No Tristans Allowed Beyond This Point—-

Debunking the Western Myth of Romantic Love  © 2010 Jonathan Zap

“Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western Psyche.  In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.”

—-from We by Robert Johnson

Western romance mythology centers around being in love as an ecstatic state in which we feel we have been completed, found the ultimate meaning in life, and have larger than life feelings of intensity.   Unconsciously we have the expectation that our lover provide us with these feelings continuously.  We also assume that our model of romance is the best and that love relationships not based on “being in love” must be pale, insignificant shadows by comparison. We are convinced of this despite all the evidence that tells us that few enterprises, besides diets, begin with such high hopes and typically such dismal results as the falling in love sort of romances.  Western society is the only culture in history that assumes romance should be at the core of marriages and other love relationships and is the highest ideal of “true love.” The ideal romance, the West believes, involves the ecstatic adoration of  the image of perfection in the form of a  man or woman.

The Western myth has come to flourish and dominate during a patriarchal and increasingly materialistic era where the image of the divine is only rarely experienced in the context of religion.  The “imago dei” has shifted from the image of  God, gods and goddesses, the heavens,  etc. to the romantic beloved.  With religious mania and frenzy many seek to capture and possess someone they are in love with as though this fellow, flawed mortal could redeem a lifetime that is deficient in meaning.  Just as those who have absolute, fundamentalist identifications with  particular religions have historically been some of the greatest sources of violence, oppression and suffering, so too, those who identify absolutely with the aims of the Western myth of romance  often become violent and create chaos and tragic dramas in their wake. Today’s newspaper should give you many examples of both types of violence.

Our culture does not provide us with a single ruling mythology.  In that vacuum some will seek out religious fundamentalisms, and others will  pursue the myth of romantic love as their religion.  Still others may pursue dieting or the world view of an eating disorder as their religion, or perhaps the latest multi-level marketing scheme, self-help or New Age fundamentalisms like The Secret or other variations of  you-create-your –own-reality, etc.

A person whose life is lacking in soulfulness, experience of the feminine, deep relationship and spirituality may seek to recapture all of these through the pursuit of a beloved.  Such a person will say they are looking for “love,” when actually they are looking for a very specific type of deluded romance. Our whole culture tends to falsely equate romance with love when the two are quite different, and in some cases manifest as almost polar opposites.  One can be swept up by romance and yet be severely lacking in love, commitment, loyalty, or even basic relatedness.

The Western mythology of romance is an atmosphere charged with sexual, emotional and mythological content that has surrounded us for our entire lives.  We have breathed in this atmosphere from music, movies, television shows, advertisements, casual conversations, novels, and text messages. Just like fish might have a hard time getting an outside perspective on what it’s like to be wet and immersed in water, it is hard for us to get a perspective on this key element of our inner and outer world.

For example, can you remember when you first heard that an ideal relationship should involve “falling in love”?  Was it a song on the radio?  An overheard conversation?  Most of us won’t be able to remember such a moment, because it is more like our psyches were booted up into a cultural operating system in which the Western myth of romantic love was a core, unquestioned element.  For some, to even raise the question of the value of “being in love,” may seem an offense to rightness equivalent to questioning the value of sunshine.

The religious certainty that exists in so many about key aspects of the Western myth of romantic love derives from its genuine ability to tap into some of our deepest psychological, alchemical, social, sexual and spiritual aspirations.  We are not talking about some flimsy mental construct, but a powerful mythological system that is capable of channeling our core energies. To deal with a system this powerful, and that is at the core of Western values, we are going to need one of the most powerful Western technologies for gaining distance from something.  In short, we are going to need to turn the Western myth of romantic love into an acronym.  Hereafter I will refer to the Western myth of romantic love as “WMRL” ( which I pronounce as “wormal”)

“Always you were the reason for my existence;

To adore you for me was religion…”

— from a Mexican love song quoted by Robert Johnson in We

If WMRL is a kind of religion, where and how did this religion arise?  According to Robert Johnson, the French myth of Tristan and Iseult “…was the first story in Western literature that dealt with romantic love.” ( We , p. xiv)  Johnson traces the origins of WMRL to an early religion now nearly forgotten:

“One of the most powerful of the early religions was the Manichean movement, named for the Persian prophet Manes.  In Europe this religion became “Catharism,” for the believers called themselves Cathars, meaning “pure.” By the twelfth century entire towns and provinces in the south of France, though nominally Christian, practiced Catharism, and many of the nobility in the courts of Europe were Cathars. In France the movement was called the Albigensian heresy because the movement centered in the city of Albi in France.

“One of their basic beliefs was that “true love” was not the ordinary human love between husband and wife but rather the worship of a feminine savior, a mediator between God and man, who waited in the sky to welcome the “pure” with a holy kiss and lead him or he into the Realm of Light. By contrast this with this “pure” love, ordinary human sexuality and marriage were bestial and unspiritual.  Cathars believed that the love of man for woman should be an earthly allegory of their spiritual love for the Queen of Heaven.”  (p. 69)

After a period of flourishing alongside of Christianity, Catharism was driven underground.  Johnson continues,

“The pope declared Catharism a heresy and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux drove it underground by relentless crusades.  But like every powerful idea that is driven underground, it reappeared in another form—a supposedly ‘secular’ form. The teachings and ideals of the Cathars suddenly reappeared in the cult of courtly love, in the songs and poems of the troubadours and in the ‘romances.’ Some cultural historians believe that courtly love was a deliberate ‘secular’ continuation of Catharism, that the knights and ladies who first practiced courtly love were Cathars continuing their religious practice under the guise of a secular cult of love. To outsiders it looked like a new and elegant way to make love, to woo and flatter pretty damsels, but for the insider who knew the “code,” it as was an allegorical practice of Catharist ideals.

“The ideal of courtly love swept through the feudal courts of medieval Europe and began a revolution in our attitudes toward the feminine values of love, relationship, refined feeling, devotion, spiritual experience and the pursuit of beauty.  That revolution finally matured into what we call romanticism.” (pp. 70-71)

Courtly love so caught on fire in the Western imagination that it became “…the driving force behind a flow of poetry, song, love stories and plays.  The French love stories were called romans , which was anglicized into ‘romance.’” (p. 46)  As Johnson points out, our present view of romance, even entomologically,  derived from 12^th Century French love stories:  “Our word romantic and our romantic ideal have come down to us through the romances. Romantic love is ‘story-book’ love.”

Our present view of romance is a sexualized version of Catharism- influenced courtly love.  Here’s how courtly love worked as summarized by Johnson:

“There were three characteristics of courtly love that will help us to understand it. First, the knight and his lady were never to be involved sexually with each other.  Theirs was an idealized, spiritualized relationship, designed to lift them above the level of physical grossness, to cultivate refined feeling and spirituality.  The second requirement of courtly love was that they were not to be married to each other.  In fact, the lady was usually married to another nobleman. The knight-errant adored her, served her, and made her the focus of his spiritual aspiration and idealism, but he could not have an intimate relationship with her.  To do so would be to treat her as an ordinary mortal woman, and courtly love required that he treat her as a divinity, as a symbol of the eternal feminine and of his feminine soul.  The third requirement was that the courtly lovers keep themselves aflame with passion, that they suffer intense desire for each other, yet strive to spiritualize their desire by seeing each other as symbols of the divine archetypal world and by never reducing their passion to the ordinariness of sex or marriage.”  (pp. 45-46)

WMRL, with its origins in a repressed religion,  is an encompassing mythological belief system that has as many martyrs, misguided crusades and deluded practitioners as any fundamentalist religion.  An essential tenet of WMRL is that one should “fall in love” with someone and through this path of “being in love” experience ecstatic heights, and tremendous feelings of completeness, wholeness, meaning and fulfillment.  What systems besides WMRL make such exalted claims?  Religions do; this is what people look for in religious experience.  The word religion derives from the Middle English word “religare” which means to tie, fasten or bind.  Some have interpreted this etymology to suggest that the original word means “re-link” as in relinking to the divine. To me it sounds like they are editing out the other, darker implication—bondage to a mythology or a belief system.  For many, WMRL is their religion, their way to seek to relink to the divine. Too often that path leads to a deluded bondage to a romantic relationship or aspiration. Of Human Bondage is a classic novel by W. Somerset Maugham on this exact theme. Jung once said that  everyone who came to him with a religious problem turned out to have a sexual problem, and everyone who came to him with a sexual problem turned out to have a religious problem. The religious and the romantic, the sexual and the spiritual, are highly connected, and one of them will often come grotesquely masquerading as the other. Both religion and WMRL have an ability to relink us to the divine, but also an all too familiar tendency to bind us to a rigid conceptual framework that produces mechanical, stereotyped behaviors.

The purpose of this essay will be to take a look at WMRL as a relinking or religious system for connecting to the divine and to suggest some alternatives. The central thesis is that WMRL attempts to interpersonalize the search for wholeness which needs to be intrapsychic.  You cannot find wholeness in the beloved; you can only find it where it always was—within. When we shift our relinking aspirations from the interpersonal domain to recognizing intrapsychic wholeness, we will not lose our connection to love.  When we set aside the many well-worn golden oldies of WMRL we will actually become far more capable of love, and more likely to have deep and truly loving relationships.

Getting past WMRL is not something that can be done by reading an essay. I’ve known about WMRL for many years and yet still find myself deeply affected by its awesome power. WMRL has profound influence on my sexuality, emotional body, my sense of social status, interpersonal boundaries and many other key aspects of my life and being.  Awakening from such a potent and far reaching enchantment is a long and labyrinthine process.  But the labyrinthine journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and the first step is to be able to name WRML, to see its outline, to gain some sort of observational distance so that we are not entirely encompassed by its world view.

This essay is largely inspired by the book We by Robert Johnson and a dream and synchronicity that highlighted its significance.  In early March of 2010 I was trying to summon enthusiasm to finish my essay “Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom—Androgyny, Alchemy, Evolution and the One Ring” which, as of this writing, remains in the rough draft state it has been in for the last several years. This essay uses the Tolkien mythology to illustrate the need for androgyny, the alchemical inner marriage of archetypal masculine and feminine within, to replace the externalized search for wholeness in an outside “precious”—-a romantic beloved, material goods, social status, etc.  I was having trouble summoning enthusiasm for the rewrite since the document had been sitting for a few years. During this period of neglect I had a dream where I was in the basement of my parent’s house in the Bronx and saw a book that was poking out of a book case.  It looked old, neglected, but highly numinous and filled with emotional content. The book was entitled “We.”  Immediately after I saw the book I woke up and realized I had been given a message meant to be worked out in the waking life.  In the dream I imagined the book to be a novel, but I knew it wasn’t the classic Soviet science fiction novel entitled We . Vaguely I remembered that a Jungian author I had never read, Robert Johnson had written three books entitled He , She and We . Since Johnson is a fellow Jungian dealing with mythology and depth psychology I felt sure that it was his book that my unconscious was pointing toward.  I immediately went to the used book store and got a copy.

An hour later I walked into the Roma coffee shop in Boulder and began reading the book.  We turned out to be a parallel work to “Casting Precious…”, essentially about the same thing—the drive to look for wholeness outside rather than within. While “Casting Precious…” centers around the Tolkien mythology,  We centers around the 12^th Century myth of Tristan and Iseult.  Johnson’s central thesis is that WMRL began with this myth and that Tristan, an heroic figure who violates every bond of loyalty and ethics after drinking a love potion and falling in love with Iseult, represents the Western ego fully under the control of WMRL.  For some reason, after reading the book for a couple of hours at a corner table in the coffee shop,  I turned around and looked behind me at the employee area. Just a couple of feet behind my head I found a handwritten sign had been posted that said, “No Tristans Allowed Beyond this Point.”  The meaning of the synchronicity was both obvious and perfectly succinct:  This is the point where, at least for me, being controlled by WMRL (what Tristan is emblematic of) has to be disallowed.

In We, Johnson documents that WMRL began as a religious offshoot, a path of spiritual aspiration which was championed by the knights and Troubadours of Tristan’s era.  Unlike our version of WMRL they chose to sacrifice seeing woman as sex object and “…instead made her into a symbol of the eternal feminine, the soul, divine love, spiritual ennoblement and wholeness.”  ( We , p. 54)  In our time,  Johnson points out, “For lack of any other channel, any other form in which it could be lived in our modern culture, our religious instinct has migrated almost completely into one secret place where it is allowed to live sub rosa: romantic love.”

Because WMRL carries religious content and is the modern person’s closest connection to the divine, it is necessarily out of control. The Western ego has so much trouble coping with WMRL because secretly and unconsciously we want to lose control, we want the ecstatic, transformative experience that lifts us out of the sterile, scheduled, rigidified worlds created by the ego and patriarchal society. The image of the divine, the imago dei —the god-image—-content that is submerged in materialist, patriarchal culture— resurfaces from the unconscious personified by the beloved. The person on whom we project this image will then have great power over us, though we may also seek to compensate for that effect by attempting to have power over them.  Even if we succeed, it may only be to find that the image of the divine has now shifted to someone else, and we are, like a person chasing after a rainbow, never able to bring the image of desire within our control.

Essentially, the person in the grips of WMRL projects disowned aspects of their own soul onto the beloved, causing them to light up as numinous and all-attractive.  This projection has two key unfortunate aspects.  he first is that when we project part of ourselves onto the other we get further from recognizing, owning and integrating our own inner content.  We fragment; we split off part of our inner wholeness and attribute the disowned part to someone else. The second great misfortune is that the projection causes us to be deluded about the beloved.  We idealize them, and therefore fail to locate them as the specific, flawed human being they actually are. When the idealization inevitably collapses it turns into the equal and opposite disillusionment, and the relationship to the actual person is undermined or destroyed.

The person who is “in love” is essentially related to a projection, a piece of themselves and not to another person. Their commitment is not to any particular person, despite what they may think, but to romantic passion itself. To achieve this passionate intensity the WMRL-addled person may willingly sacrifice everything else—loyalty, duty, obligation, relationship, and commitment. They are, as some have put it, “in love with being in love.”

“Being in love” is a state of intense projection in which one projects onto a human being an image of the divine—the perfect man, woman, youth,  androgyne or whatever.  I am only going to give a quick example of  Jung’s anima and animus to explain this projection because his model tends to stereotype  the way this works, and doesn’t always fully acknowledge some of the variations. Anima and animus does work well, however, to explain many of the classic cases of projection.  For example, a heterosexual man is walking down the street and sees a beautiful woman he has never seen before.  She lights up in his psyche like a goddess. He has this feeling of eternal recurrence, as if he has known this woman from other lifetimes and he feels this conviction that he and she are destined to be together. This is a simple example of what Jung calls “anima projection.”  The man projects his soul, which is connected to the archetypal feminine, onto an actual woman.  Since it his soul that he is seeing mirrored back to him through projection, he of course feels like they are destined to be together and that they have been companions in past lifetimes, etc.  He is seeing a disowned, unintegrated part of himself in the outside world.

The most common, and often deadly, form of human unconsciousness is the perennial confusion of inside and outside.  We think we perceive something in the outside world when actually it is a projection of inner content.  The result could be stalking, scapegoating, genocide or the billion he said/she said arguments going on any time of the day or night. Unless we are taking the contra naturum path of rigorous self-examination, we live in a state of continual projection.  In “Stop the Hottie!” I illustrated projection this way:

“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.”

So when a person is “in love” they are primarily or exclusively in love with their own projection.  If the actual person they are projecting onto does something inconsistent with the projection—sleeping with someone else, for example—their “love” could turn to homicide in a heartbeat.  Just as sleepwalkers can become violent if suddenly awakened, the person who is in love may be ruthless with anyone or anything that stands between them and their projection.  What clouds the picture a bit is human complexity and variability.  Some people are “in love” with someone where it is not entirely projection. The projection, for them is a superimposition on the actual person so they perceive a composite containing elements of projection and elements of the actual person.  In a fortunate case, as the projection inevitably starts to decline, authentic love for the actual person fills in the vacuum.  For example, one of the most classic cases of an authentic love relationship most of us are likely to have witnessed, is that of an elderly married couple who are devoted to each other and are life companions and best friends.  If you ask them, they are likely to tell you that they were “in love” when they were young sweethearts who barely knew each other.  When that phase ended there were many years of bitter arguments and disappointments, but they managed to survive many difficult  phases and that’s when the real love started to grow.  Louis de Bernières,  in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, describes the evolution from infatuation to authentic love with poetic eloquence:

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are.

“Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

Although I would want no part of the custom, arranged marriages seem to have as good or better chance of turning out happily as marriages  based on romance.  Adult match makers may be less subject to projection and may therefore pick more suitable matches than those arranged by romantic projection.

From the classical Jungian point of view, if you are conscious of projection it is no longer a projection.  In my view that’s too clean a distinction.  For decades I have been conscious of my romantic projections, but they are still a powerful influence. I may experience aspects of “being in love” while at the same time have a fairly realistic perception of the actual person. Ideally, in such a composite case, one sees the best potential of the actual person lit up by the projection and this is inspiring to both parties. On the less ideal side one will tend to inflate the beloved’s virtues, overlook or underestimate serious character flaws, and form a codependence.

The composite case is a very realistic possibility for people consciously working on freeing themselves from WMRL. An element of projection may be necessary to have the requisite enthusiasm to form a relationship, but one does not mindlessly idealize or become infatuated with the beloved.  The outcome will be a sliding spectrum of composite possibilities with elements of neurotic WMRL in the ascendant some times, and authentic love at other times.

One way to tell you are on the wrong side of WMRL is if you find yourself ruthlessly pursuing the beloved without regard to basic ethical principles.  In the Western world it is often considered correct to suspend ethics when in love because the pursuit of romantic love is considered more important than any other value.  Hence the familiar proverb:  “All’s fair in love and war.” The saying dates back to 1850 (Francis Edward Smedley) but it seems to be a paraphrase of  a line from Don Quixote (1605-1615, Miguel de Cervantes):  “Love and War are the same thing, and stratagems and polity are as allowable in the one as in the other.”

Western romantic love is expected to be pursued with the ruthless, obsessive focus of warfare.  A movie about someone going to insane lengths to win over someone they are in love with is considered a “romantic comedy,” when actually what’s portrayed is usually a toxic blend of self-humiliation, sexual harassment,  deception, crass manipulation and cloying sentimentality.

The connection between WMRL and warfare shouldn’t surprise us given the fact that it began in the context of chivalrous 12^th Century knights who, when they weren’t pining after some impossibly idealized woman, were busily hacking people to pieces to defend or acquire territory.  The person under the sway of WMRL is focused on getting what they want, not on love.  As Margaret Anderson put it, “In real love you want the other person’s good. In romantic love you want the other person.”

Like someone coming out of a football huddle, like someone getting psyched up for warfare by a charismatic general,  WMRL tells you that you have to go for it, consequences be damned.  As U.S. Navy Admiral David Farragut put it during the American Civil War Battle of Mobile Bay:  “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”  WMRL tells you to rush in where angels fear to tread. It insists that you have a cyclopean focus on obtaining passionate, romantic love with the other person no matter what happens to you or to them. As Ronny Cammarei (played by Nicholas Cage) tells  Loretta Castorini (played by Cher) in Moonstruck :  “I don’t care if I burn in hell.  I don’t care if you burn in hell.”  In this classic star crossed lover’s statement we see a blending of WMRL and Christianity. WMRL is a kind of religion, so it is not surprising that it should have parallels to other religions. When Christianity made Gnosticism heretical, it lost sight of finding the savior within.  Instead the focus became you, the wretched sinner, in pursuit of the external, absolutely perfect savior.  This is what I have called in “Casting Precious…” the “mislocation of the Godhead.”  From my point of view, the location of the Godhead should be oriented like some of the more recent interpretations of the Sanskrit salutation “Namaste.” A popular (if nontraditional) version is sometimes translated as: “I honor the Spirit in you which is also in me.” You recognize the godhead in the other, but also recognize that is within you and everything else.  This location of the godhead is like the Sanskrit definition of God as a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If your location of the godhead, however, is asymmetrical, if it is unevenly distributed, you get major schizoid splits and often violent outcomes.  If I locate the godhead exclusively in me than I will tend to become an Anti-Christ, a psychopath, a Wall Street executive or something of that sort.  If I locate the godhead disproportionately onto a savior, a sky god, or something like that, I tend to feel that everybody is a wretched sinner and I need scapegoats to carry the dark side of reality which I don’t want to attribute to my savior or sky god who is supposed to be the sunnum bonum or all good.  I may feel that some sort of blood bath is necessary to please God, and so forth.   (For a more thorough discussion of how this works see “Casting Precious…”)

The tendency to seek for the divine externally is a commonality between WMRL and many versions of the three Abrahamic faiths. This type of religion, the external savior type, is the gateway drug that primes the psyche for WMRL.  Robert Johnson, who is a Christian, views WMRL as sort of counterfeit religion.  Religion, he seems to assume, is a far more appropriate medium for relating to the divine.  But more blood has been spilled in the name of Christianity than even WMRL.  Islam, in many of its variations, can create even more suffering for women than WMRL. Fundamentalist religionists often adopt “all’s fair” ethics and want to convert the infidel at the point of a sword and pursue crusades and jihads. The Twelfth-Century knights that got WMRL going were also Christians. WMRL, warfare and bad religion seem to always be getting mixed together, and the Priesthood tolerates a plague of pedophilia, and religious fervor wants to proselytize, crusade and jihad.  If recent generations want Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll, for most of history it’s been a much more dangerous combo: blood, romance and religion. WMRL, warfare and bad religion all tell the psyche: “I own you. Go into a frenzy doing what I tell you to do regardless of consequences: Kill anyone who stands in the way of your love. Put on this explosive vest and sleep with afterlife virgins tonight. Onward Christian soldiers!”  WMRL, warfare and fundamentalist religion are like a good margarita—the tequila, lime juice and triple sec all seem to blend together and you’re always drunk on something: romance as your religion pursued like warfare, religion pursued as warfare, warfare pursued as religion, and so forth.  After so many centuries of intoxication with blood,  romance and  bad religion, it’s tough to sober up.  Of course, I’m talking about the dark side of religion and it doesn’t exactly correspond to fundamentalism—the Amish are peaceful fundamentalists, but almost everyone on the dark side of religion are fundamentalists. The dark side of religion is not a matter of aberrations, however, not just a few bad apples, it is a huge side of the overall expression of the human species and its relationship to religion.  Obviously, this subject is beyond the scope of this essay, but suffice to say that like WMRL, the more a particular variation of a particular religion mislocates the godhead, the more violence tends to happens  Religions that locate the godhead everywhere such as Taoism and Buddhism are rarely the ones who want to please God with a blood bath.  So if you have an outside savior—whether it is a romantic beloved or a divine entity—if you do not locate the godhead/the kingdom of heaven within—you are likely to do some major violence to yourself and the outside world as you stumble around in a state of projection.

Breaking the spell of WMRL is like trying to deprogram someone who has been part of a cult for 8 centuries.  An 800 year collective addiction to WMRL means that there will be some serious withdrawal symptoms. Sobriety is likely to be a one-day-at-a-time struggle. We may need some version of the twelve steps:

1. We admitted that we were powerless over WMRL, that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. We came to believe that a power greater than us did not reside in the other person and we thereby restored our sanity.

….and so forth.

We could shrink the antidote to WMRL down to a single phrase: the inner alchemical marriage of masculine and feminine. How to achieve that is also obviously beyond the scope of this essay. You can find more depth on this subject in the still rough draft version of “Casting Precious…”  For now, if you are WRMLaholic—admit it and aim at living your life in a way that allows authentic love to supersede romantic love.

Robert Johnson says essentially that we should replace the contrived, histrionic dramas of WMRL with “stirring the oatmeal” —a humble acceptance and appreciation of “…ordinary human life, with its obligations, its ties, its commitments, its duties, its limitations…” ( We , p. 139)  Johnson describes grounded, authentic love with an oatmeal metaphor:

“Many years ago a wise friend gave me a name for human love.  She called it ‘stirring-the-oatmeal” love…Stirring oatmeal is a humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth.  It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To ‘stir the oatmeal’ means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything.”  (p. 195)

Johnson points out that for many of us this: “…focus on ordinary human beings, is too earthbound, too dull and sordid for our romantic prejudices.”  In other words after eight hundred years of hitting the crack pipe of WMRL the transition to oatmeal is a bit difficult.

I am wary of fluctuating between polar opposites because that just keeps you swinging forever on the pendulum of enantiadromia. For me, the transition from crack to oatmeal is a little too steep.  I need some transitional steps, and I need more than oatmeal to fill the vacuum of WMRL withdrawal.  Some may be ready for the oatmeal phase— by a certain age decreasing hormones and other physiological changes may pull the metabolic rug out from under the velvet slippers of WMRL.  It’s like the story about the old man who is walking down the street when he finds a talking frog staring up at from the pavement.  He stoops over, picks the talking frog up and puts in his overcoat pocket.  The talking frog squirms in his pocket with frustration. It’s voice muffled by the overcoat, the talking frog shouts at the old man:

“What are you doing?  Don’t you know that if you kiss me I’ll become a princess?”

“Well, at my age,” says the old man, “I’d rather have a talking frog.”

But suppose you are at an age when you don’t prefer the talking frog, but are more attracted to a prince or a princess?  Personally, I can’t go cold turkey with WRML and live on oatmeal, bad religion and talking frogs.  Giving up WRML is a sacrifice, but the potential gains are power, creativity and authentic love. Imagine if the human race were able to get back all the psychic energy that went into WMRL and channel it into something else—say space exploration.  I’d probably be drinking tea while casually looking out of the anti-reflective coated  synthetic sapphire window of my personal starship by now, wondering which galactic sector caught my fancy.  Instead, all of that psychic energy, money, lives, music, you name it, went into WMRL and instead of the starship I’ve got glossy magazines telling me all about which celebrity slept which other one, and who’s breaking up with whom, and so forth and so on.  To get all that psychic energy, sexual chi, time, attention, emotional energy, financial investment back from WMRL could be a giant reclamation of power, someone going from life support to where they are getting recruitment calls from the Olympic team.  As you can read in “Casting Precious…,” the forever pursuit of the precious—romantic beloved, externalized religious savior, territorial conquest—turns you into a withering ring wraith, it strips you of power, vitality, magic and imagination.  If you can get some of that power back you will also be more attractive to others, more likely to have fulfilling relationships, more likely to do something with your life besides acting out in a tawdry series of he said/she said soap operas.

How to reclaim that power and what to do with the reclaimed power once you’ve got it back is what this essay is challenging you to figure out for yourself. I want you to part of the team that puts a manned mission on Mars.  I want to hear from you what you’ve been able to pioneer, what propulsion systems you’ve come up with to get escape velocity, to break the surly bonds of blood, romance and bad religion and cross the event horizon into other worlds than these. We all need to be part of this great enterprise of exploration.

So before I turn the controls of the starship back over to you, I have just a few more things to say about WMRL and how to change one’s relationship to it.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher says: “Nothing is cheaper and shoddier than dramatic living.”  In fairness, it seems that we should also add that nothing is more exciting than dramatic living.  And of all dramas, romance is the most exciting.  When in love we feel like the star of our own dazzlingly unique movie, but as Robert Johnson points out,

“Strangely, this is the point where a man feels most unique, most individual, as though this has never happened to anyone other than him and his beloved.  In fact, it is at this point that he loses his individuality. The lovers lose their individual identities; they are Tristan and Iseult or Romeo and Juliet—actors in a collective play where the script is predetermined and the scenes are known beforehand.  It is precisely because one has ceased to be oneself and has become a player in a universal drama, that one feels so intense, so out of the ordinary, and at first, so wonderful.” 164

Nothing strips away individuality better than falling into stereotyped romantic delusions except for something that’s even worse—becoming addicted to despersonalized sexual promiscuity. If your alternative is to be an interchangeable part in the hydraulic machinery of sex on the level of the genitalia, then you might be better off WMRL. Deromanticized sleeping around is not a transcendent solution to WMRL.  See Born Under a Blood Red Moon and Incendiary Person…. for more on that theme.

Getting rid of deluded romance does not mean that we get rid of the magic and sense of the sacred that flowed through the distorted portal of WMRL.  It means that we work to reclaim magic and the sense of the sacred and get them flowing through perhaps better portals.

Although I’ve expressed some differences with how I view WMRL compared to Mr. Johnson, I would highly recommend that everyone read We and allow Robert Johnson to illuminate an amazing journey into the world of Tristan and Iseuld, a journey which leads right up the present day and most likely into your life and psyche. Essentially, what Johnson points out is that the real sin is to confuse the personal and archetypal, to project the divine outside and then try to bring it under ego control.  As he puts it,   “If there is such a thing as psychological blasphemy, it is to take what is sacred and try to convert it to something else; it is to try to make the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill. Psychological sin does not consist in sex nor in being physical nor in “immorality” but rather in calling a thing other than what it really is, treating it as something other than what it is, pretending to do one thing while doing another. This is the sin against consciousness, the refusal to take life consciously.”  (177)

Rereading what I’ve written, I see that I have perhaps too one-sidedly treated WMRL with sarcastic disdain. When compared to the trend of increasing materialism and cynicism which favors exploitative promiscuity as the “sophisticated” alternative to WMRL, the path of romantic love shows some redeeming qualities.  For many people, the romantic love relationship may be the most spiritually transformative experience of their lives.  Sometimes the transformation comes because it leads to dark nights of the soul and various forms of tragedy and suffering.  Sometimes the transformation comes because the projection eventually leads to authentic love for the actual person.  Sometimes the suffering and dark nights of the soul, as well as the inspiration and intensity  brought by WMRL, are exactly what is necessary to lead to the authentic love for actual persons and a renewed sense of the sacred.

The Dali Lama usually encourages spiritual aspirants to reconnect with their own native spiritual traditions.  If WMRL is a major part of your spiritual tradition, as it certainly is for me, perhaps there is a way to redeem it, to allow it to transcend itself and not merely pathologize in all the stereotyped ways. Perhaps what was unconscious enchantment could be transitioned toward a conscious sacrament. By becoming more conscious of the projection, we can learn to relate to it as symbol, as a metaphor for the divine.  A person of great physical beauty can be appreciated as evocative of the divine without confusing them with a god or goddess.  I can be stirred by the light coming through the stained glass windows of a great cathedral without thinking that I need to worship stained glass windows.  The windows, like the beautiful person, like the droplets of moisture that prismatically refract a rainbow, are a medium through which my inner sense of the divine is stirred and inspired.  If I am consciously in love with someone, and am aware of the projection, I can relate to the actual person while at the same time feel inspired by the sacred refracted through that actual person like a rainbow.  As with rainbows, I know that any particular manifestation won’t last, and that new rainbows will appear when the conditions are right.  I may know the scientific reasons for rainbows, but still experience their numinous beauty.  Rainbows are still just as beautiful even after I have learned not to chase them down for pots of gold.

Instead of seeing the other in an impossibly idealized way, as if they were permanent rainbows, their numinous beauty could instead light up their highest actual potential in my perception, and this could be inspiring to both of us.  Recognizing the projection and the machinery of WMRL, I can side step some of the obsessive aspects. Realizing that the divine projection will alight on others, and eventually fade from any particular person, I recognize that a relationship with the beloved must be grounded in their individual actuality, not on the projected idealization. The more I learn about the history and workings of WMRL, the more I realize that all is not fair in love, and that ethics should not be suspended because of an intense projection on someone. I follow the rainbow but not to a pot of gold or a god or goddess, but toward a recognition of the inner source of divinity and authentic love.

Note: For some reason paypal has not been asking for a mailing address.  Please make sure you include that or email that to me.  Thanks.

Give a gift that has no physical weight whatsoever, only a metaphysical one. Order a dream interpretation and/or I Ching session for some deserving person. Mention in your email (jonathanzap@hotmail.com) that this is a gift session and whom it is intended for.

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Jonathan Zap

1107 12th Street

Boulder, CO 80302

To purchase any of the services below please scroll to the bottom of the page and click add to cart for the product you want, when the paypal page pops up fill out the number of minutes you want and click Secure Checkout.

Dream Interpretation Service

The cost for dream interpretation is $1 per minute pre paid with a ten minute minimum.  Ten minutes might be adequate for a very simple dream, but more complex dreams, or a series of dreams, will require more time.  This service can also be combined with I Ching or Zap Oracle interpretation as there is the same cost for all the services.  If you purchase extra time then we can consider amplifying the meaning of the dream with the I Ching and/or the Zap Oracle.
Once you have prepaid send me an email with the phone number you would like me to call and good time ranges to reach you you (please indicate what time zone you are in).  I will send you back an email suggesting a specific appointment time, and then you can either confirm or request another.  I recommend recording our consultation if possible, or at least having pen and paper available for taking notes.  Although phone consultation is generally better, I can also do dream interpretation by email for a flat rate of $20. For people who are destitute or genuinely in need I will consider a sliding scale.  These are spiritual services so I don’t want to turn people away because of money.  If you are twenty or younger and have never had dream interpretation  (and don’t have much money) I will consider doing it for free.
Please read  Some Things to Consider Before Dream Interpretation before your interpretation.

I Ching Service

The cost for an I Ching reading is $1 per minute pre paid with a twenty minute minimum.  Twenty minutes can be adequate for a basic reading, but going into more depth will require more time.  This service can also be combined with dream interpretation or Zap Oracle interpretation as there is the same cost for all the services.  Once you have prepaid, send me an email with the phone number you would like me to call and good time ranges to reach you (please indicate what time zone you are in).  I will send you back an email suggesting a specific appointment time, and then you can either confirm or request another.  I recommend recording our consultation if possible, or at least having pen and paper available for taking notes.

For people who are destitute or genuinely in need I will consider a sliding scale.  These are spiritual services so I don’t want to turn people away because of money.  If you are twenty or younger and have never had an I Ching reading  (and don’t have much money) I will consider doing it for free.

Please read Some Things to Consider Before an I Ching Reading as this will save time during your reading and improve the value of your consultation.

Zap Oracle Interpretation Service

Although the Zap Oracle is designed to be user friendly so that you can do your own readings, there can also be value, as with the tarot or I Ching, in having a reading as a consultation done by someone else.  As the developer of the oracle I can point out things about the history of the cards and archetypes represented and discuss with you patterns of meaning that often arise in the relation of cards in a spread.  The consultation can be about readings you have already done (assuming you have recorded the card numbers), or a live reading we do together, or both.

The cost for the consultation is $1 per minute pre paid with a twenty minute minimum.  Twenty minutes can be adequate for a basic reading, but going into more depth will require more time. This service can also be combined with dream interpretation and/or I Ching as the cost for all services is the same.  Once you have prepaid, send me an email with the phone number you would like me to call and good time ranges to reach you (please indicate what time zone you are in).  I will send you back an email suggesting a specific appointment time, and then you can either confirm or request another.  I recommend recording our consultation if possible, or at least having pen and paper available for taking notes.

For people who are destitute or genuinely in need I will consider a sliding scale.  These are spiritual services so I don’t want to turn people away because of money.  If you are twenty or younger and have never had an I Ching reading  (and don’t have much money) I will consider doing it for free.

MIND PARASITE MATRIX

I have  produced a multi hour audio presentation entitled Mind Parasite Matrix .  I removed the pricing information because we are working on making this a free mp3 download on the site.

DVDs
Jonathan Zap’s thoughts on prophecy, Jungian psychology, 2012, Tolkien mythos, mind parasites, and a dozen other intriguing topics, are on these two two-hour DVDs (four hours total).

Dialogues on Prophecy and the End of Time
Jonathan Zap and John Major Jenkins recorded August, 2004 by Lost Arts Media
Two hours. This is part one of a four hour presentation.  Among many other topics, Jonathan Zap talks about the psychology of prophecy and why prophecies are almost always wrong about time frames.  Prophecy and the idea of an end time are examined from the perspective of Jungian psychology and the “singularity archetype” is introduced. John Major Jenkins (author of seven books on the Maya) talks about the Mayan calendar and his discoveries about the meaning of 2012 and the cycle of galactic alignment recognized by a number of cultures.

Looking Toward the Event Horizon Jonathan Zap, interviewed by John Major Jenkins recorded August, 2004 by Lost Arts Media—two hours, part two of this four hour presentation.   Jonathan Zap discusses evolutionary changes currently underway and what the “singularity archetype” indicates about the evolutionary event horizon we are approaching. Topics include evidence that a more visual and telepathic mode of consciousness and communication is developing, the mind parasite phenomenon, and suggestions on how to thrive during a time of greatly accelerated change.

I’ve removed the pricing information on the DVDs because we are working on making them available as free downloads.  Last time I check there were also available on a bit torrent site as a free download.

Logos Beheld—–Visual Communication and the Evolutionary Event Horizon

with Jonathan Zap, Michael Fulton of Ion Beam Optics and Mayan Scholar John Major Jenkins    Running Time 4 Hours

Logos Beheld works alone or as sequel to Looking Toward the Event Horizon is based on twenty-eight years of research exploring evidence from a variety of fields that we are already undergoing a profound evolutionary shift toward more visual consciousness and modalities of communication leading toward collective visual telepathy.

Once again, pricing information removed because we are working on making these available as free downloads.

An Invitation to You, the Interdimensional Traveler
>Self Portrait
Interdimensional Passport collage © by Jonathan Zap
>
Self Portrait
Interdimensional Traveler collage © Jonathan Zap

This invitation is extended to you, the Interdimensional Traveler. Do you still doubt that this is what you are? Do you still believe the lie that you are only a citizen, a consumer, a gendered role-player in the soap opera/horror story known as the Babylon Matrix? Or have you already glimpsed that you emerged at birth from another dimension, and hurtle inexorably toward the event horizon popularly known as death — the emergence into another dimension? If these poles of incarnation seem distant, then wait a few hours till darkness falls and you become tired, sleepy. Lie down on a mattress, futon or sleeping bag and wait… Wait for the portal that opens for you nearly every day when the waking nightmare of the Babylon Matrix dissolves and you emerge, whether you wish it or not, into the other guaranteed dimension of all mammal incarnation — the dreamtime…

Self Portrait
black and white photo of Parallel Journeys collage © Jonathan Zap

Do you bother to remember this other dimension of your incarnation, or is the Babylon Matrix enough for you? Remembered or not, the daily rhythm of interdimensional displacement is fundamental to your existence like the systole and diastole of your heart rhythm, and your incarnation must oscillate between waking matrix and dreamtime or else unravel into madness. Interdimensional traveling is more fundamental to your existence than your heartbeat, because one day your heart will stop beating, but you’ll still be an interdimensional traveler.

Proof that you are an Interdimensional Traveler
And has no one ever told you the basic “facts of life” that to look into another’s eyes is to witness beacons from another dimension flashing across the night of time? Did you believe the Babylon Matrix lie that other entities were hottie objects with which you could have “casual sex” (dumbest of dumb oxymorons)? Didn’t you know that intimacy with the other is an impingement, an interpenetration, a merging of dimensions with consequences of cosmic proportions? Didn’t you realize that all relationship is interdimensional travel?

And have you not heard the poet/songwriter who sang that, “He who’s not busy being born, is busy dying?”

If you are passively, complacently adrift in the shifting tide of these dimensions then this invitation is not for you. If you are committed from the depths of your being to consciousness, non-harmfulness, compassion, empowered interdimensional travel and are busy being born, then this invitation is for you, an invitation to a secret room created by a fellow traveler. But before invitation, a question…

Who are You?

WHO ARE YOU? Are you a flower? Are you a tree?

Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

Are you a snake? Are you a bird? Are you a fish?

Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

Are you a monkey? Are you a pig? Are you a meat puppet?

Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

Are you a mutant?

Are you a metamorphosing being seeking through your own transformation to catalyze the metamorphosis of this whole dark, distorted realm?

If you are, then your name is engraved on this invitation in antiqued gold… if you are. If you are, then this secret room is dedicated to you.

The Babylon Matrix

But if you are not…

If you are an Agent of the Babylon Matrix, if you are a reptile-brained meat puppet programmed for territorial aggression. If you are an angel card carrying New Ager willing to try anything so long as it doesn’t work. If you are sheep or carnivore, mechanical spawn of the dark puppet matrix. If you are, then even this antidedication is not for you.

Babylon Matrix, you poisonous, parasitic lattice of anti-life decrees, territorial aggression and evil hegemony of dominator primates, you far from equilibrium toxic patriarchy hurtling toward the strange attractor of quantum evolutionary change, you suffocating cocoon of shrinking parasite-ridden medieval leather bristling with the claws and stingers of puppet-headed warlike primates. You, Babylon Matrix, your darkness has metastasized through the skull shadows of our long descent into history. But your Gregorian days are numbered…

The Looking Glass of Ones and Zeros

Shimmering on the event horizon of this troubled species are living visions of metamorphosis, a metamorphosis that has already begun, sprouting upward from mutant psyches who rebel from gender stereotypes, fundamentalisms and territorial aggression, prohibitions against plants and spirit medicines, degradations of individual will and mutant eros, soulless consumerism and environmental destruction, religious and industrial programs of mind control, dominator/zero tolerance whip hands and bludgeons of strutting, reptile-brained politicians, mustachioed police-puppets, faceless government officials and bureaucrats.

This secret room is a sanctuary devoted to the mutants, the perplexed interdimensional travelers incarnating temporarily into the Babylon Matrix, but not of the Babylon Matrix, who seek greener worlds than these, who seek metamorphosis and the eruption of love/life/light/novelty/creativity into the dark coagulation of reptile-brained puppet magic.

In this secret room are glimpses, alchemical probes passed through a glass darkly beyond the acrid smoke fires of the decaying Babylon Matrix and into the event horizon, the approaching iridescent portal to other worlds than these…

These are the glimpses of one mutant, Jonathan Zap, but they are cast out into the expanding web of zeros and ones to fellow mutants, to fellow perplexed interdimensional travelers seeking companionship and transformation.

This room is still under initial construction and in the next few months will grow until it houses a lifetime’s work (in the form of words and images), a life time’s work glimpsing and probing into and beyond the Babylon Matrix and other worlds than these.[1]

Some of what’s in this room may become a book whose expanding title is (at this moment) — Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom and the Fall of the Babylon Matrix (subtitled:) Urgent Messages of Metamorphosis from the Mythologies of our Time and a Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler. And if this is too long and mutagenic a title to be published on the reconstituted hides of slaughtered trees, then it will gradually become an object of zeros and ones on the shelf of this room, an artifact of an ambitious and obviously narcissistic mutant trying to revolutionize my universe while writing from the edge of a free campground near Ione, Washington.

Although the fellow primates camped about me do not know of the messages I scribble here, and probably would not comprehend or sympathize, this work is not done in isolation because scattered out there somewhere are other mutants peering out of the…

[As I write this a butterfly, reddish-orange and delicately veined with black, lands on my right wrist, my writing hand, and remains there despite my movement for an improbably long time, seeming to my mind a living portent of hope and metamorphosis.]

…somewhere there are other mutants peering out of the widening cracks in the Babylon Matrix looking for the secret rooms, the portals, the fellow travelers… somewhere other eyes are gazing into the looking glass of zeros and ones, that cybernetic palantir so globed and multifaceted that even the evil eye of the Carnivore[2] cannot encompass its ever-changing depths. Somewhere there are other mutants, looking with the eyes of hungry tigers for those openings into other worlds than these…

You are the ones I call out to from the edge of the campground because this is the time when the individual, isolated mutants, like scattered embers glowing in the cold, dark forest need to gather together to create a blaze of many colors, the radiance of which will reach out to the four corners of this richly chaotic realm…

Casting Seeds and Emails

Jesus said (I’m paraphrasing) that if you cast seeds (or emails) out into the world, that some would be eaten by crows or spam filters, some would be deleted by the jaded, the bored, the busy, some would be gobbled by swine, choking on pearly vomit, sliding to nowhere on a purchased staircase to New Age heaven, but some few would be received into the fertile minds of actual mutants and propagate. If you are one of these then please propagate this forward to any mutants on your email list[3]. And if you are a mutant who has received this invitation as a forward (please continue the forward propagation) and would like to be on my email mailing list, please contact me at jonathanzap@hotmail.com and put “subscription” in the subject heading. And if you want to visit the secret room, look for it at zaporacle.com.

Most of all don’t forget to overthrow the Babylon Matrix which does not necessarily require armed insurrection or battling artificially intelligent machines in a charred, post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland (unless you’re into that sort of thing and are really good at it). All it requires is that you follow your own highly individual path.

…Since it is now a new morning here at the Box Creek Canyon free campground near Ione, Washington and fellow campers — sixtyish folk caravanning in unstylish RVs — but salt of the earth good people (if not exactly mutants) — have given me strong coffee — I’m feeling a caffeinated expansive urge to tell you somewhat of the basics I’ve learned about following the path of the Interdimensional Traveler and will also throw in the Secret of Life.

On the other hand, I’m well aware that I’ve already exceeded the expected length (and density of content) of the email format by several thousand percent before I even decided to add a whole new section on the path of the Interdimensional Traveler. I’ll leave it to you to decide if you want to peruse this in one sitting or if you need to take a break, go back out into the Babylon Matrix and battle artificially intelligent machines in a charred, post apocalyptic radioactive wasteland (or whatever else you do to recharge your batteries) and tackle this later. But my goal here is to tell you in a few succinct paragraphs what I think the secret of human incarnation is and how to follow the path of the Interdimensional Traveler.

And since the strong coffee of sixtyish, salt of the earth, unstylish RV caravanning people is a stimulant, but not exactly an hallucinogen, the following will hopefully be grounded, practical and serviceable principles for the interdimensional traveler to keep as a hard copy near the top of their backpacks.

The Secret of Life

In the Sixties, aspiring young travelers set out to “look for the meaning of life.” Unfortunately, as someone once pointed out, they got the question backwards, because it is life that asks you in a challenging tone: “What is your meaning?” and you had better be able to supply the answer. Meaningfulness is what we need far more than survival; and anyway, as Don Juan put it, “There are no survivors on this earth.” Or, as a wise older man once told me, “Don’t do anything you won’t remember well on your death bed.” — a razor sharp way to cut out the trivia and superficialities to get at the meaningful marrow of life. Concentration camp survivor/existential psychologist Victor Frankel created a whole school of psychology (Logotherapy) based on the innate drive for meaningfulness[4]. The ones who could psychologically/spiritually survive the camps, Frankel observed first hand, were the few who could find meaningfulness in their experience.

A frequent theme reported by those who have had transcendent near death experiences is a revelation of a deep and unexpected meaningfulness in even the mosaic of small, seemingly unconnected experiences of life. Also revealed during many NDEs and other mystical epiphanies is that this plane of existence is something like a school where we signed on for extremely challenging learning experiences. This brings me to what I believe are the two sides of the “Secret of Life” magic coin.

The first side is self-development — to grow, develop, evolve, become more self aware and conscious in every way possible yourself. The other side of the magic coin is to help others, especially with the above. There it is, the secret of life. And notice that, unlike so many other things in life, this magic coin is always available.

But don’t take my word for it, go to the East and seek out a guru (who will probably hit on you and want you to sweep up around the ashram for twenty years), do whatever you have to do, but this is the secret of life that works for me and feels solid. And if you think, not unreasonably, that the point of view of a mutant living at the edge of a free campground is open to question (which it certainly is) I would also like to point out that the life stance I am espousing here is not my original fabrication (much though my narcissism might want to take credit for it), but is largely based on my twenty-five year study and practical application of the I Ching, the five to six thousand year old Book of Changes, on which Taoism (and much of Eastern philosophy, martial arts, medicine and culture) is based. And the I Ching doesn’t want you to have faith in it (uncritical belief) or doubt, but recommends an open, neutral stance. Take what resonates with your inner truth sense, what works for you, and leave the rest.

Returning to the two sides of our secret of life coin, notice that self-development and helping others are two sides of a single, integrated whole. But the first side, self-development, is the foundation, and it is only by developing yourself that you have the option and capability to help others with their development.

In fact, from the point of view of the I Ching, you have only one obligation in life, which is to get your relationship to yourself right. Fulfill that obligation and your relationships to others, to time, to change, to the universe will take care of themselves. But neglect or distort any part of your relationship to yourself and all these other relationships will accordingly be distorted and diminished.

Grasping for the Hottie

At the heart of healthful relationship to yourself is a stance known as “inner independence.” You (but not necessarily your ego) are the center of your own vortex, your own ever-changing equilibrium. Whenever you fall into dependence — grasping for Precious like a hungry ring wraith, your center collapses and you become an enslaved ring wraith of the Babylon Matrix. A classic example of this is grasping for the “hottie” — that all attractive person out there burning holes in your mind like Sauron’s one ring to bind them all. Quentin Crisp put it this way:
“The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.”
Codependence or inner independence? The first step on the path of seeking another to complete you is a supreme betrayal (the betrayal of your own soul) so don’t be surprised if betrayal remains a central theme of that path.[5]

The Inner Marriage of Yin and Yang

Getting your relationship to yourself right means working to evolve the inner marriage of yin and yang, feminine and masculine within yourself. Get that right and as a whole person you have the ability to have spiritually transforming, life-affirming relationships. Look to another person to complete you and you become a wraith forever grasping for a Precious that forever eludes your grasp. And of course Precious doesn’t have to be a hottie person, it can be consumer goods, money, power, career, or whatever the Babylon Matrix can tempt you with that you believe you can’t live with out. But I particularly mention the hottie because this ravenous craving, which most of us know so well, is a pillar of the Babylon Matrix. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes states that before we were in our present, gender specific bodies we were spherical beings containing both genders. Jealous gods, wishing to punish and disempower us, fractured our spherical bodies so that we would lose touch with our androgynous inner wholeness. In this weakened state we were easily conditioned to follow gender stereotypes which reinforced the ravenous delusion that we needed sexual/romantic union with others to complete ourselves. Break the power of that ancient ruling ring (which in the darkness binds you) and you reclaim your own center of power, self-actualization and ability to love others as a whole person.[6]

Meeting Halfway — The Touchstone for Relationship

At the center of relating well to others, cautiously moving outward from your center of inner independence, is the I Ching principle of meeting halfway (Hexagram 44)[7]. Less than halfway would be, for example, to neglect others to whom we are connected by inner ties. More than halfway would be, for example, giving unasked for advice, proselytizing, self important intervening, life-guarding others, etc. So if you go to a party and see someone you’re attracted to, but you’re so shy that you hide in a corner and never approach them, then you have met less than halfway. Hitting on them (without some obvious encouragement from the other) would be meeting way more than halfway.

Even in the course of a conversation one needs to apply this principle of meeting halfway by keeping attuned to the moment, aware of the subtle minutiae of openings and closing in the other person. With the openings we advance, with the closings we retreat and yield space.

When the other transgresses, invades boundaries or comes at us with false personality, we should never go along with it, should never do anything that compromises our inner dignity. We should withdraw energy from the person who is coming from their false self. This can mean anything from breaking eye contact (a withdrawal of energy), ending the conversation, or in some cases, going our own way for a lifetime. When we do withdraw we should do so lovingly, giving the other space to come to their senses on their own. We do not, in I Ching terms, “execute” them in our minds, which would be to view them as hopeless and unable to improve. This would only help to keep them imprisoned by doubt. We also don’t indulge excessive optimism that assumes they will become more conscious in this lifetime, or that extends trust where it is being abused. We step back to allow the creative to take its zigzag course. And for our own sake, as well as the others, we try not to carry “lawsuits” or ongoing grudges against someone. From the I Ching point of view, we are responsible not only for what we say or do to the other, but also for our thoughts, because these are communicated on the inner plane.

Psychic Filters and Inner Voices

Speaking of our thoughts, we need to watch them constantly. (I’ve decided to surrender to the nonlinear and let intuition zigzag between interpersonal and intrapsychic principles.) We need to recognize that different voices, often generated by distinct subpersonalities, speak in our heads, and we need a central, witness personality that observes those voices/subpersonalities without becoming them. Hexagram 27 reminds us not to nourish ourselves on negative, unnourishing thoughts and fantasies. Yes, that’s easier said than done, but here are a couple of psychic filters to keep online that are guaranteed to catch all the psychic allergens (all the negative thought forms) that all too easily pervade our inner world.

We’ll call the first of these the “tone filter.” As you listen to the voices of your inner world (or the voices in your outer, interpersonal world) refuse to believe any voices that aren’t calm, compassionate and centered. Listen to them, understand where they are coming from, but don’t become them, don’t identify with them or believe them. If a voice is nagging, carping, bitter, mechanically repetitious, whining, angry, self-pitying, hypercritical, etc. then it is not to be believed! By tone, you can easily distinguish the voices of false subpersonalities and the still, deep voice of the self.

Gerund Filter

A second filter involves a list of categories of thought that are indicative of the ego nervously trying to control the Tao. The position of Taoism (based on the I Ching) is that the universe is unfolding as it should. But the ego, like a nervous back seat driver clutching an imaginary steering wheel in its sweaty, white-knuckled grip, never trusts that nonlinear path of the creative so completely out of its control. Categories (presented as a list of gerunds) that indicate the ego resisting the Tao and/or trying to assert imaginary control over it include: WANTING, WISHING, WORRYING, HOPING, FEARING, DREADING, DESIRING, ENVYING, COMPARING, SUPERVISING, LIFE-GAURDING, JUDGING, COMPLAINING, SELF-PITYING, STRIVING, ANTICIPATING, EXPECTING, PRESTRUCTURING, CONTRIVING, FORCING PROGRESS, HEDGING, RATIONALIZING, CLINGING AND DOUBTING.

Yes, this is an intimidating list! It is an embarrassing revelation of just how often we default to the ego dominating our psyches. We’ll get into some of the nuts and bolts of how to change patterns of thought and the afflictive emotions that ride into town with them, but first I’d like to say a few more words about the ego.

Ego Bashing

In New Age and Eastern circles, ego-bashing and intellect-bashing are the norm, and it is often claimed that the only path to enlightenment is to eliminate ego completely. Unfortunately, they’re never able to actually show you people who are walking around and functioning without egos. Their claims are like a diet book filled with endless horrifying “before” photos, but without any believable “after” photos. To the extent that they have an “after” image at all, it comes into focus in the manner of an incompetent watercolor done in an impressionist style. And when they do claim to have an egoless guru to show you, it inevitably turns out to be a womanizer with fifty Rolls Royces and an immature, unruly ego so gigantic and off scale that the deluded disciples can’t see that the Emperor of No Ego is wearing only a loincloth while their ego projections clothe him in Saruman’s wizard cloak of many colors.

The Self-Organizing Principle of the Organism

Ego is so basic to our existence that one transpersonal psychologist defines it as “the self-organizing principle of the organism.” With no ego there is no self-reference which you need to do almost anything. An amazingly good discussion of the nature of the ego is to be found in the “What is Ego?” edition of What is Enlightenment magazine[8]. Everyone they interviewed had something fascinating and insightful to say about the nature of ego except for one famous female guru from India, who while claiming to be a divine being without ego, reveals the classic delusions of a sadistic, power tripping, gigantically inflated ego.

A Flaw in Many Eastern and New Age Paths

Eastern gurus with acting out, unruly egos have become such a classic syndrome that they deserve some special mention in our discussion of ego. Jung, who helped bring the I Ching and other Eastern teachings into the West, warned Westerners not to uncritically adapt wholesale Eastern practices of transformation that were designed in a different era for psyches very differently structured than what we usually find today in the West (and increasingly in the modern East). A classic flaw in many Eastern approaches to transformation (and also certain New Age and Christian permutations) is a one-sided emphasis on vertical spiritual transcendence, and a gross neglect of the horizontal plane of human incarnation — the engagement, the descent into the worlds of relationship, activity in the world and the details of how our personalities work and interrelate. Especially deficient in so many of these vertical transcendence sects is integration of what Jung called “the shadow” — the inferior and repressed parts of the personality typically hidden by a cloud of self-loathing, denial and unconsciousness. Hidden within the shadow are often unexpected talents and powers cast off with the rest of the unwanted aspects of personality.

Shadow Projection and Integration

When the shadow is unconscious and unintegrated, then it must be displaced, projected onto some despised person or group. For example, the Nazis projected their shadow onto the Jews whom they said were trying to control the world (while they attempted to establish a thousand year Reich). Typically, on the personal level, shadow projection is experienced as an intense dislike of some irritating person, usually of our gender and age range. Repulsion can be like attraction in reverse and we are often magnetized, like a gruesome car accident we can’t look away from, by the spectacle of someone acting out the inferior traits we fear and deny in ourselves. Integration of the shadow begins by reclaiming these despised traits, following the projections back to their source (our psyches) and recognizing that the shadow is part of us. This takes a great deal of moral courage and will. In the Star Wars fantasy this is what Luke must do when he is instructed by Yoda to go into the cave and face fear without his light saber. He ignores Yoda’s advice about the light saber, cuts off Darth Vader’s breath mask only to discover that his own face lies behind it.

The Wayfarer’s Path

Most people are not willing to face their own shadow and unconsciously make the choice of the Wayfarer in the poem of the same name by Stephen Crane:

The Wayfarer,

Perceiving the pathway to truth,

Was struck with astonishment.

It was thickly grown with weeds.

“Ha”, he said,

“I see that none has passed here

In a long time.”

Later he saw that each weed

Was a singular knife.

“Well,” he mumbled at last,

“Doubtless there are other roads.”

People who have sought out paths of one-sided vertical transcendence usually have done nothing to integrate their shadow, but instead form cliques, sects or cults where they can join with others in reinforcing each other in the delusion that they’re on a path of transcending their egos. Actually they to tend to form communities of immature egos, with grossly unintegrated shadows, which run around acting out all the inferior qualities they believe they have transcended. Any charismatic leader of the cult or sect will typically have complete license to act out compulsive sexuality, to power trip, dominate, seduce and financially swindle followers. The followers will feel an electrifying desire to proselytize. The need to proselytize is almost always a classic sign of an imbalanced psyche — the hysterical need to spread the psychic contagion and gain partners in vice while believing that you are converting the infidels. At the very least they will reek of spiritual affectations and more transcendent than thou attitudes.

To be a whole person means integrating yin and yang, feminine and masculine, horizontal and vertical, shadow and spirit. This is not as easy as the vertical shortcut, the purchased stairway to heaven or satori, and that’s why Jung felt that crucifixion — being caught between the horizontal and vertical axis of life is a central metaphor for the human condition.

Mind and Ego in the Hierarchy of Psychic Functions

Eliminating the ego to resolve our troubled relationship with it is no more sensible than decapitation would be as a remedy for recurrent headaches.

Superstitious dread of the ego is almost always accompanied by a fanatical anti-intellectualism and disparagement of the mind. Mind and ego are not our enemies, it is where we place our mind and ego, and how we work with these priceless resources that often makes them our enemies.

In most I Ching hexagrams the fifth line is the ruler and the fourth line is the minister. This structure contains the secret of how to work with the ego and mind so that they become powerful allies instead of adversaries. In the place of the ruler in our psyche should be our higher self and global intuition.

True Will and Taoism

Taoism is often presented in a way that makes it seem that you are passively surrendering to an outside Tao. A way to pierce through this illusion is with a concept such as Aleister Crowley’s “true will.” Your true will is the will of your “higher” self (many object to the spatial metaphors of higher and lower), the will that arises out of the depths (another spatial metaphor) of your self. This true will speaks through the still, centered voice of global intuition and is often confirmed by synchronicities, oracle consultations, etc. This true will is your inner refraction of the Tao and is to be followed before anything else. This might require you to proactively overcome all sorts of inner and outer obstructions. You are not necessarily passively led by outside trends. As George Bernard Shaw said, “The mark of the reasonable man is that he adapts himself to the world he finds himself in. The mark of the unreasonable man is that he expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men.” Many would interpret the reasonable man’s position as Taoist and the unreasonable man’s position as egoistic and anti-Taoist. This would be true if the unreasonable man were expecting the world to adapt itself to his ego. But if the unreasonable man (or woman) is centered in their true will, then this is Taoist as compared to a “reasonable” person whose reason and rationalized ego are oriented toward accommodating the default parameters of the Babylon Matrix.

The Ruler and the Minister of the Psyche

With your true will and global intuition in the ruling place in your psyche, you can then appoint your mind and ego as ministers that follow the ruler and work as helpful subordinates. In this place ego and mind can, among other functions, act as skillful intermediaries between the aims of your true will and the outside world. It is only when the mind and ego are foolishly promoted above their capabilities into the ruling position that they work at cross-purposes and undermine everything we do. And yes, they can be foolishly ambitious in the way of the Peter Principle to rise to their level of incompetence. The unenlightened ego thinks it should be in charge. The goal is to develop a more conscious, evolved ego that knows its place. The mind can also be a brilliant amplifier and translator for global intuition and primal creativity among other useful functions. Try fixing your computer with your feelings or transcendent spirit!

I’m still working on the process of aligning these aspects of the psyche in myself. Consciousness is not something you arrive at, but that you have to earn and work toward moment by moment. I’ll use myself briefly as an example to ground this in a particular real life case.

Because I am (according to Jung’s typology) a thinking-intuitive type, raised by thinking types, people often have an understandable (but somewhat mistaken) impression that I am up in my head thinking of the things they hear me say or write. More often, the way I experience my psyche working is that there is a cascade of intuitions and my active thinking function works with that cascade analyzing, interpreting and typically turning the intuitive input into complex sentences that may give the impression they were “thought up.” Of course sometimes that’s true, sometimes I am calling up memorized raps on various subjects and reciting them. But originally these raps were sourced from a melding of intuition and thought. After the fact I can ask the thinking function to act as information minister and recite the rap, which has been processed (and sometimes distorted) by thinking, but not originally created by thinking.

My thinking function, working by itself, I experience as hollow, boring and incompetent (except to trouble shoot the computer and learn instruction manuals, etc). I can only feel enthusiastic about using my psyche when intuition, thinking and (often) feeling are all connected and working together. The difference is instantly discernable, like the difference between a stereo system where all the components are working together to create a full, spatial sound as compared to the tinny, irritating monophonic of an AM radio broadcasting a call in radio show. Of course, sometimes the ego can play tricks, like putting a grandiose symphonic sound track behind its irritating, hollow monophonic voice, but if you pay attention you can tell the difference.

The Power of Holding Back

Many people feel trapped by their mind and ego because they find themselves caught in an introspective hell of mental tape loops that often focus on alternatively self-degrading and self-aggrandizing self-evaluations. They come to feel that the inner life itself, self reflection, and meta cognition (the ability to think about thinking — a great evolutionary advance) are what are holding them back from an effectual life. They may even come to believe that the way to escape this inner turmoil is to become a thoughtless extrovert, a “man of action.” I came to realize this when I was nineteen and wrote a paper on Doestoevsky entitled, Doestoevsky and the Profound Egocentric, which I expect to get scanned in and on the site soon. Many Doestoevsky characters lament their internal consciousness as a liability, feel that reason makes them incapable of action and decisiveness and seek to become unthinking men of action. The narrator of Notes from Underground, for example, says:

…the direct, the inevitable and the legitimate result of consciousness is to make all actions impossible, or — to put it differently — consciousness leads to thumb-twiddling…

The earliest literary example of this syndrome I can find is in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet reproaches himself for being a “John-a-dreams.” In one monologue he states,

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied over with pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action. (Act III: SC I, lines 83-88)

Hamlet eventually tries to rebel against his introverted state and become a man of action, “‘O, from this time forth / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth!’” (Act IV, SC IV, lines 95-96)

T.S. Elliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock voices similar sentiments. Prufrock says, “time yet for a hundred indecisions,” and “there will be time/ To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and ‘Do I dare?’” Prufrock would prefer to be thoughtlessly instinctual rather than in this state of ineffectual self consciousness, “to have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”

Like many contemporary persons, these literary characters falsely attribute their ineffectual indecisiveness to introspection, reason and self-awareness. What is imprisoning them in psychic entropy is not self-awareness, not reason or ego, but the hierarchy of psychic functions. They are living in an inner hell world where mind and ego are in charge of introspection. If intuition and the self were in charge of the process, and mind and ego in service of these higher functions, their experience would be altogether different in kind. When I was nineteen and wrote my paper on Doestoevsky I had a break through in this regard, I discovered that light could break through the shadowy mental prison when intuition took the place of recursive thinking. The inner process that used to torment me when it was conducted by mind and ego I now find to be entertaining, enlightening and forever providing me with exciting new material. Instead of mind/ego alliance playing the same old anxious tapes, my inner process is led by the muse[9], the ego and mind are very much at work in that process, but as followers, not leaders.

Some people who villanize the mind and ego as the problem, rather than the foolish placement of the mind and ego, even more foolishly believe they must get rid of mind and ego through a life time of meditation. Other people villanize introspection and believe that being a thoughtless man of action is the answer. For example presidents 41 and 43, Bush the father, and the son, frequently brag, “I don’t psychoanalyze myself.” W. has even said more than once, “I only look in the mirror when I’m shaving.” But Socrates said, “Know thyself.” This world is dying from lack of effective introspection. Spend that inner time guided by your intuition, if you spend it alone with mind and ego then the inner temple will seem a prison and you will feel like the mind and ego’s prison bitch.

This helpful alignment of higher self/ global intuition and true will with mind and ego is often especially challenged when we are caught in some dilemma and feel pressed to make a decision. The ego can’t stand the ambiguous, ambivalent situations that are so typical of human incarnation. It would like to force progress, come to some kind of clarifying decision and get on with its linear goal tracks. This can lead to some horrible choices. Alternatively, the ego and thinking function, sensing their incompetence as high level decision makers, will take the ambiguous situation and keep gnawing at it like a dog with a chew toy. Another metaphor is an endless ping pong match where different thoughts and possible scenarios get bounced back and forth forever. What is needed here, and mentioned throughout the I Ching, is the all important ability to hold back, to not go forward until we have been shown, till we have heard that still inner voice speak our true will or until a light has been shown through the unfolding of events of where we have to go. As Goethe said, “A master first reveals himself in his ability to hold back.” The Zen archer who hits the mark does so because she holds the arrow back until just the right moment.

Solitude as Default Position

One aspect of life that is a classic illustration of this principle is the choice of whether or not to go forward into a romantic relationship. Some people have an ego identity that requires them to be in a romantic relationship. It’s as if something in side them says, “I have to be going out with someone, might as well be this person…” Anybody who finds they are weighing this kind of choice by examining lists of advantages or disadvantages of possible mates is playing this sort of game. This is the merchant mind trying to evaluate where it can get the best deal. My personal point of view is that for the conscious person the default position should be solitude, but with a willingness to enter into romantic relationship and give it all the infinite care it deserves if, and only if, that is our true will, and we are called from the depths of our being to have a relationship with a particular person (and not an idealized projection). Although I am fanatically opposed to one size fits all formulations, especially about something as fantastically varied as human eros, this is what I believe can spare the conscious, evolving person from the suffering of messy karma. Hold back until you know.

Reticence

A woman I know has been practicing a wonderful inner discipline which accords with I Chinginner yes.” Until a choice lights up in her whole body and being as an inner yes than the answer is no and she waits. This takes patience, but saves her from many costly mistakes. principles that she calls something like the “

Similarly, the I Ching puts a high value on reticence, holding back with spoken words and other actions, until you are sure you have the inner yes. When you are dealing with a captive audience, for example while riding in a vehicle, I believe that a moral person should have strong inhibitory filters before they speak. If I speak to a captive audience I am usually blocking any members of that audience from being able to effectively concentrate on their own thoughts. So before I encroach on the perceptual space of the other I ought to be convinced that what I have to say is something they need to hear, as compared to me venting or indulging the narcissistic urge to capture attention.

Dealing with Afflictive Thoughts and Feelings

Earlier I promised that we would get more into the nuts and bolts of how to deal with negative thought forms and the afflictive emotions associated with them. The most comprehensive and effective approach I’ve found is in a marvelous book entitled Emotional Alchemy by Tara Bennett-Goleman. Tara, a Zen Buddhist psychotherapist, and her husband, Daniel Goleman, wrote the best-selling book entitled Emotional Intelligence. They’ve also collaborated with the Dali Lama on a book about overcoming afflictive emotions.

Emotional Alchemy

If you like this approach, I would certainly suggest reading Emotional Alchemy, which is now available in paperback at almost any large bookstore. The book is rather repetitive, however, and in a few pages I can probably tell you 80% of what’s in it.

The Golemans bring together Buddhist psychology, cognitive psychology and some recent findings from neuroscience into their groundbreaking work on afflictive emotions. “Afflictive emotions” is a Buddhist term that describes a general phenomenon that most of us are all too familiar with — the suffering, the affliction of negative emotions. There is nothing new about this problem, but it has also never been timelier with depression and anxiety disorders dramatically on the rise in the West, particularly in the U.S.

First we will take a look, through a synthesis of the three disciplines mentioned above (neuroscience, cognitive psychology and Buddhist psychology) at how afflictive emotions work, how they gain hold and easily dominate our inner experience, and then we will discuss the alchemy part, how to transform our relationship with afflictive emotions through methods that can dramatically reduce suffering. (I can testify from my own personal experience to the effectiveness of this method.)

Neurological Materialism

Part of the reason that afflictive emotions are so virulent, and so hard to change, may have to do with our neural architecture. I say “may” because neurology is in its infancy and has never been able to successfully explain the association of consciousness and the brain. A terrible delusion which I’ve written about elsewhere[10], and which I wish the Golemans had acknowledged, is the philosophical and pseudoscientific position known as “neurological materialism.” A neurological materialist believes that consciousness (if they admit consciousness exists at all — many don’t) is an epiphenomenon (a secondary effect) of biochemical process in the brain. Neurological materialism dominates the psychology departments of most colleges and universities in the U.S., and many ordinary citizens have picked up on this and taken it as a given, proven by “science.” But it has not been proven by science, quite the contrary. There is much scientific evidence pointing away from neurological materialism. Part of the problem is that in the “soft” sciences of biology and psychology, many have not been able to integrate the findings of quantum mechanics and are still pretending to do science while inhabiting an archaic Newtonian universe where everything is governed by causality. Physicists like Danah Zohar[11], Roger Penrose, Amit Goswami and Fred Alan Wolfe have proposed quantum mechanical models in which neurological process is a correlate, an analog, an acausal parallelism to a consciousness that is hyper spatial, nonlocal, not “in” the brain. Those who have had OBEs (I’ve had numerous) and NDEs have experienced that consciousness can exist outside the body and is actually greatly enhanced by being out of the body.

Neural Architecture and The Emotional Body

You do not, however, have to buy into the fallacy of neurological materialism to recognize that neurological realities — such as neurotransmitter levels and neural architecture — are huge players in human experience. So after this long disclaimer about neurological materialism, let’s take a look at what neuroscience can tell us about afflictive emotions.

The Low Resolution Amygdala

Now that we have the technology to do real time body imaging of live people, scientists are able to map out activity levels of different brain structures moment by moment. What’s been observed is that when people are exposed to an emotional trigger event, the amygdala, a brain structure somewhere behind the frontal lobes, goes “hot.” When strong emotional response is aroused, the amygdala lights up on the computer screen as its metabolism intensifies.

Neuroscientists believe that the amygdala evolved as an environmental threat detection monitor. They believe that it stores threat patterns (such as snakes, spiders, fire, predators) and when a trigger event occurs, when something is perceived in the environment that matches or seems to match these patterns, the amygdala turns on and triggers flight or fight readiness throughout the body. The amygdala, however, is no rocket scientist; its pattern recognition ability is crude, primitive, low resolution. As a survival strategy it’s safer to get a lot of false positives rather than to miss a single actual hazard. Better for a scaredy-cat (a domestic cat with overly strong startle reflex) to jump away from imaginary hazards then to miss one car. (The big cats I used to work for at the Prairie Wind Wild Refuge didn’t have this type of startle reflex because no one sneaks up on a six hundred pound tiger…) So, for example, an animal or person could have a powerful startle response to say a piece of rope dangling from a branch at the edge of peripheral vision that the speedy, but imprecise, amygdala may read as a dangerous snake.

Also, to put the amygdala in the context of neural architecture, it has strong neuronal connections to the neo cortex in human beings. This may explain how the amygdala, which is fast, but low resolution in its discriminations, can easily dominate our higher thinking which is higher resolution but much slower to react. Therefore we experience a second or two when we actually think we’ve seen a snake until our neocortex can reassert itself and reinterpret the sensory information with higher resolution discrimination.

It is also believed by neuroscientists, that in this phase of evolution where most human beings are more threatened by emotional trauma in early childhood than by snakes or fire, patterns of emotional trauma are now what is primarily stored in the amygdala.

Schemas: Stereotyped Patterns of Emotional Reactivity

Following that glimpse at the amygdala from neuroscience, we switch to cognitive psychology which contributes a finding that there are classic, stereotyped patterns of emotional reactivity that it calls “schemas.” These schemas (and here you would do well to go to the Emotional Alchemy book where they are individually discussed) include very familiar afflictions such as: abandonment fear, low self-esteem, deprivation and entitlement. When trigger events occur, these engrained patterns of emotional reactivity click in and we typically have disproportionate, inaccurate, stereotyped responses, while the higher resolution discrimination and more reflective aspects of higher thinking are overridden by an intense emotional funk.

Trigger Events And Storylines

Let’s ground this in an example so we can see how all this comes together in a typical case. Our case involves a young woman, an office worker, who was raised by narcissistic, rather unloving parents. As a consequence of her early childhood experience, she is especially governed emotionally by the deprivation schema with generous helpings of the low self-esteem and abandonment schemas thrown in. One of her coworkers goes out on a coffee run for everyone and when he returns, as a random accident, her coffee was forgotten. This minor accident is a trigger event for her deprivation schema. Almost instantly, in less than a quarter of a second, her amygdala lights up and catalyzes a cascade of pronounced physiological changes — her face flushes as capillaries dilate, heart rate increases, body temperature elevates and breathing becomes fast and shallow. The amygdala sends strong signals to her neo cortex causing her thinking to fall into line with disproportionate, inaccurate, stereotyped thought forms coalescing into a storyline which helps to perpetuate the trauma and reinforce the schema: They forgot mine on purpose. I’m always left out. No one ever gives me my fair share. I knew they didn’t like me. He’s just like my father. Etc. This funk could continue for hours, or continue almost perpetually in the background, especially as internal perturbations — traumatic memories, negative thought forms and fantasies can be internally generated as trigger events to perpetuate the misery.

The Law of Dependent Causation

Buddhist psychology now comes into play with suggested methods of self-liberation from afflictive emotions. The Buddhists have a concept variously translated as the law of “dependent origination” or “dependent arising.” There is a chain of dependent, causally related events that creates the suffering of afflictive emotions. In the case of the schema attack described above, for example, we have trigger event linked to neurological response linked to physiological response linked to cognitive response (the storyline). Break any part of this chain and you can break the whole cycle.

Breaking Inner Tape Loops with Numbers Exercises

For example, an elegantly simple method to break the cognitive link involves occupying your mind with simple numbers exercises. This method is not in Emotional Alchemy and the particular numbers exercises come from a book of psychological techniques and exercises designed to support a Gurdjieffian approach to consciousness[12]. Use this method especially when you find that your mind is “looping” — playing the same negative storyline tapes again and again — “he said she said” etc. When you focus your mind on the numbers exercises you will stop the looping, stop the storylines stone cold dead in their well-worn tracks. True, numbers exercises may not be very entertaining, but I’ll take nonentertainment over looping storylines that create the suffering of afflictive emotion and thereby degrade bodily health as well.

The first numbers exercise, which demands focused attention, is to count up by 2s from 1, and down by 2s from 100 in an alternating sequence:

1, 3,

100, 98,

5, 7,

96, 94,

9, 11,

92, 90,

13, 15,

88, 86, etc.

This gets a little tricky when the two streams of numbers cross, but you’ll find that you get into a rhythm with it and it gets a lot easier with practice. Your mind will want to default back to storylines, day dreams or other distractions, and if it succeeds, it will break the numbers exercise at which point you just pick it up again, from the beginning if necessary.

The second numbers exercise is much easier and can be done partly on autopilot which presents a great temptation for your attention to wander and for you to lose track of the numbers. It’s designed that way to train you to maintain focus, to have power over the default mechanism that wants to switch you back to storylines, daydreams, etc. It also trains you to divide attention as you can easily do this exercise while doing laundry, driving, manual chores, etc. This time you count up by twos in an ascending/descending sequence that keeps growing like a ladder that you climb up and down adding a new rung with each ascent. The top number is always repeated and is 2 higher than the last top number. It looks like this:

1 3 3 1

1 3 5 5 31

1 3 5 7 7 5 3 1

1 3 5 7 9 9 7 5 3 1

1 3 5 7 9 11 11 9 7 5 3 1

One more part of this easy sequence is that whenever you hit the number 11, coming up or down the ladder, you do some sort of bodily movement — snapping your fingers, blinking an eye, etc. You’re doing well with this exercise if you can make it into the 70s without losing the number stream by defaulting into tape loops, daydreams, etc. Like push-ups and sit-ups, numbers exercises may not always be fun, but they are an effective and direct way to become stronger.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle And Self Observation

Now we’ll return to the Emotional Alchemy approach that centers on the Buddhist practice of mindfulness. I’ve been practicing mindfulness techniques for years and have found them to be very effective in everything from dealing with bodily pain (mindfulness pain management), every day tasks and even getting more enjoyment out of eating food. We know from physics (Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) that to observe a thing is to change a thing. The maximal case of this effect is when the human psyche is observing itself.

Mindfulness Pain Management

Mindfulness involves sustained investigative awareness, a persistent witness consciously observing what’s going on (inner and/or outer) with great presence moment by moment. To practice mindfulness pain management, for example, I focus in on the pain sensations. The pain I feel in my recently dislocated thumb seems to radiate outward in pulsing concentric waves from the center of the knuckle. I observe and map out its periodicity, its ebb and flow, when it is peaking and when it is subsiding. I don’t shrink from it, I welcome it into perception and carefully observe its modulations. When I do this it becomes an interesting energetic phenomenon happening in my perceptual universe. Emotional funks and negative thought forms can also be studied with this careful, impersonal observation.

Mindful Self Observation

When I hear a voice speak in my head I can welcome it into my perceptual field, the inner theater of my mind, and ask it to step into the spotlight of attention and show me who it is and what it really wants. By mindfully observing the emotions and storylines, we cannot be identified with them, we have an outside witness observing, so they cannot think us, as they did to the young woman office worker in her schema attack. You can observe them with a cool, neutral, compassionate observational stance. Instead of shrinking from them, welcome them into attentional space. The metaphor I’ve used for myself is that I am a butterfly collector in the Amazon where a rare, interesting butterfly has flown into my net. Aha, here’s a live one I can study. As you work with this practice you will find that your mindfulness will have less discontinuities and you will catch schema attacks sooner.

At the early phase of the practice you might notice that you had a schema attack after it’s over. Why did I get into that silly argument? Oh, I see, it was my deprivation schema triggered when she said… Another time you might catch a schema attack while it’s happening, while the butterfly is in the net. If it is happening just internally (not an interpersonal argument) you can observe without direct interference and learn something about what type of schemas you have and what type of subpersonalities come forward to speak for them. See how long the schema attack lasts, when does it peak, when does it start to taper off, what was the trigger event, how is your body being affected — breathing, muscle contractions, etc. After you have felt that you’ve sufficiently studied who the voices are and what they want, etc. you can choose in a later stage of the practice to actively intervene. The numbers exercise is one way to do that.

The frightening looking deities seen outside of some Buddhist temples are supposed to be entities of “wrathful compassion.” At this phase of the practice you can be wrathfully compassionate and intervene with a ferocious act of will. I used to visualize a glowing magical sword hovering above an old reel to reel tape recorder I used to have, the moving reels of tape playing the annoying thought forms. When I summoned my will the sword would come slicing down into the tape, cutting it in two so that the reels would begin to spin quickly in opposite directions.

Another visualization I’ve used comes from the first two Lord of the Rings movies where we see Gandalf facing down the Balrog on the Bridge of Kazadum in the Mines of Moria. I see Gandalf activating his staff and luminescent sword, Glamdring, and saying with all his might “You cannot pass. I am a servant of the secret fire… You cannot pass.” A simpler technique I recently came up with that seems quite effective is that when I notice my mind picking up a dumb tape loop I just say to myself in the tone of an irate, protective mother watching her two year old pick up a dog turd and about to put it in his mouth, DROP IT!!! DROP IT!!!!! Get creative and use whatever works for you.

The Magic Quarter Second

Finally, if you really want to go for the Olympic level of this practice, you will try to derail a schema attack in what neuroscientists call “the magic quarter second.” If you were able to recognize that a trigger event is catalyzing your amygdala to launch a schema attack in the first quarter second, before it has gained a physiological hold on you, then you could knock it off its tracks, nip it in the bud before it can do any damage at all. Usually you don’t know if a trigger event is coming. But in some cases you do, let’s say you have to make a phone call to that difficult parent or problem person you know is likely to trigger you. I had a great opportunity to try the Olympic version when I was canvassing for a wildlife refuge. In certain yuppie neighborhoods I knew there was a high probability of getting a nasty response. As a former, recovering New Yorker, who was also a school teacher for 14 years, six in the South Bronx, my whole being is conditioned for the high speed come back. I might have needed that back then, but with canvassing that can get you and your organization in trouble. So what I would do is ring the bell, take a couple of deep breaths, center myself in my body and wait like a tennis player for the ball to come across the net and a golden opportunity to catch the magic quarter second. But even though I knew the trigger event was coming I often couldn’t help but to react anyway.

It should go without saying that what you especially don’t want is to allow a schema attack to control your actions, decisions or spoken words. There is a well-known Samurai story where the Samurai has a duty to assassinate the assassin who killed his master. Methodically he stalks the assassin and at the right moment approaches with drawn sword. The assassin spits on him. The Samurai sheaths his swords and walks away. The idea is that he became emotionally agitated when he was spit on and now if he used his sword it would no longer be a pure, impersonal act. Words are often swords. When we are emotionally agitated we should sheath our tongues and hold back from actions and decisions.

Dealing with Shock

Satan Smiting Job

Satan Smiting Job—-William Blake

But how do we deal with the shocks that appear outside as fate, the curve balls chucked at us by the Tao that sometimes seem to smash us right in the face? How can the Interdimensional Traveler work creatively with the “Slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?”

Since I’m undergoing a series of shocks in my own life right now (and shocks like earthquakes and their aftershocks tend to come in a series), this is no academic exercise, but a challenge to see how well my philosophy of shock can hold up to the real thing.
The Necessity of Shock and the I Ching

First, in order not to take shocks personally, we need to acknowledge that they are both inevitable and necessary. Shock is such a well-recognized principle in the I Ching that it is not only one of the 64 hexagrams (hexagram 51, Shock, Thunder, the Arousing) it is also one of the 8 trigrams out of which the 64 hexagrams are built. Shock is a crucial alchemical ingredient needed for evolution.

Homeostasis and Punctuated Equilibrium

Why? One reason is that all organisms are conservative. They dial in an equilibrium, what biologists call homeostasis, and they seek to maintain it. This is a crucial life function, because organisms are generally complex, fragile processes, which require relatively narrow parameters of environmental conditions — such as oxygen levels, temperatures, food sources — and inevitably, the environments in which they occur have destabilizing, chaotic elements which frequently threaten them with death or even extinction. Organisms work indefatigably to try to dial in their niche, to maintain the homeostasis that keeps them going. You don’t want your liver enzymes, heart rate or blood sugar to fluctuate wildly, that would threaten your survival, you want them dialed in, rolling along on an even keel. The human psyche is an organism, the most complex we know of, and complexity often means fragility. What both Freud and Jung recognized, what anybody looking about themselves should recognize, is that the human psyche is also highly conservative.

Contra Naturum Development

Conservatism can be good for homeostasis, but can also, if it is excessive, put a ceiling on development and evolution. To evolve means to change, and we don’t always want to change. The two most conscious and compassionate people I met at this campground both told me at different times, and without mincing words, “I don’t like change.” I told them that I could sympathize because change is usually precipitated by shock, often unpleasant shocks (which I’d been experiencing myself so recently) but to dislike change is to create inevitable suffering because change is the only constant we have.

You may have heard of the story of the ancient emperor who challenged the wise men of his court to come up with a statement which would be true at all times, in all circumstances. What they came up with was, “And this too shall pass.” But when we inwardly resist the passing, the change, then we are more likely to experience it as an outward shock acting as fate.

The conservative tendency is so strong that many will resist change, even if they are in a bad situation that is attempting to get better. You may remember the Morgan Freeman character in Shawshank Redemption who is unable to adjust to life as a free man and wants to get locked in at night. I’m also reminded of a newspaper photo I once saw of a young girl who had been horribly abused by her mother who had broken many of her bones. The photo was of a court hearing and shows the little girl being led away by some kindly looking matron while she is screaming to be reconnected with her mother. Better the devil we know, than a devil, or even an angel, that we don’t know.

The average person tends to tread water, seeks to maintain status quo, homeostasis, and will change inwardly only in response to drastic outside shock. When shocks occur they take no responsibility for them (especially if they are negative shocks), instead they believe they are the victims of “bad luck” or forces beyond their control. This may be true, of course, especially when the shock is a macro geophysical or nation state effect like flood, earthquake or war.

Shocks, it should be pointed out, can be “good” or “bad.” Winning the lottery or suddenly falling in love are shocks just as much as a car accident or economic crash. Shock just means the equilibrium has experienced a perturbation or disturbance — a sudden disequilibrium. Don Juan said (I’m paraphrasing), that for the average man everything is either a blessing or a curse, but for the warrior everything is a challenge and a learning experience.

The psychic inertia that resists change is so strong that Jung described the path of individuation, or unique individual development, as “contra naturum” — contrary to or against nature. Gurdjieff, who so eloquently described man’s mechanical nature, called the change to unmechanicalness “against God.” Their point was that to generate your own internal change meant pushing against such vast inner and outer inertial force that it was as if you had a whole universe resisting you. Often it is us, our own neurotic homeostasis and passivity, our false ego, that provides the resistance. And as Jung said, “Man’s greatest passion isn’t sex, love, money or power — it’s laziness.”

So shock can be like a divine gift, a catalyst for evolutionary change. After all, if it wasn’t for shock in the form of a giant asteroid hitting the earth sixty-five million years ago and flattening everything larger than a chicken[13], there might be a velicoraptor strolling through tropical foliage instead of you sitting there reading this over the internet. Our incarnation began with birth shock and often ends with a shock too. Shock is our constant, if unpredictable, and often unwelcome, companion.

Thought Experiment In Subcreation

Try this thought experiment. You are the author (the equivalent of God) of a novel about a young person who in the course of your story is going to develop greatly as a person — psychologically and spiritually. Would you as God/author provide them with the perfect, peaceful relationship, the perfect career and a tranquil, happy “successful” life? Not unless you wanted to create a boring story and a boring character. What you will probably find is that as God/author you are going to have to create “evil,” you are probably going to have to hurl at that young person some gigantic shock, right at the limits of what they can handle, to get them out of the door and on their quest. If you are writing a screenplay you better do this in the first ten pages (the equivalent of the first ten minutes of screen time). This is called the “inciting incident,” and if you don’t have it, unless you are an absolute master with a cult following, you will probably lose much of your audience. There are classic, archetypal elements to story structure because story structure parallels life structure.

Tolkien called fantasy writing “subcreation” because the author is acting as a subset of God in creating their own world. What would the Lord of the Rings be if Tolkien hadn’t subcreated evil in the form of Sauron, Saruman, ring wraiths, orcs, etc? Hobbits going on dates with other hobbits? Boring. Nobody wants to watch Frodo eating second and third breakfasts every day while getting fat and complacent in Hobbiton. No, we want to see him at the cracks of doom tormented by evil temptation. We want development in our stories, not stagnation; we want shock, change and lots of it. But when it comes to us, no way, we want predictability, we want a world where we get what we want when we want it — and what we want is to get dealt the royal flush and with no jokers or wild cards.

The message of hexagram 51 is that shock can be developmental. What counts is our stance in relation to the shock. We need to accept shock, even welcome it as a learning challenge.

Many shocks we experience involve relationships. Our voluntary relationships (such as romantic relationships), by an almost invincible psychological principle, reflect where we are inwardly. So instead of going into he said/she said mode and creating a schema-driven storyline bound up with the particulars of that episode of the soap opera, you can instead ask yourself this question: When have I been here before? When have I felt, in different circumstances, what I am feeling now? If you are honest with yourself, you’ll probably recognize that this isn’t the first time. So pull your gaze off of the present overly charged situation and look at these parallel points on your inner map, especially if they are points involving other relationships. Take a step back and see if you can find a pattern. Is there a mistake here you’ve made before? Are certain schemas activated? Remember the principle that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and especially if it is relationship history!

Subtle and Gross Shocks

The way things often work is that we are first given a chance to learn from a subtler shock, but if we don’t learn from it, don’t answer its demand for change, we get more powerful shocks. Our bodies teach us through shock, and so do our psyches as well as the force vectors of seemingly outside fate. For example, a man poisons himself with too much alcohol and his body sends him a self-protective shock. He finds his head in the toilet in a violent spasm of vomiting and he wakes up with a horrible hangover. That’s actually a subtle shock, way too subtle for some people. The man works through that subtle shock and a few more like it while he develops his “acquired taste” for self-inflicted punishment and he even comes to take pride in his tolerance for poison, “I can really hold my liquor. I may be fat and impotent, but I can drink these young punks under the table.”

When subtle shock doesn’t work, then you get big shock. Instead of nasty symptoms, your body presents you with a major disease like cirrhosis of the liver. Still, some will disown responsibility for the shock, “I ought to sue those liquor companies.” Feeling a victim is indicative of refusing to rise to the learning challenge of shock. If you are a victim of your personal history, than you are bound to remain one as history repeats itself, because a victim is the opposite of a learner/warrior.[14]

Catching Things Before they Exit the Gate of Change

The conscious person prefers to learn from the subtle shocks rather than getting hit over the head with a two by four. Instead of waiting till we have a major disease we can pay attention to our bodies, notice the subtle shocks that tell us we’re doing something harmful and make corrective adjustments. The idea is to, in I Ching terms, “catch things before they exit the gate of change.” If you can notice the subtle pre-signal shocks you can sometimes avoid the need for full-scale shocks. For example, if your observation of body language signals tells you that your approach toward a certain person is creating resistance in them, you can back off and avoid the shock of argument and conflict.

Attuning to Subtle Shocks

Some ways to become attuned to subtle shocks include paying attention to intuition, considering synchronicities as possible signs or portents, remembering and interpreting dreams and consulting with the I Ching or other oracles.

In his potentially life-saving book, The Gift of Fear, security consultant Gavin de Becker provides numerous case histories that demonstrate that most victims of violent crime rationalistically overrode distinct intuitions warning them of impending danger. Our intuition is much more acute (and so much faster) than our conscious thinking, especially in rapidly unfolding life or death situations. Many of Gavin de Becker’s clients, often celebrities, are being stalked or harassed by anonymous threats. Gavin discovered an intriguing and effortless way to find the identity of an anonymous harasser. I don’t have the book in front of me but it goes something like this:

Gavin: Who do you think it could be?

Client: I have no idea.

Gavin: OK, just as a game I want you to pick the name of anybody you know, anybody, right off the top of your head.

Client: OK — Bob.

Gavin: Any reason to think it might be Bob?

Client: Oh, no way, it couldn’t possibly be Bob; he’s such a nice guy, so polite, he sent me a dozen red roses last week.

Almost inevitably the person they pick off the top of their head will turn out to be the harasser.

Dreams, especially nightmares, can be subtle shocks seeking to awaken us to inner (and much more rarely, outer) problems giving us a chance to learn and make adjustments so that we don’t have to get whacked over the head by fate or develop full blown diseases, “mental illnesses,” etc. Oracles, especially the I Ching, The Book of Changes, can give us a heads up about a problem that if neglected may become shock. Sometimes it can give us an early warning radar blip that shock is coming. If the shock has already arrived it can advise us on how to weather the storm.

Choosing Shock through Self-Initiation

Some people seek to generate their own shocks to stimulate development. Since we live in a culture that does not provide the developmental shocks that in traditional cultures are provided by initiation, we may seek to create our own initiations. Self-initiations, voluntary shocks, include things like fasting, heroic doses of hallucinogens, mountain climbing and extreme forms of travel, sports or adventure. These self-initiations can go amiss if they serve to build up false ego rather than collapse it. I might, for example, undertake these extreme practices so I can build up a prideful identity for myself as a master of asceticism, an hallucinogenic test pilot, a daring mountain climber, etc. If the means of initiation becomes an end in itself than it is being abused and has depotentiated as a developmental shock.

Traveling, for example, can be a great way to stir up change, to shock your complacent equilibrium, but as Emerson put it, “The problem with traveling is you take yourself with you.” Traveling can be a real secular pilgrimage, a transformational journey, but only if we are integrating it as inner change, not just as a changing glamorous backdrop for ego identity and dramas.

Some people try to push the self-initiation option too far, which amounts to the spiritual self-violence of forcing progress. Some people have a Germanic death wish and fall for the glamour of excessively risky behavior. One of Nietzsche’s moral superman notions was, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” But that notion can be pushed too far, and Nietzsche ended his life completely insane. So taking a hundred tabs of acid, for example, my neither kill you nor make you stronger. You want to learn from subtle shocks if you can, and don’t necessarily need to whack yourself on the head with a two by four.

Avoid Presumptions about the Shocks of Others

Also, we should adopt a learner/warrior relation to shock for ourselves, an inwardly independent stance, but not necessarily apply it across the board to the shocks and misfortunes of everyone else. In twelve step programs they’re fond of saying, “God only gives you the burdens you need to bear.” Fine, I accept that for myself, but I wouldn’t want to tell that to a baby dying of AIDS. I don’t want to smugly look at a continent of people dying of famine and presume they are getting the burdens or learning experiences they need, or that their karma is punishing them. It’s not so clear (without having to resort to reincarnation and multiple lifetime karma) if the shock as learning challenge applies to those who, for example, don’t seem to have enough neurological/cognitive function to learn from what’s happening to them. I accept this stance for myself because I know that I have (and probably anyone able to read this) the inner resources to learn from the shocks I am experiencing. If I don’t choose victimhood for myself, that doesn’t mean that I assume there are no victims anywhere. What about mistreated animals and abused children? Is God giving them the burdens they need to bear? I’d love to have a pat formula to explain these horrors away, but I feel like it would be a self-serving disrespect of authentic suffering out there.

Are Shocks Good News or Bad News?

One lesson of shock is that we’re not in control of the Tao, and there are lots of unknown, unknowable variables in play that make life the unpredictable experience we all know it to be. From our limited vantage, it’s also hard for us to know if the unpredictable shocks are “good news” or “bad news.” You’ve probably heard the old Chinese story about the farmer whose neighbor asks him, “What’s new?”

“One of my horses ran away.”

“That’s bad news,” says the neighbor, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Well, actually, the mare that ran away came back with a stallion so we ended up with another horse.”

“Great news,” responds the neighbor.

“Well, actually, when my son went to train the stallion he broke his leg.”

“Oh, that’s terrible news.”

“Well, actually, the army came through to conscript young men into the draft, but because my son had a broken leg they didn’t take him.” And it keeps going like that…

Every event is so connected to a vast unknown web of antecedent and consequent events that we can’t judge the overall effect. On the other hand, we should also resist the New Age fuzzy-headedness that insists that we be nonjudgmental about everything. The warnings about being judgmental are about using bad judgment, especially to stereotype people based on religion, race, orientation, etc. We have to be judgmental. To say that it’s bad to be judgmental is a judgment! Shocks demand that we make good judgments. So although we don’t know where everything is going, and don’t presume that negative shocks may not be developmental, we also don’t surrender our judgment by adopting glib sayings like, “It’s all good” or “God only gives you…” It’s not all good, and there are things our true will may demand we make judgments about and work to change.

When in the Belly of the Beast

Finally, it’s one thing to have a philosophy of shock, it’s quite another thing to be in the belly of the beast. When I look back at my own efforts to walk the talk during my last fortnight of shock, I see cases where these principles helped me handle things well, and other times when I was on the ropes, the shocks triggering huge schema attacks, and it was a titanic struggle to regain my inner independence.

When you’re feeling overwhelmed it can be good to third person yourself for a minute, consider your situation from an outside vantage and ask yourself, “What would I advise this person given this set of circumstances?” There is an advanced martial arts technique where if you are being attacked by multiple assailants you create a remote POV, like an eyeball on the ceiling, mapping the action out from above. Writing this guide has been an exercise in remote POV for me.

Sometimes, under the acute stress of shock, it’s easier to be a warrior than in ordinary circumstances. Don Juan said, “It is much easier for warriors to fare well under conditions of maximum stress than to be impeccable under normal circumstances.” Use the shock as an opportunity, rise to the occasion. The Chinese ideogram that means crisis also means opportunity.

Conclusion

Although I may not have walked the talk perfectly (who ever does?), I did use this occasion of shock as an opportunity to examine and write out my “Weltanschauung” or philosophy of life. Shock can be an opportunity for you to do the same. If for no one else this is a guide for me, this perplexed Interdimensional Traveler, as I try to find my way through the labyrinth of the Babylon Matrix into greener worlds than these…

[1] Written in 2003 when I had a web page with two or three documents on it, the start of what would later become zaporacle.com. To read a narrative of the strange circumstance in which this document was created, see The Path of the Numinous (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/10/the-path).

[2] A government program that in 2003 was said to read everyone’s email.

[3] This was originally written as an email.

[4] See Man’s Search for Meaning and other works by Frankel.

[5] See Stop The Hottie (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/16).

[6] I’ll have much more to say on this theme in Casting Precious into the Cracks of Doom… (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/43/castingprecious).

[7] By the way, I am indebted to I Ching scholar Carol Anthony for her work to draw out of the I Ching into terms accessible to the Western mind many of these principles implicit in the I Ching — visit her website: ichingoracle.com. For an introduction to the I Ching, see Some Things to Know before getting an I Ching Reading (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/4/about-i-ching).

[8] Go to wie.org back issue #17.

[9] See The Path of the Numinous (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/10).

[10] See The Glorified Body: Metamorphosis of the Body and the Crisis Phase of Human Evolution (www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/article/7).

[11] See her book, The Quantum Self.

[12] Gurdjieff was the esoteric master of illustrating the mechanical nature of man and ways to become less mechanical.

[13] I’m indebted to my late colleague Terence McKenna for this and a couple of other colorful phrases I’ve adopted.

[14] For more on the warrior stance go to: www.zaporacle.com/textpattern/?c=Warrior-Stance.

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copyright future mega celebrity Jonathan Zap

Celebrities rock. Celebrities are number one, numero uno in my book and I’m sick of all these media types trying to make scandals to bring down celebrities. It’s jealousy, that’s all it comes down to. Media types are just celebrity wannabes. Let’s face it, celebrities are hot, little people are not. As a future mega celebrity myself I’m gonna come out and say what all of us feel in our hearts, but most are too politically correct to admit. Celebrities rock. Everybody’s wet dream is to be a celebrity and if they can’t be a celebrity they want to get fucked by a celebrity, and if they can’t get fucked by a celebrity then they at least want to get ruled by a celebrity as governor or president.

Like that governor race in California—who wants to be ruled by some wimpy politician when they can get a true mega celebrity like Arnold Shwarzenegger? When I grab the latest People magazine I don’t want to read about some little boy with leukemia nobody ever heard of. I go right for the articles on the hottest celebrities. I’m sick of these pretentious media types always going on about Iraq blah blah blah blah Israel invades Syria blab blah blah blah like anybody’s really thinking about that when it’s barely been 72 hours since JLo and Ben Af got back together again. These celebrity wannabe news anchors do all that Iraq blah blah blah because of just one reason—jealousy. They know just as well as any of us that JLo is one of the hottest celebrities of all time, so just to spite her they do all that Iraq blah, blah, blah. They just don’t want to admit that celebrities are hot, and that they are not.

That Ted Turner, a quasi celebrity at best who got dumped by Jane Fonda, a top celebrity back in her day, is jealous of real celebrities, so that’s why CNN is the Iraq blah, blah, blah network. If it wasn’t for jealousy CNN would be what the people really want—The Celebrity News Network with celebrity news 24/7. I’m sick of these knee-jerk liberal types who try to pretend that everyone is created equal and that the so called little people are just as important as celebrities. NOT. If everybody is created equal then someone needs to tell these jealous nitwits that celebrities are more equal than others. They’re just jealous because celebrities are hot and they are not. If they’re so equal then why don’t they try a game of one-on-one basketball with mega celebrity Michael Jordan? Why don’t they try to out sing and dance hot mega celebrity Justin Timberlake? Or even try to do math homework better than a paralyzed quasi celebrity like Stephen Hawking? Please. Celebrities kick ass, and little people pass gas. If I had any doubt in my mind of my status as a future mega-celebrity I couldn’t even stand to look at my face in the mirror. Quasi 19th-century celebrity Fredrick Nietzche said, “If there are gods, how can I stand it to be no god?” As a 21st-century future mega-celebrity I say if there are celebrities then how can I stand it to be no celebrity? To paraphrase quasi celebrity FDR: “There is nothing to fear, but the possibility of not being a celebrity itself.” Or as former mega celebrity JFK put it, “Ask not what celebrities can do for you, ask what you can do for celebrities.” Or how about super star celebrity Jesus Christ who said, “What if a man should gain his own soul, but lose all world-wide recognition?” Jesus knew that it was better to be crucified by jealous celebrity haters than to live longer but die in obscurity with the little people. Jesus knew that even when a mega celebrity like Michael Jackson undergoes a melt down, their nose is still more interesting than the entire lives of a million little people. Jesus wasn’t afraid to be a celebrity even though he knew that little people would persecute him out of jealousy. Jesus was the first celebrity to really get it about branding and logos. Last time I checked there are more references to Chrisitanity and more crosses on all sorts of products world-wide than even mega celebrity corporation Nike, and the cross icon beats out the Nike Swoosh in both longevity and sheer numbers hands down. And when it comes to viral marketing, Christianity literally wrote the book. That’s super star celebrity power for you rockin’ down the centuries, rockin’ down the millennia in the case of Jesus Chirst Super Star Celebrity. So next time some little guy or gal is blah blah blahing it about their own dumb little lives tell them to get with the program, tell them to shut up and listen to the all star cast, tell them that no one in a world with red hot celebrities like JLo and Jesus wants to hear little people yakking. So next time a mega celebrity like Arnie Schwarzenegger sacrifices a really happening movie career to give little folk a chance to live under celebrity rule let’s stand up to these jealous media types who just want to tear down our greatest celebrities with dumb scandals. (Like those little women weren’t dying to get groped by MR. UNIVERSE himself. Please.) You’re either with the celebrities or they are against you. Together we can make a new world order where celebrities get what they truly deserve and we smoke those little people out of their holes. Asta la vista little folk. Rock on celebrities. United we stand.

© 2005 Jonathan Zap

Note: This is a working copy of an unfinished treatise on androgny as the key to unlock many of the mysteries of: the 6,000 years of feminine-hating dominator societies that continue to rule our world, key forms of religious extremism, the torturous enchantments of romantic relations, gender identity, how to regain a wholeness that we lost when we become fractured into a form that allows the matrix to bind us, and the core meaning of the ring symbolism and other aspects of the Tolkien mythology.  That’s a fairly tall order and I am open to your feedback as to whether I seem to b e succeeding with such (grandiose?) ambitions.   Given the density of the subject matter you can expect writing with a lot of density, but I’m hoping that it is readable  for you, the perceptive reader, —let me know if it is for you…..—-the title is just a working title, it will almost certainly change , but the word “Androgyny “will be in there somewhere….Also the introduction—here just a paragraph—–will be a page or two when finished… At a few points, especially at the beginning, I have some questions or comments for the unfinished draft reader.  Some people have liked the way it is written, one very intelligent person, but who says he doesn’t read much any more, found the vocabulary and phrasings unnecessarily difficult. That’s a concern, because I want this to readable, not for everybody, but at least for perceptive readers I don’t want to be creating unnecessary stumbling blocks. Most of my nonfiction writing has departed from the scholarly voice, but here I have gone back to it and that may be a mistake from the point of view of accessibility.  The scholarly voice can also become a narcissistic affectation and I value feedback on whether that seems to be happening.

ANDROGYNY , ALCHEMY, EVOLUTION AND THE ONE RING

© Copyright 2004 Jonathan Zap

(the single introductory paragraph that follows is more of a working outline of a roughly four part structure)

Androgyny is the key that unlocks many of the most difficult paradoxes and delusions of the interlocking realms of eros, religion, psychology, gender relations, spirituality and sexuality. This treatise on androgyny will begin with a discourse on what androgyny is and isn’t, its history and role in human development individually and historically. The second part will employ androgyny as a key to unlock the ring symbolism of the Tolkien mythology which will expand the meaning of androgyny and illustrate its extreme relevance to the present human predicament individually and collectively. (This section, and many other Tolkien allusions scattered throughout, may be a problem for people who are completely unfamiliar with the Tolkien mythology. I could give a synopsis of the story as an appendix, but that seems like a poor way for someone to be introduced to Tolkien) The third part will discuss the five thousand year era of patriarchal, dominator  societies, theories about their origin, and the millennia long campaign against women and the feminine. It will consider evidence of a cycle shift underway, as well as dreams and mythologies that reflect a metamorphosis of gender.  The fourth and last part will suggest ways to integrate androgyny into our psyches and lives.

My understanding of androgyny is greatly indebted to June Singer, a fellow Jungian, who has done by far the best formal study of androgyny. Our lives paralleled a little bit, June Singer is apparently Jewish and from New York . I met her briefly at a Jungian conference in New York in the Eighties, and in the introduction to her book Androgyny she particularly thanks Werner Engle, a colleague of Jung whom I also knew as well as his nephew Jonathan Goldberg, also a Jungian analyst, who is a close friend of mine. I was talking to Jonathan Goldberg when June Singer approached us at the conference.   I believe her book on Androgyny (Androgyny: The Opposites Within —an earlier edition had a different title: Androgyny Toward a New Theory of Sexuality ) is one of the most important books of the 20^th century.   (Note:  Just visited with Jonathan Goldberg when I was last in New York , he told me that June Singer died just this year and more about her relationship with his uncle, Werner Engle.)

Another book on androgyny which deserves some pioneering credit for probably being the first published book to have the word androgyny in the title is Toward a Recognition of Androgyny by Carolyn G. Heilbrun. It was published just three years before Singer’s book. Unfortunately, it is no where near as insightful or useful. Ms. Heilbrun, who was an English professor at Columbia (an advocate for suicide as a conscious choice, she exercised her escape clause a year or two ago) seems to find the Western academic canon of literature to be the only part of the phenomenal world worthy of attention. For example, she makes the absurd statement that, “… America has not produced a novel whose androgynous implications match those of The Scarlet Letter …”  Has Ms. Heilbrun, or anyone, read every novel produced in America since The Scarlet Letter debuted in 1850? I don’t think so. She just assumes that anything that hasn’t come to her attention as an English professor can’t possibly have merit, and typical of the parochial academic literary critic doesn’t even bother to consider the whole genre of fantasy literature, which is actually the mainstream of literature, and in which she would find much more about androgyny than she or Nathaniel Hawthorne ever dreamed of.

Rather than putting her work into my words, I am going to introduce June Singer’s work on androgyny through a collection of quotes. This is no substitute for reading Androgyny: The Opposites Within which is a real master work. Quotations are presented in italics, where words are underlined that is her emphasis not mine.

(These quotes will probably be paraphrased in a finished version.  Most are so well phrased that rewriting them hasn’t seemed like a priority yet.)

Androgyny may be the oldest archetype of which we still have any experience.

Find it in Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Platonic tradition, but expunged from Judeo-Christianity

The androgyne will not be discovered by turning outward into the world, but by turning inward into ourselves. It is a subtle body, that is to say “nonmaterial”…androgyny is a state of consciousness that is far from ordinary, and therefore it threatens many people’s state of equilibrium. Second, androgyny threatens many presuppositions about individuals’ identity as men or as women, and hence threatens the security of those people, including most of us.

The androgyne approaches the problem with the recognition that true change begins primarily within the psychic structure of the individual. Here is where the androgyne differs fundamentally from the bisexual. If the concerns of the bisexual are mainly interpersonal, those of the androgyne are mainly intrapsychic.

The androgyny principle is intuitively experienced as the key that unlocks the prison of sex and gender—a key that is available to anyone who has the courage and imagination to make use of it.

Dionysus is kept in the women’s quarters and disguised as a girl in order to keep him from being discovered by Hera. He is treated and educated like a girl and he grows up to be effeminate. Unable to differentiate feminine from masculine functioning in himself, he scarcely knows who he is. Like an eternal youth he wanders over the world, changing shape, going mad, drinking himself into insensibility, living the abandonment of total nature and, like nature, experiencing the cycles of death and rebirth.
Dionysus is not the true androgyne any more than Hippolyte was, for he has not come to peace with his feminine side. His masculine and feminine aspects are not fused, they are merely confused…
Dionysus as god of madness, ecstasy, drunkenness and frenzy—was given to wild outbursts of excitement, performed preferably before an audience.

This description of Dionysus also tells us that many of the rock stars described as androgynous, like the young Mick Jagger, were channeling the Dionysus archetype, but not androgynous as Singer defines the term. Singer very incisively points out that our culture tends to provide representations of only the immature, confused and acting out face of androgny. This type of person, where masculine and feminine are confused, Singer terms “ hermaphrodite ,” and she reserves the term “ androgyne ” for those in whom masculine and feminine are fused and integrated.

Singer quotes James Hillman in The Myth of Analysis ,

….the peculiar tendency in our own culture to suppress these androgynous images. I noted that when such images do appear, they show themselves not so much as true androgynes, with their compensatory masculine/feminine aspects working in harmonious relationship to one another, but rather as the imperfect, incomplete, distorted image of the hermaphrodite. Such an image is the double-sexed Dionysus, whose borderline nature makes it impossible to tell whether he is “mad or sane, wild or somber, sexual or psychic, male or female, conscious or unconscious.”

In popular speech people continually confuse androgynes, hermaphrodites, and bisexuals. For example, in Dan Brown’s run away best seller The Da Vinci Code, the protagonist, Robert Langdon, is lecturing a group of prisoners on Leonardo Da Vinci:

… Da Vinci was in tune with the balance between male and female. He believed a human soul could not be enlightened unless it had both male and female elements.”
“You mean like chicks with dicks?” someone called out.

Brown may be contributing to the confusion somewhat by using the terms “male” and “female” which imply anatomical differences. Jungians use the terms “feminine” and “masculine” to refer to the complimentary archetypal principles which the Chinese called “yin” and “yang.” Masculine and feminine, yin and yang, exist in all human beings. It is not uncommon at all for a particular female to be far more masculine than a particular male. A couple of years ago I gave a talk about Tolkien and androgyny and began by carefully explaining this distinction. Despite this, at the end of the talk I was amazed to get several comments (especially from women in the audience) who thought I was stereotyping men and women when I was referring to masculine and feminine. People are so used to being stereotyped by their gender that even these archetypal terms can generate automatic defenses. So let me state one more time: masculine does not equate with men, feminine does not equate with women, these are archetypal qualities all humans possess and from the point of view of androgyny need to be acknowledged and integrated parts of all self-actualizing people.

(Question for the reader:  Someone who just read this draft, said that even though I explain this difference between archetypal masculine and feminine and the usual use of these terms to stereotype males and females, that it was still confusing to read these terms and have to translate them in her mind.  She suggested that I substitute “yin” and “yang” for “feminine” and “masculine.”  I am continuing with masculine and feminine temporarily, but if others find these terms to be dissonant than I will switch to yin and yang.  Please let me know your feeling about it.)

The first mention of the androgyne in Greek Philosophy is in Plato’s Symposium . Aristophanes is speaking:

[The] original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two, as they are now, but originally three in number; there was a man, woman and a union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which once had a real existence, but is now lost, and the word “Androgynous” is only preserved as a term of reproach.

Aristophanes describes the original humans as spherical, and containing both genders, but Zeus, wanting to humble them, divided them in half,

Each of us, when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and is always looking for his other half…the intense yearning which each of them has for the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

The movie, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, a wonderfully creative and funny film about a transexual entertainer, includes an animated version of Aristophane’s mythology of the androgyne. In an interview, the movie’s creator and star compares Hedwig’s blonde wig to the One Ring of the Tolkien books! The non-androgynous person (Hedwig would have to be considered an hermaphrodite) will crave another to complete them in the obsessive way that Gollum seeks to be reconnected to his Precious. As Singer puts it,

In the hope of achieving the feeling of love, this mystical joining of two beings into primordial oneness, people will do the most ill-advised things, beyond all reason. The loss of love can drive people to murder or suicide. …The archetype of the Androgyne is at the base of much of the anxiety that surrounds love, and especially it is connected with the emotions of jealousy, because it points to the fear of being torn asunder from that other.

(Lack of androgyny can lead to infatuation with another) person who is required to be present for the rounding out of one’s own personality—-who is, in fact, required for one’s very existence.

Singer relates the loss of androgyny to the Perennial Philosophy and the densifying precession of four ages which have involved a fall from light, wholeness and androgyny (for parallels see The Mutant Vs. the Machine…, A Splinter in your Mind and Clock-Time Metastasizes toward 2012 ). Singer writes,

…as we examine more mythological systems we will observe a consistent theme in which each succeeding world is of a lesser quality than that which preceded it. We saw this in the Greek system, with its progression from Golden to Silver to Bronze to Iron ages.

The four fold structure of mythology: ….Creation and the created world we know and live in belongs to the fourth stage. By this time the Primal Androgyne has either fallen from the spernal sphere to earth or the androgynous figure has split in two—and then perhaps into many parts—lost its immortality, and finally become human.

From my point of view the ultimate outer form of the androgyne would be that of a mercurial shape-shifter. Inwardly, the androgyne is a shape-shifter and inter-dimensional traveler connected to the axis mundi. As a changeling, the outer manifestation of the androgyne would alter to accord with the vicissitudes of psychic intentionality and circumstance. Singer points out that the Gnostics had a similar idea about Christ:

Another Gnostic conceptualization of the Son of Man is that he is Aipolos, the pole (also a pun on the Greek word for goat herd, the one who must turn in all directions).This figure is symbolized by Mercurius, the ever-elusive trickster who is of essence but whom one cannot grasp; also Proteus, the shape shifter, in whom every quality exists in potentia.

Although the New Testament tells us virtually nothing about Christ’s appearance, he has almost always been depicted as rather androgynous, though it is more likely that he was short, stocky, and swarthy with lots of body hair. Popular Science recently funded a study on what Jesus most likely looked like. They consulted experts in anthropology and came up with a computer composite image that would be much more likely to draw the attention of airport security than the approval of many Christians used to the androgynous, Nordic Jesus. How he is imagined to look, however, may be far more appropriate from the point of view of archetypal projection, since he has always been the bearer of an androgynous message. It is always amazing to me how right wing Christians (a recent president comes to mind) manage to take the prophet of “turn the other cheek” and “the meek shall inherit the earth” and turn his message into macho, “Onward Christian Soldiers” posturing. It is especially the Jesus who was edited out of the New Testament (mostly by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine) who expresses an alchemical gnosis of androgyny.

… .from the Gnostic Gospel According to Thomas:
..Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into as single one, so that the male will not be male and the female (not) be female…then shall you enter (the Kingdom).

Singer adds,

Androgyny is the act of becoming more conscious and therefore more whole …

Singer follows Jung’s lead into alchemy, recognizing it as a science of human transformation, with much to say about androgyny. The Taoist I Ching , which employs an alchemical metaphor throughout, emphasizes the need for the conscious person to follow the path of “reverse alchemy” to regain their original essence. Acquired conditioning, beginning at birth, separates us from our original nature and wholeness, and the conditioning acquired from any culture is always full of gender role conditioning. Aristophane’s myth goes further and suggests that human incarnation, incarnating into a gender specific body, is itself a departure from wholeness. Recent research demonstrates that a good part of gender differences which were believed to be culturally conditioned, turn out to have very strong biological underpinnings. Regaining androgyny, therefore, may be more difficult than even the heroic efforts necessary to break free of acquired conditioning. Some gender limitations may be over-determined, with part of their determinative influence locked down even into our DNA . To become androgynous may be analogous to trying to break the source code of the matrix, which is multi-layered, including both social and genetic coding.

The alchemists, and consciousness pioneers like Jung and Gurdjieff, understood that their work was “contra naturum , ” it was against the enormous inertial mass of nature or matrix ( “matrix” actually means mother). Gurdjieff even said that the work to not be mechanical was “ against God .” At first glance it would seem that such an effort would be the supreme violation of the Taoist principle of working with, rather than against, cosmic forces. But as I’ve written elsewhere (see The Taoist Path on the web site) it is our “ true will ” (a phrase I am borrowing from Alistair Crowley) which is our deepest inner refraction of the Tao and the aspect of the Tao to be followed above all others. True will is the inner core of our harmony with the cosmos, and this will is to be followed no matter what resistance is met with socially, politically, and even biologically.

The alchemists seemed to know what was at stake, and how deep into the rabbit hole they really had to go to regain their freedom and original wholeness. To break free of the matrix they first had to break down existing structures, to regain the prima materia out of which structures are created. Mixing alchemical and computer metaphors, this would be a cauldron of ones and zeros, undifferentiated potential for informational or psychic structure. Psychically, psychologically, spiritually this requires the dark night of the soul which some, in both tribal and modern contexts, seek to bring on with the use of ordeal poisons and/or hallucinogens. A series of paintings in Alex Grey’s visionary book, Sacred Mirrors , illustrates this process. We see a healer or potential shaman ascending a mountain. At one point he seems to be blown apart into a horrifically surreal explosion of body parts. This is a brilliant visual representation of the dark night of the soul (what the alchemists called the “nigredo” ), the death of an ego identity, the necessary destruction of structure to create new form. Some initiates voluntarily choose to bring this on by self-created initiations—–fasting and wilderness isolation, hallucinogens, etc. There are advantages to the self-initiated metamorphosis in that it is consciously chosen, but there are also grave dangers.

A few years ago, at the Penny Lane coffee shop in Boulder , a very enthusiastic young woman told me how she was involved in a new education program for kids which would involve “tribal initiations in the wilderness.” Although not wishing to deflate her enthusiasm, I felt forced to tell her that actually she was talking about arts and crafts in the woods, that tribal initiations were impossible for any legally constituted school in our society because you would have to be willing to have some initiates die or go insane.

Self-initiations must be dangerous. If the self-initiate is fortunate, the danger proves lethal to ego structures but allows other healthy tissue to survive and reconfigure. But many self-initiations, just as those induced by the tribal collective, are shattering to the body or sanity of the initiate.  There is always the danger that the self-initiate has presumed upon their inner strength, and like the naïve, young hero ends up devoured.

Another form of initiation is not self-initiated but is induced by the shocks that life supplies. (see Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ) Shamans often have histories of medical emergencies and/or other brushes with death in their youth. Another form of shock that could induce initiation is love shock. Someone with a great inner potential for consciousness may seek wholeness in the conventional way, through infatuation with another incomplete human, and in the shattering aftermath may sacrifice an identity and become more whole. An outcome of wholeness is relatively rare, and the more likely course is that one seeks another love object or becomes a depressed version of the former self.

The alchemists are self-induced initiates and well aware of the depth, scope and acute peril of what they undertake. Their endeavor could aptly be described by Galadriel’s words to the Ring Fellowship: “Your quest rests upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and you will fall to the ruin of all . ”

What follows are a number of interesting quotes from Singer’s exposition on androgyny and alchemy:   (probably to be paraphrased in a finished draft, certainly introduced better)

Gnosticism is Mater Alchimica, the Mother of Alchemy.

There was thought to have existed before Creation a chaotic prime substance. This was referred to in alchemy as the prima materia.

The intent of the alchemists, or so many believed, was to gain control of the prime matter and recombine it so that they could fashion substances of their own choosing and design. In other words, they would initiate their own process of creation. …they admitted that their work was an opus contra naturam. In this monumental task they were forever inveighing against hubris. …

…each metal had a masculine or feminine association that corresponded with the planetary power: gold-sun-masculine, silver-moon-feminine, copper-Venus-feminine, iron-Mars-masculine…

The alchemists worked in male/female pairs in a process referred to as the alchymical wedding

The crux of the process is the engagement with the prima materia, and this is symbolized in the problematic figure of “mercurious” in whom all things were supposedly combined. The opposites are present in him at the start of the process, but not yet differentiated.

Mercurius, also called Hermes, is not only the receptacle of the prima materia and the symbol for it, he is also the agent of transformation.

Mercurius is frequently depicted as an hermaphrodite, an image designed to reflect the nature of Divinity, which is “All in One.” The mythical teacher Hermes Trimegistus, in revealing his secrets to Asclepius, says: “God has no name, or rather he has all names, since he is at once One and All. Infinitely rich with the fertility of both sexes, he is continuously bringing to birth all those things which he planned to create.” The young healer god then asks: “What, you say that God has both sexes, Trismegistus?” “Yes, Asclepius, and not God alone but all beings animate and vegetable.”
The elements with which the alchemists work are seen through the dark glass of symbol and metaphor as bipolar constructs: “Sun-moon,” “sulfur-salt,” “King-queen,” “heaven-earth,” “fire-water,” “living-dead,” “open-occult” and, of course, “masculine-feminine.” The work on the soul is an integral, though not always stated or understood, part of the process. This means being able to commit oneself to the work, to put into a secondary space the purely personal and ego concerns (the psychological concomitant of the earth-centered world view) and to see oneself as part and parcel of the entire universe. The image to be held before one is that every act by every person has an effect on all, changing the delicate balance that keeps the universe in motion. Therefore, it was considered necessary by the alchemists to so conduct their work and their lives, which were really the same thing, as if the salvation of the world depended upon it.
The breaking down of substances into the prima materia would bring about the stage called the nigredo, which is characterized by the utter blackness of the original chaos. It is a period of destruction and despair, and it is absolutely essential to the process. It has its parallel in mystical literature as the “dark night of the soul”…akin to what is experienced by an individual as deep depression, either suffering a physical illness or beset by a dis-ease, a weariness of soul…The kind of healing they seek is what the word “healing” essentially means; that is, “to be made whole…The object of this stage was to bring about a condition where a new union could take place between opposites which have been broken down through the agency of operations personified in Mercurius.”

From the Zohar (the classic Kabbalistic text) :…when they (the masculine and the feminine) unite, they look as if they were one body. From this we learn the masculine by itself is like only one part of a body, and the feminine also. But when they join together as a whole, then they appear as one real body.
….Therefore we know: what is only masculine or only feminine is called only part of the body. But no blessing rules over a faulty or incomplete thing, but only over a complete place, not one that is divided, for divided things cannot long endure or be blessed.

The Gnostics and the Hindus, among others, saw the reality we experience as matrix or “Maya” —a deception or delusion. The awakened androgynous person is able to transcend this delusion:

The Indians saw the world as a construct of the Great Goddess whom they call Maya, who measures out time and space, both in an important sense delusory.

…the embodied Self is freed from the enchantment of the flesh and passes into the sate of rapture known as samadhi.

The paths of Kundalini Yoga, Tantra, T’ai Chi and Chi Gung are Eastern alchemical paths that open the possibility, for advanced initiates, to reconfigure themselves energetically and restore their lost androgyny:

What is so strongly potent about Kundalini is the realization which it brings of the possibility for some individuals to come to a unity within themselves, a unity consisting of the interplay of energy and matter, the feminine and the masculine, the bodily experience and the spiritual experience. This path is difficult, arduous and demanding, but Kundalini Yoga offers one possibility for achieving one’s androgynous potential. It requires a rigidly ascetic discipline; it leads its adherents to the experience of our temporal world as illusory and of little value in comparison with the attainment of non-dual awareness of the “undivided Whole,” the non-separability of the created and the Increate.

…the Buddhist Tantra stressed the androgynous being of the transformed, enlightened individual…

The I Ching and Taoism are both centered on the principle of androgyny which is perfectly expressed in the T’ai chi symbol or yin-yang, where the masculine (yang) and feminine (yin) each contain their opposite and are dynamic parts of a unified whole. The sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching are the sixty-four possible combinations of yin and yang lines into patterns of six. (for more on the I Ching see I Ching Readings and Dream Interpretation ). Singer writes,

If there were a ritual dance of the androgyne, T’ai chi as performed by this master could be that dance. It is neither a masculine dance nor a feminine dance. It has the strength and grace of both…The moving outward portion of the cycle belongs to the phase of the Masculine, Yang, the moving inward to the Feminine, Yin.

T’ai chi, the dance of life, can be done with the whole body, it can be turned into a work of calligraphy on a sheet of white paper, it can find its way into the art of painting, into music, into the cultivation of a garden, and into the act of love. Always it is the art of asymmetrical balancing, in which the flow between the opposites is so exquisitely smooth as to be almost indiscernible. The energy is never spent; it is always put forth and then drawn back. When the dancer stops he has more vitality than when he began.

Singer discusses the two hemispheres of the brain, connected by a dense bundle of nerves, the corpus callosum, as parallel to the dual nature of human beings (Keep in mind as left and right are discussed that in right-handed people, the right hemisphere controls the left side of the body, the right hemisphere the left.),

In the early part of the present century, most brain research emphasized the superiority of the left hemisphere functions of the brain, primarily the intellectual, verbal, analytic capacities that tradition has associated with the masculine mind.

In a study of the myth and symbolism of left and right, G. William Domhoff finds that the left is often the area of the taboo, the sacred, the unconscious, the feminine, the intuitive and the dreamer.

In Fritjof Capra’s book, The Web of Life , he emphasizes the dialectic of two great forces in nature—-the integrative and the self-assertive. Our society obviously idolizes the self-assertive tendency while more earth-based cultures emphasize the integrative. Singer discusses Arthur J. Deikman who seems to have had a similar conception,

Arthur J. Deikman, in considering the infinite variety and rapid shifts of psychological and physiological states in an individual, concluded that there were two primary modes of organization: an “action” mode and a “receptive” mode. The action mode is the one that is organized to “manipulate the environment, while the receptive mode is organized around intake of the environment rather than manipulation.” He points out the need for recognizing the relativity of the different modes, rather than assigning absolute primacy and validity to the one with which we are most familiar; namely, the “action”mode.

Singer introduces Robert Ornstein’s research into the nature of consciousness,

Ornstein expressed the view that it is the polarity and the integration of these two, the intellectual and the intuitive, that underlie some of the highest achievements of mankind

Singer and Ornstein would be the first to acknowledge that these two terms, intellectual and intuitive , are an oversimplification, but the need to efficiently language this distinction forces us into a certain degree of reduction. Recognizing this difficulty Ornstein has prepared a chart to illustrate some of the ways the distinction between day-night, masculine-feminine consciousness has been understood by a variety of sources from the ancient to the modern:

THE TWO MODES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Tentative Dichotomy

The emphasis on words may abstract the living realities of these forces. Understanding how these forces work in you and others is necessary to ground this distinction. Using myself as an example, it took me a while to recognize the androgynous nature of my own mind as I was brought up in a family and culture that emphasizes the intellectual, analytical, and verbal modalities as the leading edge of perception and that which validates insights. When I was younger I identified with that side of mind and didn’t recognize what now seems obvious—–intuition was always the leading edge of my mind, the analytic and verbal followed behind processing the information streaming in from intuition. I have also noticed that others frequently misperceive me in the same way that I misunderstood myself— because I was brought up to favor a mode of detached analysis, people hearing me talk, or reading what I write, often have the false impression that what I am communicating is the result of a sequence of analytical thoughts. Actually the primary process is intuitive and analytical thinking and verbalizing come in as a secondary process. Since the “finished product” is often a set of words presented in a tone of detached analysis, the secondary process is the more visible and manifest and seems to be the driving force. Now that I have recognized that my mind is a melding of intuition and analysis I have also shifted to discussing ideas (at least some of the time) in a more intuitive, surreal style ( Stop the Hottie! , and Vision at Chichen Itza are examples). One of the general implications of my particular case is that the process of becoming androgynous is largely a matter of inner recognition rather than transformation. I was always more intuitive than intellectual, but recognizing that allowed me to transform, to become more who I always was in my essence, and that process is not finished, as I age I notice that I am becoming more and more comfortable with allowing intuition to be the leading edge.

Often I find that the most intelligent young people I meet have identified with their thinking process. My intuition reveals that they are more powerfully intuitive, but some inner bias in them causes them to discard intuitions. My intuition senses their intuition as active and online, and it used to shock me when I would catch on that they were not reading or accessing their intuitions, because they have a prejudice that this source of information is not as valid as thinking. I find myself trying to communicate to these unrealized intuitives how much more empowered they would be if they learned how to meld intuition and intellect so that intuition was the leading edge (see also discussion of the hierarchy of psychic functions in Part II of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ).

A less intelligent sort of person I frequently run into in counter cultural circles has rebelled from the intellectual and analytical altogether, dismissing it as a patriarchal constraint. They believe themselves to be beyond the intellectual when they are actually not up to its mark, so they prefer to scorn that which they desperately need, but in which they are desperately incompetent. This rebellion does not, of course, empower their intuition but rather turns their psyches into a lunar landscape of complete confusion where discernment is entirely lacking. They falsely believe they are involved in occult or metaphysical study when actually their minds consist of a mushy hodgepodge of fragmented urban legends, “can you top this” bits of pseudo-esoteric lore, New Age clichés, etc. Their “study” mostly consists of narcissistically excited bull sessions in which they proffer bits of this inner refuse to anyone that will join them in kind or even pretend to listen to them. They personify what Singer identifies as “hermaphrodites” rather than androgynes. The androgyne values and is skilled in intuitive and intellectual abilities.

Singer credits Ornstein with recognizing that the passing age is characterized by its tendency to polarize the left and right, the lunar and solar modalities of consciousness. You are either a “serious” scientist or thinker or you are an artist, mystic or freak. But the present dilemmas and Swords of Damacles hanging over our heads will not be understood or addressed by those who work out of only one hemisphere of consciousness.  We need people, like Jung, who had both hemispheres firing, the androgynous mind, to comprehend what is happening to us.

A radical surgical treatment for grand mal epilepsy involves severing the corpus callosum ( the dense bundle of nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain). It was discovered that these two hemispheres, each of them connected to a different eye, were forced to work independently so that when patients who had undergone this procedure closed one eye they could read words but not comprehend pictures, and if they closed the other eye they could recognize pictures but not name what they were seeing. Singer makes an excellent point that this surgical procedure can be viewed as the ultimate symbolic act of the age of Pisces, the Age of Polarities. The Internet, which in just a few years has come to be a global central nervous system, may be seen as a technology of the Aquarian Age since it wires everyone together and since it involves word, sound and image it has the potential to engage both hemispheres and to wire many billions of brains or psyches into one interconnected system.
(For more on hemispheric dominance and precession of ages see section later in this essay on the One Ring and language and also on The Alphabet vs. the Goddess .)

Although we are already experiencing aspects of the Aquarian Age, the Age of Pisces still seems to be in power, especially politically. Singer quotes the following classic lines from Yeats to describe the situation at the end of the age of Pisces, the situation we still seem to be in:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity .—-W.B. Yeats

Singer suggests that Systems Theory may be a mythology of the Aquarian Age which she expects to be an age of androgyny. Although as a Jungian Singer recognizes mythology as a far more substantial thing than the way most people hear that word (many people hear it as a bunch of nonsense and superstition ), I think that Systems Theory might more aptly be called a paradigm of the Age of Androgyny. Singer writes,

As we move into the Age of Aquarius (which may come to be designated as the Age of Androgyny), no one would be surprised to discover that a new myth is emerging. Naturally it manifests as have all the other myths, in the guise of a “sacred truth”; only this time the truth is designated as science: The Systems View of the Universe. Systems theory does not announce itself as a mythology; no mythology ever does.

Indeed, Systems Theory does seem like an inevitable evolutionary correction of Western thought and science which has gone to such extremes in dividing, reducing, and compartmentalizing knowledge and investigation. Systems Theory recognizes what the I Ching long before recognized, that everything is a pattern of energy and change embedded in other patterns of energy and change interwoven with all patterns of energy and change and harmonizing with the principles of energy and change found everywhere.

As Singer puts it,

…. the universe is not lying in fragments at the feet of the philosopher. Nor are the polarities “worlds apart” in reality. The world is characterized by a remarkable degree of consistency and coherence. If we do not see it that way, it is because of the limitations of our own capacities—the elephant is not divided into pieces because the blind men are only able to sense its parts.

Inner and outer are not the irreconcilable opposites which they were for Descartes and are for many in science,

Inwardness, called “psyche,” and outwardness, called “world” may appear to be in opposition to one another. From a more encompassing viewpoint they may be seen simply as two systems, one subsystem contained within another larger system.

….We need to recognize that we are members of an interrelated series of systems which all obey the same principles and have a common theme.

Some people in the New Age, particularly those who have dabbled in Eastern practice, have swung with the pendulum to a new extreme or one-sideness. They will monotonously insist on the oneness of everything no matter what is being discussed, and use this obvious reality as a way of leveling all difference, distinction and discernment. This point of view can be even more limiting than the tunnel vision of the reductive thinker, since at least the reductive thinker is still thinking about and investigating something , no matter how much they may miss of the infinite context of the something. This type of New Ager, however, takes oneness as a truism that relieves them of the need for thinking, discrimination and discernment and pulls it out of the hat, like the most tired of magician’s rabbits, whenever any issue requiring discernment appears. Recognizing that individuals or groups that are in conflict are part of the same oneness is crucial, but it is also crucial to recognize their individual differences and what sets them apart. The great American pioneer psychologist William James wrote around nineteen hundred that besides the oneness of things, anyone who glances at the phenomenal world should also be struck by the eachness of things, we see a world of unique individual trees and people, for example, and not a homogenous mass of treeness or undifferentiated pool of humanity. The androgynous mind recognizes that there is both oneness and eachness, these are the two poles of the paradox that must be held in mind to understand both interrelation and individuality.

Quite often the same person who is a proponent of the oneness of things will unconsciously switch to reductive dualism and the next minute be preaching to the choir of like minded friends about the badness (and implied otherness) of corporations, environmental destruction, etc. One of the first challenges I face when trying to explain my evolutionary theories is to get people to step out of the box of literal ego judgments that is sure of what’s good or bad for evolution. If I were talking to Christian Fundamentalists (which I’m not, of course) this limiting dualism would not be so objectionable, because there is no false advertising involved. What is really maddening is talking to the New Ager who if they are not preaching about the oneness of things are telling you about the badness and wrongness of everything they don’t like (always something human associated) which they will inevitably damn with their harshest of epithets, their version of the Mark of the Beast, the fiery brand of “ unnaturalness. ”  Whenever you hear the words “ natural ” or “ unnatural ” being used you are almost certainly in the presence of sloppy thinking. The Fundamentalist tells you that homosexuality is unnatural though it is displayed by thousands of species, and the same people who condemn the simple-mindedness of the Fundamentalist will tell you that everything modern man does is unnatural. Let’s get this one concept of interrelation straight: Nothing is outside of nature. Therefore nothing is unnatural or supernatural . Mother nature created a technology extruding primate, so if what we’re doing is “wrong” you might as well blame M.N. as G. M. for pollution and other human pathologies.

Of course, what I just said is still only one side of the paradox, there is a meaningful discrimination to be made between, for example, eating a toxic diet of processed foods and eating a diet of live, organic whole food. But furless primates who choose to eat poison are still part of nature, part of the Tao, and what doesn’t make sense to someone’s preferences, may make perfect sense if understood out of the judgment box and seen as part of an unexpected web of connections. (For more on the false use of “natural” and the paradoxical nature of evolution see Chaper V of my book The Capsule of Intentionality and Part IV of A Guide to the Perplexed Interdimensional Traveler ).

Singer quotes one of the original systems theorists, Buckminster Fuller:

What seems to be important at the moment is never what is really going on. For the bee, it is the honey that is important; for Nature, what matters is the cross-pollination the bee effects in going after the nectar. So also, 99 per cent chromosomically programmed humans have been doing the right things for the wrong reasons. What we think of as side events are really Evolution’s main events. How events and discoveries will cohere is unforeseeable. The one sure thing is that cohere they will. The “Planner” incarnates the human mistake of supposing that Universe is waiting for human beings to make the major evolutionary decisions.

Of course, the honey for the bee is also important for nature, but the principle is sound. As Singer points out,

Fuller is the generalist par excellence…One of his favorite priniciples is synergy , a word that means the unexpected interaction of parts in combination.

Jung, himself a master generalist, decried the growing prevalence of soulless experts which increasingly characterizes our society (see “Crossing the Great Stream …” an article I wrote for Holistic Education Review ). The “expert” is almost the opposite of the androgyne. The focus on expertise in academics and science tends toward that well known syndrome of knowing more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The androgynous mind is a generalist mind, it may have expertise in certain areas, but will not become so married to its expertise that it will be unable to see the gestalt of things, it will instead be able to thrive on the serendipitous synergy of different fields of knowledge. This is what characterizes a great Renaissance thinker, and androgyne, like Leonardo Da Vinci who was creative in arts and sciences. Another of the great Renaissance androgyne is William Shakespeare. His androgyny is not reducible to his bisexuality (the classic love sonnets were written for a male youth), it is his ability to project himself empathically and with great penetration into such a wide spectrum of human types of every age and gender. Shakespeare pioneered the rediscovery of androgynous “ Green Worlds ” (see  A Splinter in Your Mind ). When the characters in As You Like It find themselves in the Green World of the Forest of Arden, gender bending ( a boy plays a girl who plays a boy who pretends to be a girl) becomes the key to unlock their various neurotic dilemmas. Although androgyny may seem to be worked out interpersonally, remembering that Shakespeare created all the characters from within you can see As You Like It as manifestation and realization of his own intrapsychic androgyny.

There is a strange way in which my interest in androgyny, the Tolkien Mythology and Singer’s book intersect, and oddly enough it has to do with masturbation (hereafter I will omit the word masturbation and instead use auto-eroticism which is not a euphemism, but a more accurate term, as masturbation defines only a physical act of manipulating genitals while auto-eroticism encompasses a type of eros with much larger implications.)

For most of the time I have had a connection with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, since I was twenty or so, I had been extremely uneasy about the ring symbolism of the trilogy. Since the ring is a circle, and the circle is the classic symbol of wholeness and the self (the Sankrit definition of God is: “ A circle whose center is everywhere, and circumference is nowhere ”) I was rather suspicious of the need for it to be destroyed. I was aware of Tolkien’s orthodox Catholicism and felt that it might be the source of Tolkien’s antagonism toward any human, or human-like individual possessing a symbol of divine wholeness. I felt that Tolkien’s hostility toward the ring came from a problem with what I call “ location of the Godhead .”

I am minimizing here the use of the word “ God ” because it is so forever contaminated by anthropomorphisms and emotionally charged projections of such variety that using the term only invites confusion and tends to widen the gap of miscommunication between the person employing the term and their audience. Instead I am using the term “ Godhead ,” which has various dictionary definitions, but I am using it to mean that which is divine and the source of divine emanation . Like all definitions this is imprecise and circular, but hopefully the meaning will emerge.

The healthy, androgynous way to locate the Godhead I believed, and still believe, is to see it located everywhere.  Again, this is like the Sanskrit definition of God as, “ A circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is no where .” In the Eastern salutation “ Namaste ,” one is acknowledging the divinity of the other person. It is not just in them, but in oneself and in everyone and everything. In other words, everything that we experience is part of the “ mind of God .” Viewing everything as the Godhead may be the position most in accord with the findings of physics. Once the monad , or indivisible constituent of reality, was believed to be a small particle. This was first postulated by the Greek atomists and continued until Einstein when matter was shown to be not a particle but  a special case of energy. Matter turned out to be mostly empty space and a more congealed form of energy. The universe came to be recognized as a flow of patterned energy. Now many physicists are saying that the universe is more accurately considered a flow of information. Physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Amit Goswami go a step further and say that if you posit the monad as consisting not of matter, energy or information, but of mind, of consciousness, then all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics vanish. This is what I believe—-everything is the Godhead and everything is composed of consciousness.

Many Christians (and orthodox Catholics would especially tend toward this) do not view the Godhead everywhere but see a very uneven distribution of it, mostly they locate it in God the Father and his son Jesus. This relocation of the Godhead into two male identified figures is part of a strange evolution of mythologies:

Joseph Campbell’s five-volume study of mythology, published under the general title of The Masks of God, contains in each of its volumes an extraordinary record of the ancient  shift from matriarchy to patriarchy.  The shift is schematized by Campbell in four steps as follows:
1. The world born of a goddess without consort,
2. The world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort,
3. The world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male warrior-god,
4. The world created by the unaided power of a male god alone.
(Heilbrun/ Toward a Recognition of Androgyny )

Many forms of Christianity (but not Gnostic Chrisitanity!) moved toward a massive schizoid split, and the split fractured every layer of reality—–cosmologically, spiritually, psychologically, sexually—-it split men from women, masculine from feminine, light from dark, mind from body, Christian from non Christian. This split was caused by the drastically uneven distribution of the Godhead. God the Father and Jesus became ever more divine and perfect, the “ sunnum bonnum” and all darkness, through ever more tortured reasoning, became the fault of Satan, humans through “original sin,” female witches, the Jews… As white light came to glow around father and son, man and human nature (though created by God and in his image) became blacker and blacker. Divinity was almost exclusively in the two male Gods and humans were dust and corruption. One apotheosis of this insane split was American Puritanism. A classic expression of this madness are the hellfire and brimstone sermons of the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). The schizoid split in Puritans became so extreme that it resulted in the most pathological projections. Women were burned as witches (nothing new there, Europe had burned several million) and human beings were so dark and repellent that God could scarcely hold himself back from damning them to eternal punishment in hell for even one more moment. Here are some excerpts from Edward’s most well known sermon, “ Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God .”

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. …There is no other reason to be given why you have not gone to hell, since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell. …Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; …He will not only hate you, but he will have you, in the utmost contempt: no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets. …It is everlasting wrath. It would be dreadful to suffer this fierceness and wrath of Almighty God one moment; but you must suffer it to all eternity. There will be no end to this exquisite horrible misery. When you look forward, you shall see a long for ever, a boundless duration before you, which will swallow up your thoughts…and you will absolutely despair…You will know certainly that you must wear out long ages, millions of millions of ages, in wrestling and conflicting with this almighty merciless vengeance; and then when you have so done, when so many ages have actually been spent by you in this manner, you will know that all is but a point to what remains. So that your punishment will indeed be infinite….this is the dismal case of every soul in this congregation that has not been born again, however moral and strict, sober and religious, they may otherwise be. …The wrath of God burns against them, their damnation does not slumber, the pit is prepared, the fire is made ready, the furnace is now hot, ready to receive them; the flames do now rage and glow. The glittering sword is whet, and held over them, and the pit hath opened its mouth under them. The devil stands ready to fall upon them, and seize them as his own…

Jung, a Christian and the son of a Protestant minister, had the courage to ask himself a question that few Christians have ever had the courage to ask themselves. Why has more blood been spilled in the name of Christianity than anything else in human history? Jung considered this question in his book, Aion, and basically concluded that by removing all darkness from creator and messiah a schizoid split was created which required a feverish need for shadow projection, a need to locate darkness in some human group that would serve as scapegoat. Once you created an all white light Jesus, then unconsciously you needed to create as his twin Anti Christ to counterbalance this one-sidedness. From my point of view an Anti Christ is a person who locates the Godhead in themselves, but not in others. The rest of the universe is merely real estate and livestock to be exploited.

For more than twenty years I suspected that the need to destroy the ring came from the schizoid disempowerment of locating the Godhead outside the self. As an orthodox Catholic Tolkien would tend to think that recognizing divinity in the self would swing the pendulum of enantiodromia to the other one-sided extreme of Anti-Christ. Even today I believe that this is a factor in his ring symbolism.

When I was twenty I recognized a parallelism between the need to destroy the One Ring and its corruption of any ring bearer with the harsh Catholic taboo against auto-eroticism. Freud pointed out a crucial difference between what he called “primitive” man and modern man in their perception of sexual energy. The primitive worshipped the mysterious fire within, while the modern man worshipped the beloved, the object on whom the fire was projected. In other words, our eros had become configured or conditioned so that we project power outwards, just as in Christendom divinity was projected outside the self onto an all perfect God or messiah, sexual fire was projected onto an idealized, external love object. From the age of Chivalry to Victorian times, and even to this day, a classic form of this projection was for a male to feel his desires “unworthy” of some idealized woman whom he thought “too pure for this world,” certainly too pure to have any sexuality of her own, etc. This form of schizoid eros parallels the schizoid projection of the Godhead as outside the self and residing in an all white light divine figure. To the extent that the feminine was recognized as divine at all it was in the inflation of Mary, mother of Jesus (who in the Bible Jesus treats rather contemptuously) into a demigod, a distant third in the otherwise male field of three that comprise the Catholic Trinity. But the earthy and dark side of the feminine were edited out and she became the “white Madonna,” a virgin mother too pure for sex, etc.

What makes auto-eroticism so horrifying to this schizoid mind set is that the human personification of Godhead, the beloved, is not necessarily projected into the external world but is generated by a single individual. The auto-erotic individual is generating both subject and object, and is partaking in the potential sacrament of orgasm without the mitigation of individual power by an external person, institution of marriage, Church delivered sacrament, etc. No control system wants the individual to be so empowered and able to close the circle within themselves. In the Catholic Church, to this day, birth, marriage and even death require priestly sacraments, i.e. authorization by external authority. A control system wants you to always be seeking fulfillment, love, security, salvation outside , out in the society and institutions that it controls, so that you become an object of control within the system. This is the prime commandment of the matrix, Thou shalt not exercise the ability to generate your own reality, but shall abjectly submit to the reality created for you. George Bernard Shaw seemed to understand this when he said, “ The mark of the reasonable man is that he adapts himself to the world he finds himself in. The mark of the unreasonable man is that he expects the world to adapt itself to him. Therefore all progress is made by unreasonable men .” The “ reasonable ” person is the one who submits to the matrix, the control system, the “ unreasonable ” person is the androgyne, the person who is aware of themselves as cocreator. 

I believe it is appropriate to redefine masturbation and autoeroticism to parallel the way Singer has redefined hermaphrodism and androgyny . The conventional form of masturbation common in our culture involves the same kind of projection of power outside the self as in much interpersonal sexuality. An idealized beloved (or in contemporary society, now so much more geared toward materialism and hedonism—-a “ hottie ”  see Stop the Hottie! on the website) becomes the focus of the magic of eros. As in the hermaphrodite, this type of masturbation is more characterized by the confusion of masculine and feminine rather than the integrated fusion of them in the androgyne. Auto-eroticism, as I am redefining it, means androgynous auto-eroticism, and that means that the individual is conscious of themselves as the creator of the fantasy and the fantasy itself, is aware of themselves as both subject and object, lover and beloved, masculine and feminine, and whether they generate a lover of the opposite or same sex, no one at all, or any other possibility, they are consciously closing the circle (wielding their own ring of power). The androgyne in an auto-erotic experience realizes that they have the power of the shape-shifter to be in any body they deem appropriate as well as to generate a lover in whatever form is desired. They also realize that their point of view is not bound to the subject, but may travel back and forth between the created lovers if they feel so drawn.

Orgasms that are not merely the result of genital stimulation may in some cases be experienced as a sacrament, as a participation mystique with the universe where one emerges into an energy body that is interpenetrated with the universe. That such a sacrament could be an experienced by an individual without permission or reference to outside power and authority is horrifying to a control system which demands that power be projected outside.

I am not trying to disproportionately glorify the autoerotic experience as compared to the interpersonal sexual experience or the person who abstains from any form of sex. All experiences may be sacred or profane depending on the experiencer and the context. Indeed, for some an excessive indulgence in the autoerotic could be a version of the dark side of the uroboros archetype, the snake swallowing its own tail. A given individual, at a given time, might need the interpersonal to be more powerful to pull them out of themselves, etc. What I try to emphasize whenever I talk or write about eros is that ONE SIZE DOES NOT FIT ALL! If there is one obvious fact about human nature and human eros that is most neglected, it is respect for its fantastic variability. Human situations need to be examined from a much more case specific point of view.

I also find it interesting that masturbation taboo is to a partial extent multicultural. Singer points out the prohibitions against masturbation in numerous cultures and spiritual disciplines including Taoism, kundalini Yoga and Tantra and states that it has no basis in human anatomy, suggesting that is based on archetypal material. From the point of view of the Eastern energetic alchemies of Tantra and Chi Gung, ejaculation by males is in most cases viewed as extremely detrimental. While these systems have, in other ways, a very sophisticated understanding of human energy, when it comes to male orgasm they seem to view the energy system not as an open flow of energy, but as a closed system with limited resources which each ejaculation permanently diminishes. But the body creates seminal fluid to be ejaculated and not to be indefinitely retained where it can putrefy and cause infection. Dr. Andrew Weil (go to drweil.com and type “masturbation” into the search engine) reports on an Australian study which finds that men who masturbate are 30% less likely to develop prostate cancer than those who don’t! Anybody who knows how hard it is to find detectable statistically significant correlations with many health factors will tell you what a gigantic differential this 30% is.

I am not suggesting that there is no truth to the position of Tantra and Chi Gung on ejaculation, but I am asserting that it is a one size fits all formulation. Indeed, excessive ejaculation can be draining, particularly when conditions are more yin and less yang. Aging makes one more yin, and therefore older males need to ejaculate less than younger males. Also, during winter, which is much more yin (longer nights, less warmth, etc.), ejaculation may be more depleting than during the height of summer which is far more yang. Again, the case specific points of view, as well as general formulations, need to be considered. When ejaculation is interpersonal, rather than autoerotic, there are all sorts of other factors to be considered. There are significant numbers of people of either gender who are able to drain another person’s energy (see Mind Parasites, Energy Parasites, Vampires) . Excess ejaculation, like an excess of anything, can be detrimental, but the phobic, horrified, over-the-top warnings and prohibitions against masturbation indicate schizoid projections.

One of the aspects of June Singer’s book that most resonated with me were her very parallel findings on autoeroticism. Singer implies a parallelism between androgyny and autoeroticism as both are subject to taboo and secrecy:

If androgyny has remained submerged over the centuries, then masturbation has been similarly ubiquitous and nearly as secret.

Especially fascinating is that Singer connects autoeroticism to the Tree of Knowledge in almost exactly the same way as Terrance McKenna connected it to hallucinogens. Terrance would sometimes refer to the expulsion from Eden as, “ history’s first drug bust .”

From earliest childhood on into youth and maturity, masturbation is an act of self-assertion, the object of which is a movement in the direction of independence.…Masturbation and the prohibitions against it can be viewed in connection with the legends that are told about the Tree of Knowledge. Here, also, the issue is the potential independence of the individual from the more powerful Other. There is the prohibition against eating the fruit of that tree because if Adam and Eve do eat of it, they will learn the secrets of carnal life, which are allied with the secrets of creativity. This knowledge would make them like the gods; that is, powerful and independent….The God who prohibits eating the fruit of the tree which enables humans to know good and evil may be afraid they will begin to believe that they can become self-sufficient if they can meet their own sexual needs through self-manipulation.

Singer connects autoeroticism with the individual partaking of a forbidden independence and power. She quotes a patient:

That was the first time I remember that I ever masturbated to orgasm.  It was a great feeling.  For the first time I was feeling in control of my sexuality .

Those seeking to shame and discourage people from masturbation portrayed it as having the most dire consequences for physical and mental health. As recently as the Fifties young men were told that they would go blind or insane. The parallels between these absurdly over-the-top and blatantly false warnings and the Refer Madness type propaganda used to scare young people away from marijuana and other hallucinogens are quite striking. Engaging in autoeroticism or hallucinogen use is in either case asserting your power to be your own alchemist, to engage in highly mood altered energetic practices outside of social sanction or control.

Singer points out that autoeroticism can actually be a practice that engaged in the right way can produce healing and lead toward wholeness and creativity.

Masturbation can provide a person with the intensely felt experience of being the lover and the beloved at the same time. The experience can be a total one if accompanied by fantasies that are healing; that is, “making whole.” It provides also a stimulus for creativity, reminding us of the Egyptian creation mythology in which creation proceeds from a masturbatory act. Here giving and receiving, activity and receptivity are combined. There is great freedom in knowing that one can be whole in one’s inner life, and that this wholeness need not depend absolutely upon a relationship with another person.

The difference is that the masturbation that belongs to the androgyne’s experience is performed consciously; the reason for it is understood and accepted; and it is entered into with the fantasy which allows the soul to participate in the experience of the body without guilt or shame.

An aspect of autoeroticism that associates it with the Tree of Knowledge and that would particularly “anger the gods” is that the individual is exercising his or her power to “ subcreate .” “ Subcreation” is a term introduced by Tolkien in his essay on fairy stories as his way of acknowledging that the fantasy writer is generating a creation, a subordinate reality within the larger creation of God. Tolkien’s creation of this term, and the way he employs it, reflects a certain ambivalence toward creation, and may partly explain his dark view of the One Ring. Tolkien needs to acknowledge that fantasy writing at its highest level is a profound act of creation, a birthing of a parallel reality. But as an orthodox Catholic who locates the Godhead more outside than inside, he is careful to put “sub” before it and emphasizes that the fantasy creation is a derivative subset within God’s creation. Tolkien tells us that subcreation is a natural human right and divine, but also warns about hubris and the tendency for power to corrupt and to be used wickedly,

Fantasy is a natural human activity.

Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.

Are there any ‘bounds to a writer’s job’ except those imposed by his own finiteness? ….humility and an awareness of peril is required…
The right to ‘freedom’ of the sub-creator is no guarantee among fallen men that it will not be used as wickedly as is Free Will.

Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality; hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.  If he indeed achieves a quality that can fairly be described by the dictionary definition: ‘inner consistency of reality,’ it is difficult to conceive how this can be, if the world does not in some way partake of reality. The peculiar quality of the ‘joy’ in successful Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth.
]]> http://www.zaporacle.com/wp/categories/uncategorized/casting-precious-into-the-cracks-of-doom-androgyny-alchemy-evolution-and-the-one-ring/feed/ 0 http://www.zaporacle.com/wp/categories/uncategorized/corporate-controlled-media-continues-to-underplay-celebrity-pregnancies/ http://www.zaporacle.com/wp/categories/uncategorized/corporate-controlled-media-continues-to-underplay-celebrity-pregnancies/#comments Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:58:39 +0000 jon http://www.zaporacle.com/wp/?p=224 Corporate Controlled Media Continues to Underplay Celebrity Pregnancies

Why is that every time I go on google news and other corporate controlled media all I hear about is the death of the Pope, the voting for a new Pope, the Marburg virus going airborne,blah, blah, blah and maybe, if I’m lucky at the bottom of the page there will be like one daily update on Britney’s pregnacy? Hello? THE Britney Spears is pregnant and I’m suppose to obsess about which of a hundred elderly cardinals will be the next Pope? Let’s get real people, there has been one Pope after another for almost two thousand years, but to my knowledge Britney has never been pregnant before in human history, in the history of the universe for all I know and barely 20% of news coverage has anything to do with one of the most significant celebrity pregnanices of our time. People just don’t seem to have any perspective anymore. We are living in the midst of two of the biggest celebrity pregnanices in history, and yet it’s been like two or three days since I’ve heard a single thing about Julia’s twins. I don’t even know if they got their shots or not. The corporate controlled media wants everyone’s attention to be so diverted by wars, plagues and the economy and I just feel like Britney is pregnant in some dark corner somewhere and no one is even watching.

All I know is that one day, before I know it, Julia’s twins are going to be all grown up and I’m gonna feel like I wasn’t even there….

:06 AM 3/22/06

DawoudKringle@aol.com To:

jonathanzap@hotmail.com

Subject:

What you asked for.

Peace;

Thank you for the last email, and its polite and well deserved admonishments. You got me – you got me good. I was being sarcastic. The “hysteria” you sensed in my last email was sarcasm – pure and simple. I stand corrected: my manners fell to the wayside, and I behaved inappropriately. I hope you will forgive me.

However, I did, in no uncertain terms, sense the hysteria in the tones of Sean’s writings; and denounce him as a hate monger. While his tone was mostly quiet, the insane fury smoldering behind his words are obvious to anyone – and I can’t understand how someone could not see this. I stand by this, and will not be swayed.

I wanted to try a different approach to argument: exposing you to the side of Islam that you clearly have no experience of; the mystical side, the spiritual element. And I wanted to apply this to not so much your intellect – which has limits (intellect itself: I did not imply that you lacked intelligence. Quite the antithesis!), but directly to your heart. I use this approach in the prisons; and it works. I will not abandon showing it to you. You mentioned that all religions have their “gems”, and you’re right. However, you seemingly ignored what I showed you (seemingly: I hope I’m wrong). You made little comment, or criticism of those emails wherein I shared some of the “gems” of Islam. I wonder what you truly make of the Gems of Sufism / Islam?

” I agree with Sean that you repeatedly state how easily you could debunk his assertions and quotations. which begs the question: why don’t you?” You got me again. I am a bit reluctant to offer tafsir (commentary) on Qur’an, along with an explanation because you have refused to believe that I can / would provide anything resembling an accurate explanation of what the original Arabic says. You rejected my corrections of N.J. Dawood’s translation – and then admitted you had no understanding of Arabic by which to make this determination, and shrugged it off with a flimsy claim that these things cannot be accurately determined – and then accepted without question the N.J. Dawood translation that the hate mongers find so useful. What am I to think?

You asked for refutation and commentary on the website. A few random examples:

” The sole arbitrator on the subject, Muhammad, said in his Qur’an that a Muslim who does not leave his home to fight Jihad in Allah’s Cause ceases to be a Muslim. Allah calls them “hypocrites” in the 9^{th surah and orders good Jihadist Muslims to kill them in the 4th, so that he can personally attend to their torture in hell. As for reform, Islam’s lone prophet said, “Islam cannot change.” And in that regard, he was a prophet. The religion is just as deceitful, destructive, and deadly as it was when Muhammad was inventing it in a milieu of mass murders, piracy, rape, plunder and slavery. Reforming Islam is akin to thwarting Nazism by asking Hitler to edit the most deceitful, destructive, and deadly passages out of Mein Kampf.”} .” ^{Here’s what’s wrong with this paragraph:}

– 1. Muhammad was not the author of the Qur’an.

– 2. the 9th sura, Surat-at-Taubah (Repentance) begins by addressing a specific historical event: a cease of hostilities during the war against the Muslims (which the Muslims did not start – and which was engaged after 10 years of persecution, including slaughter, confiscation of property, and exile; during which time the Muslims took no act of vengeance . What explanation does Sean have for this?). It makes clear the fact that fighting is permissible only in cases of aggression against the Muslims: and amnesty for the pagans who wish it. Verse 6 mandates that asylum should be given to any pagan who asks for it. And “pagan” is translated form the word “mushrik”: which is NOT the same as “Kuffaar”. Non-Muslims often erroneously use the words interchangeably and translate them both as “infidel”, for reasons I leave to your imagination.

- 3. 9:39 says that those who do not engage in “Tanfiru” will be punished. “Tanfiru describes the act of moving forward against suffering for the purpose of spiritual and moral progress.The word also shares grammatical roots with “Aghstafir”: forgiveness, which puts a different spin on things.

– 4. The Arabic word for Hypocrite, “Munafikuun” occurs six times in the 9th sura: not a single time does it directly refer to people who refuse to fight. The word hypocrisy is mentioned in reference to the acts of the munaffikuun, and also to the Bedoin Arabs; about whom ironically, the Qur’an has little good to say.

– 5. Nowhere in Sura 4 “Surat an-Nisaa” (Women) does the command to kill hypocrites appear.

- 6. Sean’s term ” Good Jihadist Muslim ” does not exist in the Arabic language, and does not appear in the Qur’an.

- 7. ” Islam’s lone prophet “. Yet another error. Islam has many Prophets: these include but are not limited to Noah, Moses, Abraham, Issac, Ishmael, John the Baptist, and Jesus. Some unknown prophets are alluded to in cryptic language (and some Islamic scholars believe these may include Krishna, Buddha, Lao Szu, etc.) All of them, without exception, are spoken of in reverential tones in the Qur’an.

– 8. ” Deceitful”, “destructive”, “deadly”, “mass murders”, “piracy”, “rape”, “plunder”,”slavery “. More propagandist rhetoric. More hysteria.

You will note that I will not attempt to disprove any of the crimes committed by the Zindiq (heretics) among the Muslims. Nor will I apologize for them, or make light of them. I ask only that you consider the refutation of their association with Islam.

” The overwhelming majority of the Islamic literature printed by the Saudi government and distributed in American mosques and Islamic schools is uncivilized, hateful, violent, and treasonous. But then they claimed, without evidence or reason, that such materials were reflective of Wahhabi extremism, and were therefore a corruption of Islam.”. Without evidence or reason??? Permit me to reiterate with words that I wrote, and made public to Muslim readers, and which I got from studying Islamic history sources:

“,,, the founders of the Wahabbi sect of Islam, which dominates Arabia, as well as the founder of the Saudi clan. They and their leader, Ahmed Aziz Saud, were, around 200 years ago, not only found guilty of sedition and treason against the Khalifite, but were found to be themselves Zindiq (extreme heretics) by the Hanifi scholars of the time. Unfortunately, they succeeded in assuming power: without abandoning their hearses – which are easily provable by anyone with elementary knowledge of Islam.”

.” My writings, and the sources I used to arrive at this conclusion, are well known in many circles in the Islamic community – and almost completely unknown outside of it. Granted: the Wahabbis don’t want this widely circulated; and a great number of Muslims are, in fact, contaminated by Wahabbism. But they are facts.

Sean mentions .” ^{Ibn Ishaq ‘s “Sirat Rasull Allah” (the correct title of the book). Sean is correct that it is among the earliest biographies, and was written less than 150 years after Muhammad’s death. It survives in the later editions of Ibn Hisham and al-Tabari . Several siras predate Ibn Ishaq’s work, including: al-Waqidi , Zubayr ibn al-Awwam (d.712 c.e). and whom Ibn Ishaq, al-Waqidi, and at-Tabari are all said to have used as a source, Uthman ibn Affan (d. 725 AH) and Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. 730 AH). There are some differences between these versions; and Sean did not mention which version he used – nor what translation (I need not point out that some translations are, shall we say, questionable). And even with these different versions, some of the accounts are of questionable authenticity. The means by which this is determined is called “Isnad”: and is still being argued about to this day – the details of which would take hours for me to write. Against the background of Islamic scholarship, Sean lacks the capacity and objectivity to make these determinations, and his views of the Prophet’s biography are unacceptable and irrelevant. Sean quoted the Qur’an 5:33 thus:}

” The punishment for those who wage war against Allah and His Prophet and perpetrate mischief [reject Islam or oppose its goals] in the land, is to murder them, to hang them, to mutilate them, or banish them. Such is their disgrace. They will not escape the fire, suffering constantly.”"

The actual verse is rendered into English like this:

” The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption through the land is death or crucifixion, or the cutting off of their hands and feet on opposite sides, or exile from the land, based upon the severity of their offense. This will be their humiliation in this world, and in the hereafter they will have a grievous punishment ”

Verse 34 continues,,, ” except those who repent before you apprehend them; in this case, know that Allah is Forgiving, Merciful ”

You’ll notice the following facts:

– 1. “Corruption” is translated from “fasaadan”; which describes a category of all manner of violent crime, such as murder, robbery, rape, arson, etc. The phrase ” reject Islam or oppose its goals” is a flimsy attempt to append words to the Qur’an that are not there.

- 2. The word “fasaadan” is also applicable to sedition or treason: and it is not uncommon for the nations on earth to punish sedition and treason with death. Like it or not, the Muslims were at the time a nation.

– 3. The Arabic word for “hanging”, “qal’aai” does not appear in the verse.

- 4. The specific Arabic word for “murder” (as opposed to murder as part of a category which we find in firasaadan), “Lataq”, does not appear in this verse.

- 5. The Arabic word for “mutilate”, “Tratab” does not appear in this verse.

(In other words, the clearly altered translation Sean sites does not in any way resemble the original verse.)

– 6. The ” cutting off of their hands and feet on opposite sides ” was a common punishment in ancient Egypt. The Romans were known for crucifixion (remember: the Qur’an was revealed while the Roman Empire was still in power). Are the modern nations any better with hanging, firing squads, lethal injection, gas chambers, etc.?

– 7.If you will kindly indulge those who wish to establish a theocracy for a moment, the offense of “firasaadan” is against BOTH the laws of man and the Laws of Allah / God. This is not an inconceivable idea born of savagery, but attempts to establish a code of conduct that balances human imagination and intellect, and Divine Revelation; which is beyond the capacity for human beings to equal.

– 8. Verse 34 offers a way out for those who sincerely wish to amend their conduct – this, even in the case of severe crimes. It is an act of mercy and forgiveness mandated by Allah.

” What kind of people would conceive and perpetrate a scheme that would lead to the burning, mutilation and death of 350 young children as was done in the school this week in Russia? What dogma was responsible for motivating Islamic women earlier this week to strap bombs to their bodies and board two Russian aircraft filled with passengers for the purpose of blowing them up and killing everyone? ”

You will notice that the propaganda of any totalitarian state often begins by asking questions that leave little room for any answer than the one that will be inevitably provided. It is a pattern that you doubtless noticed in your studies of the English language, and translations from propaganda from other sources like Communists, Nazis, Neoconservatives, Zionists, etc. And the website almost never mentioned “Muslim” crimes: always “Islamic”. The emphasis on Islam itself as opposed to erroneous and blasphemous interpretations by humans (motivated by non-religious agendas such as politics) is deliberate in its attempt to associate these horrors with Islam itself. Admittedly, the people who did this are monsters – but they can never be Muslims and do not represent Islam. I reject them, and refuse association with them; as do 1.3 billion of my fellow Muslims.

By the way, did you look at “Yada Yahwah”? http://yadayahweh.com/chapter.aspx?g=5106&i=51608 Sean seems to have his own religious agenda. But I digress,,,

” For two days, the world witnessed the face of terror. The Images on this page defy description; images of actions that can only be defined as sub-human. Yet we remain unwilling to acknowledge its cause. No political dogma or personality cult in all of human history has been sadistic enough to cause men to celebrate murder and mutilation. Only one thing can do that–Islam.”

” Face of terror “, ” sub-human “, ” Yet we remain unwilling to acknowledge, ,,”, ” sadistic “. My mind’s eye easily envisions a fevered tone of voice, hands making clawing motions in the air, a demented gleam in the eyes – and I cannot imagine these words spoken without them, no matter how subtle these gestures and tones may be.

Note also the lie about ” no political or personality cult, etc .” when you and I know that there are countless examples of at least the same ugly celebrations of murder and mutilation in non-Muslim religious fanatics, personality cult, and politics. A good example would be Adolph Hitler’s use of words like “Krach”, “Zerstörung”, and “Vernichtung”.

Allow me to respond to your disapproval about my (admittedly sarcastic) statement: ” The logic of their positions demand that they begin immediate acts of genocide against all Muslims .

Sean wrote: ” Islam is the most vile, intolerant, sadistic, destructive, and violent fraud ever perpetrated on human kind. It turns many into monsters. Islam must be exterminated or it will exterminate freedom, choice, truth, prosperity, liberty, life, and salvation .”

(Bold type is mine). Again, the emphasis on Islam itself; an obviously dehumanizing turn of phrase, while by default points the finger at Muslims. Note also his parroting of words like freedom, choice, truth, prosperity, liberty, life, and salvation” like other despots who rally people to their cause with these same words, only to establish a dictatorship. Consider; you cannot exterminate an idea; you can only exterminate living creatures . There is no escaping the fact that Sean deliberately called for extermination. It is an interesting syllogism to note that the German word for “extermination” is ” Vernichtung ” (see the previous paragraph).

I rest my case.

Jonathan, do you still believe that this man’s work is ” sober and factual with almost every statement carefully documented by reputable sources .”? I still say I could go on; but do I really need to? Must I dissect the whole website word for word? Or have you seen enough?

Perhaps if you approached me with different questions you’d find the answers you seek.

Oh, about the “spiritual station” comment, I meant no disrespect. You do use the word “Oracle” (zaporacle.com) in association with yourself, and you interpret dreams. Did I misunderstand you?

As I said, I was wrong to indulge in sarcasm. Passionate argument – and humor! – is one thing. And I do get passionate; sometimes more than I should. That is my nature. But bad manners are another thing. And I was remiss in not providing detailed arguments: which I remember is exactly what you asked for. This was wrong of me.

I often have difficulty finding time to write these things with the attention to detail that they deserve. I work two jobs; and have to find time to prepare for my work as an Imam as well. I have to speak to my own community. As you know, many terrorist groups recruit new members in prisons; I do almost all of my work as an Imam in prisons, and use Qur’an and Hadith to prove that Islam forbids terrorism, and to divert Muslims – especially vulnerable new converts – from extremism. I am on record with the New York City Department of Corrections and several mosques in the NYC area (including the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood, Masjid al-Farah, and Imam Ali Masjid) for doing this, and have been for the past nine years. I have been blessed with many successes in this; despite the “evidence” that Sean would present that would make this an impossibility. I say this only to show that I stand by what I believe, and I have seen that what I believe works.

It may interest you to know that I was “drafted” for the job as Imam, I never asked for it; and I don’t get paid. Its all voluntary.

I hope you’ll forgive my defects of character.

Ma’a Salaam,
Dawoud the Muslim Primate

Response from Sean 3-22-06

Jonathan
Dawood is confusing my website with Craig Winn’s site. Everything he is talking about is from Winn’s site. Not mine. I don’t have any links to Winn’s site. YadaYaweh is Winn’s site. I don’t have a religious agenda. I appreciate him taking the time to work through the translations. It’s very interesting to get his perspective but he’s on the wrong site and his responses don’t apply to me. This is the 6th time he has mentioned N.J. Dawood when I’ve said before I’m not using that translation. I have yet to open a Quran translated by Dawood and on his recommendaton I never will.
I’ve never said “Good jihadist Muslim” as he claims in point number 6. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Craig Winn did. I didn’t mention Ibn Shaq. Craig did. Dawood is on the wrong website. I Never said Islam should be exterminated. He is critiqing the wrongs site, although I should say he did a very good job and again I find the translations very very interesting. My everloving point on my website, which I’m not sure he has even visited yet, has more to do with women burned, butchered and abused. www.womensassistance.com. I look forward to hearing thoughts on my site if he’d like to take the time. He can email me through the site directly.

Response from Jonathan,

Sean’s response speaks for itself, but I do want to add that you are correct in criticizing those statements from Winn’s site. Craig Winn is a Christian Fundamentalist and I find most fundamentalists to be hate-mongering. You may have been confused because at some point I sent you links to his site because it does have accurate quotes from the Qur’an. Although I gave a link to his site I only skimmed it myself and do find the parts you objected to extremely offensive.

As far as my ignoring the spiritual gems of Islam, you are probably right, but I didn’t set out to look for spiritual gems which can be found in all sorts of traditions, I set out to discover why so many women are being maimed and killed, and so many other bad things are happening in the name of Islam. Similarly, if this were the Middle Ages, I would want to know why Christians were burning millions of women at the stake. If a Christian responded by showing me many of the beautiful, pro-feminine statements by Jesus, I would respond, “Fine, so Jesus isn’t the problem, but what is the problem, where is this coming from?” When I look into the sacred texts of most religions I find a mixture of wonderful, exalted stuff and completely inconsistent hate-mongering stuff. This doesn’t surprise me because the human authors of these texts were sometimes inspired, sometimes in states of hate-filled projection. I am not against any religion, because a truly spiritually attuned person will sift through and find the gems. I am against fundamentalists of all religions because of their dangerous and naive use of texts to promote hate and violence. Again, and again I am seeking to turn my attention to a worthy object of contemplation, which is not your spiritual state or mine, but the extreme violence happening in the name of Islam. If there is any light that we can shed on this subject, we have a moral imperative to do so. I would like to see us working on the same side as opponents to this violence, and I see you as having tremendous assests to bring to this inqury with your background and your willingness to confront Muslim fundamentalists who distort the religion.

The inquiry that I am interested in, and that Sean and I are both interested in and actually on a daily basis doing things about (raising money for Muslim women who have been the victims of honor burnings, etc. and are asking for help) is about the violence happening today. There are a number of avenues of inquiry into this subject. One, which we have been pursuing together, relates to sorting through the historic and textual origins of this. This is a very tricky area because it requires real scholarship. You are better qualified to speak on these texts, but so far your posture has been understandably defensive. But here is how I would like to redirect that avenue of inquiry: are there parts of Islamic texts that really do, even if inadvertantly, support mistreatment of women and violence toward the infidel? I would be extremely surprised if there are none, if they are all mistranslations. In reforming a religion that has largely turned into a pathologocial fundamentalism there are a number of steps. One is to find out any passages that are being willfully mistranslated or interpreted to support violence and exposing that. Another step is to admit any passages that really are objectionable, not to sanitize these with creative translation or interpretation, but to openly repudiate them as regressive artifacts of earlier times that a living faith (and living means changing) can throw off. Besides the textual analysis, there are other key avenues of inquiry into unraveling the source of such virulent hatred and violence. Many on the left emphasize political and economic causal factors, which are very real, but which tend to get over emphasized so that the perpetrators of the violence are condescendingly viewed as innocent and merely reactive to oppression from Western forces. There is some validity to this, but it is taken too far, because other peoples have been even more oppressed, say the Native Americans, and didn’t take it out on their women. These same people on the left would not similarly excuse Hitler and the Nazis by pointing out that the Treaty of Versaille after WWI humiliated Germany and punished it economically and therefore Nazism was a completely understandable response. The avenue of inquiry I feel most qualified to participate in is a psychological inquiry into what is motivating the present violence, much of which seems to be a gigantic sexual pathology. There is much more I could say on that subject, but I first want to inquire about your willingness to follow this redirect of our attention which I sincerely believe will give greater moral purpose to our trialouge.

Sean writes 3-22-06

Hey Jonathan
This is right off the WAF website on the Purpose page. I’m not spreading hate, I’m pointing to issues of abuse that in my opinion are not being given enought global consideration.

Our desire at the Women’s Asssistance Fund is not to spread hate or fear about Islam, Muslims or any religion. Our desire and conviction is to provide a safe haven for women who are being physically abused, tortured, and deprived of life and the basic rights of human life, for whatever reason. We are not experts on the Koran or Islam, though our exploration of these subjects is ongoing. We do not make any allegations about what the true meaning of the Koran is, or what true Muslims believe. What we study and what we cry out against is the abuse of human life, specifically the abuse of those who have been rendered powerless by the legal and social structures of the societies in which they live. In our informational texts, we quote from the Koran to show how it has been and is being used as a basis to deprive women of rights. We quote religious figures who, by their own declaration, do not believe that women are equal to men and do not believe that they should be granted equal rights, and who base those beliefs in Islam. We do not do this to malign any religion; we do so to educate those who might make a difference of the reality of the horrible abuses that take place, and of the depth of belief that fosters such abuses.

Of course, we recognize that (probably) all religions have some followers who are truly compassionate towards others. We recognize that there are Muslim men who would never dream of abusing a woman, and that there is a wide range of freedoms experienced by women in different segments of Middle Eastern, Muslim society, depending on a woman’s family, location, background, education, affluence, etc.

Unfortunately, religion has been used throughout history as a pretext for myriad atrocities. Specifically, Islam has been used to justify the abuse, repression and murder of women for thousands of years, just as Christianity was used to justify the Crusades and the burning of witches hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately, Muslim societies today are, without question, the most repressive of women’s rights worldwide, so it is there that we focus our energies, and it is from those cultures that the most horrible stories of abuse arise. We share this information to educate those who are fortunate to live in free societies of what we can do to help stop human rights abuses. That is our only goal

Peace;

Dawoud responds, and also to an article we sent him by a Muslim woman seeking reform, Isrhad Manji:

The general consensus about Irshad Manji is that she is a fool. A bitter woman who has in effect declared that Islam as a thing in itself is wrong and by Allah, it better change! She’ll give us one more chance, then she’ll walk out and take her friends with her.

I hope you’ll allow me to indulge in a little bit of sarcasm!

Mind you, she does bring up valid points about the abuse of women, etc. But her error, and it is a monumental error, is to believe that these problems are something that is built in to Islam. This is not the case. Her scholarship and attempts to validate her beliefs with evidence from Qur’an and Hadith are quite pathetic.

I’m glad you brought this us. It affords me the chance to share some ideas I didn’t have time (or space: AOL is imposing a “rate limit” on my outgoing emails that never happened before. If it continues, I will go to one of their competitors) before.

I trust that I need no reiterate for you the evidence I gave in a previous email about that verse in the Qur’an that people ask about regarding “beating”.

In several verses in the Qur’an men and women are referred to as equals. For example, 5:8;
“Oh you who Believe, stand firmly for Allah as witnesses for justice and fairness, and do not let the hatred of outers cause you to act unjustly. Act with equity; for that is nearest to piety, and be careful of your duty to Allah, for Allah is aware of what you do”. in this; “Oh you who Believe” is not gender specific; a rarity in the Arabic language.

There are other verses that contain the phrase ” Ya ayuhul aminu, nass, wa aminu nisaa ” Oh you who are Believing men and believing women. In this context, the two genders are treated equally. The verse that tells women to “lower their gaze and guard their modesty” tells men the same thing.

In 4:1, Surat-ul Nissa (Women) Allah says ” Oh Humanity!  fear your Lord (Rabb) who created you from a single Nafs (soul / self / individual will / individual ego); created from it his mate, and from them twain scattered like seeds countless men and women. Fear Allah through whom you demand your mutual rights, and reverence the wombs that bore you; for Allah is ever watchful ” Note the phrase “mutual rights” which implies that both male and female have right to be fulfilled. Yet after this, we are commanded to reverence our mothers.

The Prophet Muhammad, whose life and example we follow, showed the following in his life:
1. He never beat, neglected, abused, or even yelled at any of his wives. And you must admit that his life was meticulously recorded. If spousal abuse were mandated by Islam, and Muhammad’s life is part of the source of Islamic Law, then by default, spousal abuse is a violation of Islamic Law.
2. His wives (9 total) owned and inherited their own property and ran their own businesses. Some became scholars, teachers and historians. A few were warriors! (during one battle, when the Quaraish broke through defenses, and four of them surrounded the Prophet, a woman, whose name I don’t know, picked up a sword, and fought alongside him. In another battle, a woman came up to the Prophet and complained that her sword broke. The Prophet told one of the men “give her a sword”)
3. One of his wives was Jewish; and she never converted to Islam. The Prophet never insisted that she do so.
4. The Prophet once said “The women are our first teachers, and Paradise lay at the feet of the mothers”
5. The Prophet said that ” The pursuit of knowledge is an obligation laid upon every Muslim man and every Muslim woman “. This is in Sahih Bukhari: and thus is Law. When the Taliban prevent women from receiving education, they forfeit their claim to Islam; and by choice and consent claim the status of Infidel and Apostate.
6. All of the Prophet’s wives could read and write; as did the women on their community. In fact, when the Muslims started engaging in warfare, the POWs were given a deal: for every ten Muslims they taught to read and write, they would be granted their freedom
7. The Prophet specifically forbad the practice of female circumcision.

There are many other examples I could give, but I believe you get the idea.

So! Where does the abuse of women come from? Tribal / cultural customs. The exact same psychological dementia that causes a man to abuse his wife; except that in some places it is extended to social structure. Religion is a mask they wear; and just like that scene in Star Wars 6, if you remove Darth Vader’s mask; you see an incomplete and malformed weakling under it – one that bears no resemblance to a true Muslim. or a true Believer (and make no mistake: these are not the same thing at all). Or a true Jedi for that matter!

Now, there are some marked psychological differences between men and women (I will not insult your intelligence by listing the physical ones! HA! HA! HA!). In general, men work their wills in the world externally, and process thoughts and feelings internally. Women do the opposite. Men have qualities that, when properly developed and tempered, embody those of a king, a warrior, a magi, and a lover. Note the emphasis on properly developed and tempered. This is the kicker: if any of these are out of balance, then all manner of defects arise: cowardice, bullying, manipulation, greed, abuse of the weak, etc. will arise. And in our society, we no longer have the means of assisting young people in the transition between childhood and adulthood. Many people are not adults; they’re children in adult bodies. They, in turn, sire more such creatures. The result is a nation of children.

If women were our first teachers and paradise lay at the feet of the mothers, what kind of man could oppress them? The Taliban and others like them are in such a condition because they  violate Islam. How can they know anything when their “first teachers” know nothing? Men MUST lead; and women MUST guide and inspire. They need each other or the whole structure becomes unstable. Both Muhammad and Jimi Hendrix said that a woman is the other half of a man.

Ms. Manji is part of a shattered landscape that is crawling about desperately trying to make sense of senselessness and pleading for love and recognition. But her logic is backwards. In the end, she and her followers will arrive at an intellectual and spiritual cul de sac.

Ma’a Salaam,
Dawoud
Peace;

I cannot overemphasize the sorrow I feel for the mistake I made and the slandering of Sean’s character! I’m almost overcome with shame for having done this – albeit mistakenly – to one who I now see, in retrospect, to be a man with a good heart and honorable intentions.

In a response I made to the “Muslim woman speaks about the wall” article; I attempted to show a few examples of how Islam actually forbids the mistreatment of women. I also touched upon how these things are actually manifestations of, at best, human weaknesses, and at worst, human evils. I will look any man in the eye and say that the Qura’n is Allah’s Words and not the product of human imagination. However, Allah is compassionate and merciful; and we should embody these qualities ourselves. To twist them into horrors like “honor killing” or suicide bombing is nothing short of a blasphemy and a crime in the eyes of God and man.

We all have to understand that the “Left” and “Right” have claim only to a part of the solutions needed. It is sometimes necessary to “step outside” the dialectic of current political bodies, and see them all from a perspective that allows no alliances to either.

I wish to be clear about something. The verses in the Qur’an that talk about fighting, were revealed when the fledgling Muslim community was under attack – and this after enduring ten years of persecution. And it is also important to note the specific circumstances that they were revealed in. When the Qur’an speaks in seemingly disparaging tones about Jews, there are two basic contexts here. One is in direct reference to those specific times when the Bani Israel broke their covenant with YHVH, and in reference to two Jewish tribes in Arabia at the time whose practices of the Mosaic Law were so corrupted that other Jews refused to recognize them, and the fact, recorded in Muslim and non-Muslim histories, that they broke peace treaties with the Muslims.

While Islamic Law is clear about taking up arms only to defend yourself, starting war for the sake of war is forbidden. I doubt anyone will argue this. But I ask anyone: if we are attacked, oppressed, or treated with injustice; do you really expect us to simply lay down and take it? Do you think that it’s inconceivable that we may have legitimate claims to justice? Is our blood cheaper than that of other’s.

And even in the case of some of the places where terrorism and war happen, we must admit that each case must be taken individually; and not broad statements that will overshadow the truth. A truth that gets more complex as time goes on, and more difficult to see beyond the confines of our own individual perspectives – and egos. For that is the road that leads to hysteria, hate mongering, war mongering, and hell. All human beings must pay heed to this warning.

There are no blanket answers to this. Everyone had blood on their hands and no group is innocent. But among them are innocent people in dire circumstances that they may not always make the right choice about. I know of Israeli solders who refused to participate in the persecution of Palestinians. I met Palestinians who have no ill will toward Jews or Christians, and simply wish to be left alone. I know Jews who reject Zionism. I know Christians who help Muslims. I know neo-pagans whose ideas in many ways resemble the basic spirit of the Abrahamic Faiths.

I also know Jews who looked me in the eye and told me that God wants them to have that land and to exterminate the Palestinians. I know Christians whom it is impossible to have a conversation with before they start howling about JEEEEZUSS! I know Muslims who say the most unbelievably stupid things about their religion (some entertaining examples: “The most important thing about Islam is that your wife is covered!” “It is haram (forbidden) to chew bubble gum!” “All Jews are the scourge of the earth!” “Your wife must wear a garment that covers every part of her body except one eye!”. I met one Muslim man who reprimanded a young woman for using a camera, saying that photographs are haram; and then worked into his tirade an obscure Hadith where the Prophet was quoted as saying “If you allow a dog to lick from your plate, you must wash it seven times before using it again” – apropos of nothing).

About seven years ago, a Bosnian Imam gave a sermon, and he said that in parts of Bosnia; women and children were being murdered and raped in the streets; and the men were in the mosques arguing about the proper length of a man’s beard! In light of the problems that face humanity, it is perhaps best to leave the theological hairsplitting for another day. On Star Trek, the Klingons used to say “Only a fool fights in a burning house”. However, the Qur’an, Hadith and Tassawuff (Sufism / spiritual and mystical science of Islam) are my weapons in this spiritual struggle. I will share what teachings and evidence to refute the crimes of the infidels (who are undoubtedly real: but not who most people think they are!) as well as the psudo-Muslims who wish to turn Islam into a dictatorship with no god but their own egos.

Please let Sean know how badly I feel about the horrible mistake I made. I pray that this email finds you all well.

Ma’a Salaam,

Dawoud

Peace;

I’m not usually wrong, but when I screw up, I do it big time !

My most profuse apologies to you and Sean. While I stand by everything I said in critique of the WAF website, I was under the mistaken impression that it was Sean’s website. In this, I stand corrected, offer no defense, and ask one and all, especially Sean, for forgiveness.

I feel as great a fool as I ever did; and would never willingly assault the character of an innocent man; least of all one who is engaged in unselfish work to help the defenseless.

I just made a brief visit to Sean’s website; and I must say I am impressed! From my brief perusal, I will say that Sean’s work is not only necessary, but noble and inspiring.

Know that I repent my association of Sean with the WAF, and will try to amend my bad conduct. Please post this apology on your site ASAP: all must read it.

Ma’a Salaam,
Dawoud

Dawoud

Peace;

To continue please go to Part V

Thanks for those thoughtful messages, traffic to the site has been increasing dramatically so your thoughts should be getting out there.  I want to give Sean a chance to respond on the issue of whether there is any text that is supporting violence and mistreatment of women, frankly I’d be surprised if there isn’t, because such things can be found in most religions.  My expectation is of an inconsistent mix—-some egalitarian passages, other misogynist ones.  We might as well sort this out first and I want Sean to supply any egregious passages you have not explained, but would also ask you to be evaluative rather than defensive about the text—–are you telling me there is nothing in Islamic scripture that demeans women or promotes violence toward the infidel?  In the Hebrew Bible there are lots of objectionable things, and in the reform Judiasm I was  brought up in these were acknowledged and openly rejected, and all references to God as having a male gender removed from prayers and hymns, etc. customs changed to allow for female Rabbis and Bat Mitvah of girls, etc.  Does Islam allow for their to be female prophets, female imams, etc. ?

Hey Jonathan
I’m glad Dawoud finally made it to my website…there is still some confusion in his mind about which site is which. The womens assistance fund website is WAF. The critique he stands by is of the prophet of doom website. I’m sure he will find some things he disagrees with on my site too but I’m glad he can see there isn’t a hateful tone to the site. I’m convinced that the violence toward women in the Islamic world comes, at least in part,  from the use of the words in Quran 4:34 “…as for those whom you fear desertion… beat them.” Every interpretation I’ve seen includes those words somewhere in the verse even if some of the translations include “not too severely”. Any fear, suspicion, hearsay or rumor of misbehavior in many cases is a legally and culturally acceptable reason for a man to kill a woman. The burnings are also happening because Sharia law as it’s written and interpreted today in many countries doesn’t veiw violence toward women as a particularly important issue.

• Article 97 and 98 of the Jordanian Penal Code ensures that a husband who is provoked will receive reduced sentences or exemption of penalties for murder of female members of his family. – Christian Science Monitor March 2, 2005/ Feminist.com

• Article 548 of the Syrian Penal Code ensures exemption from penalty for a husband who murders a wife suspected of illegitimate sex.  -About.com

• Article 375  - Mere beating and light injury shall not be penalized. – Libyan Penal Code

• Article 420 Lesser penalties shall apply to crimes of wounding and beating without intent to kill even if death does result if committed by the head of the family. Moroccan Penal Code

• Article 257 Whosoever commits a crime in an outburst of extreme anger resulting from a grave action shall be liable for lesser penalty. – Lebanese Penal Code

• Article 17 – In crimes requiring the sympathy of the court (honor crimes)  the Judge can reduce penalties. Algerian Penal Code

• Article 409 A man who kills his wife for adultery will receive a sentence not to exceed three years. Iraqi Penal Code

• Article 153 A man who kills his wife, daughter, mother or sister for adultery will receive a sentence not exceeding three years or a fine not to exceed 3000 dinars. Kuwaiti Penal Code

• Article 188 A man who sees his wife in a state of disgraceful adultery will be exempt from liability of murder. Ottoman Penal Code. The last seven entries of bulleted info comes from the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Laws and Inter-rights Honor Crimes Project

Thanks for the notes
Sean

Response from Jonathan:

Just spoke to Sean on the phone.  I want us to be able to move toward areas where there is greater agreement amongst the three of us, the very lamentable present laws and practices being done in the name of Islam, but I think we need a bit more of a resolution about the past and sacred documents.  I can believe there are some mistranslations here and there, but if I were to believe your statements, Islam would be the only major religion not to contain misogynist elements.  Your evaluations seem skewed by an understandable desire to put everything in these texts in the best possible light.  For example the terrible statements about Jews are dismissed as related only to a particular historical context, but this doesn’t seem to hold up because if this man is a prophet, and the Qur’an is written for all time, wouldn’t there be an expansive awareness of other contexts in which these statements would prove dangerous, as they, in fact, have?  Jesus lived in stressful times, but never promoted war or fighting particular groups (except of course for his apparent support of the U .S . going into Iraq for nonexistent WMD ).  I would like you to be more objectively evaluative of your own tradition rather than defensively explaining away every troubling passage. As a non fundamentalist you have the right and the duty to scour your own traditional texts for parts that need to be reformed, and it strains credibility if you tell me you can’t find such things which are easy to locate in the Bible.

The following exchange between Jonathan and Dawoud began around April 1st when Jonathan sent everyone on his email list a link to a spoof website.  Dawoud sent back a comment that the site was run by a bunch of homosexuals lampooning Christian Fundamentalists.
Jonathan replied,
I can’t imagine anything more appropriate than homosexuals lampooning fundamentalists. Is there anything wrong with homosexuals?

Dawoud responds:
Peace;
That’s a loaded question. The only answer I can give would, no matter its actual value within the realm of Socratic Debate, be labeled as “politically incorrect” (an Orwellian term if there ever was one). My reasoning would almost inevitably be misinterpreted.
I wonder if there are any human beings left in the world who could comprehend the difference between the rational and reasonably thought out disapproval of the practice and propagation of homosexuality, and irrational knee-jerk homophobia? I believe they exist: but are rare.
Most people are – by choice and consent – incapable of understanding the difference.
(Present company excepted)
Ma’a Salaam,
Dawoud

jonathan writes:
Give me the only answers you can give, because political correctness as you probably realize by now, has no value in my mental universe except to influence me in the other direction. I am also really curious to hear what could be the “rational and reasonably thought out disapproval of homosexuality” since I’m not aware of any outside of those under the malignant spell of fundamentalist taboos. For one thing, a certain amount of homosexuality is the norm in every human culture and society and that is not only the case for human but also for thousands of species including most mammals and many bird species. In fact, there are bird species where there are lifelong monogamous homosexual relationships. I’m hoping that rational and reasonable means something other than written in the Koran, but am curious to hear where you have come by such notions.

Peace;
Well, you know that being a Muslim I’m going to take the Islamic side. The Qur’an (correct transliteration: the “Q” is closer to the real sound of the Arabic letter “Qaf”) si clear about it, and the Hadiths on the subject paint an unambiguous picture that nonetheless is a bit different from the Judeo-Christian doctrine More on that later. However, you ask a valid question: and your “political incorrectness” is positively delightful.
I read “Homosexuality: A Freedom too Far” by Dr. Charles Socardies. He is a psychoanalyst who specializes in the treatment of homosexuality. He went into considerable detail about how homosexual organizations methodically changed the AMA’s and APA’s definition of homosexuality from being a psychological condition to being a “lifestyle”. He also described some other interesting facts. One that comes to mind is the work of Simon La Vey. In the 1970′s, La Vey published a paper claiming that he isolated a gene that predisposes homosexuality in humans. Dr. Socardies pointed out that:
1. La Vey found this gene in only 48% of the test cases.
2. His research methods did not conform to accepted scientific standards of experimentation to develop a theory.
3. Neither he nor anyone else was able to repeat the results of the experiment.
Assuming that this is true; then the theory of genetic predisposition of homosexuality that La Vey proposed has no basis in fact.
Dr. Socardies also went into considerable detail about how homosexuality as a psychological condition / phenomenon is almost always triggered early in life by some experience that alters the development of gender identity. He also went into the fact of homosexuals having a subconscious death with; and this manifesting in the form of refusal to propagate the species.
As far as Islam is concerned, there is a Hadith where (in modern colloquial terms) the Prophet and some of his companions were in a town where the people had accepted Islam. There was a man in the town who was “al Mukkhanaath” (a homosexual / effeminate / transvestite). He asked about the man, and the people there told him something to the effect that “he’s always been like that”. The Prophet told them to tell him to pack his things and leave town. His companions asked him “You want us to do him? You want him dead?” He said no. Leave him alone, but tell him to leave.
This leaves us with the conclusion that while it is forbidden in Islam to practice homosexuality, technically it is not forbidden to be one. This may seem paradoxical and has given rise to some legal ambiguity; but allows for the faults and weaknesses of human beings; and offers an avenue for the redemption of the person in question – if he / she desires it. It is simply the difference between blindly hating a person, and disapproving of something they do – a difference that is of supreme importance.
This is not far from Dr. Socardies’ conclusions; although his perspective is confined to the realm of psychiatric medicine.
I was speaking to some Rabbis once, and the subject of homosexuality came up. One of them told me something interesting. In Rabbinical Law, same gender sexual acts are forbidden to men, but not to women. He used the metaphor of “two empty vessels”. Which has a certain logic to it worthy of debate.
You said “a certain amount of homosexuality is the norm in every human culture”: and of course this is a perfectly admissible argument. Its there: as are a great number of other anomalies that would require discussion outside the scope of this email. But the epidemic proportions of homosexuality have, historically, preceded the downfall of society. Greece and Rome are good examples. The sex drive turning in upon itself has repercussions that echo throughout the society in which it manifests.
Your mentioning of birds, etc. was interesting: but we are of a different species. These same criterion do not apply. I’m more interested in being human.
I try not to see religion and science as being separate things. In fact, I don’t believe that at their core essences they are different. Emphasize science and you become cut off from the spiritual essence of yourself, and from Allah. Emphasize religion, and the danger of fanaticism is lurking around every corner. In fact, Imam Hanifah (the founder of one of the four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence) once said “Embrace Sufism and ignore Shari’ah (Islamic Law), and you will become a heretic. Embrace Shari’ah and ignore Sufism, and you will become a fanatic”.
Ma’a Salaam,
Dawoud

Jonathan Responds:

Hey Dawoud,
Sorry for the long delay, I had a hard time summoning enthusiasm to respond because rather than breaking new ground, I seem to have to debunk notions that are so archaic and thoroughly debunked that it seems like a tedious exercise for me.  You live in New York City with a substantial gay population, don’t you notice the same range of high to low qualities that you find in heterosexuals?   Do you really find homosexuals like Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci to be spiritually or psychologically inferior and lacking in life drive?   A hundred years ago even Freud debunked the notion that homosexuality precedes the fall of a civilization.   Homosexuality was the norm in ancient Greece and Rome when they were at their very height. Socrates and Plato were gay as I’m sure you know.
You criticize some genetic research into homosexuality in the Seventies, but there have been all kinds of much more recent findings that point toward genetic correlations. Then you wheel out a wing nut like this Dr. Socardies’  who explains homosexuality as a “subconscious death wish.”  Please, if you can’t recognize that as pseudo scientific clap trap I don’t know what to tell you.  I’ll post an article about Dr. Socardies at the end of this.
Really absurd was your final remarks where you quote some rabbi (Islam certainly has no monopoly on archaic inanities) who said that homosexuality was wrong between men, but not women.   You wrote: He used the metaphor of “two empty vessels”. Which has a certain logic to it worthy of debate. Logic worthy of debate?  The idea of women as empty vessels has a long and notorious history.  Well into the 19^th century Western medicine thought that a man’s seed was what made a baby and a woman was merely a vessel that contained it.  The fact that a woman’s genitals are more in the interior of her body hardly makes her “an empty vessel.”  If I remember my biology right aren’t women the gender out of which entire human beings emerge?  Doesn’t that make males seem rather empty considering their bodies only contribute an often ill considered squirt of semen that only has half the chromosomes?   I feel silly even debating this type of “logic.”

I have also found myself feeling burned out on writing about things Middle Eastern in general.   No matter what your intentions you end up in quagmire and the more you struggle the deeper into you sink.  I’ve got so many other projects competing for my attention that seem more likely to bear fruit that enthusiasm for debating archaic and absurd propositions seems to be running down.  I think I may need to retire from this field at least until some other projects are completed.

So please forgive me if I become less of a dialogue partner.   I have confidence in your spiritual intensity and think that you’ll find your way out of  some of these obsolescent  and illusory notions.  Whatever you do, I wish you all the best.

The following was written by Mitchell Gore
Charles Socarides, with Benjamin Kaufman, and Joseph Nicolosi founded the North American Reparative Therapy (NARTH) organization in 1992 to combat what they claim to be the erosion of the scientific study of homosexuality. NARTH states that homosexuality is a mental disorder caused by conscious and unconscious conflicts, is a “sign that deep emotional wounding has occurred,” and is the cause of intense suffering because it “distorts the natural bond of friendship” between members of the same sex and “works against . . . the all-important family unit.”
Socarides’ son, Richard Socarides, is one of the best-known gay activists in the country. He was a special assistant to President Clinton and senior adviser for public liaison; one of his principle jobs is White House liaison to the lesbian and gay community. Charles Socarides explains his theory that same-sex desire is a “neurotic adaptation” that can be traced to “smothering mothers and abdicating fathers.” Asked once by a reporter whether his “lousy parenting” caused his son to be gay, “Socarides neatly places the blame on ‘a combination of uncontrollable events,’ like the fact that he and Richard’s mother divorced when Richard was about 3 years old, the age at which the ‘neurotic mechanism’ of homosexuality can be implanted in a child. Socarides also says that Richard’s now-dead mother was ‘quite harsh towards my son’ after the divorce.”
It should be noted that Socrades has been married 4 times so the views put forward by a man was unable to maintain a steady relationship with a woman, should give one pause.
NARTH begins its work with the presumption that homosexuality is a developmental disorder or a mental illness, which it frequently compares to alcoholism. It claims that “powerful political pressures have done much to erode scientific exploration and study of this disorder.” It attempts to position its adherents as heroes swimming against the mighty tide of the brainwashed psychological community and the mainstream media.
Charles Socarides has also run into trouble with the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), of which he is a member. According to a letter from Dr. Ralph Roughton of the APsaA, Socarides misrepresented the position of the APsaA in a published paper and a court affidavit. Socarides attempted to make it appear that the APsaA agrees with his positions on homosexuality. He did this by quoting an APsaA document written in 1968, which supported his views and which he called the “official position” of the APsaA, while ignoring a 1990 revised statement that drastically contradicted his views. The Executive Committee of the APsaA instructed the organization’s attorney to write a letter to Socarides asking him to cease this misrepresentation and threatening legal action if he continued.
Additionally, the APsaA newsletter decided to stop printing advertisements for NARTH meetings because the organization does not adhere to APsaA’s policy of non-discrimination “and because their activities are demeaning to our members who are gay and lesbian,” according to Roughton…
Socarides, NARTH’s president, wrote in JAMA in 1970 that “homosexuality is a dread dysfunction, malignant in character, that has risen to epidemic proportions.” More recently, in 1995, he wrote that the removal of homosexuality as a mental disorder from DSM was a “Trojan Horse which, once admitted into the gates of the heterosexual world, has led to a sexual and social dementia.” He asserted that homosexuality “is a freedom that cannot be given.”
NARTH’s presence in the psychotherapy profession is small but significant. NARTH members are licensed psychotherapists, psychiatrists, and medical professionals who, by virtue of their credentials, have some influence within certain psychotherapy and medical institutions. In addition, these credentials give their ideas the appearance of legitimacy when marketed to the public. Last year, Charles Socarides, Benjamin Kaufman, Joseph Nicolosi, Jeffrey Satinover, and Richard Fitzgibbons co-authored an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal advocating reparative therapy for gay men.
In response to the aggressive marketing of reparative and conversion therapy to both the public and the psychotherapy profession, the American Psychological Association, in August 1997, reiterated its long-standing official position that homosexuality and bisexuality are not mental disorders and therefore do not require treatment.
NARTH’s positions on homosexuality and reparative therapy, that it is a choice and should be “reversed” are universally rejected by every major medical and psychiatric organization. NARTH’s founding members appear on the boards of many far-right Christian hate groups. Socarides for instance is listed as a major contributor to “The Pink Swastika” and other hate-fear propaganda. In fact if you read the acknowledgments of that book you will find the same cadre of far-right religious lug nuts that ooze out of the wood-work over and over again such as Peter LaBarbera, Lon Mabon, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc.
“The Pink Swastika” is a piece of ideological [junk] which tries to equate the foundation of Nazism with homosexuality. Never mind that homosexuals were herded into the concentration camps bearing the infamous pink triangles sewn to their clothing, in the same fashion that (and at times used in conjunction with) the yellow star of david used to identify and “sort” jews.
The above is only a scratching of the surface of the “connection” of Socarides, NARTH and other anti-gay activists and “doctors”. It should hopefully shed a sliver of light onto the cockroach like lurid agenda being out forth by such “doctors”.

“Choose a form that appropriately represents your being and intentions in the lower astral realm.  Please take a few moments, contemplate your intentions and seal them deep in you soul, for you must now cross the river of forgetfulness, shed you old identities, accept the reality of your new form, and the incarnation in the lower astral realms.
When you are ready, step across the threshold.”
Up ahead of you is another ornate doorway, a variation on the theme of the last one, ornate, curvilinear, this doorway at the end of a corridor of rough hewn stone, just a few sconces hold flaming torches providing very subdued and flickering illumination.  On the other side of the threshold are moving forms at the edge of comprehensibility, as if seen through a misted window.  You approach, crossover…
It is night time, and you are curled in a fetal position in an alley of crumbled and strangely charred concrete, you are in a wasteland of a city, post thermonuclear, but you are unharmed, your body  perfectly intact, you are dressed and have with you a few accoutrements and possessions.  You have a talisman of your own design, a powerful tool, which could also be a weapon.  You have a small shoulder bag, and in it are a few items of your own design, perhaps they are specialized tools, devices or weapons, or perhaps your intentions are such that you have only basic provisions with you, maybe you have nothing at all.  You decide what you bring to the lower astral, but everything you bring, even if it is cloaked, or made to be disguised or deceptive, must obey a version of the doctrine of signatures—-it must be appropriate to your essence and intentions.
You are awakening on the concrete, your body still in fetal position, and so, for now, is your memory, you have all the general knowledge of you kind, but do not as yet know, and perhaps will never know in this incarnation, your past identity or experiences.  You have crossed an event horizon, and your essence and intentions have been retained, and the tribal or collective knowledge of your kind have been retained or acquired, and these are all the resources that you bring into the lower astral realm.
You know only that something terrible has happened, that you are in a charred wasteland of a city.  You know nothing else of your circumstances.  There is everywhere, permeating the reality, the feeling of a great malignity and of fell powers.  A full, silvery moon provides pale and shadowy illumination.
You walk for a while amidst the labyrinthine ruins, the twisted girders and charred concrete, hulking wrecks of industrial forms, partly melted,  streaked by black soot.  Coming around the side of a partly collapsed building you see someone you recognize  deep within as a spiritual ally, someone you have chosen to journey with into the lower astral realms, someone on a parallel quest (the other player(s)).  You spend some time acquainting yourself with your ally or allies and you share provisions to have a simple meal together.  You journey on in the wasteland, sometimes you hear from a block or so away the echoing voice of a woman calling for a lost cat, her voice plaintive, haunting.
And now you step into a walled, concrete courtyard, almost a plaza of ruined concrete.  There is a man standing by the entrance to the courtyard, he is an older man, pale, emaciated and he wears the striped uniform of a World War II concentration camp, his eyes are intense, intelligent, haunted—-a feeling of feverish and electrified will, and of a fierce determination rising from a depth of absolute desolation.  He holds at his side a staff of dense metallic alloy, part of some shattered industrial machinery, the top of it is crooked, and the way he holds the staff suggests its use as a potential weapon, a heavy bludgeon.  The man’s attention is focused on two forms up ahead of you, a feeling of fell power about them.  The emaciated man flashes a look at you, it is haunted, feverish, but also sincere and non-threatening, the horror and rage in his eyes are not for you, but for what lies ahead.
You approach these objects of fell power which are hovering, ever so slightly bobbing, suspended on fields of slippery anti-gravitic energy, they are rotating slowly, one is shaped like a giant bell, the other is the classic domed disc, perhaps 20 meters in diameter with four meters of width at the domed center.  Both objects are made of riveted titanium and have insignia, black swastikas, in a circular field of white.  They are hovering, bobbing slightly in a field of energy which to you looks like heat rippled air.
You walk back to the entrance, to the emaciated man, and he speaks to you, his voice hoarse, but intense,
“You see what they are, you see the evil ones, the fathers of darkness, they are in  a loop, a continuous loop, a loop I cannot break…. I am no scientist, no engineer, I do not know the technical secrets of it, but I know a little, I have heard it said that they use a radioactive form of mercury rotating at high speeds like a centrifuge, scalar waves generating a stable, continuous loop, a shielded loop in the lower astral, the antigravitic fields around them will not allow us to make contact or I would pound on them for a thousand years till their hulls shattered, but they are in a loop with time as well as space, time is slowed and out of phase with us, the atoms and particles within the loop, and the bodies suspended within these vessels are,  from our point of view in time, animated by a metabolism that may involve only seventy heart beats in a day.  But the minds of twisted evil within those bodies are not so suspended in time, nor are they contained, they are free to travel in the lower astrals as shape-shifters, and they are demons, in the bell-shaped craft is the demon Himmler, and in the disc is the arch demon, Hitler.  They have killed all those that I have loved, have burned the living flesh of my beloved, Sarah, and have blasted the world into ruin.  I will stand vigil here for a billion years if I have to, for ten billion—-for one day the loop will fail and I will batter on those hulls for another thousand years until I have broken them open and can batter their fleshly bodies into dust.”
As the emaciated man speaks to you, he also telepathically communicates images to you, and revealed in this telepathic imagery are the interiors of the Nazi craft, grey panels with black knobs, dials with needles trembling on calibrated scales beneath discs of glass. Interior electronics have rows of orange-glowing vacuum tubes, there are hatches with circular locks, as on submarines, and the hatchways are gasketed with heavy black rubber.  Within you see the bodies lying in metabolic stasis on surgical gurneys of tubular stainless steel, ironed white hospital sheets,  glass bottles of intravenous solution and clear tubing.  Himmler and Hitler have pasty, pallid faces.
The emaciated man continues,
“While they are in this loop they have escaped the consequences of their evil.  They escaped as the Third Reich was dying, as the Russians were shelling Berlin , but they escaped in these vessels into the lower astral, and the corpses which were found were clever counterfeits.  And so their potent specters travel freely in this realm, and on Old Terra, as shape-shifting, shadowy forms, black sorcerers doing new evil, creating horror and suffering wherever they go. But I can do nothing about this, I can only stand guard, waiting for the loop to fail, and when it does I shall batter them into nonexistence.”
Your move…