Your horizon needs to be connected to your sexuality. When you are moving in your horizon, your sexuality is moving. —John de Ruiter
In the beginning it was all about love, as if we could reach right into the core of that substance and touch it, as if it was something material we could feel with our hands, something visible to the naked eye that filled us with light, a highly valued tenderness known deep down and bound up with the longing for communion. In the beginning it was all about love. In the end it was all about sex.
I warned my fiancee, my receptors for love were damaged or undeveloped due to childhood trauma. I wasnt left on anyones doorstep but I heard that thought cross Mothers mind. She had better things to do with her time than childrearing, along with a social impetus that powered her into the feminist movement. If I had it to do over again she would say, Id only have dogs.
My fiancee responded, saying, I have just the ticket for you. Meet my spiritual friend, living in the frozen north, a master of truth, he said. I listened to a few recordings of the masters slow and monotonous voice, hardly making any sense of the alien notions he spoke of. I later learned that this measured slowness of speech is a technique to quiet any anxiety someone might have about being controlled by another. Oracle Girl has the same hypnotic cadence in some of her messages to the newly freed slaves of the old world order. Very relaxing.
I had secretly been yearning for a spiritual teacher, or otherwise for a way out of the artificial imagery of my life, the colourful devices of lanthanide and plastic, the endless nights out eating someone elses creativity, and drinking too much while watching the incoming, upscale trends of a privileged few moving in. They also wanted a way out, to escape from their once beautiful city, wrecked with homelessness and the permissions of wokedom dawning. Once discovered, there was a laying hold of our small town charm with big city ambitions and desires. It wasnt a fit for me anymore, and as the War on Freedom in the US was freshly in our faces from 9/11, moving to a foreign country seemed a wise choice. I agreed to join him. For the sake of immigration, my decision included marriage, an institution so easy to step into and, thankfully for us, difficult to step out of. It kept us abiding by one another through the harrowing times that arrived after we arrived in the land of the Cree and a player named Gretsky.
The land of the Lord of Love. When sitting still for a period of time, maybe a moment, maybe hours, there is a different frequency that becomes evident within awareness, a slow moving wave in the body that seems to merge with unfamiliar vibrations outside of the physical form. The physical form begins to dissolve into that wave and the sensation that slowly edges in is of a weightedness and immovability, an inviolable essence of ones own being that knows everything and has no preferences for any of it. Lao Tsu writes of this heavenly place, a mystical locus, free of neocons and rappers. There is a visceral sensation accompanying the conscious experience of this level of perception. It is compelling and quiet and may be divine. It may be addictive, like a drug that takes over and levitates consciousness out of the artifice of matter and into the exaltation of a nameless place where nothing at all is ever wrong. We put a name on that and it becomes a destination to return to every week, on schedule, put your money down, and sit in your place, being with the Lord of Love.
The space around my husbands master was an ideal space for reaching that formless place of awareness. There were many hours spent together sitting still in silence. All of a sudden, right then and there, the Master of Truth might enter into you and hang out, an interloper in the land of love and tao. The sensation was supernatural, the experience of someone elses energy inside you and present to what was occurring in your intimate spaces. One moment we might be filled with an ecstasy that seemed to pour from him into us, or was it us into him? In the next moment came an emptiness that could only crave for the return of his attention. We gave it many names, and every name was a name for him.
Without offering up our praises to the master, we received no attention, no visitations, and no ecstasy, all in the name of honesty. It was honesty, he claimed, that would support us, that would uncover our lameness to be seen. For that we would feel cut off and deprived of his love. Despite the unbearable misery of that deprivation, it was all a form of dishonesty, not to be spoken of or even thought about. We were liars should we speak of any lameness. There was no compassion for the wounded, the lame and the blind in that cult. Buck up and get on with relating to higher truth. Sit still, dont move, and dont close yours eyes. He always wanted access into us and he came in through the eyes. We were paralyzed under his gaze.
When youre not completely honest within you will support feelings not representing the highest truth in you. There are no honest feelings. This seems to be a reoccurring jingle among spiritual teachers. Feeling, intuition, or any other internal compass that could possibly insert itself between blind obedience and an understanding of what is actually occurring is not to be trusted. Theyre just feelings. There is an honest you. There is a less than honest you. You can have distorted feelings and at the same time you can be honest. He was forever cutting deeper into a split between one part good, one part bad, although he would say, It isnt bad, its just not it, so then a finer split through more fragments of oneself.
Nonetheless, the language resonated with many receptors, developed or undeveloped in me. Honesty is a highly valued quality in my experience. If someone isnt telling the truth and I know it, I am clear to steer clear. He often invoked The Highest Truth which I associated with my highest longing, the ability to see clearly and actually know what is real. That was the holy grail to me. The Highest Truth likely had as many meanings as there were attentive hearts sitting together in his imperial room. Keeping definitions open and vague served the greater good— good for him in that we returned to revisit the Real and the True, regardless of the ambiguity.
I remained enrapt through love, a movement that burned through the group of us loving him. The love of my husband was nothing compared to this love of him and the higher truth he was revealing. Did anyone actually see the truth he repeatedly said he was revealing? Rather, there was always something else, repeatedly, an unnameable New. The unnameable New, or Next as it was sometimes called, always and repeatedly arrived with the choice to manifest the All of You. There was also a Shift that was required to be made into the New in hopes of manifesting the All of You. In the meantime, the grail I came seeking was never revealed.
I continued loving the little bit I did see, what was actually inside of me, and inside of my cohorts, the joy of an enlightened possibility, and a promise from within my own dear soul that there can be clear thinking, free of emotional hooks and blocks, or the patterns in myself that keep me returning to old ways of being, what wouldnt allow for becoming what I really am. What I really am! There was a spiritual ditty that rang through the group like a fire in the dry woods, what we truly are! Beyond the makeshift reality of the world, what we really are! What exists on the planes of existence that actually inform this ad lib world, what we truly are! A master builder moving pieces around the planet like a great game of Risk, each piece being or becoming what we truly are!
A piece in his game.
Its difficult to express the challenges that this relationship with my husbands spiritual friend visited upon my marriage. Imagine a third party persistently insinuating himself between you and your lover. Imagine the suggestion of you making love to him through your sexual relations with your husband. If you had no husband, or even if you did, there were other ways to express sexual love for him via video calls, him in his truck and a maiden in her bed, moving her sexuality toward him.
Whats wrong with sex!? said one wife to her doubtful husband. I kept to myself about the astral visitations that occurred in the night. Later I learned I was not the only one susceptible to this fantasy, or perhaps actuality. Im not a dweller on that threshold but if its possible, I was participating with an energy that was not mine, nor my husbands, but it did come a-calling often.
Perhaps it was the delusional result of the overwrought and frenzied field of sexual energies, churning among the lot of us. We talked about sex. We believed in sex as a powerful source of energy. We believed it was meant to open us to The Higher Truth of things. Its difficult to relate to those beliefs now, now that I am gone from his diseased world of sexual dominance. I try to look back and remember but all I see are my comrades who remain enticed by his power and his sex, his promises that go nowhere but toward satisfying his addiction for more and more, more petit mort.
Suddenly I think of the neocons. Not so surprising, with World War 3 up for an old world scramble. Armed traders, perplexed by death while giving it tremendous value, their missiles like penises, trembling in their hands, impatient to shoot their destructive wads.
We are naturally drawn to sources of energy, our faces turn toward the sun from crowded beaches, or upward to watch a fast moving cloud and wonder at its invisible propulsion. We cannot look away from the mysterious mushrooming of bombs. We are all, inevitably, falling into the mysteries of dying. What will it be like? What higher source draws us toward our end? What if many of us all go at the same time?
In dying, our reply to this life will be made manifest. What brilliance! What beauty! This life lived in love, real and true, in spite of any masters.