The Inter-Marriage of the Line/Circle

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One of the tantric living principles is the “Intermarriage”. The intermarriage of the opposites that bring possibility for unity and infinity. These opposites in the inner marriage represent our dualistic human nature and is helping us evolve to get us to this reality of where we are today. We are at a place where men and women are breaking traditional gender norms more than they ever have in human history in order to find more balance in our inner (and therefore outer) marriages. We can see these opposites at work all the time in our lives. The light and the dark, the yin and the yang, the poles of a magnet – electricity and the earth, masculine and feminine energies, and the qualities of the line and the circle, are only just a few examples.

Let’s just say for the sake of this writing that the new vision of enlightenment is “Hieros Gamos” (1), the intermarriage. And the intermarriage is where I can awaken to the integration of these polar forces that represent the unique inner marriage configuration inside of me as they live as me. Bringing balance between the energies of the qualities of lines and circles is the awakening that is happening in our culture in every situation, every moment in time, every dynamic there’s actually a play of line and circle always happening.

as-above-so-belowNow it is important to remember what the lines and circles are – the circle is the sexual expression, or the erotic expression, of the feminine. The line is the sexual, or the erotic, expression of the masculine. From there flow the principles. The point I’m making, as the Hermetics taught, “as above, so below.” That it’s not a coincidence that actually the erect line phallus exists in the world or in the round circle of the great mother.

And we begin to identify the line and circle qualities in ourselves and how we can play with these energies. Where are those qualities relevant in your life? How strong or weak is my deployment of a particular quality in its light aspect? How much or little do I have of the shadow of that dimension? Where can I find it in its light aspect in my life? Where can I find it in its shadow of that dimension?

Friedrich_NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche said, “How could something arise out of its opposite? For example, truth out of error? Or the will to truth out of the will to deception? Or selfless action out of self-seeking? Or the pure sunny look of the wise man out of greed? Origins like these are impossible. Anyone who dreams about them is a fool, in fact, something worse. Things of the highest value must have another origin peculiar to them. They cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, trivial world, from this confusion of madness and desire! Their basis must lie, by contrast, in the womb of being, in the immortal, in hidden gods, in ‘the thing in itself’— their basis must lie there, and nowhere else!”

To the extent that there’s a lack of integration, there’s also an imbalance between my line and circle qualities, that I’m very weak on a bunch of line or circle qualities or they don’t balance properly – where my lines and circles aren’t penetrating or receiving each other is that precise extent where I am imbalanced, playing in shadow, un-integrated. I’m not going to be fully in my Eros…I will be de-eroticized… I will be alienated, imbalanced. All of that is going to produce all sorts of shadow results in my life which actually appear fully, powerfully, potently in the world. I need to appear as my best undivided self, which means that I’ve realized the intermarriage in the unique configuration of lines and circles as they appear in me. This realization causes the emergence of some larger mystical understanding and merging of the properties of lines and circles in our reality. And that intermarriage in me participates in the evolution of love.

“Our greatest moment comes when we find the courage to rechristen our evil as the best within us.” Nietzsche

1. This teaching on lines, circles, unique self and hieros gamos is sourced from Marc Gafni’s presentation at Shalom Mountain Wisdom School. Spring 2014

 

Dear Daddy…

posted in: Compassion, Ethics 0

A joke is just a joke, right?

And gosh, why does everyone try so hard to be politically correct? Can’t anyone take a joke anymore, or say thank you to a compliment?

Those are the kinds of things you might be hearing a lot lately. But pushing back against certain types of jokes is so important because rhetoric, including jokes against women, helps form people’s threshold for what’s normal and acceptable. That rhetorical normalcy in targeting women can cause the most disturbed among us to think it’s OK to prey on them.
Who can make that point to ordinary men better than their own daughters?

CARE Norway created a powerful video to get that point across. In a spoken letter to her father, a girl tells her dad what her life is going to be like because of misogyny.

She knows how protective he is of her. He won’t even let her mom eat sushi.

But his daughter has to break the bad news to him.

“By the time I’m 14, the boys in my class will have called me a whore, a bitch, a cunt, and many other things. It’s just for fun, of course.

She continues, showing how what she thought were seemingly innocuous cultural norms can translate into painful situations.

“Still, some of the people won’t get the joke. … So by the time I turn 16, a couple of the boys will have snuck their hands down my pants while I’m so drunk I can’t even stand straight. And although I say no, they just laugh. It’s funny, right? If you saw me, Daddy, you would be so ashamed … because I’m wasted. No wonder I’m raped when I’m 21.”

She goes on to detail more of the kinds of dire situations that will arise in her life because of a society that thinks it’s funny to degrade women. So she asks her father a huge favor: to be one of the people who stands up against misogyny when he sees it and hears it.

This video is not safe for work.

And be forewarned that she makes statements blaming herself for the things that happen to her — in order to make a point about how women so often blame themselves instead of the factors really at play.

The video gives a visceral, chilling vision of how the world is not safe for women.


A new society that is as safe for women as it is for men is possible.
But everyone has to work together to make it happen.
Dads everywhere need to see this. Daughters everywhere need to see this. But so do sons and mothers. Make sure they do.

 

Sex IS Ethics!! The Driving Force of Our Existence

Quotation-Judy-Blume-life-humor-philosophy-wisdom-truth-hate-war-Meetville-Quotes-104706Why it’s so hard to enter into the territory of “Sex IS Ethics”? Why is it so taboo?

Sex is used in such crazy and debilitating ways. People can be degraded and use sex as degradation. People take the worst forms of sexuality and then in their mind, what emerges, is their belief of what sexuality really is. People have within themselves a very powerful and primal set of fantasies about sex that derive from some of their earliest conditioning, their earliest wiring and earliest experiences.

Most human beings, both men and women, have a set of sexual fantasies. And these fantasies are not the way they want to show up in the synagogue or church on the sabbath morning. We have this whole world of sexual beings each with a set of hidden sex fantasies. Then people get afraid, they think that their fantasies indicate that they are somehow fucked up in some essential way and they just manage to hide their fantasies from the world. Because people think that if the world only knew who they really were, that everyone would treat them very VERY differently. We need to be aware of that in an utterly profound way and realize that people are operating from this enormous sense of pain and fear, that somehow they are going to be exposed and unmasked. That is the underlying fear of expressing our desires and fantasies.

Underlying this fear of expressing our desires and fantasies are people’s general sense that they are in control of their lives and that they are healthy good people. Often, people’s sexual fantasies have something to do with coercion or domination/submission. Which has something to do with dimensions that involve full loss of control and full regression to our primal nature, and no one wants to regress to be an ape. So we need a framework of understanding and creating visions to know why the fear surrounding our sexual desires and fantasies is inaccurate.

“Fuck” is at the core movement of the universe and the core movement of reality.

“Fuck” is the driving force that is evolving consciousness and what brings us together to create higher forms of beings.

And it’s happening all the time.

The line (masculine) is penetrating the circle (feminine) at every moment and it’s what I like to call “polarity” and the living tantric principle of the inner marriage that is inside of us all. It’s in the binary aspect of basic computer programming (zero-one), it’s in every dimension of personal relationship, of economy, of physics. The entire world is based on this attraction/repulsion.

When one thing is attracted to something else, we call that “Eros”.

Quarks are attracted to each other and then they become atoms. That principle of “fuck” makes atoms become molecules…molecules into cells, cells into more complex forms of life and so on. And it happens at every level of our existence. It creates communities, it creates economies. This consistent movement of attraction, of wanting to enter into the moment, to receive the moment. This penetration/receiving is actually happening all the time.

“Fuck” is happening all the time. And inside the realm of “fuck” is the realm of sexuality, the actual act of sexing, the verb tense of “sex”, and is the model for everything, a model for the whole story. “Fuck” was placed at the center of reality because it is the great wisdom teacher.

There is a choice here. Either I can enter it from the perspective of… this world is a lovely place or a horrible place… there is this horrible thing called “fuck” which we have to keep under control, or know that the world is this wonderful thing called “fuck. And a place where we learn to widely engage “fuck” is in sex. Is the core movement of reality, truly, “fuck”?

YES!

What does sex is ethics – fuck is ethics mean? It means that it’s more than relationship, more than love. Relationship always has an sexual_ethicsaspect of penetration and of receiving. Moving forward and of taking in of the other. We need to liberate “fuck” from it’s doldrums of contraction and perceptions of wrong doings. When we say god is love, it’s not a hallmark card. Sex is ethics doesn’t give all encompassing sexual license, doesn’t suggest promiscuity in the negative sense of the term. It gives meaning to ways that are about the essential movements of our evolution. Isn’t that what the traditions meant when they talked about the divine marriage? It doesn’t mean they got married and then went shopping or got married and had dinner. Why did god create the world? Because he didn’t want to have dinner alone. What it actually means, is that god didn’t want to sleep alone.

There is this a desire for merging the concept of “sex is ethics” with our human existence of reality. The big bang is god “fucking” the world open into existence. Sex is ethics, is a core driver in the world, a core driver towards consciousness, a driver towards greater and greater love. As reality emerges and unfolds, it unfolds into higher and higher levels of consciousness and higher levels of love. But that core driver that moves it forward, that force of attraction, that force of allurement, which is “fuck”. When you get that “fuck” is the throbbing force of reality, you realize how actually beautiful it is. Then, more importantly, you get to begin to realize that sex, which is the realm that fuck appears in most readily, is, at its best, a model for all wisdom. It teaches you about everything, you learn everything from there. For example…radical control and radical giving up control at the same moment. You learn and learn and learn and learn….

Let’s look at some examples. What are other examples of what we might mean when we say “Sex is Ethics”? In what way does the sexual model ethics? In sex, on the one hand, you lose yourself in it and on the other hand, you totally are paying attention at every moment. A funny paradox, isn’t it? You are totally aware of every flutter, of any physical movement; totally aware of how everything feels so your body is radically sensitized and enlivened. If you are actually connected, you can feel into an experience somatically, exactly how your partner feels. That tells me that sex is that place in which sex models radically paying attention, radically alive. Fully aware and cognizant of the other. Just that is “sex is ethics”, because in order to be a good lover, the good lover is one that is fully aware, who almost anticipates their partners desire. We say “almost” because you can’t ask people to be magicians. Who almost anticipates their partners’ desire.

Sexual-Ethics-DiagramHow can we practice “Sex is Ethics”?

1. Radical Paying Attention – Fullness of Presence
Sex models paying attention and fullness of presence as a key prerequisite to success in gifting to the other. I can’t give a gift to the other unless I have the sense of paying attention and being present in place. Sex models this notion as the key to gifting the other. Only if I’m paying attention will I know what gifts to give, when to give them, how to give them, to what measure and to whom. Erotic enrapture allows me to see what needs to be seen.

2. Responsibility For Our Own Arousal
Enter into arousal, into the field of arousal, and begin the process of losing yourself. Lose yourself in the sensation, in the subtle energy, in the fragrance and in the aura of the whole thing. And as you lose yourself, you realize you are losing your small self and you are recovering your actual larger self, your wider self, and your deeper self.

2. Would You Rather be “Right” or Be In Relationship?
People make love in a particular way and sometimes develop patters in sexuality. What happens is that people fall into their comfortable position. How do you do it? This is the way I do it! Or people just flutter around quickly from one position to another without locating their pleasure. It becomes a free for all without any kind of depth. In life, you have to take a position to find a place where you are comfortable operating and then be able to give up that position to genuinely explore other positions. You can work this as a sexual thing and then investigate how it applies to other aspects in your life. You have to have a desirable position for yourself or else you enter into sex asking “what should we do”? “What do you want to do”? “I’ll do what you want to do”! Having to negotiate it over and over again, then you are kind of dead in the water. You need to have a default position but that position cant be blocking you off from the other, which could be an even higher possibility. You can only be what you are willing to become. You can only become if you are willing to shift positions. You need to be able to hold a position and be able to give up that position in order to be open to greater possibilities for the discovery of pleasure and maintaining relationship.

3. The Receiver Is Always Right
Looking for what’s actually true is not a minds construct. The first person perspective of the receiver trumps the intention of the deliverer. Let’s say we are having an argument, and I tell you that you shouldn’t have another bowl of ice cream. My intention is to help you because you asked me last week to help you lose some weight. But somehow you completely feel hurt and insulted. It’s not that you are right, it’s that you are insulted because you did ask me to help you a week ago. What it means is that I need to take into account your experience before I recalibrate and continue. Minimally, it means that I have to stop and listen to your feedback and take that seriously in some way. Then from our conversation we might decide to continue as we are, to shift tracks, but the first thing I need to do, in the first person of the receiver needs to be taken into account, to be protected. The receiver is never an object, never just the object of my penetration, but always needs to be honored as a separate independent subject. Therefore in sex, when you are trying something and the person says “I don’t really like that”, you don’t say that “you should…because actually, it’s good for you”. That is a bad thing to do. “Isn’t this what you asked for?”, “you used to like this yesterday, why don’t you like it now?”, “why don’t you do it for just a couple of minutes?”. There is an immediate responsiveness, and the response doesn’t say that the person is right or wrong, its not about being right or wrong. You have to step back and respect the first person experience of the receiver in all dimensions of life, even in the face of logic. A person, first persons experience, is holy. It’s not always right but it’s holy. The first steps is to kind of step back, desist, honor the independent autonomy of the other and from that place decide how to proceed. Staying in the conversation with them.

4. Staying In The Game
What if there are many roads to heaven? There are many roads to heaven, many roads to nirvana, so if the road you are working isn’t working, try another one. But don’t get mad at the police office when they tell you that you cannot go this way and then go home and sulk and then don’t go. Often we try a life path, and life slaps us, we get a cold douse of water from life. So, what we do is that sometimes we try another path and then when we get another douse of water, we just stop. Ok, clearly this isn’t want the universe wants. But, actually, that might not at all be true; the universe totally wants you to get there, just not through those two paths. So if you really feel into the strange attractor of full sexual fulfillment, which keep you going? What is it that keeps you going? What keeps you in the saddle? What keeps you from packing up your bags and going home is that you want to have that experience and you want to give your partner that experience. You have this driver, this attractor that pulls you into the inside of the experience. In life, you have to feel the same attractor, the same erotic attractor alluring you which says to you that you want to be living this value driven, this purpose driven life and if the first way doesn’t work, try another way, and if that doesn’t work, try another way. But, Don’t go home, staying in the game and keep trying with every way possible to move forward.

5. Imagination and Creativity
How does creativity/imagination happens. Creativity doesn’t happen by just starting to build a house. First you need an attraction, a compulsion, an allurement, a fantasy to build a house. You feel the pull of creativity. Second, you imagine how to do it; you have a picture of the house in your minds eye which gets re-evoked time after time and you begin to draw the picture that’s in your head, until ultimately you build the picture in you head first. This is all about the importance of imagination and fantasy. It’s the imagination and fantasy that builds reality. In sexuality, what half of the game is, is imagining. Imagining what the sexual interlude might be like, picturing what it might be like and your imagination is what draws you forward. Imagination is the key to creativity. You would never enter into the creative process of a relationship if you didn’t have a vision or a picture of what it might be like. Having a vision draws you towards it. Which means I need to develop my faculty of fantasy. I’m never going to be able to heal hunger in the world unless I imagine how to do it. Or on a smaller scale, I’m not going to be able to solve a problem in my community unless I imagine how to do it. So we need to re-access the faculty of imagination. Imagination is a big deal and we are good at imagination in sexuality but really bad at it in lots of other areas in our lives. Accessing the power of imagination is an important thing. That is a teaching that sex teaches us because sex doesn’t work without imagination, they are inextricably bound up. When you enter into the world of imagination, you enter into the world of sex.

6. Desire
What does sex tell me about desire? Sex is driven by desire. What does desire do in sex? What is the experience of desire? A loss of control, insanely motivating, shameful but let’s stay on the positive side. What is the experience of desire? When you are in desire, its like all the space is filled up. You aren’t in the space of wondering what the purpose of my life is. You are in the desire and the desire justifies your life. When you are seeking to fulfill desire in a raw sexual way and you are moving towards your gifting and your fulfillment; do you say to yourself “what is the meaning of life?”, I don’t think so. It’s not that you say to yourself that, that breast is the meaning of life, although it might be. But that isn’t what you are thinking, the question just disappears and that tells you something. Desire is purpose. Desire means that I want to get someplace, I want to get somewhere, I want to do something, I want to reach toward something, and I want to merge with something. And that really is the inner nature of reality. Reality is desire, meaning reality is moving someplace, it wants to get somewhere, it has direction. When you happen to feel into the inner core of reality you realize all of reality is going somewhere. All of reality has purpose, animals want to survive, that is a purpose, a desire. As we move up the evolutionary chain, our desires get more subtle, more complex. I want to know, I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to expand, I want to deepen, I want to evolve, I want to love. They are all expressions of the same “reaching towards”. And what sex tells you is, that desire is holy. Desire is self validating because when you are in desire you feel in align with the inner movement of the cosmos, because the cosmos is desire, the cosmos is moving towards more and more fulfillment, towards more and more realization, always moving in a particular direction, evolving, there is a story of evolution, a narrative of desire. Quarks want to become atoms, atoms want to become molecules, and molecules want to become cells. There is a desire, an allurement, a movement to higher and higher levels of mutuality, recognition, union and embrace. That is the core movement of reality. So sex models the core movement of reality and by aligning with that movement on the highest level, I’m aligned with life. When I’m aligned with life, I have no more questions about the meaning of life because life just is. Sex models life. Sex is desire and life is desire and the best word for both of them together is “Eros”. Eros is that movement of attraction whose purpose is to hold and bring everything together. Eros is the quality of the universe, self-organizing to higher and higher levels of reality and consciousness

Sex is ethics… Sex is wisdom itself. That’s why it’s at the center of reality. And as the reality principle, the divine principle, the god that knows our name, places sex in the center of reality…is it to tease us? The sadistic god vision? Or, because it actually has all wisdom?

Everything is there!

Divining the Masculine – Part 2 – The Lover

posted in: The Lover 0

LoversThe phallus, penis, cock, dick, member, pecker, prick, putz, tool, shaft, johnson, schlong, woody, manhood has always stood as a sexual symbol and the symbol of life-force itself. There are many stories and beliefs from ancient human history which say that blood is the carrier of spirit, energy, the soul and when the blood entered into the penis and made it erect, it was incarnating spirit into flesh. This resulted in the union of human life and the holy, of the cosmos and God and was always creative and energizing. With this different perception of life… new forms and new combinations of opportunities and possibilities were born.

How many forms and types of love are out there? The Greeks talked about “agape”, a non-erotic love and what the Bible calls “brotherly love.” The Greek God of Love, Eros, was also talked about in both a limiting sense of a phallic or sexual love and in the more precise modern day definition of an expansive sense of love as the bonding and uniting urge of all things. The Romans also had a God of love, Amor, or Cupid as we know of today, which was defined as the complete union of one body and soul with another. These forms of love, along with others are the living expression of the Lover energy in human life.

The Odepial ChildThe Lover is the archetype of the display of healthy embodiment and being in one’s sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame. The Lover is deeply sensually aware and sensitive to his physical surroundings in all its splendor and is connected to them all, drawn into them through his sensitivity. His sensitivity leads him to feel integrated, compassionately and empathetically with them. For the man accessing the Lover. all things are connected to each other in the most mysterious ways.

A man feeling the impact of the Lover wants to feel everything, physically and emotionally, and wants to be impacted by everything. He recognizes that everything is connected and thrives on the connectedness he feels with the interior world and in the exterior world with his powerful feelings of his relationships with other people. Ultimately, he wants to experience the entire spectrum of sensual experience in everything. Not only should the lover a symbol of the joy of life in his capacity to feel at one with others and the world. He must also feel all of their pain. Others may be able to avoid pain, but the man in touch with his “Lover” must endure it as he feels the pain and suffering of being alive-both for himself and for others.

There is a shadow and dark side of the “Lover”. A man who is caught in the shadows of the lover will be caught in destructive habits and patterns of not putting any limits on his sensual and sexual experiences in this vast universe that we live in. The addicted Lover says, “The universe holds a never-ending supply of pleasures, why should I limit my access to it?”. He becomes a victim to his own sensitivities and becomes enmeshed into the sensations.

We can get caught in the fire of loving, immersed in the misery and the joy of our own cravings that we become unable to step back and act from a distance, unable to come back to ourselves, to detach and observe our feelings from a distance. Many lives and relationships are ruined because people cannot distance themselves from damaging partnerships and relationships. Whenever we feel ourselves caught in an addictive relationship, we had better beware, because the chances are very good that we have become victims of the Shadow Lover. A man possessed by the addicted Lover is really a man possessed by his own personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. He is devastated.

The addict as shadow of the lover is a byproduct from childhood into adulthood. The child became absorbed into the Mother and is still within the Mother, and is struggling to get out. It has become so
painful that in order to break free he must destroy the alluring and enchanting “feminine” beauty that is keeping him from experiencing his manhood. This need to detach from and to contain the power of the “feminine” may also account for our masculine sexual perversions, especially those perversions that show up in unhealthy sexual activity and in the violent sexual humiliation of women.

In the shadow of the lover, men will learn the advantage of boundaries the most difficult way. He will learn that his lack of mature masculine formation, lack of discipline, his resulting infidelities, and his authority issues will surely get him into trouble. He will be fired from his jobs, and the women in his life who loves him dearly will eventually leave him.

What happens when we feel that we are out of touch with the mature masculine Lover in all his fullness? We are then possessed by the powerless lover. We will be living our lives in an asleep kind of way. We will “feel” have a lack of enthusiasm, and be missing the aliveness for life. We may have trouble getting up in the morning and trouble going to sleep at night. We may find ourselves increasingly isolated, alienated from our family, our co-workers, our friends, our lovers and our own desires.

Men who are habitually possessed by the powerless lover are consistently depressed. They feel a lack of connection with others and are cut off from themselves. When we ask what they are feeling, they will have absolutely no idea… He may say, “I don’t know. I just feel I’m in this cloud.” This often happens when the powerless lover is getting so close to really ”hot” material. What happens, is that a shield goes up between the conscious Ego and his feeling.

When we are allowing the fullness of the Lover into our lives, and keeping our Ego structures
in tact, we feel connected, alive, compassionate, empathic, energized. and romantic about ourselves, our intentions, our purpose, and our successes. It is the Lover, properly accessed, that gives us a sense of meaning-a connection to spirit. The Lover is the source of our longings for a better world for ourselves and others. “I have come to bring you a passion for living, that you might access it more generously.”

The Lover maintains his access to feeling the real life situations of our fellow human beings struggling in a difficult world. Our negative self talk, degrading our vitality and our “innate goodness” begins early in our lives. Many of us may have so repressed the Lover in us that it has become very hard for us to feel passionate about anything in our lives. The trouble with most of us is not that we feel too much passion, but that we don’t allow ourselves to feel our passion much at all. We push away our feelings of joy. We don’t feel able to be alive and to live our lives the way we wanted to live them the way we imagined them being from the start. We may even think that “feelings” and, in particular, our feelings, are annoying obstructions and wrong for a man. We CANNOT surrender our lives… we need to live our lives more abundantly and, only then, will we be able to empower others to live fully, perhaps for the first time in their lives.

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