leathersex, involving as it does more extreme experiences of the body, more complex mental choices, and more intense emotions than most other sexual encounters.


Also see [ Authors of erotica ] and/or [ Authors of BDSM stories ]

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