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| On sexual spirituality"What we're born with, what we experience all through infancy and childhood, is a sexuality that isn't concentrated on the genitals; it's a sexuality diffused throughout the whole organism. That's the paradise we inherit. But the paradise gets lost as the child grows up."
Ranga Karakuran in Aldous Huxley's Island, page 70 of the
1989 paperback reprint published by Perennial Library/Harper & Row
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Have you ever wondered why so much of human sexuality is drowning in misery? Why people seek ever more intense experiences and fail to have them? Why there is so much fear surrounding human sexuality? Why marriages and the families which spring from them are largely failures?
Having had an existence which spans millennia, I think that I may speak with authority here. Before we made the switch to spoken language - and worse, onto writing - we communicated with each other by a telepathic transmission of our emotions. There was no lying possible and no fear about our sexuality or the sexuality of others. Where I lived on the island of Antikythera there was a spiritual family of women who devoted themselves to refining and experiencing feminine sexuality with each other to the highest degree imaginable. It was not that we hated men, not at all. But there was no place for men in our world. We did not need to be entangled with the prospect of giving birth and raising children. We were subsidized by the people on the Helladic and Anatolian mainlands and they gave us food and fabric, and occasionally, girls nearing maturity who had volunteered to join us. I was one such girl.
Even when I lived on the mainland, before I went to Antikythera, we greeted each other with embraces and not words. There were those around whom we felt less than comfortable and we openly acknowledged this by refraining from an embrace - a nod and a smile were enough. Such vocalizations as we made were entirely incidental to any socializing we did. Seeing a burn on someone's hand, a sense of curiosity passed from the questioner to the burned person, who would make a quick hand sign and think of the flame which had burned them, and possibly, but not necessarily, a cry such as you'd make if you burned your own hand.
I will not dwell on what we girls did together as we grew up because it was very much like learning any other physical skill such as climbing or swimming. The more you practiced the better you were. What I wish to emphasize is the emotional bonding which went on between us. How we fell in love and that love deepened and deepened again. Add to this the innate curiosity about all things which we have in our hearts and eventually there were any number of others with whom you would fall in love, with no jealousy or fear involved. This is the paradise which the fictional character Ranga spoke of in the quote that leads this essay. I lived it and I still do, but no longer as a living human being.
What happened? I only have what Mike Archontas and Stavros have told me. There arose a group of male-dominant peoples in Central Asia who spoke, who wrote, who waged war and who had no use for sex without fear. Their whole culture was apparently based upon fear and from it arose such perversities as Christianity and other religions which seek to enslave people with illusory laws, deities and again, fear. Why they arose I do not know, all that is certain is that they took over the Mediterranean world quickly. Pockets of the old religion lingered on in southern Africa and northern Europe, and to some degree in the outer limits of what is now Siberia. The Australian part of the world was long free of the hideous influence, as were the Oceanic and Polynesian worlds but eventually, all succumbed, at least partially.
What the world is today is a place where love is literally battling fear, and the battleground is in human sexual desire. What's your intimate life ruled by - love or fear? If you think that it's fear, you can desert the evil hordes and learn again what you knew as a child about your body. That, you are meant to experience pleasure and love fully, totally, and not just in your genitals. That the emotions you have as a young person which seek to cry out "I love you!" during those first intimate times are real and not something illusory or foolish. The world, the world of fear will quickly try to make you believe just that - it's "puppy love." But it isn't.
So now let's imagine here: you're an adult and your sexual self is in tatters. You would refrain from any further excursions into the land of physical intimacy but you have some powerful endocrine glands telling you just the opposite. Your heart has been broken. Possibly numerous times, eh? What can you do?
You can start by letting yourself feel what your body is experiencing at any given moment. Are you tired? Hungry or thirsty? Are you in pain, or do actually feel physical well-being? Give yourself twenty minutes a day to just savor how you are feeling physically, even if you're in pain. Next, what are you feeling emotionally? Chances are that you're in some kind of quiet torment because of any number of fears. Start with the ones given you by the media: are you concerned about terrorists, or that there might be a nuclear war? Are you worried about prices of everything because they just keep going up and up? How rational and realistic are these fears? Do you worry about what other people may think about you, may say about you? Why? Other people are just like you in that way - they have their quota of irrationality to keep them occupied, and with that irrationality comes - right! - fear! Simply put, if you allow yourself to approve of how you live and what you want, even for a few moments every day, the fears will begin to melt in the sun of your self-esteem. Did you know that you are born with a natural self-esteem? Think of how many times your parents told you that you were "bad." Do you wonder where that self-esteem went? It was chased into the basement of you, not only by your parents, but by your teachers and your religions. You can begin changing this by allowing yourself to believe - again if only for a few moments every day - "Hey. I'm not so bad!" No, you're not. You are probably pretty damned good underneath all of that fear!
Have you ever wondered why the ones with whom you hope to have a relationship are bad and badder? Why they fail? Although you speak and write, your emotional telepathy is working just fine - and you seek out those who are not only "just like you" but just like both of your parents. Your emotional telepathy sees those who are most like you and sends some pretty strong signals. "That one. That's the one. That's the one whom you have got to be with. NOW!" And this other person is beautiful, is witty, charming and sexy. Until the reality comes down some days or weeks later. If you don't believe this, think of someone you might know who has made a one night stand with someone and regretted it the very next morning! Take some time to see other people as they are, the ones that your poisoned emotional telepathy ignores. As your fear lessens and you become more aware of your body, you'll be surprised at how suddenly attractive other people are - others whom you might have ignored.
What about actually having sex as you grow into a new awareness? Remember what Ranga said, it is a whole-body sexuality and not just concentrated in your genitals. As you grow in your new awareness you'll find that even a hug can be quite intimate! Yet, what Ranga spoke of is a goal for now, one which must be practiced. You've heard of the "practicing homosexual?" They're just trying to get it right! And if you're a practicing heterosexual, you'll try to get it right as well. It involves falling in love. "Oh SonShon, not THAT, no, I can't ever fall in love again!" Why? The alternative is to die in a stew of your own fear. So your heart gets broken - it will heal. One of the things which Jesus is supposed to have said applies here: "Except you become as small children, there is no way you will enter paradise." Remember what Ranga called "paradise?" But you can, you will if you try, enter a new world ruled by child-like wonder. This is not a return to your past, to your childhood as you lived it. Would you really go back to your child-life, where everything was dictated to you with an "or else?" This is a blank-slate childhood, one in which you set the rules and indulge in wonder.
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| So much in our lives.......So much, so much that has happened. Our old friend Fyodora is in Helsinki with Kasandara, and they are talking about marriage. And a honeymoon in Bangkok. Ling has been going back and forth from where we are in the UK, making some incredible new art. I feel gladly overwhelmed in some ways. But most of all it is springtime in the northern hemisphere. Flowers blooming everywhere and the song birds are around once again. | | |
| A New Model of Human ConsciousnessI have been asked to post an entry on this subject and I do hope that you find it to be interesting. I am currently in the UK with Anwarii, Ling and Gwenny and shall at a future date make some comments of my own: A New Model of Human Consciousness
We are gradually spreading the word throughout our system of sites, blogs and phlogs that we beleive that we have developed a coherent and new model of human consciousness. We came across the idea during an e-mail discussion with an Associate of the OC and that was about ten days ago. Since that time we've been slowly working out the ramifications of it and it goes like this:
It has long been thought that our consciousness - which we shall define here as that which we know, think and feel - is located in our brains. This has been the "standard model" since some time before the Enlightenment and today nearly everyone accepts it as a given. Much research has been expended in psychology, biology and neuroscience to find just where in the brain human consciousness resides. We are proposing that this is just so much barking up the wrong tree.
Human consciousness uses the human brain. It does not originate in the brain nor is it in any way a permanent feature of the brain. Human consciousness resides in the unobstructed universe, that realm which so many of us cannot see yet is around us all. In this place where live those who have passed on, those yet to be born and those devic or angelic beings which were here before us - it is from that very place that our individual human consciousness uses our brains. We have been enculturated not to be aware of this. Yet we "use" our brains much as radio signals "use" a radio or a computer's operating system "uses" the computer's hardware. I might be taken to task about the seantics of the last part of the last sentence, being corrected with "the computer uses the operating system;" but in reality it boils down to a choice of perception.
This would explain a great deal about a number of things which we as living human beings experience in our lives:
- it would validate the sense of personal immortality with which even the staunchest atheist is embued; if we were here before our mortal lives, and likely we were, then we shall continue after
- it would explain a great deal about those things which our culture views as psychological abberations such as paranoia, schizophrenia and especially "multiple personality" phenomena. If a mind using a brain becomes so convinced of the reality of its permanent location within a brain it will take very seriously certain fear-producing events which can occur. A beating or rape, being involved in a wartime incident will certainly affect how you view the world even though you are a personality in an ethereal location which is using a living brain. Schizophrenia might well have nutritional and other biological causes but the implication is that if you found that your brain was physically malfunctioning you would still attempt to use it. This would be like shouting into a cell phone that is out of its range of coverage, or using a computer that has a malfunctioning hard-drive. That human consciousness would be affected during life would account for depression and some forms of paranoia. The analogy here would be a corrupted operating system, or one with a virus. In computer operating systems there really is not a "virus" in the biological sense; it is well understood that certain kinds of code perform in a similar manner to the biological virus. Multiple personality phenomena - as opposed to using the word "disorder" would be explained by saying that a human consciousness has been so traumatized as to refuse to any longer use the brain or body in which it operates. The brain then would either attract a new consciouss entity or, a new conscius entity would at least part of the time use the same brain. The analogy here is like a hard-drive partitoned to use more than one operating system on a computer in a series of "virtual machines."
- it would explain why some people have what are called "out of body" experiences - OOBE's - because such individuals have learned, usually on a subliminal level, that they aren't really tied to their brains. Human brains are not used to processing direct information from the unobstructed universe, which would explain why such experiences are often innacurately portrayed when verbally reported. This segues into dreaming.
- our dreams are usually not pleasant and this would be an habituation of a mind residing in a brain but experienceing the unobstructed or numinous world; unaccustomed to the "different reality" thus experienced the brain's various perceptual centers - visual cortex especially - will produce paradoxical and sometimes upsetting imagery. The stuff from which nightmares are made.
- to conclude this proposition I suggest that certain drugs which affect the brain do so in a manner which gives our immaterial minds numerous options of perception and action. Thus chemicals like DMT and LSD-25, which are commonly called "hallucinogenic" - "generating hallucinations" - will have a mind using not one part of a brain but many at the same time. For whatever reason empathogens such as MMDA, MDA and MDMA would for whatever reason make those areas of the brain through which emotions and feelings are processed by the mind seem most inviting.
We have just begun exploring the implications of this idea and welcome comments.
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| Home for a whileI am home now, the pain of heartbreak seems at last faded, washed from me by the waters of the sea and the love of Ling and Gwenny, and of our loving dolphin companions. | | |
| We came back to Clifton the other night, we had a long-needed break from our day-to-day; Seima tells me the idea of a "vacation" is to tempoaraily vacate your life for a bit. We did. Ling was all set to get back to work as ArtGroup head or whatever but said out loud, "I want to play," and made two pictures just for fun, both are at Deviant Art. Certainly different. We all work here and apparently work a great deal, and so we will be talking about relaxing more. The Community does not need our attention 24/7 and if anyone really needs someone here they know how to get to us immediately. That's always been a given. Come to think of it, I think I'm making this post just for the fun. I'm enjoying a song by Smashing Pumpkins called "1979," which is not exactly a happy song but it is infectious for sure; the fellow singing lead is singing and not screaming the way he usually does. Summer wind, summer spirit. | | |
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