Last night’s dreams were one of the more impactful “night schools” that I’ve had. All the mini-realizations of the past 5 weeks in retreat collected and exploded into one: The Way of the Feminine Lineage is Call. What call is in the material, physical realm, call is too in the spiritual and energetic. The aim of all erotic training then is to train the vessel to be aware that they draw the world into being. Once that awareness is trained, what follows is how to work with the “archetypal” energies, to receive and to exchange with them in OM. This is why you work with the 10 spots, 2 directions, 3 pressures, 3 speeds — together those make up the potentialities. One learns the way first to allow and then to interact with the various archetypes in the viscera. The third level is then how to employ those energies.
So, you have three levels: preparation, generation, and completion. Principles, practice, and application. You are training to first, accept that within you dwells the potential to “call in all reality” — to shape the theater or dream you see, or live in.
We can show scientifically that a woman’s biology is geared to move both men and women (women have call and response, men just response). This is a huge shift from the mindset that “men hold the power and are doing something to me” to “men are in response to my at-present unconscious system that directs their response.” If by extension we were to take the material, the world of physical appearances, to be the “man”, then we see how people come to feel beholden to this physical reality when in fact they have the power to sway it.
OM offers the training ground for a woman to discover the power and sway her call holds over the world around her. As she continues to OM, she advances in the training of her call, both by making it conscious and by learning to steer it. These are skills developed in OM by learning to approve of each stroke, opening to, engaging with, and what is then called “getting off on”, i.e. “lighting up for”, or “activating”. Men can respond in different ways to the call, but in how she meets every potential stimulus, she alters the stroker. This is the key.
She learns to soften, to open and deliberately draw in heavy pressure — entirely counter to what we’ve been taught in the world. In doing so, she discovers that her reception subdues the pressure and makes it available for her use, easily redirecting the energy like an aikido master. What the world has made frozen or hard becomes liquid and dynamic through her reception in OM.
(This reminds me of the 37 Bodhisattva trainings I learned this year of “taking on suffering”. In OM, I learned this “law” in the viscera. Not only do you release the habit of blocking unwanted experiences and sensations, but you open to them. And not only do you open to them, you draw them in. And not only do you draw them in, you use the energy of that suffering to create heat. And then when you are advanced and able to create enough heat to purify any form of suffering from that energy, you send it back out — heated, purified, soft.)
Or she may call in an entirely different stroke and she learns that light strokes in the upward direction on the twelve o’clock spot confer a sense of purity, breath, and relief from the body. There is a sense of being in clear light. As far as I can tell, this is the same location one “breaks into” in practice of tummo.
The lesson to be discovered in this location of OM, is the potential for state addiction encoded into the spot. State addiction demands that one organize their lives around creating the experience of this state. In OM, you learn these various energies, the built-in issues, how to enter, how to counter the proclivities — ultimately with the aim that you can get off on any stroke. She will train her attention and nervous system, first as an aperture to open to and connect with all, and then to both magnify and broadcast that signal.
Through connection with the stroker (the physical world), one can get off on whatever life brings — to meet, activate for, and release any frequency. This is the aim. You expand your bandwidth by working with stronger frequencies; frequencies that would inspire the grasping that keeps you from releasing, frequencies that inspire the blocking which prevents you from entering, and erratic frequencies designed to prevent someone from following lest they be able to make connection.
Preferences get melted down into the pool of potential. Do you prefer alone, silent, sublime fields? Do you prefer earthy, intimate, opulent fields? Do you prefer deep, grindy, heavy fields? One entrains their strong suit with their less strong until the capacity and attention are equal and simultaneous in all directions. The attention becomes a neutral pool of potential such that whatever enters can be met fully.
One of the most potent lessons for me was the realization that reception is power. By fully receiving what my strokers were giving, not only could I change my internal state, but the stroker’s physical stroke would transform. Beneath this was a deeper truth that many years later, I am still learning: No matter how clumsy or skillful the stroke, it is always in response to a frequency that I am broadcasting. Realizing this brings the strokee to the second phase of her training, where in addition to getting off on every stroke, she learns to consciously tune her nervous system, broadcasting at new and unfamiliar frequencies in order to call in the strokes her deeper self desires.
This training is painfully difficult because it brings you face to face with your unconscious material. And, you begin to see very clearly that this unconscious material is influencing and directing your stroker. But there is also a moment in training at this level where one sees that they are, conscious or not, the conductor, the musician, and the music. That becomes the motivation to make unconscious material conscious. You learn that you have no “out”. There is no “them”. It’s a strange moment of only mind. The walls collapse and reveal themselves as mirrors upon mirrors.
For me, it was a moment seeing that the only thing to do in this life is to broadcast good. That’s a much-oversimplified version but it’s hard to articulate. I should mention that I don’t like law of attraction, but it is an over-simplified version of this. It is not enough to do good. The practice is to develop intimacy with every frequency, those we consider negative and positive. Intimacy is the way, not positivity. Placing positivity over a “negative” frequency is insulting to that frequency. One must make love to it, be possessed by it, and then lovingly harness it.
We learn to not reject, renounce, block, or placate. Or put anything over. You simply meet it nakedly, listen to it and engage with it, allowing it to inform you.
The highest achievement is to be “one of” in OM. To be able to match frequencies such that you meld with and become that frequency. The resonance shakes open consciousness such that the “erotic mind” opens. That is how it is rewarded and trained. I think, for what I know of various traditions, what one might discover that is unique in OM is how to nakedly activate. In mere emptiness meditation, it is analogue, so I do not learn how to interact with “electrified” archetypal energies. In visualization, it is that much extra over what already exists inside of me. In OM, the stroker, often male, learns to relinquish a self in service to the frequency. The strokee learns to claim and make conscious a self in order to emit a frequency.
One more piece. In the early days, I met with a high, male teacher. He described OM as 2.0 of Buddhist work because you are working with the area where projections go to die — the darkness/death/sex — and deliberately making that your station in order to turn on consciousness there. Much or even most of OM is working with what you would otherwise avoid only to discover that this is the sweetest juice. The instruction is almost the opposite of much tradition: don’t “withdraw from,” but go directly into sex, money, power, jealousy, obsession, and the rest in order to mine the trapped light.
This is why in OM, one starts with the understanding that everything is perfect, all is good, all is for you. There is light and there is trapped light. We can liberate enough trapped light such that the light becomes autocatalytic, absorbing and vivifying all.
(I do not like what the New Age Movement has done to the understanding that all is good. They cheapened it and made an incredibly difficult and sophisticated practice into an affirmation. But I also don’t like the concept of demons and dark energies. That a) overcomplicates things and b) is ignorant and insulting. The hope in OM is that we become wealthy enough to see those energies on their terms and love them, the same way I try to train women (and the marginalized) to live in their wealth, able to recognize the -ists and -isms as the disability of ignorance and starvation. The proper response to a “racist” or “sexist” is compassion, not retaliation. Retaliation against someone so disadvantaged would be like punishing a toddler for spilling his juice.)
To reveal that all is good, one must penetrate the darkest material and have a mind that can remember under great duress that this is good, or even “this is fun!” Remembering that this is theater — all while being genuinely thrashed about in the theater. Then, while being thrashed about, focusing to stabilize one’s frequency through engagement, approval, reception, and listening to develop one’s Call. This is the completion stage of OM.
In higher-level OM you learn viscerally that the stroker is “playing” the instrument of your body in accord with the music being emitted. So often in “reality,” we are forced to choose one or the other: either to disconnect and do our own song or be played by what is offered. The very highest-level strokee has the capacity to broadcast her music harmoniously, irrespective of the stroke. In other words, regardless of what her stroker does, she can both play into that music, creating a feeling of connection with the stroker, while also directing the music so that it moves in the direction of her desire.
Her desire sets a frequency that moves everything around her and, so long as she’s done the “principles” stage and set her frequency well, moves those things to their highest unique good. There is not an imposition of “what is good” onto a person, but an activation of what lies within them. Their good might be more “heavy, slow, 6 o’clock”. It may be “medium, peaking, 1 o’clock”. She should be able to reach and activate the most subtle, sublime states of the guru and the deepest thrusting states of the gang banger. Her capacity is determined by engaged range. What is called for in each varies greatly. She calls in what is absent.
This is fun and a great puzzle. The advanced practitioner needs to go into every field possible to “learn that music,” to be taken and possessed by it, losing herself, and then finding her own music inside of it. Then, in a connected way, she emits her broadcast such that it nourishes and plays with the other. As Miles Davis said, “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Before your music can fill that open space, you have to master the foundations and learn to listen to how each musician uniquely plays.
How this translates in completion stage OM, is in the understanding that all our life circumstances are called into being by us and the aim is to first be able to get off on each. That alone heals the world and ourselves; anything properly received is transformed.
But then, and this is the game/theater/lucid dreaming level, we begin to see physical reality as a stroker. You take the events and experiences and strokes and go deep into your laboratory and see how to alter one’s frequency to call in or shift how it plays out. The hardest part with women is to get them to claim the power of their biological call such that they make it conscious. It looks so real that men and the world are doing something to her, and not that her agency is unconsciously arranging reality to match her call. She has to face all that she unconsciously drew to her; how her fear of abandonment, her need to be superior, her tendency to withdraw, her prettiest pony show all create her reality and then, to harness the power of those unconscious compulsions to drive her toward greater conscious use of their raw impulse. They are not good or bad, they are conscious or unconscious.
So, if we were to abstract “call” into an energetic or philosophical underpinning of the feminine tradition of Eros, we would see that the purpose of the sutras is to train the mind in the awesome power of consciously working with the undifferentiated archetypal energies in order to call in a theater that meets the Erotic standard of art, beauty, healing, connection, liberation, and justice. Then, to bring those things down, to incarnate them on the planet.
The religion of Eros is intimacy. The constitution of the masculine is to bring compassion and kindness. The life that comes into and through the feminine makes her fundamental constitution intimacy.
If masculine tradition is to “wake up”, feminine tradition is to “turn on”. We turn on this awesome capacity to call in the dream, each thought and sensation an artist’s stroke.