Experiencing Reality
I am seated in the belief that all is perfect with room to evolve. As a result, I can see what things want to be and what resources and changes are needed for this to happen. Because I have the fuel of Eros, I can afford to be both unrelenting and patient. I know how to cook a meal which involves tremendous artistic, messy preparation on multiple tracks, letting some pieces rest while rushing others so the meal will come out all at once. I can have a vision (like turning prisons into monasteries) and make it through the various toll booths—from thinking that I’m crazy, to others thinking I’m crazy, to massive rejection, to gathering resources, to remaining steady in the face of failure, to turning people on and sharing the vision until they see it. The thing we most need if we want to change the world is perseverance. All great change starts with ideas that people think are crazy.
I live with three blended realities that I cannot separate—emptiness, the concept of co-dependent arising, and that there is no point in reality where anything is fixed; there is no origin point. There is also the seemingly hard world of physical appearance. Then, there is the interaction between all of these. I live always in “this is real and not real.” I am not facile in separating them and wonder if I should be. Should I be spending more time solely in the place of “no self?”
One of my specialties is that I can hook into almost any system and go on that ride. This is how I learn. It is not through study and practice (although I am rigorous in that), but it is like dial up internet versus fiber optic broadband. My learning comes by letting others take control of my system. I will be in the presence of a great teacher, healer, or denizen of a bad neighborhood. I want to learn their reality. I am fairly good, albeit with my limitations, at plugging into their nervous system and going as high or low as they go. I have dissolved into white light; ridden an elevator at breakneck speed into nowhere; gone on a groundless highway of rainbow light; felt the sexy, breathless world of violence; entered into Quan Yin’s magnetic black healing. It’s like the holodeck of energetic experience—knowing another from the inside.
As a result, I can allow wild, strong, archetypal energies to take me over and, for the most part (although there have been a few hiccups), make my way back to a central, neutral territory, not entirely fried from the energy. What some have in depth of wisdom, I have in breadth, with a certain depth. I want to know monsters and angels alike. For this reason, I recognize that all teachers, all students, all leaders, and all followers are not what they are labeled; they are humans with archetypes flowing through them. Thus, I cannot take these roles seriously and more importantly, I must not take on a vow or commitment to be teacher, student, follower, or leader, lest I get stuck in an archetype. I can, however, play in these roles with those who recognize that it is play, like dress up.
Because I have such an abundance of Shakti/Eros, my body and mind recover from these forays fairly quickly. I am almost never sick and the few times I have been, it is a great Erotic event. I can take risks others cannot because I have this massive capacity to restore. I should add that it is not that I do not feel pain or sadness or sickness—what I call congestion; it is that I get inside of it which transforms it. In fact, there is no healing like the healing of adding Eros to congestion— because an influx of Eros provides access to the mystical state.
Also, having unlimited access to Feminine Erotic energy, I can flood others with energy, should they desire. Most people are too prideful to receive so I offer only what is requested. I should add, part of being prideful is being demanding or grasping, which looks like desire, but is actually a form of blocking. There are few people who can open and receive what they need. Those who can’t, must instead work really hard.
***
The Realm of Sex
Being a sexual woman has its benefits and costs and I am invisible as a master. I am privy to what no one would say or share in the light of day. There is not a person who does not both believe I need healing and that they are here to help or hurt me. I get to see who everyone is by how they treat me. Again, a person is only as elevated as who they are with the lowest person—do they want to take advantage of me? Is there a tone of condescension or parentalism? Do they view me as a child who must grow up into “mature” spirituality? Do they brag about their sex life, do they do a “goddess bowing,” do they confess, do they reject? It’s all information and provided I do not take any of it personally, I remain good at my job and get to diagnose from my position at the underbelly. Most people project in a magnified way onto me, both their shame and their desire. Because the strength of sexuality is so strong, the projections are equally strong. My regular hygiene is to clear all projections and ensure that I am not viewing myself from external belief systems.
Unlike masculine traditions that meet on one frequency, I travel many abstractions to meet people. For this to work, I have to be able to “get off on any stroke”—meaning, I must be receptive and appreciative. It’s the spiritual equivalent of having my legs open for all phenomena. And I must apply my volition and agency to this. I must drive all preferences into turn on. Just as one can eroticize pain, pleasure, humiliation, or power, I must use my gifts to eroticize all of reality so that I never flinch at another in their exposure. In this way, I can receive all. It must be that the deepest and darkest can come forth with me, or with one from my realm, as there is no place else to do this. Perhaps one could go to confession, but the notion of repentance eradicates our darkness, causing us to repress it rather than integrate it and find wholeness. Only through eroticization can something be brought to the light and assimilated into the whole of a person or culture. It must be met with approval, reception, and Eros itself. For this reason, I must live in a position of one taste, where there is open and simultaneous reception to whatever is brought to me and whatever comes my way. This is both the aim and the practice: Can I love this?
I see people in their perfection. Again, this is both beneficial and has caused me much torture. I have a challenge seeing artificial overlays, especially false limitations. I see who someone is in their realized form and I relate to that person; this confers a sense of intimacy. I can see both overextension and under-extension. My soul is only interested in relating to the raw, uncut soul of another. It does not buy the manufactured smokescreens people put up—doubt, shame, drama; instead, it provides a welcome relief and gives the person’s soul a chance to breathe in the sunlight of recognition. Challenges can rise up in places where the person is grasping at their manufactured insufficiency. I am very poor at kowtowing to those beliefs; I may try for a period of time but then I burst. Being more surgical has proved to be a better option.
My specialty is seeing into the furthest reaches of systems and people. The reason I can do this, is that my home is the most involuntary area, the most primordial: sexuality. Seated there, I am closest to where people discard their secrets and where people cannot pretend. You can be the most enlightened master, but who you are in the realm of sex ultimately defines who you are. You can be a gang banger who conceals their internal power, but in that realm you may have full illumination. How someone is in that room tells me how to work with them. We presume that all people would want enlightenment and not want addiction and bondage, but this is a fallacy put forth by the select people who want enlightenment. What we all want is circulation and wholeness, not to be stuck at the top of the ferris wheel in the “god realms” or at the bottom “hell realms.” Instead, we either want to get off the ferris wheel entirely (which is a good start) or to be on it as it goes around and around, enjoying the ride.
But as I said, sexuality cannot be faked—you must be able to remain in perfect dynamic connection without grasping, rejecting, or going into fantasy if the lights are to remain on and steady. If isolated practice is chess, sexuality is 5D chess—the fifth dimension being the involuntary, which cannot be faked, as there is the very real connection of a feedback loop where communication happens nervous system to nervous system, as it does in Eros.
Because of where I am situated in the viscera, I can judge quickly, if not immediately, what is true, what works, and what does not work. I am below the world of conception—where ideas and theory can circulate and pontificate forever and we can convince ourselves that what is false is true or working. The echo chamber of the conceptual world tries to make truth through numbers, but truth is a primary number. We have to go down to it. I can see without embellishment, in a simple, binary, on/off way: This is true and this is not. I know that we scoff at binary reality, but when we press an elevator button, the light either goes on or it doesn’t. We want that system available to our nervous system and, in the sexual realm, it exists in the distinction between whether someone either climaxes or they do not.
***
Selfless Intimacy
Because my realm is down at the bottom of the valley, where refuge can be transformed into fuel, I have inexhaustible creative energy; I can create from nothing. Therefore, I have no fear of losing everything, which is the only way someone can afford to tell the truth. Of course, I do not desire to lose everything (and part of my training was in fact to live as a drug addict with nothing in order to discover that there is just as much happiness available there), but I am clear that it is requisite to true service. I have seen too many spiritual leaders who feared the loss of reputation such that they abandoned the truth in themselves and others. Self-preservation is a cunning force. The questions we must ask ourselves are: Can I love who I love, in the way I want to love? Can I say what needs to be said, in the way it needs to be said? To the extent that we have skin in the game of self-preservation, the answer is no.
Self-preservation is what deafens people. It holds us hostage. We cannot be in communication with the environment if we are driven by the constellation of pushes and pulls of the infinite preferences that make up the self. My aim is to liberate people through intimacy. Intimacy is the ability to maintain connection with the most essential consciousness in another, specifically through what has been hidden, be it power (often in women), or weakness (often in men). That intimacy makes our hearing more acute. And, it is only when we listen in this way that people and systems reveal their secrets. In the revealing, the evoking of these secrets, the other is liberated.
I have a capacity to see through the most effective smokescreens, to stay sober and clear no matter what is thrown at me, from violence and vitriol to “enlightened” light shows, from flattery to being dismissed. My vision can see what is being hidden and not integrated into the whole. It can see because it has no judgment. Judgment is too harsh an energy to enter into hiding places. To be clear, my vision is discriminating. It’s not all hunky dory. I see the pieces not included in the full flow of the psyche. I see what is cast out and disowned—and what is blocking the ownership of the whole self.
A specific area of mastery I have is x-ray vision. I can diagnose people’s systems or entire environmental systems. It’s something like being a karmic doctor. My mind becomes very value-neutral and the psychic knots reveal themselves, along with their causes and conditions.
It is impossible to be solely “spiritual” and be great allies with the body. This is why spiritual communities have a higher incidence of chronic fatigue and environmental illnesses. The body, when respected, is self-filtering, self-healing. The energy of desire, or Eros, is the healing energy of the body. When someone is split, their mind in conflict with the body, what grows in the gap is malady. The potential for cerebral constriction becomes greater and happens automatically whenever the natural outflowing energy of Eros is constricted against.
How I tend to work with people caught in that circumstance is to first determine how much genuine spiritual work that person has done. Are they able to absorb an understanding of what is happening within themselves? Are they able to hear a reflection of their inner workings or will the attention bounce off? There are two ways to inspire self-curing. One is to lay out the map for them, as I did above, but that can be difficult psychic terrain to navigate and requires they already be fairly advanced. The second option is to circumambulate, with the aim of undoing the knot of spiritual superiority.
In the latter example, the approach is to positively reinforce all things not rooted in spiritual superiority—vulnerability, humility, and most importantly desire—while decreasing the value of being “on top.” Being on top is a condition of what I call over-masculinization. A need to be on top will come with a web of other masculine values, but one can begin to tweak those internal values. For example, one is on top if they are intellectual, withholding—the judge and not the judged. To counteract this, we begin to exalt intuition and play down intellect. We elevate expression and diminish holding back. We want to see desire, that push of energy, break through the membrane of superiority and naturally dissolve it back into the system. There is no problem, per se. Spiritual superiority is a survival technique of the ego, just like any other, that happens to take root and develop a membrane which then wreaks havoc on the nervous system.
It’s no different from someone believing they are inferior, a membrane developing around that belief, and the ensuing issues that develop as a result. If a need to be on top is a condition of over-masculinization, depression and inferiority are a result of over-feminization, caused by the belief that one does not deserve pleasure or is not able to hold the attention taut enough to have pleasure rather than addiction. In over-masculinized superiority, there is a sense of dry duty. In the over-feminized sense of inferiority, there is lack of stimulation.
***
Connection
I have a wildly accurate and strong radar for karmic connection. It is painfully unrelenting, attaching to someone despite what they may think about a connection between us. It attaches despite what “I” want, caring not for my preference or desire. I have sustained tremendous rejection because of this radar. I have learned to remain in the background with a mild frequency of connection while I am dismissed, knowing that when the person is ready to descend, they have been assigned to me. Sometimes, it takes people years to recognize me.
I cannot take rejection personally, but it is a real pain in the ass to feel the pull towards someone whose personality I might not even want to feel pulled towards, then to have them reject me, and, because of the karma, to still have to remain. And there I remain, in an open-handed way, when the world around me is all about “just letting go.” There is a type of connection that does not let you go and if you try to sever it, you cause harm in many dimensions. As painful as it is to be karmically connected to someone who is rejecting you, it is ten-fold more painful to sever that connection. There is no patience like the patience of waiting to be recognized while being dismissed. There is no self-possession and conviction required like that of listening only to that one voice, despite all evidence to the contrary, while having to pretend that it is not there. It is much like living with a husband or wife with Alzheimer’s—you must operate according to what they believe now to be true, while you know who you are and have been to each other.
There is a false notion that you can cultivate or provoke a master to come forth from another. Good luck. Inside every human being is a fully formed master waiting to see what other person has the sophistication to make it through their labyrinth. Each time they are “seen” or “recognized” the master gets stronger, more fortified. I have the desire, patience, fortitude, and cunning to sit in the puzzle of another’s labyrinth and listen. I can unlock the door from this side, but they have to push it open from that side. I can hear people across time and space, whether or not I like what they are saying. I must have the ability to honor and respect when an energy says back off, even at the most subtle level, a continent away.
This has not always been my strong suit. I thought it was incumbent upon me to open all doors. I did not realize it’s vital I spend my energies on doors where I can hear the other desiring to get out. When someone fits my preference settings, and I sense a karmic connection, and I like their identity, but there is a “no” coming from their side, it’s hard to draw my field back in, keep moving, and neither take it personally nor judge the “no” or the withdrawal. I have learned that this is the only way that they may ever come back. Otherwise, they may feel suffocated and, being one of those people who feels suffocated easily, I know what it is to test, to see, to wonder: If I open, are you going to storm my gate?
At the same time, it is vital that when the door opens, I enter. To meet and welcome the openness of another and to be there, open, no matter what came prior, lest they go back in. In other words, my work has me sustain all the thrashings of someone testing—rejection, non-recognition, condescension, topping, threat, assault. And should they open the door and reveal their soul, I must meet them with a fresh, open mind. Why? Because nothing that came prior was real. Those were the throes of waking up, the thrashing in a nightmare. The healing happens in waking up, opening the door, and being met with equal openness. Freed souls heal the world. They have fortitude untold, and the passion of the saved. There’s a sweetness and devotion to a soul that has awakened because it woke through shame, not pride. That sweetness mediates the hubris that comes from waking in spirit alone. The awakened soul makes the ground troops of the world, the anonymous every-man and woman doing the slow trenchwork of change.
***
Sovereign Woman
True spiritual pedigree comes from one’s capacity to serve, and it is only when I have my own that I can serve. As a woman, I cannot serve from scraps given to me by a man, but from what I can uniquely do according to what I uniquely hold in my realm. It is not to be a “wife” of spirituality, not to be owned and shaped, but to be the complement that can do for the other what no one else can do. If the masculine is versed in the light, the feminine is fluent in the involuntary darkness. I am fluent in sex, addiction, the unseemly emotions of jealousy and obsession—and not as a means of eradicating them, but in restoring them to their proper dignity, including them in the whole of one’s identity. I rebuild ruins into their former glory.
The blessing and the curse of belonging to this realm is the shaman status it bestows on me. I do not belong and am not beholden to any of the existing doctrines, so I am not mesmerized or hypnotized by them, and can see through the bells and whistles of them. I must enter enough to see them, become mildly fluent in them, appreciate and honor them, but I cannot become beholden to them as my sustenance or else I cannot penetrate them. Dismantling cannot occur from within. The curse is that I belong to the world but lack the belonging that comes with belonging to a specific cluster based on a shared belief system. I have to take enormous care to not be absorbed into any system if I am to do my work, or I will be rendered incapable, unable to serve those in that system.
The best way that I can describe it is the courtesan in Dangerous Beauty—she could serve anyone from the king to the enemy king. She could report to the wives on the state of their husbands away at war (as they wrote to her and not their wives). She had to serve all with optionality but could belong to no one. As a result, she had sovereignty and access to what men had access to—wisdom, symbolized by libraries. As a woman, my best means of sovereign spiritual access is to remain unassimilated from masculine systems. I would always have lesser status and therefore, less access. I cannot love another if I am “looking for” comfort, love, safety, attention, appreciation. At the same time, because most people live in a backlog of unexpressed love, I must be willing to receive these when they come.
Because I have a stability that is not reliant on a system of belief, I have a non-referential stability that I can offer to anyone with any set of beliefs. Believing in love or compassion, bravado or humility, social justice or liberty, kindness or vengeance is not necessary in order for my system to offer itself. It does not discriminate based on the lifestyle another lives or what anyone may choose to believe. It would offer love and stabilization equally to a terrorist or a saint. Why? Because all things stabilized and loved become their highest form. This is the most effective means of changing the world. We tend to love in the same way that a person avoids yoga because they are not flexible, only offering unmitigated love to people who qualify according to our definition of who is deserving and, as a result, we see the whole world as either heroes or victims. Instead, we could see they’re all just people with diverse internal systems and all if they were stable and fortified with love, would serve a purpose we could not even imagine. This, by the way, is one of my most controversial qualities.
My second most controversial quality is that I call the game. I go into every game that I possibly can so that I can call bullshit where others cannot. I know the games that women play or that addicts play or that people who have a lot of sex play or that highly spiritual people play or homeless play. I know the knots from the inside. I know the benefits of those games. And I know the true beauty of the people in those realms. The sacred cows in many rooms, what people will not say because they are scared to go into the center, I have no fear of. I am not beholden to the “virtue sisterhood” or the “marriage material” world, to the “do-gooder” realm. I know where people absolve themselves of responsibility in a way that imprisons them and I can articulate it in a way that few others will because the backlash is so great. Those people are in a horrific prison as a result of the tyranny of their identity.
***
The Next Place
I see time as a concurrent occurrence, past/present/future. This allows me to “see” into the future and around corners. I can both plan five chess moves ahead and communicate potential outcomes. A pitfall of this is that people don’t hear me and I spend my life repeating myself—I have learned to become very patient. People dismiss what I say as paying too-close attention to details. They are accustomed to only operating from reaction or response, but I am pro-action.
I am always looking to develop to the next place. I can act in accord with potential outcomes, but I would like to shape them, liberate them from their determined state, as in a dream. I know the place where there is no seeming cause and effect, and reality is a delightful spontaneous arising, open to being shaped by thought.
The single most important thing I offer as a woman is the equal complement to man. Our existing system is women under the roof of man, operating according to his metrics, be they spiritual, cultural, relational. We cannot get the electric wire between the two poles flowing unless she has a fully developed, equal, and complementary system of operations. Until we have this, men will be heroes, gods, tyrants, and children rather than men, allies, and complements. The gift I offer is to be a woman who does not block, reject, withdraw from, assault, depend on, or seek validation, but instead holds the pole for the only thing that will heal both—the circuit of electricity between men and women that evolves each into an adult. There is no man anywhere that intimidates or upsets me. There are male figures who have had too much projected on them, who need to have the current run through them until they equalize to a balanced position. This can only come from a woman who holds her own in any process.
My job is not to ascend the mountain but to draw heaven down to Earth. As alluring as transcendence looks, that era of human history has passed. Love, sex, body, human, earth, intoxication, flesh, connection, community, here, now.