Becoming Human

Osho on love and relationships

When a man loves a woman, then he naturally also loves many other people; and when a woman loves a man, then she also loves many other people, because love cannot be limited to a single person. If there is love there at all, it cannot be circumscribed. This is only possible when there is no love.

Love is like breathing. If someone told you, “I only breathe when I am with you, and the rest of the time I don’t breathe”, then you wouldn’t believe him. How could you believe him? He would be dead, if he didn’t breathe without you.

Love is the breath of your soul.

But this is what we have turned it into: for centuries we have made people believe in such stupid ideas and in the process brought so much unhappiness into the world, sown so much jealousy, possessiveness and hatred – for no reason at all! We have programmed this stupid idea into people’s heads that love can only be between two people and therefore must be a dyadic relationship. “True love is a dyadic relationship. When it is not, it is not true love.”

The truth is the exact opposite: when it is a dyadic relationship, it is not true love. In this case, it is not authentic, it is a deception, just an illusion. Then two people are imagining something and are untrue to themselves – not only to their partner, but also to themselves!

How can a man who has a sense of beauty avoid noticing the beauty of women? How can he avoid being interested in them? The only way is to destroy completely his sense of beauty. But then he is not interested any more in his own wife either. This is exactly what has happened: because of this idiotic idea that love must be purely a dyadic relationship, there is no more love on earth. The only possibility is that the husband no longer loves his own wife, since he must kill off the very drive to love. He must suppress every sense of beauty and forget completely that there is such a thing. But then – don’t forget this – he cannot love his own wife any more either – all he can do is pretend. Then he is condemned just to making empty, meaningless gestures.

A woman who is told, “You may only love your own husband and not show any interest in anyone else” necessarily will also lose interest in her own husband.

This is how couples lose interest in one another. They argue all the time. They never stop finding new reasons to fight with each other. But the real reason for their disputes is simply that their life energy is not allowed to unfold.

The truth is simply this: that a man who feels drawn to beauty is interested in many women. A woman who is interested in beauty is interested in all possible men. It may be that she is most interested in just one, maybe so much so that she wants to live together with this one person, but this does not mean that her interest in other people simply disappears: it is still there. However, when you go for a walk together with your husband or your wife, and the man says, “look at that woman, she is really beautiful!”, then there is immediate irritation. How can he say such a thing?! But there is nothing wrong with it. You should be happy, that your husband is normal and alive and that his tyres are not yet worn out. You should be happy, that he is still young and fresh, that he is still receptive to beauty. There is no reason to become jealous.

Osho

(I retranslated this from a German source, if anyone has the original let me know!)

A spiritual manifesto

When I married my partner, almost to the day five years ago, we, like many couples who are dissatisfied with traditional concepts of marriage, were faced with the challenge of how to formulate our marriage vows and our marriage contract to reflect what it was we at that time really believed was the meaning and content of the commitments we were entering into. We didn’t find a lot of resources out there to help us do that, because every alternative we found – be it polyamorous, Wiccan, or other new age notions – seemed to be envisaged, by its adherents, as a new orthodoxy. That is, it was characterized by a bunch of behavioral prescriptions and once-for-all negotiated space but it did not go to the heart of the sacredness of human relation and of the human person, nor did it reflect truly, for us, the deep spiritual urges underlying the wish to enter into a relationship and to bring up children. So we did our best to find words.

Five years later, and I see the problem in a different light and from a number of new angles. I want therefore to try to propose a solution to it, and I hope I can count on the support of some of the very wise people I have met over the intervening years who have a similar clarity of vision as to what it is that is actually going on in the space of human relationships and its meaning within the context of humankind’s spiritual evolution.

I believe it should be possible to distill, out of the various experiences and movements that have brought us an immense new global consciousness of our human potential, some principles which are perfectly universal and to which any person who has seen beyond her or his conditioning and glimpsed their true nature will find it natural to adhere. Indeed there is no effort of adherence required, merely an effort of formulation. This article is trying only to introduce the concept and some basic ideas; on the basis hereof I hope together with others to arrive at a text which can really find a natural consensus, because it seems to me that on all essential points of it all authentic persons and teachers would agree.

What are the key elements of such a declaration?

Firstly, it seems to me that it must be in the first person. The ancient Hebrews (basing themselves on the even more ancient Sumerians) formulated their code of laws in the second person and credited it with divine sanction. We have been living with it and all its inadequacies for over three thousand years. Its manipulative and paternalistic character as well as its primitive nature are plain to see.

Our new set of principles will not be imposed on us from outside, it will simply emanate from our soul; and it will not serve a purpose of organizing society around a set of ethical precepts, which is a worthy but separate purpose. It will rather serve to communicate and reach out, and its effects will be only in the private sphere.

The new set of principles must be based on a complete renunciation of any claim on the life of another person. We have recognized the evil of slavery and of many social injustices; with the same passion we must recognize the evil of traditional prescriptive family institutions, chief among them marriage. It is a Faustian bargain which 21st century man can no longer tolerate. It predates on mankind’s desperate desire to achieve some measure of spiritual advancement and consolation, and should in its traditional form be simply outlawed: the law should recognize, at it does in so many other areas, that a contract written under such oppressive conditions cannot be binding. This is the principle which has underpinned humanity’s progressive emancipation ever since liberal thinkers began challenging the moral precepts of the church and the inherited social order.

Marriage is not a divine institution, but a contract between two individuals subject to a high degree of social incentive and coercion; marriage as a contract is, however, in almost all cases based on a collective misrepresentation, a social psychosis; even if such misrepresentation is innocent, it seems to me that (whilst I recognize that children enter into the institution without contracting or being able to contract to do so, which is the only remaining justification for a legal marriage regime I can see) all marriage contracts should be voidable by the automatic application of contract law. There is doubtless a need to reformulate the institution of marriage in order to protect the interests of children, rather than abolish it entirely; with this I do not take issue. However, such an altruistic concern is hardly the foundation of marriage law today.

Whilst marriage law is the easiest target because of the institutionalized nature of marriage, an adherent to the declaration will undertake, of course, to recognize patterns of manipulation in all of her or his human relations and both to admit them and to seek to go beyond them, vis a vis children, colleagues, friends and lovers.

The declaration must also be objectively multilateral and subjectively unilateral. There are no parties to the agreement, not even those others who happen to subscribe to the same text. The benefits I accord to you are the same benefits I accord to every human being, not only to those other human beings who are as “enlightened” as myself and still less to one single human being. (Philosophically speaking they may, indeed, not stop at the species boundary either; but for our purposes I think there is no need to develop this).

The text will need to take a form in order to underpin community but it cannot be rigidly formulated or breed hermeneutical bureaucracies. No one need ever tell another what it means or does not mean. No one will certify whether or not my behavior conforms to it in practice.

It should be and can be, I believe, perfectly ecumenical and even scientific. The basis for it is our understanding of how the self is formed, developed in psychoanalysis, and how it acts, developed in psychology more generally. To complete the picture, a simple extrapolation of liberal and humanistic principles on which there is wide agreement is enough.

And what are the advantages?

My hope is that the manifesto will constitute common ground on which spiritual people can build their relationships and communities. Communication can take place around it. Some may consciously decide to derogate from it, and they may have their own reasons for doing so. However, relations between spiritual people may hereby come to take place on a basis which is explicit, not in the shadows of hoped-for shared values and unelucidated conflicts of interest. Simply put, if you adhere joyfully and willingly to the principles set out, a lot is possible between us; if you do not, I am forewarned of the difficulties ahead.

The manifesto will be only a basis, a kind of framework law or constitution. Much will come on top, much that is specific to individuals, couples and groups. However, as a basis for communication and a source of shared understanding from the outset of human interactions, it is an invaluable shortcut which will slash the opportunity costs of building community. I envisage its use across the web as an invitation to authenticity and real dialogue: in social media whether, like Facebook, general in scope or devoted specifically to meeting new people.

I would also like to add that I am not “against” manipulation and even its past institutionalization, I perfectly well understand the circumstances under which it has arisen and the role that it has played and continues to play in human society. It can be argued that the institutions in question, although I qualify them as evil, are in fact a bulwark against greater evil and as such a least-bad social choice. This is not a debate I am entering into. I speak here to persons wishing to leave behind the childhood of the human race and become autonomous, empowered, enlightened individuals. For such people, these legacy institutions are inimical to spiritual growth, and this is the real point. Compromises with civil authorities doubtless need to be found. However, at the heart of what our human relationships are really about, we can all choose. I invite to this choice.

And so finally, what could this manifesto look like? It would be nice to have something memorable, a sort of Aquarian decalogue. It needs to start with my attitude to myself. As I imagine it may be difficult to sum up what needs to be said in ten short headlines, there may need to be a paragraph accompanying each to clarify the meaning, not perhaps for those of us to whom these spiritual principles are intuitive but certainly for those for whom they are not.

I don’t want to write it here as I first want to gather ideas. But let me try, to make it concrete, to give something of the possible flavor:

I understand the origin of my emotionality in my childhood experience
I take responsibility for my own experience of the world
I acknowledge my conditioning and do not seek to defend it
I distinguish between my inner feelings and what is going on in the outer world
I communicate my feelings without blame or criticism
I communicate my needs and wishes without making demands
In managing our common interests and those of those who depend on us, I will treat you with fairness and respect and honor the differences between us
I honor your need for touch and your sexuality
I honor your vulnerability
I speak my truth and listen to yours
I do not instrumentalize or objectivize you
It is my honor to delight you and to serve you

…..

Your thoughts and views are very welcome!

Mental health in Belgium

Oh boy, Belgium is the number one per-capita consumer of sleeping pills in the WORLD! And not by a little bit (see p.8 (271) of the report here). 76.5 statistical DDDs per thousand inhabitants means nearly 8% of the population is taking these each day. That may well also hide a difference between Flanders and Wallonia: the figure for France is 66 pro mil whilst for Holland it is only 23 (I say “only”, but that still places them at 15th place in the world). This figure is, or should be, completely shocking.

There are, admittedly, two factors that may contribute to this, but neither of them is reassuring. The first is the underlying state of mental health. This is turn says a lot about how Belgians treat their children 🙁 The second is the facility with which chemical substances are used to repress anxiety, rather than humanistic therapeutic methods which actually help to resolve neurosis and trauma. Such therapy is very hard to find here, much more so than in Germany or Holland. Admittedly it might be that in some other countries, prescription of these substances is more tightly controlled (on either public health or economic grounds) and that some people procure them on the black market, I have no idea. But the figure of 76.5 pro mil is in any case shockingly high.

On top of this, Belgium occupies the 6th place in the rankings for consumption of anxiolytics, with 84 pro mil. The main class of anxiolytic drugs are also benzodiazepines, it is only the molecule and dosage that vary according to the use. So these numbers are to add together. That’s 16% of the population, which must be well over 20% of the adult population (though for all I know they may well also be prescribed to children, especially as of the onset of puberty).

Moreover, exogenous sources of stress in this country are extremely low by the standards of developed countries. Many workplaces are positively soporific, job security (for those who have one) is very high, reported violent crime is rather low – it’s not exactly London, New York or even Paris. It’s a laid-back provincial backwater where living standards are high.

So that’s a hell of a lot of dark family secrets. It’s time to wake up and start admitting it.

On yoga

I love yoga, and the more I practise it, the more I love it. Its physical and mental effects are great.

At least the way I do it (when I do). But i honestly really do wonder on what planet most of its practitioners live. I wonder what their practice means to them. For all seems to be directed against the body, at “conquering” it, at acquiring some illusory peaceful state of mind that must represent the complete triumph of the superego, the ultimate repression of all emotion. Emotions are so unwelcome in the average yoga class, so much a taboo. Let’s pretend to be peaceful, serene – however much we are aching inside.

That’s too bad. An age-old tradition entirely turned against its own spiritual-therapeutic logic and roots, no longer a vehicle of liberation but one more vehicle of social control. Those forces are so overpowering and so in control of us that there is nothing they cannot capture and use to their ends. So hard is it to find the authentic, even a taste of the authentic, within the jungle of these myriad forms of repression.

Happily, apparently not all yoga teachers think like this. So I guess it’s just a question of finding that rare pearl… (of course, in tantra we don’t think like that at all – emotions? bring ’em on 🙂 )

Well I liked, for now, Five Rhythms. Very much in fact. For yoga I will keep looking for someone who will love me more than their ego, and let me be as I am.

Sexual orientation

I inadvertently wandered into a sea of hostility when I posted recently a few thoughts on this subject on the blog of a person self-identifying as bisexual. Although I was extremely supportive and only doing a bit of thinking out of the box, I encountered what can only be described as a ghetto mentality: you’re not one of us, therefore you can’t be on our side. Which I find rather sad.

In the hope of launching a more serene debate, let me try again here. This is, I think, a subject that troubles the tantric community. In tantra there is much talk of the male/female polarity, sexuality plays a defining role and, accordingly, non-heterosexuality is difficult to reconcile with both practice and theory. Osho seems never to have taken non-heterosexuality seriously as a natural phenomenon, and writers like David Deida offer not only a stark dichotomy of the sexes, but also what might be viewed as unhelpfully stereotypical portraits of “superior men” and “superior women”. Sure, all this gets politically correctly glossed as being about “essences” not biological gender and sure, we all have male and female aspects to us, but this only allows the head to be held above water. It is anything but satisfying. At the end of the day some of us are men and others are women, and tantric union occurs between those who are men and those others who are women. Of course some form of union may also occur between men and other men and between women and other women, but this form of union then has no characteristics to distinguish it from any other experience of mystical union with whatever element of nature; it does not occupy an archetypal position, either in theory or in practice.

At the same time, the practice of tantra contributes a lot to the breaking down of barriers to same-sex intimacy. As in society at large heterosexuality is generally equated with homophobia (which encompasses not only a rejection of homosexuality, but often of any form of intimacy between men, even non-sexual), the loss of this barrier is destabilising and may lead some to feel they need to redefine their identity. If I can enjoy intimate touch from men, does that mean I’m gay, or, at “best”, bisexual? For women, who have close biological bonds to their mothers and feel less cultural pressure to be homophobic in the first place, this question may be less insistent. Still women, in my experience, may like to identify as bi, and this for a number of reasons. For a start, there is a much greater demand on the part of men for their female partner to be bi (or “bi”) than vice versa. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that many men are turned on by the idea of their wives playing with other women; in any case many more than there are women turned on by the contrary scenario. Secondly, for men, to self-declare as bi, especially after a period of heterosexual identification, not only runs into society’s homophobia, but also risks being seen as a cover for actual but unadmitted homosexuality. On the other hand, women seem, in my culture at least, to be less at risk of this kind of stigmatization. Lesbianism is statistically less common than male homosexuality, but although in some countries such as the USA more men than women seem to have had same-sex sexual experiences, in others such as France and Australia the reverse applies (see here). Because it is a bigger “deal” for men than for women, women may tend to adopt a wider definition and be more ready to self-identify as bisexual, and self-identification may not accurately portray underlying behavior.

In the course of this debate, which was unfortunately cut short by the blogger in question, it was both suggested by me and put to me that sexual attraction might be a better gauge of sexual orientation than simply the incidence of same-sex play. On a basic level, it may be considered that erotic touch by persons of either sex creates a similar primary response and may be similarly enjoyed without activating or being associated with other layers of sexual experience, in just the same way as other characteristics of the person providing the touch may not be very relevant, such as age, appearance, education and so on, factors which nonetheless play an important role in pre-intimate sexual response, that is, the response to sexual stimuli and signals other than intimate touch. If same-sex touch is not so enjoyed, this is more to do with its mental associations and conditioning, factors which, again arguably, could be considered not germane to determining primary sexual orientation.

On this basis, one could legitimately ask the question of whether the typical hormonal response that characterizes heterosexual attraction, with which I am familiar, is comparable in the case of homosexual attraction and whether such attraction is, then, comparable in nature or somehow distinct. From the little I have found on the subject, the endocrinology appears to be similar for men, whilst for women the results are more difficult to interpret. According to Wikipedia, in a 2004 study at Northwestern University, female participants, both heterosexual and homosexual, became sexually aroused when they viewed straight as well as lesbian erotic films. Among the male participants, however, the heterosexual men were turned on only by erotic films showing women; the gay males, however, were aroused only by films showing men. (I suspect though that a lot of the women were simply yawning at both types of film – and maybe were even more turned on by some gay male porn, which according to some reports women quite like)

Be this as it may, I do wish that homosexual and bisexual persons of both genders would show a bit more interest in engaging with those who call themselves heterosexuals in order to better understand each other’s sexuality. This ghetto mentality I find appalling. And I am pretty sure that many people denied entry to today’s ghetto really just long to talk to other people with whom they in due course would find common ground and friendship (or, for that matter, love).

I hate society’s hypocrisy and discrimination, but personally I am not too concerned by what the answers are, I am only curious. I am open to all experience, yours and my own. Whatever your orientation, sexuality should not be a battlefield, but a celebration.

Important update to our terms and conditions

Recent events have led me to realize certain ingrained patterns in how I relate to important people in my life, and the need to change these.

I have been, in the past, a person with an excessive concern for how other people are feeling, in general and about me. I usually looked for the ways I might be at the origin of their distress and, if I was able to believe I was, how I could put matters right. I needed their affirmation that they still loved me. Seeing human distress, in fact, far from prompting genuine concern and compassion activated a narcissistic script making me see the sufferings of others only in terms of my own. This tendency opened me to manipulation. It comes right from my early childhood and describes my infantile relationship with my mother.

Manipulation, I begin to realize, can take many forms. The word itself sounds very evil. The act, though, is quite conditioned and automatic. People typically manipulate others in order to force them into assuming roles which were absent in their childhood in order to provide themselves with psychic security. Thus, for example, the manipulation practised by a schizoid personality allows them to maintain control and to keep present in a defined role the persons who represent persons absent in their childhood. Such a personality cannot abandon control because to do so would constitute an abandonment of the ego to the flames of its primal dissociation. They will also choose to associate with those who are easiest to manipulate and therefore afford the least risk of destabilising their psychic balance.

Understanding this is one thing, and may help to evacuate some of the anger that the person who becomes aware of being manipulated will feel. The manipulator is acting on an automatism, and doing so because the weaknesses in your own personality make that a comfortable strategy to address (or rather paper over) their own unresolved childhood needs. However, being “understanding” is what comes easiest to the masochist. It sounds good, but it will in no way help. Understanding of this kind does not proceed from the heart and compassion and is difficult to separate from the need to feel understood, to be affirmed in ones identity as someone understanding. This reopens the doors to the same strategies as before.

Even if one is alert to manipulation and resisting it, it is hard to resist not only because of the constant temptation to give in to it in order to buttress ones self-image, but also both due to its obstinacy and unconscious nature on the part of the originator and due to the anger it activates in oneself.

Nonetheless, at whatever cost, one must resist manipulation. It is only by resisting it systematically that the light can be focused again and again on the fact of the manipulation and eventually force the manipulator first to see and then to acknowledge what they are doing and to understand its roots. However, even this sounds like a suspect excessive concern for the welfare of the other. The primary reason to resist manipulation is in order to overcome the pattern in oneself which gives rise to its ubiquity.

The mechanism of manipulation relies on values implanted during early childhood in the superego as to what is “good”, “decent”, “clean”, “normal” and so on. So long as one harbors inappropriate ideas as to what is “good”, ideas which it is easy for the manipulator to uncover and decode, one is open to being manipulated. There are almost infinitely many of these. They have originally all served the purpose of coercing the child into behaving in a manner thought by the parent to be fitting, convenient or decorous. Thus: tidiness, not raising ones voice, thinking of others, eating up ones plate, not displaying ones genitals: any standard which one cannot or does not wish to live by in the contemporary world but the absence of which generates childhood guilt, will do. When you feel guilty because your superego condemns your behavior, you feel bad and I am in control. I now pull the levers which will allow me to get you to do what I want.

Guys, I’m done with this. Done with being understanding. If anyone out there needs to be understood (read, has a fragile ego which they need me constantly to reinforce), well sorry, go see a shrink. I’m not in that game. Yes, I understand. However, please appreciate that I do not care.

In my world, I need grown-up people, as partners. That’s why, if you are over 18, then regardless of age, gender or existing allegiances I’m changing the terms and conditions of having any kind of relationship with me unilaterally and with immediate effect.

1. You are required to recognize that you have problems. I have problems, and so do you.

2. You are required to understand that your problems are your problems. I really don’t care about them and I am unwilling to take the slightest responsibility for them. Any attempt to insinuate that I play the slightest role in their ontogenesis or maintenance will result in angry reminders of the above, and I am more determined to resist it than you are able to persevere with it, so better accept this and give up now.

3. You are required to work consciously and in a determined way to overcome your problems. I do it, you gotta do it too.

4. I do not give a damn what relations we have had in the past, or what experiences we have shared. None of this gives you any rights over me. Pay attention to me in the present. If you want me to be seduced, seduce me. If you want me to admire you, be admirable. If you want me to cuddle you and reassure you, show me at least something that impresses me as to your honesty and vulnerability, so that I can relate to our common humanity and this can catalyse my limited supply of compassion.

5. I’m doing whatever I want. What I want is determined and interpreted exclusively by me. In any case, you may have whichever view of it you wish. Interdependencies will be managed on a basis of equal opportunity for you to do the same, however, in application of rule 2 above, your failure to make use of this opportunity is not my problem.

6. We can, I hope, go beyond these rather cold rules together into the heart of what really matters. This is my deepest desire. But only as two adults. I need to trust you, and I am afraid that my trust is very fragile. I need to know I am safe from manipulation. Safe I, of course, am. But I need to know it. These are sacred spaces, to enter with reverence and lightly. Otherwise, the gates are closed. As ever, I sooner die there of emotional starvation than give access to barbarians.

7. Albeit that all of the above is non-negotiable, perhaps, having agreed, you have something to add. If so I’m listening.

Conscious depression

These days, I am slowly, but it seems surely, slipping into a deep depression. It has been going on for some months and I do not know when or how it will end.

I was clinically depressed in early puberty and so the feeling is eerily familiar. This time round, I am trying a new approach. I am trying to let it be, to respect my body’s decision or need to shut down, physically and emotionally, to withdraw itself and me from those around me and wrap me in a dark cocoon. It is not easy to function like this – indeed in my teens it was impossible. One must accept that others will observe your darkness, the ebbing away of your lifeforce, or at least its retreat into hibernation. That others will in turn shun you, afraid of being captured within your event horizon. This is normal, and as it should be.

This experience, though unsought, is not, I believe, to be feared; not at least any more. I can observe it and write about it and I can believe in, in some mode, its resolution.

Depression is quite fascinating. It is fascinating to see this wall coming up, in the same instinctive way that a shellfish will close inside itself when touched. It is fascinating to see connections to the world dropped, one by one, like the arrival of winter or a foretaste of death. The shutting down of peripheral sensation, slowing of the central nervous system, the feeling of emptiness in chest and belly. To observe what passes and what remains. Where, for instance, is anger? It is there, but quiet; in no way ruffles the deep inner silence. And love? No, there is no love. Love is remembered, but coldly; it is not felt.

I can look at my limbs and it is as if they are not mine; as if no effort, however great, could ever move them from their inertia. The bottle of water across the desk could as easily be a thousand miles away.

Libido shuts down. No pleasures of any kind move me to enthusiasm. They may be, I do not hate them, but I am beside them, they are for others, not for me.

As I retreat within, on this path as infinite as the one outside, there is surely something to be learned of meditation and encounters to be made with myself, with my history and the many psychic scars I bear which never healed. In a way, it is a luxury and a choice. At least for now.

The first time round, I doubtless lost count of the number of people whose advice was to “snap out” of it. But I feel I want to go in, deeper, to understand it, accept it and yes, even be proud of it.

You see, as relative engagement with the world lessens, one may understand how relative it was to start with. The starting point was not a norm, it was a paralyzed coping, hidden and afraid to say its name. It was, itself, a degree of depression, just a degree to which I had become used, which I accepted, with which I even identified, and certainly within which, behind which, I took refuge.

To see this accommodation for the temporary and fragile equilibrium it was is, perhaps, to be freed to move beyond it. When the way forward is blocked, then one can make progress only by going into reverse. I want to know what it really feels like in this unknown country inside me. What lies behind all the mists, the horrors I experienced but perhaps also other forgotten things, precious things abandoned and left behind in the rush to escape and find safety. Cold things, treasures covered in slime or cobwebs, but still there. I have, writing this, little inkling of what they may be – their existence is as pure an intellectual construct as that of some subatomic particles. Be it so.

To recap, I know already a lot. About love, spirituality, childhood traumas and their aftermath and what it is to live as an adult, fully, joyfully. I know exactly how things should have been in my life. But I am not able to realize this journey any further at this point in time, I am quite blocked. I do not blame external circumstance, I just know that I must now dive back within. With my eyes open, an oxygen supply and a line to the surface. Consciously.

Friends, I may be a while, but I am safe this time. That place inside feels dark and numb only because it has not been allowed to be a part of me, has not dared to integrate the surface. But I know it is me, too. It is the feeling, flowing, primal me that has not been allowed to be.

Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können.

Saying yes to life

Like most Europeans, and all masochists, I am a compulsive pessimist. Not only that but I take pride in it and identify with it as if it’s some kind of sign of my cultural superiority.

Actually, of course, it’s a sign of weakness. Feeling superior to people, being able to outwit them intellectually, gives me pleasure because it is an outlet for my repressed sadism. Being always able to gain the upper hand, I am safe in the knowledge that no one can really get to me. I don’t run the risk of being vulnerable and of getting hurt. That means I’m safe; but missing out on life.

For some reason I’ve never quite figured, life on the other side of the pond has evolved in an opposite direction. Or perhaps it has just not “evolved” at all. There is something about the American outlook on life that grates terribly on a lot of Europeans. That little children laugh and play in African villages is still OK, Europeans can feel superior and still benevolently disposed towards these manifestations of joy in a simpler life, more at one with nature. However that Americans have the hubris to believe that they will succeed against all the odds, that they dare to try to infect us with their enthusiasm for frankly daft projects, well, that’s just too much. They strike us as naive, often dangerously so, and nowhere outside the mountains of Afghanistan and the souks of Baghdad is the Schadenfreude at American failures greater than in the refined salons of European capitals.

Strangely, our own failures (and God knows they are plentiful enough) fail to fill us with the same sense of joy. Actually, they fail to fill us with anything at all; we are blind to the ways in which the European nation-state extinguishes personal initiative in both the economic and private spheres.

I am certain that the American outlook has a good deal of neurosis built into it, too. I am not trying to eulogize it any more than I am trying to deprecate European sensitivities. However, when the result is that genuine joie de vivre is taken by Europeans for a marker of cultural naivete, it should set alarm bells ringing. This is called cynicism, and it is always an ego defense.

The thing is, ersatz Lebenslust is merely amusing, or sad, but it is not threatening, you do not need to defend yourself against it. And if you defend yourself against what turns out to be the real thing, you miss the opportunity to be taken up in a positive vortex; you miss out on living. In fact your ego defenses are the only thing that prevent you from living: the mirror is being held up to your own resistances.

And so it is that I am delighted to welcome tantra teacher Dawn Cartwright to Brussels. When I feel resistance at her enthusiasm, which I do, I am grateful for the chance to examine what it is that keeps me from jumping into the river of life; and then I just let myself fall in love. Life has this quality, that it is very easy to fall in love with; because life is our nature and it seeks out itself. When we are in love, we are dissolved, free, we are ourselves.

Join us 27-29 November in Brussels; fall in love; and, if you can, dive deeply into all of Dawn’s offerings in Europe this fall. They’re on her website at www.dawncartwright.com.

Lingam massage – a few questions

No, I didn’t only pick the title in a desperate attempt to get my Google rankings up! 😉 I really, truly care about the subject 🙂

The standard recipe for lingam massage has been bothering me for some time already. As we all know, it was developed about 20 years ago by an American called Joe Kramer who worked with homosexuals in particular. Now I’m not too sure, but I would guess that the distribution of character types across the homosexual population differs from that of the male population as a whole. From my experience of homosexuals they are more likely to be oral or schizoid types. As we all know, also, the nature of the genital reaction in the male (and in the female too, but that is not my subject here) is very much a function of character type. The rigid and psychopathic types tend to show diminished penile sensitivity while the masochistic type is excessively sensitive. Oral and schizoid types are more likely to show erectile dysfunction.

This has got to have some consequences for how a masseur/se approaches the lingam massage. In my opinion, instead of taking over Kramer’s ideas, we should be experimenting a lot more and discovering what works, how and for whom. I don’t have any doubt that an experienced masseuse (allow me my preference for the feminine form) has developed somewhat of an intuition for this, and probably the growth in interest around prostate/anal massage reflects some of this intuition. Still it would be nice to pool experiences and learn more.

Speaking from the masochistic perspective, I believe there are essentially two points.

The first is the failure of the standard tantra+lingam massage ritual to address the pelvic armoring. This is rather skipped over, with inadequate attention to the perineum and the inguinal fold. Of course I appreciate that the tantra massage is a sensual massage and that it does not aim at deep tissue work, even emotional in nature. Therefore my criticism should be (and is) addressed to other modalities. Nonetheless, insofar as these areas form part of the wider erogenous zone involved in male sexual response, their exclusion in my view detracts from the holistic nature of the massage and has more to do with received ideas of male sexuality than any sound neuroerotic basis.

Secondly, one really should be trying to delay the moment of ejaculation in persons who tend to ejaculate prematurely, and this is in fact what one does in tantra massage. But it makes little sense to attempt to spread the energy into the abdominal and thoracic regions when the pelvic region itself is insufficiently charged. In this case, the energy will be unable in any case to move beyond it and remain on a low level.

In my experience of the massage and my male body, I have the sentiment that there is really something missing here and that we should be developing new scripts. I suspect this is true for other character types also, and also for the yoni massage (although since this is necessarily internal, it may be less flawed). I would very much welcome views on this topic from massage professionals and lovers of tantra massage!

The tao of parenting

By putting the words tantra and parenting together in the same sentence, I thought I should stand a pretty good chance of being top of the Google search rankings for that particular combination 🙂 But actually there’s a rather nice site at www.tantricparenting.org (though it does need to move to WordPress 😉 ). I can recommend it to tantric parents and parents-to-be.

Although I (militantly) support enlightened parenting, it isn’t, though, exactly what moved me to write this article. Rather, I wanted to say what being a father now means to me, spiritually, and how my children don’t just bring me endless joy but also help me on the road (if I am on that road) to enlightenment.

On the whole, we live in a very selfish world, and spirituality is frequently its mirror. This of course makes no logical sense whatsoever when it comes to oriental spirituality, which teaches transcendence of the ego, but that fact alone does not seem in any way to have prevented its being treated in the West as a consumer good, and often even as a fashion accessory.

Whilst appreciating the appositeness of the question, I have frequently been irked by people suggesting their children were an obstacle to their spiritual practice. In the case of tantra, the complaints are not limited to having no time for yoga and meditation but also one frequently hears that children are the alleged source of diminished sexual drive and lack of intimate space between the partners.

There are a number of objections to this point of view, several of which are, I hope, sufficiently obvious that I can skip them here. Let me just focus on two ideas which I feel especially strongly about.

Firstly, there is no excuse for not creating an intimate space which includes your children, and especially if they are the children of both partners because then they are the very fruit of this intimacy.

Because what is intimacy? It means sensitivity to the other and the creation of an environment in which the senses are heightened, there is more awareness, more attention to detail: to form, design, tastes, scents, music… in which we behave naturally, in opposition to the sterile patterns of behavior that mark contemporary relationships and the contemporary world.

In this intimate world, we are loved, listened to and taken care of. Whether as children, or as lovers, what is the difference?

(Yes, of course I mean what is the spiritual difference? It pains me to state the obvious but at the risk of being otherwise misunderstood by random surfers I will do so: of course the forms that behavior naturally takes with an adult lover are not the forms that it takes with children. Not at all. But the attentiveness, the care and the love are the same, they proceed from the same basis and have the same preconditions. I do not need to tell you what form behavior should take because I have no pretence to formulating an ethical code, even less to imposing it on anyone else, and because these differences are natural, innate and obvious to any healthy individual.)

And secondly, because just as your partner is the mirror of your soul and of your ego, so too are your children; they show you what is beautiful and they show you what is ugly. With this difference: in the case of children it is often a much less distorted image that you receive.

My children are not “just” kids. I try to treat them with as much tenderness and as much understanding as I try to treat my partner and (these days, finally) I probably succeed much better with them than with her, just because it is really much easier, because no one in anything approaching their right mind can really believe that their kids are the source of their problems and that they are a legitimate screen on which to project their own childhood traumas, a realization which, with ones partner, requires an additional level of self-awareness (and whilst it is equally true of ones partner in the final analysis, it is nonetheless so that your partner may be, if not the source of your problems, nonetheless at least not the person most suited to your own spiritual growth; whilst this is never so for your children).

In my encounters with my children, I feel I touch deep truths and deep levels of spiritual awareness; deeper than in most other ways, and certainly more easily and more quickly.

They are not an obstacle to my personal growth. They are very much a major strand within it.