©  1999 Jonathan Zap

Revised 2009   Edited by Austin Iredale

Many people seem to view love as a feeling, and in New Age circles love often seems like a dose of aromatherapy, a passive, sentimentalized, set of hollow declarations that leaves a saccharine, toxic aftertaste, like eating Rose Bouquet Air Wick Solid for dessert.

What many people have pointed out is that love is not so much a feeling it is as a verb. If you have love, that means you take action. As someone once pointed out, if you want to find out what you really love, notice what you spend time on. Anyone can say they love their kids, or in their absence have a Kodak moment of sentimentalized appreciation, but do they spend time with their kids? M. Scott Peck said: “I define love thus: The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” (p.81, The Road Less Traveled )  Sometimes love means the will to hold back, and other times it  means the ability to get yourself to take action, to keep promises, and commitments, to be physically present when it is required, and to be consciously present, awake, listening, and attuned to the other.

A school principal once told me a story of how he had to choose between two school teachers who seemed equally qualified. At the end of the day, as they were about to leave the building, he had a kid go up to each of them and say that he had left his notebook in a locked classroom on the third floor. The first teacher was gruff,  had a bit of an attitude, but ultimately he retrieved the child’s notebook. The second teacher was much nicer, apologized profusely, but then left the building without helping the child. The principal hired the first teacher because, “he physically did the work.”

Love means that you physically do the work, and that is more important than the inconstant fluctuation of feelings. A mother who may be annoyed by her daughter, but physically does the work of making her breakfast, and helping her get to school, is a thousand times more loving than a person who professes a general love for the world  and makes a bunch of declarations where nothing is at stake and no actions are taken.

An eighty-year-old woman, who was a Jungian analyst, spoke a few years ago Boulder. At the end of her talk there were questions from the audience and the first one came from a young woman.  “Now that you are an elder,” asked the young woman, “what you can tell me as a young woman about a love?”  The elder woman replied, “When I was your age I was desperately trying to be loved. But now I know that it is better to simply be love .”

To be love means that you have the response-ability to take loving actions. Many people who make grandiose statements of how much love they have are actually trying to get attention, and their real character is revealed in their negligence to take simple loving actions.

© 2003, Jonathan Zap

Revised 2008   Edited by Austin Iredale

Recently, I was called on to comment on a document that attempted, with the best intentions, to come up with a conscious, inclusive, reformed approach to human sexuality. Although there were many good things in this document, I began to have a strong reaction when I noticed that there was an attempt to create a softer-edged template, a model of romantic relationships that emphasized long-term committed relationships. Although my personal bias favors long-term committed relationships, I found that in reaction to the document I ended up going on a rant against the well-intentioned impulse to regularize human sexuality and conduct. My rant, written at high speed, had a life of its own, and the finished product was more of a personal discourse than something that could be considered actual feedback. The words that came pouring out seem to have more to do with my ever-changing view of human sexuality, and I hope there may be some benefit in my sharing that view. You may notice that I make reference to “God” in this piece of writing.  Although I do believe there is an intelligence implicit in the cosmos, I don’t usually use the G-word because it so hopelessly contaminated with anthropomorphisms and is weighed down with more baggage than even a supreme deity could deal with.  I used the G-word here because the document I commented on was created by religious people, and I wanted to make an impact on their POV.

The overarching tendency of the patriarchal is to approach human sexuality—and all matters, really—with “one-size-fits-all” formulations. Any one-size-fits-all approach toward sexuality is a rebellion against God perpetrated by the human—usually male—ego. As William James observed, a strong and obvious attribute of nature—one could easily substitute cosmos, God, or Tao for “nature”—is “eachness”. Although many spiritual teachings emphasize the unity of all things, there is often an underemphasis on the ubiquitous evidence of eachness throughout this realm. We encounter a world of individual trees, not a Platonic tree template or undifferentiated mass of treeness. Related but not identical to eachness is the quality of individual variation we find throughout the phenomenal world. Although the popular notion that no two snowflakes are alike turns out to be nonsense, it is very clear that as we advance in the evolutionary hierarchy from inanimate matter to organisms, and especially toward higher forms of life, the degree of individual variance also advances. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates divine will. There is more individual variation amongst trees than amongst acorns. Whether your starting point is the big bang, Genesis, or a primeval soup of amino acids, the developmental arc is always toward greater individual differentiation. There certainly seems to be more individual variance amongst mammals than microbial life or insects. And when we look at our own species, what we see is a quantum jump in this quality of individuality, diversity, and novelty. According to evolutionary theorist Terence McKenna, novelty—the creation of new forms and also greater levels of complexity, interconnectedness, communication, and self-awareness—is a drive inherent in the universe, an atropic force that we especially see in human evolution and culture. The universe, as McKenna puts it, conserves novelty.

Sexuality and evolution need to be considered together. We should be wary of any doctrine that seems to stand in contradistinction to the workings of the universe. There is a profound deficiency in our species in recognizing that evolution necessarily means sexual evolution. Sexuality is in ways obvious, and also subtle and mysterious, right at the cutting edge of evolution. One-size-fits-all doctrines regarding human sexuality—from Western religions, Eastern sources, new age, pop psychology, or where ever—need to be viewed very skeptically for they have collectively generated a great number of toxic side effects:

1. A huge legacy for manufacturing suffering, repression, discrimination, etc.

2. Failure to acknowledge individual variation as positive and necessary for the growth of the human species.

3. Presumption that human nature is an absolute constant.

4. Their tendency to become repositories and museum exhibits of unconscious projections and the displacement of ego anxieties into elaborate control systems.

5. Their tendency for the past thousands of years to especially target women and sexually diverse individuals for horrific persecution.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and we as human authors of any doctrine that attempts to regularize human sexual conduct inherit the legacy of fools and sadists, not angels. A consistent part of the legacy of fools has been a tendency of false sophistication about human sexuality. A patriarchal attribute of religious fundamentalists, modern secular experts, and also hedonistic libertines, is this false feeling of sophistication, of knowing what’s really going on, what the bottom line is when it comes to human sexuality. This reductive view of human sexuality as sin versus sacrament, functionality versus disfunctionality, pleasure versus repression, is a manifestation of the human ego recreating sexuality in its image. We are made in the image of God and the image of God revealed by the manifested world is eachness, individual variation, and mind-boggling novelty. As J.B.S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.” When you consider the evolution that has already occurred on this planet as single-celled life advanced into the novelty engine of human culture, and recognize that future developments may be as profound or even geometrically expansive of these earlier steps, you are forced to recognize that when it comes to human sexuality none of us knows what we are talking about. The developmental arc of our individual lives is mysterious, often confounding, and the future development of the species is in the realm of pure speculation. Sexuality is at the cutting edge of a completely unknown, perhaps unknowable trajectory. It is humbling to realize that we don’t know where evolution and novelty are going, and may not be able to comprehend it any better than an amoeba can contemplate human culture.

Creating a doctrine about human sexuality is a subset of a general human activity of the human psyche observing itself and drawing conclusions, an activity that is the maximal case of subjectivity, with the maximal tendencies toward projection and pernicious illusion. When rules are made based on these conclusions, and these rules are then imposed on others, then we find ourselves living in Gulag Earth, the Babylon Matrix, the prison planet, the place where we all live right now. If your eros is adaptable or conventional enough to be in accord with the rules, then for you the prison bars are upholstered in red velvet.

We need to acknowledge the terrible legacy of the patriarchal ego attempting to mutilate nature into its idealized image of itself. Furthermore, we need to recognize that while the planet is a cauldron of evolution and novelty, the fragile individual organism, which includes the human psyche, is preoccupied with its homeostasis. The human psyche seeks to maintain its fragile, evanescent equilibrium, and as a result, as both Freud and Jung observed, it is profoundly conservative; it will cling to a toxic equilibrium rather than risk novelty. When human psyches aggregate into social groups, this conservative tendency can intensify in such a way that the body politic may have a virulent immunological response to individual variation in sexuality—or some other core attribute.

Freud demonstrated that humor is usually a reflection of anxiety, and since our culture’s humor is typically about sex, it reflects the deep and continuing anxiety human beings have about the mutagenic quality inherent in human sexuality. Therefore, we have a powerful motive to want to clear up the complex ambiguities of the erotic realm.

We have to be wary of the tendency, to imagine an ideal human relationship. Paragraphs 7 and 10—of the document I was asked to comment on—seem to offer a one-size-fits-all template for human relationship. This template may have softer edges than past templates, but, I will not mince words, it is an objectionable continuation of past illusions. Although it is my personal feeling and experience that long-term, committed, monogamous relations are most likely to be developmental for most people, I would never want to project that as a universal requirement.

In acknowledging our patriarchal legacy, we should consider anthropological data on how other cultures have handled sexuality. At the same time we need to avoid the New Age fallacy that artifacts of other cultures—Eastern, tribal, etc.—can be easily adopted for modern Western psyches. We should also expand our inquiry to include fields such as primate research. For example, I am very struck by some of the findings of research into Bonomo chimpanzees. Keeping in mind that the science of genetics, still in its infancy, is famous for making presumptuous formulations, we are now told that chimpanzees are 99% genetically similar to human beings, far more similar to us genetically than chimps are to guerrillas. Bonomo chimpanzees are remarkable for two things: They are the primate group that has the lowest rate of intrafraternal violence—humans are, of course, not even in the running—and the highest rate for novel, frequent sexual transactions across all sorts of expected boundaries. Do these findings warrant any conclusions about human sexuality? Of course not.  Inquiries into sexuality so often involve thinking that too quickly reaches conclusions, formulations and the premature closure  of  mysteries and paradoxes.

Although we may have strong feelings that long-term committed relationships seem to work best, that is just one more subjective perception. We are still looking through a glass darkly. Even if we had studies or evidence to support our feelings, such studies would not be a relevant to an individual wishing to live a nonstatistical life. To the maximum extent possible, we should leave it to the individual to make their own path through the unknown, intervening only in cases of the individual seeking dominion over others. If there were to be one universal , one-size-fits-all principle governing sexuality it would have to be consensuality, but any proscriptions beyond that are highly questionable.

One of the unexamined presumptions we have is that functional, balanced, harmonious relationships are best and that troubled relationships are in need of repairs. But, as James Hillman points out, “the soul pathologizes.” (see essay “Love’s Torturous Enchantments” in A Blue Fire ) The mythologies of love relationships from most cultures and traditions are filled with tragedy, of two people becoming three, of impossible situations and of descent into an underworld. Hillman illustrates that this may be what the soul wants and needs. The supervisory ego, however, wants to step in and do a quick fix with a regularized model or list of precepts.

As June Singer points out in her book Androgyny: a New Theory of Sexuality , the drive to complete oneself with another person may be based on a fundamental illusion.  (See Stop the Hottie! and Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—-Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring ).

A central reason that our whole planet is in peril right now is the territorial aggressiveness and other dangerous qualities that have become linked to human sexuality. We desperately need novelty and expanded paradigms in our understanding of sexuality. The patriarchal approach to sexuality is imperiling the life on this planet. (see The Chalice and the Blade by Rianne Eisler and The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Maslin)

I support the enterprise of individual human development and inquiry. What is needed is not a softer-edged template, but the empowerment of the individual to contribute to divine creativity. As Jung said,

Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always beings with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress.
— CG Jung

True empowerment is an individual thing, but we can still help to encourage it by, for example, providing resources that help individuals understand how their body image and sexual perceptions have been heavily, heavily conditioned. We need deconditioning more than we need reformed conditioning. Rather than giving individuals a new template, we need to give them tools of exploration and creativity.

© 2006, 2008 Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale

(On May 31 of 1996, a morning of intense intuitions drastically changed my view of corporeality, beauty, sexuality, and eros. This experience is described in “The Path of the Numinous” and the intuitions of that morning are developed in “The Glorified Body—Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution,” and that work serves as a foundation for the present reflections. In writing the following reflection, I use the pronoun “we,” by which I mean “me,” but also the many others who have parallel feelings. There are some for whom the experience of beauty may be quite different, especially those who have been conditioned by pornography, those who view sex as reducible to concrete actions on the genital level, and those most attracted to the human form when it is earthy, explicitly sensual, and unetherealized.)

When we look at a person that has numinous physical beauty, there are so many layers of projection; archetypes like the anima and the eternal youth may be evoked.  But what we also project is the intense inner urge to be phase-shifted to a plane of existence where matter is more animistic, more imbued with spirit, more interactive with psyche, and transformable by will and psychic intention.

The suffering and anxiety associated with the present plane of existence are almost too obvious to be stated.  Most of us are at war with time and corporeal limitations in many ways.  The oppression of bodily circumstances that defies our will ranges from a bad hair day to a crippling disease.  When we see numinous physical beauty we feel a soaring sensation; it is as if we are seeing the soul freed from its corporeal imperfections and  metamorphosed into a perfect form. The soaring feeling of perfect grace and beauty may also be accompanied by a contrasting feeling of intense desire, which in itself may not feel soaring, but rather is marked by an enslaving appetite, a sense of incompletion, and an insatiable hunger for sexual transaction.  If the beautiful other is related to us in a loving mutual romance, then there might be more soaring and less hollow enslavement. But if jealousy enters such a union, then the soaring too becomes a hellishly earthbound suffering.

Many people, at different times and places, have described what I have referred to as the “Green World”(see “A Splinter in your Mind.”) It is a world alike ours, but phase-shifted to a more animistic and idealized plane.  We see some of that in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, especially in the elf realms of Rivendell and Lothlorien.  Inhabiting these phase-shifted places are immortal elves who are more physically beautiful than mere mortals; their bodies are the uncorrupted manifestations of a divine image.

On our much more messy plane, when we encounter numinous physical beauty, it seems as though we’ve found a beautiful gem sparkling in the gutter, one that arouses our delight and sometimes our greed.  It is as if a secret has been revealed that deeply concerns us, and we may feel the illusory projection that this beautiful person belongs to us in some way, is destined to be ours.  (If this feeling is taken literally, we might become a stalker, etc.)  The beautiful person glows, shimmers, and lights up in our mind’s eye like an angel, a being that is human but phase-shifted from corporeal limitation.

What exposes this projection is a realization that the actual human, temporarily gifted with such a form, is still chained to corporeality, to the likelihood of sickness, the inevitability of aging, to fatigue and indigestion and so forth.  But at the first moment of perception, it is as if they were Botticelli’s Venus stepping out of the clamshell, as if they were light streaming the through stained-glass windows of a Gothic cathedral. If we could only merge with them we would be complete, we would be in heaven. In other words, we project and interpersonalize our urge to merge with the glorified body, our urge to phase-shift to a greener, more divine world than our own.  We sense that there is a slider switch—and there absolutely is such a switch—that shifts the matrix from coarse and vulgar to more subtle and divine.  If you doubt that there is such a switch, try the following thought experiment: You spend three or four days in a small cabin by yourself near a wildflower meadow in the Rocky Mountains. It is late June and the days are long and glorious, the nights clear and filled with stars.  During your stay you fast on fresh fruit or fruit juices, and spend much of your time meditating. Next you spend three or four days in a seedy motel room in Newark, New Jersey, watching pay-per-view porno on the motel television, drinking Night Train Express and buying all your meals at the greasy spoon across the street from the motel.  These two poles of experience give a rough idea of how much play there is with the slider switch on this plane. Circumstances, outer circumstances, bodily condition, emotional state, etc., move the slider switch.  But we want to be able to move the slider switch even more; we want, sometimes, to be able to move it into a greener world, a world where we, and the human forms we behold, have the beauty of Tolkien’s elves.

Some imagine those with beautiful bodies to be phase-shifted and unbound from this world, and long to be amongst glamorous celebrities arriving at the Oscars with  flashes strobing around them. If only they lost weight, had plastic surgery, and were a wealthy celebrity, then they would live in a world of light and beauty.  It is easier to see through such delusions when they manifest in someone else, rather than when they are present in ourselves, just as it is so much easier to see when a close friend is getting involved in what is likely to be a disastrous romantic relationship, etc.

When we see a person of numinous physical beauty, it seems as if they are made of finer stuff, as if a light were shining through them.  Some of this perception can be explained objectively.  A young person with a perfect complexion and glossy hair is an objectively contrasting form to a person with wrinkled, blemished skin and dull, thinning hair.  Although we constantly hear that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”—and there is some truth to that: different people are attracted to different type s— it actually turns out that there is wide agreement across cultures as to who is good-looking and who is not. Studies show that photos of people are ranked almost identically based on looks, by people of all types and from the most varied of cultures.  Objective qualities of beauty have even been codified mathematically, and it has been shown that those consistently ranked as more beautiful have superior facial symmetry and proportions that conform to the mathematical ratios of the golden mean. Human beauty is not merely subjective and observer dependent; some bodies are objectively  more perfect realizations of the human form than others.  But even a person who has such a body, has it only on loan, because unless they die young—a wise career choice for those who want to be, like Marilyn Monroe, an enduring object of projection—they will outlive that perfection.

But when we encounter a beautiful person in such an idealized form, it seems as if they have found a magical secret, have drunk from the fountain of eternal youth, and in our psyche that person appears like a shimmering portal—if only we could enter such a portal we would be transformed and released from the suffering of corporeal incarnation.  If we form an actual ongoing relationship with such a person, however, we become aware of the temporal fragility of their beauty, and the suffering of corporeality will now include the suffering of watching the beautiful beloved lose the perfection of their divine form.  This state of poignant loss was expressed in a perfection of words a few hundred years ago in Shakespeare’s Sonnet XV. It was written, like all of his sonnets, when Shakespeare was in love with an androgynous male youth, probably the most temporally fragile form of human beauty.

Sonnet XV is an impossible act to follow, so I will close with it, but I would like to suggest that the reader, after reading XV, consider the many ways and layers in which we individually, and as a species, in our contemplation of our own bodies, and in the ways in which we behold the bodies of others, are “…all in war with Time…” and on a misconstrued personal quest to reach that phase-shift which shimmers beyond the portal of death, and also at the evolutionary event horizon of our species.

Sonnet XV

When I consider every thing that grows

Holds in perfection but a little moment,

That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows

Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;

When I perceive that men as plants increase,

Cheered and cheque’d even by the self-same sky,

Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,

And wear their brave state out of memory;

Then the conceit of this inconstant stay

Sets you most rich in youth before my sight

Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,

To change your day of youth to sullied night;

And all in war with Time for love of you,

As he takes from you, I engraft you new.

© 2006, 2008  Jonathan Zap

Edited by Austin Iredale
A young woman I know sent me a dream with themes that resonate with the dreams of other young women I have interpreted, and now I wish  I had written down more of them, because so many of their dreams were powerful and illuminating of the state of the feminine after six thousand years of patriarchal history. In this essay I will discuss what I have learned from these dreams and from other cultural observations.  I will conclude with analysis of two  dreams, including the one from this young woman.

The most consistent theme these dreams expose is the toxicity of promiscuous patriarchal sexuality.  Jung often used the word enantiodromia , a term he got from the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus. Enantiodromia is the tendency for systems in nature to fluctuate between extremes, like a swinging pendulum, with a net result of zero.
( See The Psyche as and Oscillating Entity in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure )

A familiar example of this concept is that if a romantic relationship is begun in a state of infatuation where one idealizes the love object, that idealization will tend to turn into the equal and opposite disillusionment.  Not all that long ago, peaking during the Victorian era and continuing into the Edwardian—and in some places still continuing—was the patriarchal model for femininity called “ the White Madonna. ”  Young women were expected to be virgins before marriage, to be without impure thoughts, and to be prim, proper, passive, and on a pedestal.  In our time, the pendulum of enantiodromia has swung, and now in popular culture young women are expected to be the other side of the patriarchal coin, the “ Black Madonna, ” which is something like a professionally trained young harlot.   In Britain, where not too long ago they were putting pantaloons on piano legs so as not to give young people lascivious notions, magazines for adolescent girls —conditioning manuals— are now incredibly raunchy and advertise how to improve your oral sex techniques, how to cheat on your boyfriend without him knowing, and, of course, how to lose weight.  A couple of years ago I was in a mall here in Colorado, just outside of Boulder, and walked past a shop that sold clothes, accessories, and cosmetics targeted for adolescent girls.  The shop had one and only one huge poster that was obviously meant to suggest the theme of the whole establishment.  Depicted on the poster was a barely pubescent girl in a black, seductive Victoria’s Secret type negligee, sitting on a bed with her legs spread apart.  She wore a desolate and licentious look on her face reminiscent of the character Brook Shields played in the 1978 film, Pretty Baby , where she is the youngest harlot in a New Orleans whorehouse, circa 1917.  The caption of the poster reads “ Femme Fatale .” In other words, here is the place to purchase all the accoutrements you need to suit up as a pubescent Black Madonna.
If you open a magazine marketed for adult women, you might see an extremely thin woman in a pin-stripped power suit, with an attaché case in one hand, a cell phone in the other, and a corporate executive jet plane waiting for her in the background.  This is the image of an empowered adult woman—a patriarchal man.  In the deluded form of feminism, women rebel from repression by asserting their right to be and act like patriarchal men.  It has been said that the oppressed is always in the act of becoming the oppressor.  Young women are now conditioned to think that empowerment means the ability to act like a promiscuous male adolescent, manipulating sexual conquests, etc.
A major recurrent theme I have seen crop up in the dreams of young women is the lunar cycle/menstruation revealed as powerful and magical.  Menstruation has also undergone a patriarchal enantiodromia.  Not too long ago, the patriarchal view was that menstruation was dangerous, unclean, and taboo, but at least it was seen as powerful!  There was a kind of backwards recognition  that menstruation is something very potent, so watch out!  Now the patriarchal coin has flipped over to a far more degraded view of menstruation, which is: hygienic inconvenience. Based on how it is treated in advertisements, etc. it would appear to be a minor, if chronic, health annoyance on par with constipation and heartburn.  All women need to know is that if they use the right products and pills brought to them by the friendly multi-national pharmaceutical company, they can minimize PMS and continue to be the well-adapted worker who keeps up her busy schedule as if nothing had happened.
But in dreams, menstruation is connected with powerful magic and is viewed as a key to a woman’s destiny.  Another theme of these dreams is that women are seen as powerful, and that power is completely removed from their attractiveness in the eyes of men.  In the classic book about modern female adolescents, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher, it is pointed out that before girls enter middle school they are rather tomboyish; they are androgynous and self-initiating, and have higher self-esteem than boys.   However, by the time they get through middle school,  where they learn that their value is reducible to their attractiveness to males, they become passive, depressed, obsessed with their weight and body image, and their self-esteem is roughly 30-40% lower than boys.
In dreams, though, we see compensating images.  For example, in one young woman’s dream there is a woman in her eighties who seems to be a powerful priestess and is dancing naked, doing some sort of fire magic.  Her power does not derive from being young and skinny.   I have researched body image disorders and found a lot of truth to the conclusions of feminist historians and psychologists, that the recent obsession with thin women may have been a collective compensation for their metaphorically gaining size with the wave of feminism beginning in the 1960s.  To redisempower them, women were assigned the nearly impossible task of trying to downsize themselves to the proportions of a male adolescent.  I think there is a still deeper level to the body image problem than what these feminist thinkers have correctly recognized, and I have written about it in The Glorified Body—-Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution .
Sexuality, and eros in general, has undergone a patriarchal enantiodromia or  pendulum swing.  Not too long ago in Western culture, and continuing to this day in many subcultures, sexuality was highly repressed and was supposed to occur only in marriage and for the purpose of reproduction.  This form of patriarchal sexuality then flipped over, especially in the 1960s, and the new norm became promiscuity.  As the lyrics of the classic 1970 song by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young put it: “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you with.” What both sides of this extreme oscillation have in common is the  patriarchal destruction of eros. “Eros” is being used here to refer to a person’s capacity for deep communion or even oceanic merger with another. Eros does not necessarily have to involve physical intimacy and it is quite common for sexual transactions to involve no eros at all.  Pornographic sex on the level of the genitalia, sex as a metaphor for power,  and many other popular versions of sex may be entirely unerotic.

The more recent patriarchal norm for sexuality, the anything goes approach,  is in some ways even more male-dominated than the older version that emphasized repression.  Male sexuality has biological underpinnings predisposing it toward promiscuity.  The reproductive advantage for males is to deposit their sperm in as many places as possible, but for females it is to have a single stable partnership that will help during pregnancy, nursing and bringing up a child  (though some feminist writers dispute that). Before AIDS, certain sectors of the male gay community, witnessed some of the more extreme forms of impersonal promiscuity in gay bathhouses, etc.  With no females around to moderate sexual behaviour, they defaulted to the male biological tendency toward promiscuity.

Very much like the enantiodromia of menstruation, sexuality was once seen as powerful, dark, dangerous, and in need of taboo and intense restriction.  In the degraded patriarchal counterview, it is no more significant than a mutual back rub.  An absurd by-product of this counterview was one of the most  oxymoronic phrases invented, “casual sex.” What is forgotten is the erotic, and that when you have sex with someone you are merging your essence with them, energetic fields are colliding, and neither person will ever be quite the same again.  But to the modern patriarchal materialist, sex was described —–especially pre-AIDS— as no different than any other form of cardio exercise like running or bouncing on a trampoline.  (See George Leonard’s excellent book The End of Sex: Erotic Love after the Sexual Revolution ).  The publication of Alex Gray’s book Sacred Mirrors, was a huge cultural milestone, because a vision was revealed of  sex and eros as a profoundly transformative experience of energetic merger, as well as of anatomical penetration.
Ken Wilber, and others who are influenced by the “Spiral Dynamics” model of human evolution, talk about the “ pre/trans” fallacy.  People seek to rebel from the conventional by regressing to the preconventional, while  falsely believing that they have transcended the conventional.  People rebel from the earlier form of conventional sexuality—uptight, fundamentalist repression— by embracing the new norm—promiscuity—and yet they convince themselves they are being daring and avant-garde and so forth, when they are actually just conforming to an enantiodromia that is reverting to the preconventional—a primitive and unerotic form of sexuality.
The new patriarchal norm for sexuality, exploitive promiscuity, is particularly toxic for women, as it is, like the body type they are expected to emulate, based on adolescent masculinity.  Romantic relationships are generally expected to involve sexual exchange very early in their development; and this, I believe, is a major reason why they tend to fail so quickly.  However compatible two people might be, by engaging such an ultimate state of intimacy, when there is no foundation of emotional intimacy nor recognition of the complexity of the other person, when one is still dealing mostly with projections and counter-projections, the result is most a  short-circuiting of the gradual development of an intimate relationship. Beginning a relationship with ultimate intimacy can often create an inherently unstable structure, bound to topple, especially as idealizing projections revert to disillusionments. However, I don’t want to fall into the patriarchal tendency of “one size fits all” pronouncements on sexuality, because if there is anything that should be obvious about sexuality and eros it is the fantastic individual variability of every part of it, so there should never be a standardized template set out for everyone to follow in every circumstance.

(See On Human Sexuality )

Dreams of a Metamorphosing Feminine
The first dream came to me through what might seem a very random encounter. A few years ago I caught a ride on a Greyhound bus from Boulder and ended up sitting next to a young woman about nineteen or twenty who came from a trailer park sort of background.  I don’t remember anything else about the conversation, except the dream, and have no idea what led up to her telling me about it.

In the dream she is walking down a city street holding a baby girl in her arms, and she hears a voice, which sounds to her like the voice of God, say of the baby girl: “She was born under a blood red moon on October 30^th.” She continues down the street and sees that a wolf is stalking her and the baby, and although it has a weird, loping, almost cartoonish gait, she recognizes it as an extreme danger to her and the baby.   To escape the threat, she goes into her mother’s house. Finally,  as a gesture of magical protection, she ties a knot with string around the doorknob.

The young woman is holding a female infant in her hands, and although it has become something of a New Age cliché to talk about your “inner child,” this is a real psychic function, and if in a dream you are holding or caring for a baby of your gender, this is usually a representation of your unformed essence.  The voice of God tells her that the baby was born under “a blood red moon,” and this scarcely needs interpretation.  Obviously, it suggests that menstruation is more than an hygienic inconvenience, but rather it is a key to a woman’s destiny.  When I heard the dream on the bus, my only association with the date October 30^th was that it was right on the cusp of Halloween, a Saturnalian holiday associated with spirits and pre-Christian paganism.  Presently, there is a resurgence of fascination with this era and with paganism, as well as all and things Celtic and Druidic.  This may be part of what Terence McKenna called “The Archaic Revival” a resurgence of interest in cultural forms that date back to times when the feminine was allowed to thrive.  I consider The Mists of Avalon , a great fantasy novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley set in Arthurian times, to be the most contemporary of novels about the metamorphosis of the feminine, and I recommend it to almost every woman I meet.  The story takes place at the turning point where patriarchal Christianity is about to replace a Druidic culture, which recognizes the magic of the lunar cycle, etc.  This book reflects emergent archetypes that also surface in these dreams.

Long after the bus ride, when I shared this dream with a woman who had a parallel dream, I was told that in Wiccan mythology October 30^th is the date the goddess is born, so any female born on that date is incarnating the goddess.  The dreamer was obviously no more aware of this at the time than I was, but it makes the voice of God statement all the more archetypal. Being born under the blood red moon also means that a woman is born with a destined connection to the Goddess, or sacred femininity.

That a baby girl represents her essence shows her femininity as unformed.  Given the culture this young woman was growing up in, this was actually a healthy sign about the sate of her feminine essence.  When I have done dream interpretation for female yuppies in their late-twenties and thirties, they will sometimes have in their dreams a woman exactly their age, floating dead and face down in a stream or lake.

The danger to her unformed feminine essence is the wolf, and from her associations with the wolf she and I realized that it was a representation of male predatory sexuality, a very active presence in the subculture she was growing up in.  “Wolf” is also a slang term for a male sexual predator that was in common usage during World War II, and although it has since fallen out of favor, it is not completely archaic either.  The dream wolf is no exemplary predator; there is a buffoonery aspect to its awkward gait.  In other words, it is not a fully realized masculinity but the degraded, culturally conditioned sort of pseudo machismo of, for example, the adolescent wannabe gangster type.

To protect herself and the baby she goes into her mother’s house, which can be seen archetypally as a return to the ancestress and to an earlier form of femininity.  As a magical gesture of protection she ties a knot with string around the doorknob, and there are two meanings I derive from this gesture.  The first is that she is tying together the inner masculine and feminine within herself, the inner alchemical marriage.  The second is that “tying the knot” colloquially refers to marriage, and suggests protecting her unformed feminine essence by holding out for a deeply committed relationship , and thereby not succumbing to predatory promiscuous sexuality.

One of the most daunting challenges for women seeking to discover what femininity might be, removed from six thousand years of patriarchal history, is that there are so few female elders embodying sacred femininity.  Dreams, fantasy works, and active imagination are legitimate places to gain access to a force so rarely personified.  Exploring the life of any women that does seem to personify this force, perhaps Eleanor Roosevelt—though she both transcends and reflects many of the limitations of her day— would be another way to compensate for a lack of local role models.  One way to gain entrance to the mind of a great feminine, androgynous spirit is to read a novel by the late-Victorian novelist George Elliot—the pseudonym of Mary Ann Cross—original surname, Evans. I particularly recommend her supreme masterpiece, Middlemarch , in which a young female protagonist struggles with succumbing to patriarchal notions of romance.  The access granted in this amazing novel is not to be found merely in the plot, but in the penetrating—yet compassionate vision of the novelist, a vision that in itself is an alchemical melding of masculine and feminine.

The next dream comes from a highly intelligent, attractive young woman in her early twenties who is a computer professional.  She entitled her dream “What an Alarm.”   My interpretation was also written as an email.

“What an Alarm”    (email, January 17, 2006)

“What a way to wake up. I had these crazy dreams and then I get up (before my alarm amazingly, and early) and get a really bad bloody nose. I hate winter. So here’s my dream: I was dreaming that it was lunchtime at work and I decided I wanted a milk shake so I left. I was working in Boulder and the way it looked was most of the city was all smooshed together and in a little valley with lots of trees around. That may already sound like Boulder, but it was a lot smaller of a valley.

In any case, for some reason I ended up going all the way to Golden to get the shake. That or I started out in Golden and went to Boulder. Oh, and I was riding my bike. So there I go, and I keep getting turned the wrong direction and I have to keep flipping bitches on this road that resembles 80th Ave in Arvada. I finally get where I’m going somehow and end up taking this secret entrance into some random boys dorm room. His name is Matt and he gives me a big smile, as I carefully sneak out of his room, which is the size of a house and his mom is there too. She pretends not to notice me. There’s a gap here but then for some reason I’ve had to come back to Matt’s room and ask how to get to the city behind Boulder, or Nederland. For some reason he says I need to go through this military part of the school to best get there. All this time I have to be very sneaky, and I’m not sure why.

I had apparently left work at like 9:30 am after getting in really early. But I thought I’d left at 2:30, and it is still not even 3 yet. So for some reason he leads me into this military practice area inside this building. We walk by taped off areas, areas where people are practicing hand to hand combat (but with lots of padding), and finally we wander into an ‘open’ part where there are lots of men and women.

This part of the dream disturbed me quite a bit. All of the women were either topless or naked, and many of them were bloody and shaking. We walked through this large area where there was also a few pools, and there were all these sort of demonstrations going on, but they were torturing the women. I just remember thinking, so this is what they don’t tell you about the army, and this is what they do to women.

For some reason, by the time I got to the end of the room (and realized I would have to exit another way), I was no longer wearing a shirt either. An officer came up to me and asked if I wanted to be executed. At first I said sure, and he said, ok, come lie on this stone slab.  Then I had to ask what he meant. And he said, do you want to lie down and be killed right here.(!) I said hell no, and he said then that I’d have to leave, this is a restricted area. I said, I’m sorry, I was able to walk right in. So I left. Then I found all of these clothes all over the floor outside, so I threw some on.

Then I took off and managed to find another open access root directly to what seemed like the Officer’s dorm room. There was a bed and a TV, and I went and laid in bed and watched some TV for a while. Then I decided it was time to leave, so I managed to find this window to his bedroom to be open, and it led right outside to where I wanted to go. When I opened the window and climbed out, a small container of (pink) yogurt that was sitting half eaten by the window, fell out into the grass.

I took off and about 50 yards away was disguised by trees. There was a metal pole fence surrounding the area, but I managed to get through it. There was a guy out there doing yard work (mowing or something). So I followed this fence and managed to get into Golden or Nederland, wherever it was that I was going now. I no longer had my cell phone or bike or wallet, so I was a bit concerned. But I managed to get into the food area of this school, and order a shake. What I ended up getting was a cup full of whipped cream and a ‘tab key’ to a ‘tab key machine’ where you insert this tab and it gives you a can of soda, a slab of meat, whatever is in the machine (meat and soda were in the one I found). It also had cherry soda (my favorite) displayed, but there was no selection number next to it, so I figured I couldn’t have it and I just got a Pepsi instead.

Now, with no phone and no bike, I don’t know how I managed to get back to work. It was almost like I was already nearby. I then had to take off and ran up and down this whole series of stairs, passing some turntables with a note from a DJ saying he would be late, all the way until I got back to what I guess was work. Still with no clue how I would get home or recover my stuff. I thought about calling to let the credit card companies know my card was stolen, but then realized I had no phone. This is about where I woke up, sometime before getting to work and having to explain what happened. Pretty crazy and fucked up, eh? Good morning.”

Jonathan (email January 17, 2006)

“The quest begins with an urge for a milk shake which is one of two dairy products in the dream, the other being the pink yogurt, and in the convention of baby clothes, at least, pink is the color assigned to females. Milk is the life-giving product of female mammals. Of course, what is good for baby cows is not good for adult humans, and milk shakes are associated with adolescents, and there could even be an association with the male mammalian liquid product—-semen. You are riding a bike, instead of driving the car that you would in real life, and that brings in an adolescent context as well, the driver’s license being the secular initiation into adulthood.

Much of the world you encounter on your quest seems toxic and lacking in the feminine. You escape work and find yourself in a truncated squished-together version of Boulder. You are ‘flipping bitches’—driving in circles. That certainly  sounds like a phrase invented by a misogynist male adolescent!    You ‘get where you are going,’ and this turns out to be a ‘ secret entrance ’ —think about that phrase for a moment by itself and the obvious association of vaginal penetration—which leads to a ‘ random boy’s dorm room’ — we’ve talked about the anti-feminine aspect of promiscuous sexuality where females believe they are rebelling from repression by acting unconsciously like promiscuous male adolescents. That the room is as big as a house suggests that the male adolescent complex is big enough to become a whole personality and enclose you. That his mother is present, suggests that you are not encountering mature masculinity, but instead a ‘mother-bound boy,’ which reminds me of your recent statement that the male you were involved with was ‘just a boy.’

You ask the adolescent boy how to get to a town you know very well yourself, and he directs you into a military area where you will get to the heart of the destructive patriarchy. Passively, you follow this very dubious and immature guide, and he leads you past areas where guys are fighting—the testosterone zone of male adolescence—to where there are topless women who are bleeding and shaking as if they have just been raped. The women are being tortured, and you realize this is what they don’t tell you about the army, the patriarchal collective—it’s not a job—nor an adventure, but a place to abuse the feminine, at least in the context of this dream.

An officer asks if you would like to lie down and be executed—fucked, with sex as a metaphor for power caught in death energy. You actually say yes, but then a part of you wakes up to realize what this means, and for the first time in the dream an immunological response is stirred—the purpose of the dream—and you begin to have a healthy fight back response.

However, this healthy urge to leave such a dangerous, evil place fades to passivity very quickly, and you get sucked back into the male adolescent world. You put on random clothing, which suggests a random, generic social persona, and you go into yet another random male’s dorm room, lie on his bed, and watch TV like a passive male adolescent.

From there you go to still another patriarchal adolescent zone, a school. You have lost your tools of empowerment in the dream—cell phone, bike, wallet—but are still trying to get the milkshake. Instead of getting a shake—perhaps the whole dream is meant to be a shake or a shock to your feminine side—you are given a cup of whipped cream—the food product with the closest association with semen; and since it is ‘whipped,’ there is a tortured feminine aspect as well— and then you have to follow some dumb mechanical process to try to get the missing feminine part; you want a ‘cherry’ soda, which has an association with virginity and vagina, but the machine only gives you yang items: meat and Pepsi.

In a paradoxical homeopathic way, the dream is trying to condition you through forced exposure to the toxicity of the male, patriarchal, promiscuous, adolescent world, which is torture to the feminine, to have an immunological response to it—like Alex, the psychopathic protagonist of A Clockwork Orange , who is de-conditioned from his violent nature by being given a drug that makes him horribly nauseous while being shown films of violence. To drive the point home, you even wake up shaking, with a bloody nose, so that your whole body will register that you are the female being tortured by this world.  A spontaneous eruption of blood is associated with menstruation and the dawning of feminine sexuality, and the nose is associated with a preconditioned intuitive ability to distinguish between what is toxic and what is nourishing. The “shaking” tortured women and the ‘milkshake’ suggest that the dream happens to shake your feminine side into life.

This dream is a real classic, with much in common with dreams reported to me by other young women that reflect a waking up and rebellion from the last six thousand years of patriarchy. You were absolutely correct to title the dream, ‘What an Alarm.’ Yes, the dream is an immunological alert from your soul, an alarm meant to shake you awake, and an example of my experience that nightmares are usually the dreams most capable of creating healing. A healing force within you is trying to shake you awake from the male adolescent world that’s been pulled over your eyes.”

Metamorphosis of the Moon

The following dream was sent to me by a talented and unconventional young woman of sixteen (who had not read the essay above before having the dream).

(Dreamer’s email, February 4, 2006)

“I was in this place looking at the sky and I noticed that there were more moons. I think it started out with two moons. And then there were lights in the sky, and then I think one moon divided into another moon or something. Also, one moon sort of lit up like a Christmas tree and then wasn’t lit any more. Then I was in a classroom, I think, and an announcement came on that another moon had been spotted in the solar system or something like that. I said that I saw it and tried to point it out to other people, but nobody else could see it for some reason. Anyway, I guess I went outside again and then I climbed over a hill because I heard friends calling, and I saw them in this big grassy field (I think it was still night in my dream) and there was sort of a big park on top of the hill. The whole dream was very strange and unlike all my other dreams so it seemed significant somehow.”

Jonathan (my emailed response, February 5, 2006):

“In the dream you are a witness to an astronomical anomaly, something really significant and cosmic is going on, but you have trouble getting other people to see it. The archetypal view would have to consider the possibility that the dream envisions a metamorphosis of the feminine principle.  The moon is the archetypal feminine, yin, the receptive; it reflects the energy of the sun, the solar, yang, archetypal masculine principle. Suddenly there are new moons, or additional moons, and the solar system is reconfigured,  which suggests that your psyche recognizes that there is more than one way to be in touch with the feminine principle. In the past there was only one moon, only one way to be female, but now things have mutated and there may be many new ways, new moons. My interpretive bias would be to see this dream as another young woman dreaming of the metamorphosis of the feminine. Also, the friends in the grassy field/park at the top of the hill suggest that with metamorphosis and novelty with the feminine, the social world is both elevated and put in a more natural setting.”

Kali Moons

Here is another multiple moon dream sent to me by a twenty-one year old male college student.  He may have been a few years younger when he had the dream.  In the same email that included the dream he told me that he keeps getting the “Rebirth of the Feminine” card from the Zap Oracle.

(Dreamer’s email, March 1^st, 2006)

“I’m rolling with two fairly unconscious friends in their car, intent on scoring some herb, but things become complicated, middle-men logistics, and other bullshit I don’t want to deal with, and so I get out of the car and bid them good evening. It is night, and now I will be without a bag. I walk over to Plaid Pantry (the nearby mini-mart), and in the dark night sky I see the clouds part, and the moon appears. But there are several crescents now, one larger waxing crescent on the right, and two smaller waning crescents on the left, and they’re arranged I think in what you might call concentrically, each tracing the edges of the same circle, circling outward away from each other expanding, but suspended in the same place when I look directly. When I look peripherally at the image, and the crescents separate enough, between them appears the figure of a multi-armed dancing female whose limbs are the curves of the crescents.

I made the image into a stained glass piece, which I’ve never shown you. I should some time though.”

What’s interesting here is that the rebirth of the feminine is appearing to a male psyche, and also that what is required for the vision is that he break with the mundane agenda of contemporary males to experience it.  The feminine appears in a cosmic context, not a personal/romantic one.  The form of the feminine also appears to be the Hindu Goddess, Kali, who represents the dark side of the feminine.  Hindus believe that we are living in the age of Kali, which they call the “Kali Yuga.”

The following dream was sent to me by another highly intelligent, attractive woman in her twenties. She works as a multi-media professional. I will refer to the dreamer by the pseudonym, “Emily,” and the pseudonym for her partner will be “Mike.”

Emily (email, 2/23/06)

“Jonathan,

Ok so here we go…weird dreams

Dream not sure how it starts but the fragments I remember  are as follows.

My little brother and I are in this house – being held captive. A man in his late twenties is bringing dead to half-dead people back to this house and cutting them up – serial killer of both men and women. My brother and I are trying to clean up the blood on the tile floors of the kitchen (I only ever see the kitchen room of this house). The house is 1 million plus worth of a house with Spanish tiles and tall ceilings. The killer does not live here – he is squatting. I fear mostly for my brother’s safety-and less for myself. The killer eventually starts having my brother take the bodies one at a time as the killer comes in  from out side. He is making my brother cut them up now – the killer is tired of the job. So he hands my brother one body
after another. My brother is shaking terribly from this experience – but he goes through with it and I can
see him dying inside from having to see such terrible massacres. I am mopping up the floor from another
blood mess – there is always about a 1/2 inch of blood on the floor in the kitchen. The killer is out of the house. And my brother comes out of the bathroom (I might have seen the bathroom because I know it was blue )(the bathroom is where he has to cut the bodies up) and says that this girl is still alive and he can’t kill her, because he is not a killer. He asks what he should do. We know the killer will kill him or me or both of us if we do not follow his rules and abide by his every whim. If he comes back and this girl is alive we are all dead and will be tortured in the process. I then decide this is our chance to get out, and we would save her in the process. We calm the girl and tell her who we are and I remember coming up with a great plan for all of us to escape (if I would have written this dream down sooner – I could have told you the details of the plan). Then I remember attacking the killer when he returns to the house and somehow I get my thighs around his neck and snap his neck. And he is dead and we are free to leave. But I don’t remember ever seeing any other part of the house other then that kitchen even now at the end, but the bathroom – I remember was blue with a claw foot tub…I woke up.

Strange thing is – Mike had a dream that same night…on a river bank. He said my brother and I were chasing a woman who was half dead along the banks. She was about to run by Mike and my brother and I started screaming frantically for him to catch her, not to let her get away – to kill her! He felt confused but felt he had no time to think – he caught her- he sensed that if she got away ‘evil would  happen’ (his words exactly as he described it) so he drowned her…He remembers watching her body float down the river and thinking ‘I am cold as shit, this sucks – I’m freezing my ass off’ and then his main objective was to get warm.

So I thought it was strange that he had a dream about killing a  woman while in my dream I was saving one. His woman was a blonde and the one in my dream was a brunette.  —strange dreams”

Jonathan (my emailed response, 2/23/06):

“Fascinating dreams. First, a huge disclaimer: dream interpretation, like life interpretation, is inherently speculative,  and I am inevitably going to see a dream like this from my  perspective on the feminine, patriarchy, and so forth, so there is always that danger of connecting dots to fit an a priori theory and so forth.  The best test of dream interpretation validity is whether it satisfies the dreamer’s sense of inner truth, but even that test isn’t 100% reliable.

The opening situation of the dream, where you and your brother are held captive by a male serial killer is a metaphorical illustration of the captivity of patriarchy, which oppresses not only women, but also more sensitive males, like your little brother, who follows orders but is horrified by what he is being asked to do.  The serial killer is a very reasonable metaphorical analogue for the patriarchy which is, as the long skull shadows of history testify, the ultimate serial killer.  It is also well documented that the classic serial killer phenomenon is almost exclusively male.  The female serial killer case recently dramatized in the 2003 movie Monster, is not a classic serial killer model at all, because the female killer had been abused—most serial killers have not been, contrary to popular misconception— and her killings were motivated by revenge. Serial killings are usually defined as “unmotivated.”  The killings in the dream seem to be of this classically male kind, unmotivated, mechanical, an assembly line of death, and this is highly suggestive of the patriarchy and a male mode of behavior. By contrast, the house seems grand and aesthetically beautiful, as if it were the architectural metaphor for what human civilization could be, with high ceilings and so forth.  The killer is only squatting there; his domination of the structure is temporary and illegitimate.   You only get to experience the bathroom and kitchen, the rooms most associated with body  function, suggesting that when the patriarch usurps the structure everything is reduced to the lowest common denominator factors. The patriarch extends his power by conditioning and exploiting younger males to do the dirty work.  The older males start a military adventure, and adolescent-age males are mostly the ones who get sent to the battlefield.

Your brother objects to hacking up a girl who is still half- alive.  This girl seems to be the metaphor for the present state of
the feminine—-half-dead, half-alive, assigned for dismemberment, but arousing the conscience of those not fully conditioned.  The desire to refuse participation conflicts with the awareness that the patriarchy destroys those who don’t obey its rules.  This impossible dilemma leaves only one moral choice: rescue of the half dead feminine and yourselves from the kill or be killed bondage to the  patriarchy.  The rescue takes the form of slaying the serial killer, and specifically the method of killing is that you wrap your legs around his head and snap his neck.  This strongly suggests that you use your sexuality as a weapon to kill the oppressor.  The method of killing is castration, as the loss of head or eyes—as in the case of Oedipus—have long been equated with castration.  The head and eyes are associated with solar phallic archetypal male power, male genitals, and a burly, studly body with the chthonic/lower phallic male power.  You would seem to use your sexuality to attack the head to bring down the patriarchal power principle.  This might be construed as corresponding to the complaint of some men that modern feminist women figuratively castrate them with head games.  The oppressed is always in the act of becoming the oppressor.  On the other hand, maybe there is legitimacy in the method used—there have been some female protests against war that encouraged women to withhold sexual congress with men while they made war. As an attractive young woman, you are in the situation of being a woman who has access to the power of attraction which has certainly been used quite often by both sexes as a weapon.

However, this method of  fighting back, excites archetypal fears in men of the deadly, devouring vagina and men have tended to fear women sexually, since women are more powerful sexually in a few senses—male sexual energy is quickly expended by orgasms, but this is not the case for women; also, all fetuses begin as females, only females give birth, etc.  But this way of overthrowing the patriarchy seems to have unintended consequences and massive collateral damage producing greater destruction of the feminine, and this seems to be illustrated by the response in a male psyche.

In this remarkable case of mutual dreaming, Mike seems to illustrate how this method of overthrowing the patriarchy can have a disastrous result.  As far as I know, Mike is not a patriarchal male, but like your little brother he is a male who rebels from patriarchal conditioning.  In the dream he clearly describes symptoms of solar phallic castration: ‘He felt confused but felt he had no time to think . . . ‘ With the archetypal fear of the deadly vagina aroused in the male psyche, a dangerous archetypal projection happens where a half-alive, victimized, fugitive femininity is viewed as dark, primeval, chaotic, dangerous—he believes that evil will happen if she gets away—evil will happen if the feminine is not brought under control, which means killing it. The woman he kills is blonde, the hair color most often identified with the Hottie.  He drowns her, submerges her back into the unconscious, but in destroying the feminine he has lost half of his own energy source and becomes caught in sexual frigidity: ‘I’m freezing my ass off.’ He is cold in the genital area, and his main objective is to find another source of warmth.  Female sexuality can be used as a very effective weapon against the patriarchy, but using such a weapon leads to mutual assured destruction because it excites primeval male fears that help to perpetuate the cycle of projection and violence.”

Here’s a recent dialogue I had with the same dreamer about another dream. The dreamer is a very attractive, talented, charismatic woman in her twenties. We discussed the dream as an email dialogue, and while I can certainly be accused of leading the witness a bit, I think this dream has much to contribute to the discussion of the feminine in women’s dreams, as well as the metamorphosis of Eros. The theme of violence and bloodshed between masculine and feminine continues in this dream.

Emily (entire email exchange dated 2/24/06):

“Hey there Jonathan,

I just remembered a dream I had – years ago back in 2000-2001 it has always been an interesting one to me. Starts with going to the grocery store back in ______(a town out West) (where I grew up) with my mom, brother and my boyfriend at the time. Store is not as I remembered it – it is a combo of a few different stores. Regardless, we finish shopping and are carrying the groceries outside. I am carrying a tube like net-like bag that has kiwis in it and they are stacked in there one by one about two feet long. As we are walking out of the store there is a noticeable crowd – but we keep walking to our car as a group – just as we walked in. As we get to the car my boyfriend starts playing around – pushing and poking like a 20 year old might do . . . so my little brother and I start pushing and playing back. As we are all rough housing around my bag of kiwis splits open and they start rolling everywhere. My brother grabs the ones that roll by him. I start chasing a few that are rolling toward the front of the store. As I finally catch up with it – it has rolled right into the crowd that I mentioned earlier. As I grab the kiwi and look up there is a man with a gun swirling about pointing it at people telling them to shut up. The crowd is making fun of him – saying that he is not serious, doesn’t have the guts, that he is a wimp and so on in that degrading sense. I make eye contact with him, and he grabs me and puts me underneath him pointing the gun at me and tells me not to move. He begins grabbing others too and doing the same, before you know it he has half the crowd at his feet cowering. The crowd is making fun of him still. He hands me the shotgun and gives me this look of hold onto this for me – you are the only one I can trust here. I feel bad for him because I know he is not a bad person. I feel like I can trust him. And that he trusts and identifies with me. One of the crowd finally says something that enrages the man and he swings around for the gun and grabs it back from me. And as if he decides to prove his seriousness, points the gun at my head – right between my eyes. I have enough time to look at him and ask telepathically why he is doing this, asking him not to do this to me, because I don’t hate him I understand him, please don’t. BANG! I felt this dull but sharp pain run deep through my head – right between my eyes. My world is immediately black. The first thing that I hear is me at the sound of the bang ‘Keep breathing, don’t stop breathing, you can’t die if you refuse to stop breathing, even if your lungs fail keep breathing, you need to keep breathing, this is how you push over to the other side. Keep breathing.’ As I do this I begin to hear the faint and fragmented voices of the crowd – crying, ‘Oh my god look at her face,’ ‘She was such a beautiful girl,’ ‘What has he done.’ I knew that I was disfigured. I knew I was dying. The black faded – I kept breathing and the voices faded away completely. As the black faded into light I began to feel like I had done it I had pushed through to somewhere – either death or to the hospital – I was convinced I would wake up in one of the two place . . . the next consciousness or a hospital. I was nervous and scared to open my eyes and I finally got the courage – as I opened them I opened my eyes to my eastern facing window with the sunlight beaming through lighting up my bedroom at my parents house. And that is how I came out of the dream. It was so real that I really believed I was shot in the face. I felt that pain right between my eyes for some time after that during the day.”

Jonathan (emailed response):

“That’s a bit of a puzzler, so I decided to sleep on it. I felt I understood the last part of the dream last night, but not the first part, about which I now have a highly speculative theory. In the dream, you are carrying a very specific and rather organic seeming structure not found in ordinary life, a tube-like, net-like bag with kiwis stacked one on top of the other. I am wondering if this could be a dream metaphor for female reproductive anatomy, esp. the fallopian tubes that deliver eggs one by one? Your boyfriend starts ‘playing around—pushing and poking like a 20 year old might do . . .’ and this causes the bag to split open and the kiwis/eggs to spill out of control, leading you to danger. A sexual mischance with a single egg could have life-changing consequences. Sometimes dreams reveal specific medical conditions—were there any female anatomy health issues occurring or developing at that time? The image could also be a warning about the shocks that can come from being careless with one’s sexuality. Or this theory may be completely off base.

Typically, when a dream delivers such a powerful shock that it translates into a bodily sensation, and very especially if the dream causes one to wake with lingering sensation,  it is trying to deliver a powerfully deconditioning shock, and usually what it is trying to decondition is indicated in the dream.  Nowadays, the most common element leading to a nightmarish deconditioning shock in people’s dreams is sexual transgression, which is presently considered the norm in many subcultures, but which the unconscious red flags as much as it did sexual repression in earlier times. That one of the women in the chorus—so to speak—laments your facial disfigurement and says that you have lost your beauty, puts the shock in the context of eros. A shotgun blast to the face, if survived, can be so horribly disfiguring that survival can be much more traumatic than death. Pursuing a stray egg/kiwi, you end up under the power of inferior masculinity, a male whose eros is caught in death energy—sex as a metaphor for power. He is acting out because of weakness, and empathically you realize this and sympathize, but your empathy for his weakness actually endangers you further. He is trying to prove his machismo to a collective that taunts him, labeling him as emasculated and a wimp and so forth, so he ‘grabs you and puts you underneath him.’ Here we have the brand of sex as a metaphor for power characteristic of rapists and immature masculinity—which is the norm—and the shotgun is a phallus of death. Maybe you were having a prophetic vision of Dick Cheney, who was either running for office or recently elected around the time of the dream!

The dream then performs a function that may be valid even if the above theory is not. It takes you through a kind of near-death or death experience, and I have seen many dreams perform this function. At the time of the dream, you were closer to the age of initiation, and since our culture does not usually provide initiations—in tribal cultures these involve a confrontation with death—the unconscious may have supplied one and allowed you to see that by holding your center as you pass through the Big Bang singularity/event horizon of death, you emerge and find a sunny morning; that the self is not extinguished by death, but instead it is shocked by it. You felt pain right between your eyes, which suggests that the dream delivered an intentional shock to your third eye.

I would be very interested in hearing which, if any parts, of the above interpretation resonate with your inner sense of truth, and if you can access that from a dream that happened several years ago.”

Emily: “Well the most intriguing part was the getting shot and being told by something to keep breathing. That was the focus of the dream. It felt like the people that were there were just to move the story along . . .”

Jonathan:

“Well, that would point more towards what I felt last night, that everything was just a precursor to the Big Bang, a simulated death experience. But some sort of soul guide tells you to keep breathing, which is classic advice to a living person undergoing a huge shock from an hallucinogen, for example. On another level, the message is about keeping your center during the most apocalyptic shocks, because death itself is survivable if one doesn’t completely fragment. Still, I can’t help feeling that dreams tend to be highly efficient and make symbolic use of precursor material too. Does the theory about the earlier parts diverge from your intuitive sense of the dream, or is it more that you don’t have a feeling one way or another because the shotgun blast was so much more powerful?  Can you remember what you felt when the kiwi bag burst? Kiwis look more egg-like than most fruits, and have a furry exterior and brilliant green within. They also possess a kind of radial structure that looks a bit like a cell.”

Emily:

“Well at the time I had just discovered kiwis as one of my new favorite fruit. I thought that is why they were in the dream. I did find it strange how they were packaged though. When the bag burst I was pissed because like I said I love this new fruit and they were expensive so I didn’t want to lose any of them. It was hard to get my mom to buy things that were expensive.”

Jonathan:

“Well that’s pretty interesting, because they are almost like forbidden fruit! They seem like pearls of great price. They are living objects that, if planted in the right environment, grow into fruit-bearing trees. Also, they are highly nourishing, and a new exotic pleasure your mom is reluctant to approve. Was there anything in your life at the time of the dream, or the time you lived in _____, that would correspond—something alive that you had newly discovered but which your mom might have disapproved of as too expensive, exotic, or, for some other reason, forbidden? How they are packaged is strange: netting and nets are related to the feminine sometimes—the web of life. The kiwis are something forbidden and hard to contain, but available or packed in a one-at-a-time manner in a tube. This strangeness means there is some secret there to be decoded, since the dream could easily have conjured a weak paper grocery bag whose bottom gave out.

Keep that structure in your active imagination and see what you get. What does it feel like to hold a leaky net tube of kiwis? It seems pregnant with meaning . . .”

Emily:

“Well at the time – I was about to break up with that boy and was about to embark on my own idea of what I wanted my life to be.   I was quitting the bicycle racing thing and getting into art and film for the first time . . . I was going after the forbidden fruit – my dreams, and no one else was influencing me for once.”

Jonathan:

“So, at the very least, you were creating your own initiation and a massive change was taking place on multiple levels. The unconscious may have assisted you by giving you a perfectly safe brush with death, which strengthened you to withstand shocks. When we seek to leave a smaller world for a larger one, there are threshold guardians that block the way, and we have to be tested before we can be allowed to cross the threshold; we have to undergo the dark night of the soul, the underworld journey… I still sense something biological and sexual about the whole kiwi scene.”

Emily:

“Well I think that sexuality can be read into any 20 year old girls dreams. I mean, I always feared getting pregnant, because that is the last thing I ever want to happen, ever. So maybe that is what you are reading there. That fear is ever-present in me since the day it became something that ‘could’ happen. So that is what I have to offer up today.

I do enjoy the email discussions with you. It is a great way to get my mind through the day.”

Jonathan:

“Aha. Well that makes sense. It goes with the egg and fallopian tube thing, and it seems to work with some slang phrases like: getting ‘banged’ resulting in a ‘shotgun wedding.’ The dream might also be strengthening your anxiety about having a cylindrical sack like object burst—condom—and that is associated with the danger of immature masculinity, which is both the pushing and poking of the soon-to-be-left boyfriend, and the chip-on-his-shoulder shotgun guy proving his masculinity in a way that is a shock to you. The dream therefore heightens the immunological alertness to a very genuine, highly probable risk: accidental pregnancy—and also, I wonder, the disastrous bio-energetic merging with an unworthy partner. You were about to take a highly developmental step that involved your continuing to play an androgynous role where being ambitious, very actively engaging in the world on self-invented paths charged by the highly unconventional, having encounters with other mutants, and exploring technical and artistic creativity, would have been largely disrupted by such an accidental disaster. You can see the archetypal masculinity in choosing such an active and ambitious path, and therefore your soul may have been recognizing how disastrously an unwanted pregnancy could derail that, and it sought to create the most powerful of shocks to condition you toward a heightened wariness.

This wariness would need to be carried by bodily intelligence and the unconscious, as well as by the conscious mind. The conscious mind already knew this danger as all too real, but the dream delivers the shock to the unconscious and the body to deepen the wariness. I think the kiwis are also representative of your eros in a looser metaphor—as compared to the literal allegory of kiwi to egg—as something precious, a recently discovered exotic pleasure usually shared with one person at a time, a finite element, something invaluable and yet only very reluctantly allowed by your mother. So the stray kiwi could be seen as representing the random one night stand: a merging that got away from conscious attention and control, and happens accidentally.  This type of accident tends to be under the frequently fatal power of immature masculinity. So, the nightmare acts the way many nightmares do, a way that has some parallels to homeopathic medicine; a virtual poison is introduced, and this catalyzes a healthy immunological response, and the immunological response is about avoiding accidents with your eros—the biological accident of unwanted pregnancy, and the emotional and spiritual accident of an unworthy encounter with immature, transgressive masculinity.”

Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap

Stop the Hottie!

The title, Stop the Hottie, and the writing that follows were largely determined by a synchronicity that happened in the last hour. I was walking in the parking lot of King Soopers, the setting Colorado sun illuminated everything in an orangey-yellow light that made every complexion, every hub cap, glow with the glamour of Boulder high dessert mountain town orangey-yellow sunset lighting. Metal flake paint on the late model SUVs sparkled like fairy dust. Even King Soopers itself seemed imbued with a larger than life all-American vitality, as if it were seen through the eyes of a Hudson River School painter while Aaron Copeland’s Appalachian Spring played in the background.

I had just left a friend’s basement, the lighting in there was terrible, but he provided me with something that enhanced my appreciation of colors and turned the intuitive part of my mind way, way up, while turning the part of my mind that focused on practical and mundane items way, way down. This was a most welcome shift in the ratio of these two psychic functions as practical, somewhat mechanical tasks, had been dominating a great part of my waking life for the past two days.

At the edge of the King Sooper’s parking lot, bathed in orangey-yellow light, my vision was arrested by a hexagonal red stop sign. In the center of the giant O of the “STOP” was a mylar sticker, that although slightly weathered and partly ripped away, was in this lighting sparkling like red and blue sapphire in a field of pavé diamond. The sticker depicted a little winking “cow girl” sex toy. This was the sort of cheesy cow girl fantasy that your worst stereotype of a truck driver would blow a quarter on in a Texas truck stop. Probably the sticker was purchased by a 13 year old boy of the sort that lived the ADD, Ritalin, M-80s, violent cartoon, ultra sour candy type of life style. Impulsively, he had blown a quarter on it, and then seeing the utter cheesyness of what he had gotten, decided to slap it on a stop sign in a random Ritalin-driven gesture of juvenile vandalism and ineffectual rebellion.

Set in a circular version of the American Flag, was a seductive cow girl glowing with fiery mylar sparkles. She wore a cowboy hat, a breast-revealing red halter top with a white star in the middle above an exposed midriff, and sparkling blue panties over leather cowgirl pants. And in case this subtlety of costume wasn’t enough to hook a prospective sticker purchaser, she was also winking gigantically, and twirled a lasso with which she was improbably lassoing her own left leg. Her form and gestures seemed to express some very basic reptilian truck stop fantasy, something like, “Hey big cowboy, you’ve lassoed yourself one hunk of hot, wet cowgirl pussy tonight!!!”

I stared with fascination at this sticker, recognizing that it was the perfect manifestation in cultural artifact of that emergent archetype I’ve been writing so much about recently, “The Hottie.” Of course, there are zillions of artifacts all around us depicting The Hottie, but never before had I seen a winking self-lassoing mylar cow girl right in the center of the “O” of a hexagonal stop sign. She was the center of what looked like a giant zero at the center of the word that better than any other in the English language expresses that most basic of messages: “STOP!” Hence the title and theme: “STOP THE HOTTIE!” (I immediately pulled out my camera and photographed this archetypal artifact from all sorts of angles. Through the camera viewfinder, zoomed in close, the colors enhanced by a polarizing filter, the cow girl seemed to glow and wink right out of the collective unconscious.)

So what exactly is a Hottie, and why does it need to be stopped? “Hottie,” as far as I can tell, is a word of recent American coinage. My guess is that so many people were wearing out the adjective “hot” by saying, “She’s so hot!” and “He’s so hot!” that someone decided to make this abused adjective a noun, and a new word—-“Hottie”—–was born.

The concept, Hottie, implies the eye of a beholder. Somewhere there must be a perceiver for whom the Hottie is that sexy person making a throbbing, red blip on the radar screen of their prowling sexual fantasy. Hotties may occur naturally, or may be manufactured. Hottie providers include some of the largest, most revenue-producing industries on the planet. Pornography, as you probably know, is up there with big oil, the drug trade and pharmaceuticals in the stratosphere of mega industry. If you add in prostitution, much of Hollywood and various music and fashion industries, you begin to realize that the providing and soliciting of Hotties is the largest industry on a planet abounding with gigantic industries. Professional Hottie, Britney Spears, is a major industry just by herself, with a net worth of close to half a billion, her share in the billions of commercial revenue she has generated, without even including all the Britney internet fantasy porn sites.

Last week I saw a recent French movie called, “Bon Voyage.” The setting is France at the outbreak of World War Two. The main characters include the French Minister of the Interior, a Jewish professor who has in his car the only heavy water in the world—essential to the production of nuclear weapons, a German agent who wants to capture the heavy water for the Nazi secret weapons program, and a writer who has been wrongly imprisoned for murder. You would think that such people, in those circumstances, would have a lot of heavy stuff on their minds, but most of them, and most of the plot, centered around pursuit of The Hottie. One of the main hotties in the movie was a glamorous movie staress, who manipulates men in the most obvious of ways—faking crying fits, etc.—–and who is not above murdering an inconvenient boyfriend and getting another boyfriend to dispose of the body.

So is this the type of Hottie that needs to be stopped? Am I saying that we need to stop Britney, mylar cowgirls, and French movie staresses? That would be the solution of Islamic Fundamentalism, which forces anyone of the female persuasion to walk around with a black tarp covering up any glimmer of Hottiness. The most essential thing to realize about the Hottie, is that the Hottie is not so much a person, as it is a fantasy that exists in the mind of the beholder, the Hottie Projector. The Hottie fantasy is projected by the beholder on to some person or image, and sometimes the person or image is not trying to be hot, but is perceived as a Hottie anyway, and sometimes the person or image is designed, like a target, to attract the attention of Hottie Projectors.

Hottie Projectors are probably a substantial majority of people between the ages of puberty and withered elderhood. You know who you are. But there is also a minority of persons who are not Hottie Projectors, and this may be because their hormone levels don’t support this addictive obsession, or their eros is too evolved, or their attention is completely consumed by a struggle for survival, or some other obsession consumes their attention. Besides the Hottie Projectors, there is also an overlapping group that is obsessed with trying to be the Hottie, and the will to be a Hottie can be so intense that it will motivate some people to undergo the surgeon’s knife, to starve themselves, endure punishing workouts, and spend fortunes on costumes and cosmetics. I’m not talking about healthy efforts to look your best, so much as the feverish, consuming obsession with becoming the Hottie no matter what the cost. To this group add another overlapping group that are depressed, even despairing, because they are not the Hottie, or can’t get the Hottie, or got the Hottie but then the Hottie got away, or maybe the Hottie didn’t get away, maybe they even married the Hottie, but then the Hottie outlived their Hottiehood years, or maybe they are a Hottie and have succumbed to some of the soul-destroying temptations that come with Hottiehood, or maybe they stalk the Hottie, or buy all the Hottie’s CDs and products, but never obtain the Hottie in the flesh, or they have obtained the Hottie and are so caught up in living out their fantasies with the Hottie, that life is passing them by without their noticing. If the amount of human psychic energy, that in one way or the other, was devoted to the Hottie were expressed as a physical force, it would surely be the equivalent of enough hydrogen bombs to give a Republican President a gigantic hard-on.

So am I trying to stop all that? Am I trying to stand like a school crossing guard with my hand up in the STOP gesture before the thermonuclear power of the Hottie? The history of people trying to say STOP! to various forms of sexuality is so riddled with hypocrisy, insanity, projection and sadism that I assure you I have no interest in being the school crossing guard of anyone else’s sexuality. Wherever it rears its ugly head I am opposed to “One size fits all.” And nowhere does one size fits all fail to fit all more than with the fantastic and surreal variations of human eros.

So when I say “Stop the Hottie!,” I am saying that for myself, for my projections, the Hottie in the stop sign was my synchronicity, and I share this only because I imagine that there may be others who may be tired of handing their power over to the Hottie archetype. I only seek to preach to those who know themselves to be in the choir, to those who are tired of Hottie soap operas, and I’m not trying to convert those who are of the Hottie persuasion, and have the Hottie as their religion, and image of salvation. If the Hottie quest works for you, go with it if you want. I’m not going to stand between anyone and their Hottie, don’t much want to be a school crossing guard holding up a paper STOP sign before a rushing orangey-red river of volcanic magma.

Only you can stop the Hottie within, and even if you are committed to reclaiming that projection, you may find this to be a daunting project, so heavily conditioned are we to chase the Hottie, that giving that up may prove nearly as difficult as the Hottie itself.

As I have written in my study of the Tolkien mythology, Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy and the One Ring, chasing the Hottie is the most obvious case of grasping for Precious, the One Ring. I won’t go into every intricacy of that symbolism here, but the One Ring begins as Sauron’s Hottie. He has given away so much of his power in the creation of this Precious that he must get it back, and if it is destroyed, his physical form, and all that it has manifested, is destroyed. Like the Hottie, the Precious has an ability to burn holes in the mind of anybody vulnerable to its power. On one level, the One Ring is the emblem of what happens when power is projected onto an outside object. The projector becomes obsessed with capturing this Precious, or if he has captured it, he strives to greedily hold on to it. This obsession becomes so consuming that it eventually turns the projector into a Ring Wraith, or a Gollum. Even noble-hearted Frodo ultimately fails to be able to cast Precious into the cracks of doom.

The Hottie, like the Precious, conveys a powerful, illusory message that it has what is needed for completion. The gold ring is the perfect symbol of wholeness. The circle is a divine shape—-the Sanskrit definition of God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere. A circle represents wholeness, the gold ring particularly so. The gold ring has a relationship to the yin-yang symbol, it has an interweaving of opposites. The feminine aspect of the ring is its coital shape, able to be penetrated by a finger. It’s feminine aspect is encoded in its shape, but perfect shapes are part of the yang realm of the Creative. It’s specific materiality is its feminine aspect. But in its specific materiality, it is made of the most solar or yang of elements—-gold. The One Ring in the Tolkien movies was modeled after someone’s wedding ring. So the ring embodies the alchemical marriage of yin and yang, masculine and feminine. The problem is that the alchemical marriage of yin and yang needs to happen within, when it is instead pursued as a Hottie or other magical object on the outside it becomes the golden shackle binding us ever deeper to Maya/Matrix. Wholeness is never found outside, to pursue it externally is to begin the process of becoming withered into an obsessive wraith.

Aristophanes, in Plato’s Symposium, says that before we incarnated in our present forms we were spherical beings containing both genders, but on this plane we are fractured into (usually) gender specific bodies. A painful and illusory consequence of this split is that we would seek some other, some Hottie perhaps, to complete us, to be “our better half.” But two halves don’t make a whole, they make a quarter. If you did, however, rediscover the inner wholeness you always had within, then you would be in a great place to have healthy, relationships without addictive, obsessed codependence.

The more imbalanced we are, the less we have integrated the masculine and feminine elements within, the more voraciously will we pursue them on the outside. But we can never regain our inner wholeness by seeking to import it from outside. If we are missing part of our inner wholeness we become a hungry ghost forever trying to devour this missing inner ingredient in an addictive all consuming and never satiated effort to find it in the outside world. The more we identify with our present bodies, the more incomplete and limited we feel, and the more we feel that we must have the body of the Hottie (to be it and/or to capture it) to achieve salvation. The more we tighten our grasp, the more the Hottie, the Precious, slips through our fingers.

The characters best able to resist the power of the One Ring—-Bombadil, Aragorn, Gandalf, Galadriel and the other elves, Faramir, Sam—-all have a healthy balance of integrated masculine and feminine qualities. The ones who are most readily corrupted by ring lust—-Boromir, Denethor, Saruman, Sauron—are all notably lacking in the feminine. They lack the inner androgyny or wholeness, are overbalanced toward an arid masculinity and therefore crave the outside object, the Precious, with the most addictive hunger.

In this realm, those most integrated with the androgynous principle of inner wholeness, those most aware that their power or essence is not a function of their present bodily form, are those best able to resist the power of the Precious, the outside object, the Hottie.

During this period of alignment with the black hole at the center of our galaxy (which I have compared to the Cracks of Doom, as both are places where even the most dense external objects are irrealized) we need to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom. We don’t need to stop the Hottie, we need to stop the illusory belief that the Hottie or any externalized Precious can bring us wholeness.

To unplug from Maya/Matrix we need to see that the Hottie is not our energy source. Imagine the following thought experiment. You enter a crypt filled with pirate treasure. The crypt is absolutely dark. You have a flashlight with you and switch it on. You gasp as the flashlight beam illuminates red rubies, glittering gold, green emeralds and cobalt blue sapphires. What beautiful colors these precious objects have!

Actually, this is the illusion of projection, these objects have no color, no light energy, the light, color and energy are mere reflections and refractions of the white light of the flashlight which contains all colors. Freud noticed something similar about the sexuality of the modern person as compared to the “primitive.” The primitive worshipped the mysterious inner fire, and the object on whom this might be bestowed was secondary. The modern person conversely sees all the magic and fire in the outside object (in another words, the Hottie) and fails to recognize the mystery and power of their inner fire. Some guy sees Britney on television and says, “She’s so hot!” Actually, she’s an odorless, touchless, two inch pixel phantom moving beneath a glass screen. What’s hot is his inner fire, the power that he forever gives away to the image, fantasy or person of the Hottie.

Some of us are being called to reclaim that inner fire, to recall the inner power that we project outward binding us to the matrix, to cast Precious into the Cracks of Doom, regain our inner wholeness and Stop the Hottie!

>Self Portrait

© 2003, Jonathan Zap

Revised 2008 Edited by Austin Iredale

Recently, I was called on to comment on a document that attempted, with the best intentions, to come up with a conscious, inclusive, reformed approach to human sexuality. Although there were many good things in this document, I began to have a strong reaction when I noticed that there was an attempt to create a softer-edged template, a model of romantic relationships that emphasized long-term committed relationships. Although my personal bias favors long-term committed relationships, I found that in reaction to the document I ended up going on a rant against the well-intentioned impulse to regularize human sexuality and conduct. My rant, written at high speed, had a life of its own, and the finished product was more of a personal discourse than something that could be considered actual feedback. The words that came pouring out seem to have more to do with my ever-changing view of human sexuality, and I hope there may be some benefit in my sharing that view. You may notice that I make reference to “God” in this piece of writing. Although I do believe there is an intelligence implicit in the cosmos, I don’t usually use the G-word because it so hopelessly contaminated with anthropomorphisms and is weighed down with more baggage than even a supreme deity could deal with. I used the G-word here because the document I commented on was created by religious people, and I wanted to make an impact on their POV.

The overarching tendency of the patriarchal is to approach human sexuality—and all matters, really—with “one-size-fits-all” formulations. Any one-size-fits-all approach toward sexuality is a rebellion against God perpetrated by the human—usually male—ego. As William James observed, a strong and obvious attribute of nature—one could easily substitute cosmos, God, or Tao for “nature”—is “eachness”. Although many spiritual teachings emphasize the unity of all things, there is often an underemphasis on the ubiquitous evidence of eachness throughout this realm. We encounter a world of individual trees, not a Platonic tree template or undifferentiated mass of treeness. Related but not identical to eachness is the quality of individual variation we find throughout the phenomenal world. Although the popular notion that no two snowflakes are alike turns out to be nonsense, it is very clear that as we advance in the evolutionary hierarchy from inanimate matter to organisms, and especially toward higher forms of life, the degree of individual variance also advances. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny recapitulates divine will. There is more individual variation amongst trees than amongst acorns. Whether your starting point is the big bang, Genesis, or a primeval soup of amino acids, the developmental arc is always toward greater individual differentiation. There certainly seems to be more individual variance amongst mammals than microbial life or insects. And when we look at our own species, what we see is a quantum jump in this quality of individuality, diversity, and novelty. According to evolutionary theorist Terence McKenna, novelty—the creation of new forms and also greater levels of complexity, interconnectedness, communication, and self-awareness—is a drive inherent in the universe, an atropic force that we especially see in human evolution and culture. The universe, as McKenna puts it, conserves novelty.

Sexuality and evolution need to be considered together. We should be wary of any doctrine that seems to stand in contradistinction to the workings of the universe. There is a profound deficiency in our species in recognizing that evolution necessarily means sexual evolution. Sexuality is in ways obvious, and also subtle and mysterious, right at the cutting edge of evolution. One-size-fits-all doctrines regarding human sexuality—from Western religions, Eastern sources, new age, pop psychology, or where ever—need to be viewed very skeptically for they have collectively generated a great number of toxic side effects:

1. A huge legacy for manufacturing suffering, repression, discrimination, etc.

2. Failure to acknowledge individual variation as positive and necessary for the growth of the human species.

3. Presumption that human nature is an absolute constant.

4. Their tendency to become repositories and museum exhibits of unconscious projections and the displacement of ego anxieties into elaborate control systems.

5. Their tendency for the past thousands of years to especially target women and sexually diverse individuals for horrific persecution.

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and we as human authors of any doctrine that attempts to regularize human sexual conduct inherit the legacy of fools and sadists, not angels. A consistent part of the legacy of fools has been a tendency of false sophistication about human sexuality. A patriarchal attribute of religious fundamentalists, modern secular experts, and also hedonistic libertines, is this false feeling of sophistication, of knowing what’s really going on, what the bottom line is when it comes to human sexuality. This reductive view of human sexuality as sin versus sacrament, functionality versus disfunctionality, pleasure versus repression, is a manifestation of the human ego recreating sexuality in its image. We are made in the image of God and the image of God revealed by the manifested world is eachness, individual variation, and mind-boggling novelty. As J.B.S. Haldane said, “The universe is not only stranger than you think, it’s stranger than you can think.” When you consider the evolution that has already occurred on this planet as single-celled life advanced into the novelty engine of human culture, and recognize that future developments may be as profound or even geometrically expansive of these earlier steps, you are forced to recognize that when it comes to human sexuality none of us knows what we are talking about. The developmental arc of our individual lives is mysterious, often confounding, and the future development of the species is in the realm of pure speculation. Sexuality is at the cutting edge of a completely unknown, perhaps unknowable trajectory. It is humbling to realize that we don’t know where evolution and novelty are going, and may not be able to comprehend it any better than an amoeba can contemplate human culture.

Creating a doctrine about human sexuality is a subset of a general human activity of the human psyche observing itself and drawing conclusions, an activity that is the maximal case of subjectivity, with the maximal tendencies toward projection and pernicious illusion. When rules are made based on these conclusions, and these rules are then imposed on others, then we find ourselves living in Gulag Earth, the Babylon Matrix, the prison planet, the place where we all live right now. If your eros is adaptable or conventional enough to be in accord with the rules, then for you the prison bars are upholstered in red velvet.

We need to acknowledge the terrible legacy of the patriarchal ego attempting to mutilate nature into its idealized image of itself. Furthermore, we need to recognize that while the planet is a cauldron of evolution and novelty, the fragile individual organism, which includes the human psyche, is preoccupied with its homeostasis. The human psyche seeks to maintain its fragile, evanescent equilibrium, and as a result, as both Freud and Jung observed, it is profoundly conservative; it will cling to a toxic equilibrium rather than risk novelty. When human psyches aggregate into social groups, this conservative tendency can intensify in such a way that the body politic may have a virulent immunological response to individual variation in sexuality—or some other core attribute.

Freud demonstrated that humor is usually a reflection of anxiety, and since our culture’s humor is typically about sex, it reflects the deep and continuing anxiety human beings have about the mutagenic quality inherent in human sexuality. Therefore, we have a powerful motive to want to clear up the complex ambiguities of the erotic realm.

We have to be wary of the tendency, to imagine an ideal human relationship. Paragraphs 7 and 10—of the document I was asked to comment on—seem to offer a one-size-fits-all template for human relationship. This template may have softer edges than past templates, but, I will not mince words, it is an objectionable continuation of past illusions. Although it is my personal feeling and experience that long-term, committed, monogamous relations are most likely to be developmental for most people, I would never want to project that as a universal requirement.

In acknowledging our patriarchal legacy, we should consider anthropological data on how other cultures have handled sexuality. At the same time we need to avoid the New Age fallacy that artifacts of other cultures—Eastern, tribal, etc.—can be easily adopted for modern Western psyches. We should also expand our inquiry to include fields such as primate research. For example, I am very struck by some of the findings of research into Bonomo chimpanzees. Keeping in mind that the science of genetics, still in its infancy, is famous for making presumptuous formulations, we are now told that chimpanzees are 99% genetically similar to human beings, far more similar to us genetically than chimps are to guerrillas. Bonomo chimpanzees are remarkable for two things: They are the primate group that has the lowest rate of intrafraternal violence—humans are, of course, not even in the running—and the highest rate for novel, frequent sexual transactions across all sorts of expected boundaries. Do these findings warrant any conclusions about human sexuality? Of course not. Inquiries into sexuality so often involve thinking that too quickly reaches conclusions, formulations and the premature closure of mysteries and paradoxes.

Although we may have strong feelings that long-term committed relationships seem to work best, that is just one more subjective perception. We are still looking through a glass darkly. Even if we had studies or evidence to support our feelings, such studies would not be a relevant to an individual wishing to live a nonstatistical life. To the maximum extent possible, we should leave it to the individual to make their own path through the unknown, intervening only in cases of the individual seeking dominion over others. If there were to be one universal , one-size-fits-all principle governing sexuality it would have to be consensuality, but any proscriptions beyond that are highly questionable.

One of the unexamined presumptions we have is that functional, balanced, harmonious relationships are best and that troubled relationships are in need of repairs. But, as James Hillman points out, “the soul pathologizes.” (see essay “Love’s Torturous Enchantments” in A Blue Fire) The mythologies of love relationships from most cultures and traditions are filled with tragedy, of two people becoming three, of impossible situations and of descent into an underworld. Hillman illustrates that this may be what the soul wants and needs. The supervisory ego, however, wants to step in and do a quick fix with a regularized model or list of precepts.

As June Singer points out in her book Androgyny: a New Theory of Sexuality, the drive to complete oneself with another person may be based on a fundamental illusion. (See Stop the Hottie! and Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—-Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring).

A central reason that our whole planet is in peril right now is the territorial aggressiveness and other dangerous qualities that have become linked to human sexuality. We desperately need novelty and expanded paradigms in our understanding of sexuality. The patriarchal approach to sexuality is imperiling the life on this planet. (see The Chalice and the Blade by Rianne Eisler and The Alphabet versus the Goddess by Leonard Maslin)

I support the enterprise of individual human development and inquiry. What is needed is not a softer-edged template, but the empowerment of the individual to contribute to divine creativity. As Jung said,

Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always beings with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress.
— CG Jung

True empowerment is an individual thing, but we can still help to encourage it by, for example, providing resources that help individuals understand how their body image and sexual perceptions have been heavily, heavily conditioned. We need deconditioning more than we need reformed conditioning. Rather than giving individuals a new template, we need to give them tools of exploration and creativity.

©2005 Jonathan Zap

Another star in the galaxy of souls, one out of the six or seven billion
Swarming across this rotating, orbiting ball in space,
Comes spinning into my trajectory,
And we converge,
For a time we form a binary orbit,
Weak and strong forces push and pull,
We exert tidal forces on each other—
My weather changes, but so does yours.

You are a planet orbiting with me, the other.
And you have spin and counter spin,
But then, so do I.

Your planet is still a young world,
The cells of your planet have fewer transcription errors,
And are juicier than those of planets just a few years older.

Your cells coalesce in a way that creates topographical symmetry and glow,
A curvilinear tautness,
And from the horizon of my world you seem iridescent, opalescent, prismatic, shimmering and scintillating, sparkly and all attractive.

Astronomers on my world call such a planet of sparkly young cells “a Hottie.”
A Hottie is a planet in a certain phase of its life cycle
When it appears all sparkly and iridescent.
Many planets never even go through such a phase,
Though astronomers on other worlds view planets through different kinds of
Telescopes, and filters, and may vary in their spectrographic analysis and all that,
But I know when a planet is a Hottie from the horizon of my world,
Because it is iridescent and sparkly, its pull is tidal,
And its oceans are bluer, its forests greener, its topography is smoother, and
When it comes into binary orbit, there are shimmering waves of heat,
Heat that seems to come from the Hottie planet,
But is actually a type of global warming happening on my planet.

This global warming carries a threat of extinction,

And then I want the temperature across worlds to equalize,

I want explosive interplanetary thermal discharges,
I want to blast off in my rocket ship and
Cross the event horizon into the Hottie planet.

But that’s only what I want, that’s not what I do.
I respect interplanetary treaties and spatial boundaries.
I realize that most Hottie planets do not need
Over-heated, middle-aged astronauts racing across their topography.

Binary orbits may happen for many reasons,
And there are always energies exchanged,
Both worlds are always altered,
And the existence of tidal forces
Does not mean that there needs to be explosive interplanetary thermal discharges,
And that kind of thing.

These are planets passing in the night of time,
Their trajectories are long and mysterious,
Unknown even to themselves.

A planet may go Hottie for a time,
But that phase soon fizzles out and
Smooth, opalescent topographies become ridged and convoluted,
And yet….

And yet a molten Core remains,
Invisible to naked eye astronomy,
Which sees only the topography of a world,
That thin film of perishable life…

But the Core is molten metal and nuclear.
The Core lasts longer,
Changes more slowly,
Has more mass and energy,
And while the surface topography may be iridescent and sparkly,
With scintillating flashes of color,
But may then turn gray or even white,
And opalescent topographies may shrivel and become dull and convoluted,
Yet the Core stays constantly molten,
While topographies constantly molt,
And since the Core is much more massive,
It is the Core that has the inertial momentum,
It is the Core that determines trajectories and binary orbits.

The Core is like a molten canon ball and
The topography is like an iridescent peacock’s feather,
But in a vacuum the cannon ball and the feather fall at the same rate,
And if you become obsessed with planets that have gone Hottie,
That can suck all the atmosphere out of your planet and
Create a vacuum,
And then you can watch the iridescent feather and the molten cannon ball
Fall at the same rate.

When the trajectory of my planet, and that of a Hottie planet,
Bring us into binary orbit for a time,
I know that it is the massive, molten Cores that have brought us together.
Of course there will be obsessive astronomers on my world with
Reflector telescopes mapping the opalescent, curvilinear topographies of the Hottie,
And they will look for any sign of
Possible explosive interplanetary thermal discharges and all that,
But on my planet we know that sparkles are not signals of intent,
And we respect interplanetary treaties and spatial boundaries,
We respect the molten Core, which we cannot see,
And do not presume to know another planet’s tidal forces and trajectories.

We know that we are planets passing in the night of time,

And that there are other worlds than these…

—–What are my/your intentions toward the other?

photos and text © 2007, Jonathan Zap Edited by Austin Iredale

Someone recently asked me to state what my intentions were in relating to them.  What a great question, if only it were asked and answered more often and more honestly!  Sometimes we question the intentions of others, but forget to question our own mixed intentions, which are even more important for us to recognize and acknowledge.  So consider reading this document a propitious time to be asking yourself about your intentions to the other. What follows will be all the more powerful if you commit your own answer to writing. To start the process off I am going to share my intentions toward the other.

(By “other,” I mean someone we are connected to by inner ties, usually a member of your own species.  The relational ties could be based on friendship, family, teaching and learning, romance, etc. but they cannot be based on random acquaintance or superficial interaction.)

My intention toward the other is to be a spiritual ally and catalyst for development and co-development; to conduct myself nonharmfully, monitoring my shadow so as to compensate for potentially harmful effects; to be a good listener, careful about the intrusion of my projections into the inner world of the other; to be authentic and honest, but not with honesty that is abrasive, inappropriate, or ill-timed; to conduct myself in a way that I and the other will remember well on our death beds; to be interesting, entertaining, and a source of inspiration; to be liked, loved, and admired, but also to keep two wary eyes on these needs and desires so that they not corrupt my other intentions; to learn from the other; to explore the mystery of their otherness; to be co-learners with them, exploring the often dark mysteries of human nature, the strangeness of the human condition; and to push the edges of understanding and vision with them.  I intend this aspect to be intense, to have an intensity appropriate for members of a species in dire peril, one that needs to penetrate its own darkness and remember the future and the hidden promises of its youth.

I intend to see in the other their highest potential, their inner radiance, but not to be so blinded by beauty that I do not also see their shadow, and integrate them into my awareness as a complexity of light and dark, just as I am a complexity of light and dark.

It is my intention to acknowledge and mitigate, when possible, the harm that two human beings can so often do unintentionally to each other, because when we relate we become players in another’s realm, super massive objects like planets in a china shop; there is always some breakage.  Some of the breakage is necessary and useful and some of it isn’t, and these kinds are hard to tell apart, and both kinds create sharp edges.   We are creatures of inertia, and vast, often clumsy momentum, two planets in erratic orbit sharing a rowboat on a stormy night.

So often I have been the fool rushing in where angels fear to tread.  And often I have allowed the other to lead me into the dark night of the soul, to teach me the illusory nature of my projections through painful and shattering disillusionment.  It is my intention to remember these things, not to be so blinded by the enchantment of otherness that I forget that relating to the other can be a perilous process, a quest resting on the edge of a knife where it is so easy to stray but a little and bring ruin to all.

It is my intention to see the other as completely as I can, and that means recognizing that there are always areas that I don’t see, and that I don’t know what I don’t know about the other. It is also my intention to allow myself to be seen, as much as appropriate, and to remember that the other does not see me fully, and there is always the danger, and sometimes the delight, that we blindside each other and come toward each other from left field.

Sometimes the other is beautiful and their form may glitter in the night of time, may grow like a rose in the junkyard of mortality, and that is magical and enchanting, but this beauty also often invites the most deceiving of projections.

It is my intention to remember the times in the past when I inhaled the perfumed nitrous-oxide of infatuation, when the other planet became a giant, giant mirrored disco ball obscuring my view, and every colored light I projected at them came back as fragments and reflected splinters of light, and those fragments and splinters blinded me, causing me to reach toward their sharp edges again and again like someone addicted to self-mutilation.

It is my intention not to be blinded by giant mirrored disco balls.  I have only to walk down the street to see new ones coming into view, their bodies like mirrored mosaics catching the colored lights of my mortal desires.  But inside each disco ball is a mortal primate, just like I am a mortal primate. To see them, I need stereoscopic vision, one eye to see the beauty of their present form and another eye to see that they are, like me, a mortal primate, which means that their form is temporary and ever-shifting, a leaky raft caught in the relentless stream of linear time.

It is my intention to see the other as their present age, and to relate appropriately to that age, but also to see that a human being is a process, not an age, and that anyone who lives long enough goes through all the ages.

The age of the soul does not always correspond to the age of the body. To see the other, I must see age-related differences, differences in generations and hormonal intensities, but I must also see differences that are beyond age.  The body ages differently than the character, and the soul is not necessarily limited by one age or incarnation.  In the dreamtime, the soul exercises its right to mix ages around, and in the waking life it does not relinquish the right.  All the ages we have lived still live within us, our present age just the most recent superimposed layer, and our other ages still live, like the concentric rings within a tree, still conducting the sap of life.

It is my intention to respect that the other is probably, like myself, an aggregation of subpersonalities of various ages, and unpredictable dramas are always waiting to unfold as the revolving cast of my inner characters comes into contact with their revolving inner cast.  And so my intentions to the other are not fixed, but dynamic, and various qualities shift in intensity, some elements are more stable and others more volatile.

Like myself, my intentions toward the other are an alchemical cauldron, and alchemical cauldrons must always be watched carefully.